I was writing Review #237 while watching this movie, so I didn’t pay real close attention. What I did notice is that after a lot of build up (and shooting guns) the final fight scene delivers nice clear shots of the lycanthropes duking it out. Unlike a certain Alien Vs. Preadator sequel I recently saw.
I knew that the plot of this movie was going to be lame. I knew it was just going to be some cheap adhesive to hold together a battle between Aliens and Predators. I knew I was going to hear lines like:
“People are dying!”
and
“God help us all!”
The reason I wanted to see the movie is obvious. Bad-ass monsters fighting like bad-asses. Also, there was the promise of a “predalien”, a hybrid of the two creatures that was hinted at at the end of the last movie. I’m sure this has been a fantasy of many a nerd ever since the two franchises merged in Dark Horse comics in 1989. I know I drew a couple back in 7th grade.
So here he is:
Pretty cool, huh? Unfortunately that’s the best shot you’re going to get of him. Most of the movie is more like this:
Dark, rainy, and too much movement to tell what’s going on. I had a difficult time differentiating between a drone alien and the Predalien. The mosters had already been made, looking awesome, in their own respective pictures. Why was it so difficult for the director to show us this awesomeness in an all-out, well-lit battle? Oh, also I guess there were supposed to be tons of Aliens, like a swarm, but we never really saw that many. No long shots of the town just being devoured by them. That would have been nice to see.
All these things made the crappy plot unbearable. I felt like I was watching a SciFi Channel movie with a bigger budget and less conviction.
This review is for the Queering the Apparatus Queer Film Blog-A-Thon.
In my experience, Don Roos’s comedy, The Opposite of Sex, rarely shows up in discussions of gay cinema. However if it’s not about comic books and/or Passions I’m not well versed in it so I’m probably just not paying attention. It may pass under the radar because the biggest stars at the time of its release were Christina Ricci and Lisa Kudrow, both playing straight characters. That’s not to downplay Martin Donovan’s performance, but at the time Friends was in it’s hay day and Ricci hadn’t yet started looking like a creepy alien. It also doesn’t have a lot to do with many gay social issues but mainly the lives of these specific people. It might be because it has little or no eroticism in it, especially for a movie with the word “sex” in the title. The sexiest it gets is when Ivan Sergei’s character is swimming, right before Ricci’s character seduces him.
So what is this movie about? Basically a young woman Dede Truitt (Ricci) who runs away from her mom’s house to her half-brother’s house and causes trouble for everyone she comes across. She steals her brother’s boyfriend (Ivan Sergei), her brother’s dead boyfriend’s ashes (Collin Ferguson), extorts her bother for money a couple of times with the aid of the boyfriend (Sergei) and his ex (Johnny Galecki). Kudrow plays the sister of the dead boyfriend, commonly referred to as “Tom the dead guy” by Dede who is narrating the movie. There’s a lot of scandal, one-liners and road trips.
I am now going into bullet mode. This helps me out when I have points to make but can’t organize them into paragraphs.
What was cool
- The one liners are great in this movie, from “Teachers need to learn, no means no…at least until we’ve dropped out,” to “There are a lot nicer people coming up. We call them losers.” A lot of these quotes can be found here.
- The best lines are delivered by Kudrow. Her portrayal of an exasperated woman with pent up frustration that must be let out because of the arrival of this trouble maker is thoroughly entertaining. She’s one of those people who complains all the time, but it’s fun because she’s mostly only complaining about Dede and not you.
- Dede says at the beginning, through narration, “I don’t have a heart of gold and I don’t get one later.” It’s so true, she plays a skeezy, scheming bitch the whole time. It’s great!
- Donavan’s character, Bill, delivers a small speech that had quite an effect on me when I first saw this film. Check out this video, about 2:30 into it.
What was lame
-Lyle Lovett’s performance was very difficult to watch. The man cannot act. I feel he was thrown in there only as a romantic interest for Kudrow’s character so everyone could have a happy ending.
-The last seconds of the movie leave us wondering if Dede did, in fact, grow a heart of gold. I like to think she didn’t.
I sure wish this was more thought out and stuff, but it’s getting so close to midnight. I have to post it now! At least I did this instead of homework. Come back for more reviews of stuff and maybe a more thought-out edition of this one.
When I saw Welcome to the Dollhouse so many lives ago the thing that made the biggest impression on me was that it had no ending. I was a little confused at first because I don’t think I had seen anything like that before, but it made so much sense. Nothing changed for Dawn Weiner. She didn’t become a hero, she didn’t grow out of her awkwardness and you can bet she continued to get bullied at school. It was reality. We see how Dawn ends up in Palindromes as the movie opens with her funeral.
Palindromes is another offering by Todd Solondz of characters that are pathetic when we meet them and, rather that overcoming adversity and prevailing, end up just as miserable if not more so than when the movie started. In this film we follow Aviva, a thirteen year-old girl who is determined to get pregnant. She does so and her parents put an end to it, prompting her to run away. She encounters a truck driver with who, it is hinted at, is an ex-con for some sex offense, and who she feels some sort of connection to. She also meets a family consisting of cheery, bible thumping parents and a team of adoptive children all with some sort of handicap. This family are the only characters that are always happy, but naturally they do not escape the perpetual glum reality of Solondz’s films. The truck driver and Aviva see the anti-abortionist father as a major threat (I don’t recall the exact reason, but it has something to do with him discovering that Aviva has had an abortion) and decide to take him out. One of the children, a little girl, gets caught in the crossfire, and it’s all downhill from there.
The main idea of this movie is essentially what I felt after seeing Dollhouse, and is summed up at the end of the movie by the character Mark Weiner, Dawn’s brother, who is being accused of molesting his other sister’s baby. He talks about how people never change, that no matter what happens to them they are the same, forwards and backwards, because we are hard wired that way. “If you‘re the depressed type now, that’s the way you’ll always be,” Mark says. “If you’re the mindless, happy type now, that’s the way you’ll be when you grow up.” I can’t say I agree with that completely, I think you can be the depressed type all your life but you can change how you deal with it. However, I think Mark would file that under “People think they do (change), but they don’t.”
I enjoyed this film, but I felt the pacing was rather slow. There were a couple of times I wished the “la-la-laing” in the score would hurry up and the film would get to the next scene. I don’t see myself watching this movie too many times again. Happiness set a standard for me. The pacing was great, the script was great, the acting was great, and while Solondz’s movies always leave an impression, none have entertained me as much as Happiness.
One other thing, I do like how Solondz used several different actors to play Aviva. They ranged in age and hair color and were played by both black and white girls, including Jennifer Jason Leigh. I think this was an effective was of showing drastic change in a person who essentially remains the same in their core.
I’ve seen Ed Wood movies before. I knew what to expect, and my expectations were met. Bad writing, bad acting, bad directing, non-existent budget. I’m all for camp. Camp is one of my middle names, and yes, of course, this movie delivers. What surprises me about this movie, what makes this movie stand out from most B movies I am used to, is how unflinchingly progressive it is for it’s time.
With the exception of some surreal sequences, like every scene with Bella Lugosi, the film feels much like an educational film. However, while many films of the time, educational or otherwise, criminalize and demonize subjects such as homosexuality and gender identity, Glen or Glenda serves as the director’s voice saying “This is what it’s like for me.”
The first third of the movie involves the life of Glen, who is a transvestite, and his fiance, as well as a doctor and a police inspector. The inspector is dealing with the suicide of a cross-dresser and the doctor is explaining transvestitism to him, becoming a narrator of sorts, explaining everything very matter-of-factly.
The middle of the film begins to get weird. We see the internal struggle of Glen, who feels he needs to tell his fiance his secret. This struggle seems like a fifteen-minute-long acid trip. A lot of elements of his conflict make sense, like how he can’t save his girl from a fallen tree while dressed as a woman. A lot of the elements are just weird, like women gyrating all over a couch and Lugosi yelling things about big green dragons on your doorstep. Why is this mad scientist talking to us about cross dressers? Yes, there is still that crappy Ed Wood feel to it all.
The last part seems like another case study, adding to the educational film feel. It tells of a man who has had a sex change, how he musty adapt, and how he must continue taking hormones all his life.
If the bizarre subject matter of this film didn’t keep it out of the mainstream, it’s poor production value did. I was not alive in 1953, but I’m guessing this movie delivered a lot of facts in a manner that no other movie did at the time. It is informative, but it’s entertainment value is not much higher than, say, Bride of the Monster or Plan 9. I mean, now that I’ve seen it, and was taken in by it’s straight-forwardness, I doubt I would be entertained by it again.
Ok, I’m not going to go too much into this movie. It sucked. It just really sucked. I usually try to stay real quiet during movies, but about halfway through I joined in Jeremy’s audible dislike of the movie. I think this might call for some bullets.
-Female lead…way too old for a high schooler. Way too hot for a high schooler. Grand total of 1min, 15 seconds of character development (juvie delinquent w/jailbird dad both for GTA. How convenient).
-That kid from Holes (tee hee) is cute and seems to be a good actor, but they just have him yammering on and on the whole movie for what seems to be comic effect. It is distracting and tiresome. And he and the girl are both dirty and sweaty the whole time.
-Bad edits
-Bad dialogue
-Bad directing
-Bad cinematography
-No real conflict is revealed until about 2/3 of the way in
-A GOD AWFUL fake austrailian accent
-Long scenes. There was one where the robots were hiding from the parents in the front yard…it went on for about ten minutes and included a lot of that yammering from both kids, the parents, and the robots. I knew exactly what was going on but the scene was really pretty chaotic and could have been about 2 minutes long. there were lots of scenes like this.
-Not enough Andrew. Too much fake-accent girl. Totally uneccesary sassy black computer genius kid.
-Robots tended to change size inconsistently.
So, yeah, it was crap. Glad I saw it on the big screen, though. The robots did look cool. But they didn’t really use them wizely. For a more in-depth review, check out Andrew’s take on it.
Still not feeling too bloggy, so this’ll be a quickie.
My co-worker Nate really likes this movie for some reason. I hated it. Another co-worker, Nick, just saw it for the first time and described it this way (don’t tell Nate!):
“I could have dreamed this…and it would have been better.”
For me, it didn’t hold my interest enough to even remember the plot. Tom Cruise was never attractive, I don’t know who that chick is*, and Tim Curry looked rad, but that’s about it. If you’ve never seen it, watch the Dark Crystal instead.
*(oh, i just looked her up. she’s the chick from Ferris Bueller…the movie, not the tv show with jennifer aniston that most people think of.)
This British mockumentary follows a wedding magazine’s competition for the most original wedding. It’s done in the style of a Cristopher Guest movie with interviews and candid footage of the characters interacting. The only actor I recognized was the adorable Martin Freeman, “Tim” from the British “The Office” series. He played part of a couple who had a Hollywood Musical themed wedding. Others included a Naturist (nekkid) Wedding and a Tennis Wedding.
I really did like this move, it entertained me throughout. It was not, however, laugh-out-loud, side-achingly funny. It was more of a cute, subtle humor. And because of the accents, I might not have noticed a lot of the jokes if I wasn’t too lazy to turn the captions off on my television.
The weddings at the end were great fun to watch. The naturist one was kind of lame, but you get to see no-no places. The tennis one was just absurd. OF course, the Hollywood Musical was the most fun to watch. The number they did was great, and they sang their vows in a song that got stuck in my head fo a couple of days ( I forgot it now).
What struck me at the end was the relationships all the couples had. It was sort of obvious who was going to win, first of all, but still, each couple genuinley loved each other. The element of super-competitivness in the tennis couple could easily have broken the relationship apart if they didn’t win, but they didn’t and they still had a happy ending. In fact, the DVD has alternate ending where each of the three couples wins, and they all end up happy.
Because the Naturist couple were naked all the time, and lived in a commune or something, there is some mad full frontal in this movie. Boobies and weiners everywhere. Even the wedding planners strip down for the wedding. Speaking of those wedding planners…
The thing that stuck with me most about this movie, and it’s almost unquestionably because I am gay, is the relationship of the wedding planners, seen here:
The first thing I noticed about this movie, other than the the oddly juxtaposed opening credits, was that it had all the melodrama of a kid’s cartoon. The kids are given a few elements of “edge”, like hanging out in a abandoned house, yet are still essentially good and righteous. The men who run the track and who don’t want the main kid to win some qualification race don’t really do anything too evil, but they act like they do all the time. I don’t think this movie did that because it was geared towards children, but because its filmakers were that bad. I think what convinced me that it isn’t geared toward kids is that there was some mild anit-authority violence and profanity. The little sister of the main kid says “shit” a lot.
One fallacy I see in this movie’s logic is how keenly the biker kids are tuned into the community. Their newspaper route has made them heroes of the town, delivering the USA Today in weird, crazy, and time-senstive ways such as in a dog’s mouth, to a fire engine, and to a woman who times him. It is rare in movies, and rarer in real life, that you see characters who know their neighbors with such Archiecomician familiarity.
There was a scene before the last final race that introduced all the racers and who their sponsors were, promoting the racers and, in doing so, thier sponsors. During this final race, other than rewinding a couple of times to see the crowd reaction shots, I mostly zoned out and thought about sex.
MY favorite crowd shot was one of a dude who worked with main kid and didn’t like him. We only know this becasue he says it a bunch of times. Here he is distracting a woman with the fact that he works with this kid in order to steal her pop corn:
