OMG! District 9 got four Oscar nominations... INCLUDING ONE FOR BEST PICTURE!!!!!

And with Avatar snagging a Best Picture nod too... Is this the first time two genre movies have been nominated for best picture in the same year? Can't be... but maybe?

oof...

Lessons all movie makers should learn from "Legion."

1) We're smarter than you think, and can pick up on symbolism fast. No need to, say, make the hole in a wall after an angel blows it up with a bomb look like a cross. We get it already.

2) If you're going to name your movie something like "Legion" and it's gonna be about angels coming down to Earth to exterminate humanity... it might be a good idea to let us see more than 2 angels in the movie. Especially if only one of them is here to actually kill us.

3) Just because an ice cream truck in the middle of the night is creepy doesn't mean it makes sense to have it show up.

4) Cliches should not be wallowed in.

5) If the Christian God wants to wipe out humanity... you'd think he'd have a little bit more effective tools on his for the job than a small army of possessed people, a cloud of flies, and one (1) angel. He supposedly created the world in 7 days, yeah? And if you're instead supposing that he wants not to wipe us out but to give us a chance to prove we should still exist... if he's gonna be flashy, why should I get the feeling he was limited by a single movie's special effects budget? If you're gonna do a non-subtle pissed-off deity, you need big bucks.

6) Angels as the bad guys? That's an uphill battle to pull off without feeling stupid. Helps to have Christopher Walken sell it.

7) If an angel's gonna possess a human to turn into a killer... why would the possessed human look like a demon-possessed creature from "The Evil Dead?" Or why would it have super long arms and legs? Why wouldn't it instead have a fire halo and wings?

8) If you have a giant morning star that's capable of shooting telescoping spikes or spinning like an egg beater... shouldn't you use those advantages from the start of the fight? And couldn't God come up with a weapon that's a little less "fan fiction" quality than a morning star that spins like an egg beater?

Not a good movie. Saw a preview for "The Crazies" though, so that was fun.

Legion: D

YAY! Mel Gibson is back as a COP ON THE EDGE! The character role that made him a star in the first place!

While the movie he's in isn't as good as any of the Road Warrior movies, it IS better than the Lethal Weapon movies. There are some elements that fall apart if you stop to think about them, but the acting and story and tension are all good enough to hold things together while you're watching. And on top of that, there were a couple of action sequences in the movie that really surprised and shocked and delighted me. Particularly what happens just before the last scene in the movie, and what happens when Mel Gibson faces off against a hit-and-run criminal. Also... one of the most EVIL CEO bad guys I've seen in a long time.

Edge of Darkness: B

Peter Jackson is a very talented director. Even when he makes a bad movie, it's a delight to watch. And that's the case with "The Lovely Bones." The directing is good, the acting is good, the visuals and special effects are good... but the story is not. This is, at its core, a movie about a man who rapes and murders and dismembers children, and how his latest victim is now trapped between life and Heaven and has to decide on embracing the afterlife or remaining behind to cling to the world, while her family attempts to recover from the tragedy and the cops try to solve the case... but it's been made as a PG-13 movie, and put together in a way to make it feel like a remake of "Ghost." Where a dead girl gets one last chance at love before moving on to heaven. This is NOT a subject that benefits from attempts to make it more family friendly. It should have been R-rated.

It's the wrong choice. The wrong story. A movie like this that's from a ghost's point of view about the torment the ghost endures and either about how she returns to the living world to bring her killer to justice OR about how her family and the cops finally put her to rest by catching the bad guy would have been VERY good. This movie is neither of those. If it has any message at all, that would be: "Heaven is a beautiful place and if you get killed and raped, you'll go to that place and get to hang out with your rapist killer's other victims and enjoy the afterlife, and it's okay because humans are mortal and even though your killer will never be caught or punished, he's gonna some day die anyway, and if you're lucky you'll get a chance to possess the girlfriend of the boy you had a crush on so you can give him a necrophiliac kiss from beyond the grave."

AKA: The movie made me uncomfortable, creeped out, and in the end VERY unsatisfied. It'd be like watching "Silence of the Lambs" with Buffalo Bill never getting caught and Jodie Foster being fired from the FBI for that failure and she goes on to have a nice life anyway and 50 years down the road, Buffalo Bill dies in a car accident.

Lame. But great acting and really neat visual effects, so I was never really BORED while watching it. And now I know what a bad Peter Jackson movie feels like, I guess.

The Lovely Bones: D

So I ran the second session of "Unspeakable Futures" yesterday; the group navigated a series of underground areas connected by a ruined subway type tunnel and encountered, among other things, an angry robot with a powerful grip, ghouls, and a big hungry albino alligator.

The ghouls, though, were a bigger menace than I'd anticipated.

Ghouls in Unspeakable Futures aren't undead, and they lack the ability to paralyze folks. They DO retain their ghoul fever disease ability though, and they're prone to using toxic waste and radioactive stuff to attack due to their immunity to this (these ghouls are one part Lovecraft ghoul and one part Fallout ghoul, for those who were curious).

ANYway, the five first-level PCs were ambushed by a group of six ghouls armed with bows and bottles of toxic waste. The battle was VERY close, with two of the five PCs ending up slaughtered by ghouls and the other three surviving by the skin of their teeth, in part due to a bit of low rolls on my part (achieved honestly and in full view... wasn't using a GM screen this time) and in part due to luck on the PCs' part (and a timely cause fear spell).

It was looking like a 2nd session TPK for a bit, though!

I went in to this movie with relatively high expectations. The combination of the cast (Denzel Washington plus Gary Oldman plus Ray Stevenson plus a really cool cameo at the end from an actor I won't name here) plus the directors (who haven't made a movie since "From Hell," which I quite liked) plus the genre (post-apocalyptic world) seemed to me to be a VERY strong combination to me.

And as it works out, it fits all together MOSTLY into a great movie! It's a different movie than "The Road" (which also involves a journey through the post-apocalyptic world toward an unknown goal), and to my surprise it's also a different movie than "Road Warrior" (which ALSO involves cool action sequences on the road in the same type of world). "The Book of Eli" does have action sequences, and they're VERY well directed and presented, but the movie isn't non-stop action. (But it IS very refreshing to see well choreographed fight sequences that are filmed with a static or gracefully moving camera with long takes, rather than rapid-fire edits to artificially up the tension and mask failings in the fight choreography.) There's a fair amount of meditation on the nature of the post-apocalyptic world and what we might have done to put the world in that position, along with a fair amount of simple drama that occurs in said world. But perhaps the most interesting thing about the movie is that it also carries a really uplifting element of hope and optimism as well as presenting a grim and stark world where you have to worry about cannibals and mad warlords and being murdered for the two ounces of muddy water you carry in a dented coffee can.

The movie also has a twist at the end that I found not only to be VERY satisfying and cool, but of the type that immediately made me want to watch the movie again and enjoy all of the ways the moviemakers foreshadowed the twist without revealing it. The twist isn't anything SUPER new that hasn't been done in movies before, but the way it's handled is really cool.

Fair Warning for my non-religious friends: This book has very strong religious themes and elements from Christianity, although I suspect that most of them will be missed by folks who aren't familiar with the Bible. The movie works great even without that knowledge, I suspect, but the thing that REALLY impressed me was that at no point did the movie feel like it was preaching or campaigning for any religion in particular. In fact, it felt a bit more like "The Mist" in that it's saying that faith and hope are important to hold on to in times where there seems to be no faith or hope. It really captures well the fact that religion is a construction of humanity, not the divine, and that as such it's inherently flawed and can easily be twisted to serve anyone's agenda, be that agenda noble or cruel. Furthermore, it's fascinating that the good guy's methods of achieving his goal are decidedly NOT nice and kind for the most part, while the bad guy's goals are (while flawed and corrupted) at their core actually very noble and constructive goals... or would be, in the hands of someone who wasn't so self-centered and bastardly. Even the bad guy henchmen have motivations more than "I'm just here to look tough and do what you say when you say it, boss!"

The only thing keeping the movie from A+ for me is the fact that there's some questionable geography. I've mentioned this problem in reviews before—essentially, there's a portion of the movie where the good guy is being chased by the bad guys and even though the good guy is on foot and the bad guys are in cars, they take forever to catch up to him. It's also unclear exactly where the movie takes place save for the last location... and that location makes me wonder where the rest of the movie was located. And on top of that, Eli's been "walking west for 30 years," but I'm not sure that there's a place on the planet that big. Of course... that last bit I can excuse since I suspect Eli's been "walking as his faith compelled him" and that wasn't actually "West" as much as it was aimless wandering that he had to endure in order to achieve the state of mind and awareness he needed to be for what was planned for him at the end. Which I can't go into more without revealing the cool twist at the end.

The Book of Eli: A

It's always refreshing to see a genre movie that's about something that's been done a million times come up with not one one new idea, but lots of new ideas for said genre. In the case of Daybreakres, that genre is vampires. The setup is this: The vampires have taken over the world, they farm humans for blood, and the last few "wild" humans live in hiding. The premise is what happens when the blood starts to run out; the vampires start mutating and losing their sanity and things get pretty damn gory. Several really well-done action sequences, one that's pretty corny but still fun, explosive vampires, vampire feeding frenzies, Sam Neil and William Dafoe, and a really interesting futuristic world where vampires run the show make for a quite entertaining movie.

The movie does its best to get me to rename the cat trick to the bat trick though. Minus marks for that.

Also: Saw a trailer for "The A-Team." Which was awesome in and of itself.

Daybreakers: B+

I'm gonna repeat my project this year... but THIS year I'm gonna try to see 53 movies, ALL IN THEATERS!

Movies that I'm particularly looking forward to this year include "The Book of Eli," "Clash of the Titans," "Shutter Island," "Robin Hood," "The Wolf Man," "Predators," "Iron Man 2," "Tron Legacy," "Frozen," "The Crazies," "Piranha 3-D," "The A-Team," "Wall Street 2," "Toy Story 3," "Inception," and "Survival of the Dead."

But the NUMBER ONE movie I'm anticipating in 2010? "John Carpenter's The Ward."

In related movie news, I'm also going to try to see all of my DVDs and Blu-Rays that I've bought but haven't watched by the end of the year, so that on the last day of 2010, I'll own NO disc that I haven't watched. That could well mean seeing 53 movies at home in and of itself... not sure how many movies I have sitting out there waiting to be viewed...

So, as it works out, of the 52 movies I saw in 2009, there were exactly 11 that got either an A or an A+. So rather than decide which one gets kicked out of a top 10 list, I'm doing a top 11 list. These are the BEST movies of 2009, and in an attempt to curtail my DVD/Blu-Ray buying habits... these are probably going to be the only movies I buy on disc that came out in 2009. That won't stick... but it should help.

Anyway... my top 11 movies of 2009, counting down from #11 to the #1 movie of the year for me...

11: Drag Me To Hell
10: The Road
9: The Box
8: Knowing
7: A Perfect Getaway
6: Star Trek
5: The Hurt Locker
4: Inglourious Basterds
3: Paranormal Activity
2: Avatar
1: District 9

2 horror movies, 1 action movie, 2 war movies, and 6 science fiction movies. Not bad!

And as for the three WORST movies of the year? 
Bad = Terminator Salvation
Worse than Bad = Angels & Demons
THE WORST OF THE YEAR! = Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

So according to various internet sites... "The Ward," John Carpenter's new movie (and his first in close to a decade) is in post production. It's independently produced (YAY!) but doesn't have a US Distributor yet (BOOO!). I'll be on pins and needles for months!

So that's that. Saw 52 movies in the year they came out, 51 of which were in theaters and one which I would have seen in theaters except it didn't show locally. Next year... I'll go for all 52 in theaters.

As for "Up in the Air," it's a VERY well made movie with great acting but it's also really kinda depressing... and not only because it's about a guy whose job is to go around firing people, but because it's also about loneliness and betrayal. Well acted, well directed, and I'll never be seeing it again thank you very much.

Up in the Air: B

THE PENULTIMATE MOVIE! of the year, at least.

I normally don't go to see comedies. For the most part, comedies are frustrating and boring and lame... in part, I suspect, because comedy is the hardest type of movie to pull off well. Having an R rating helps. So does having someone from "The Office" in your cast.

I never really laughed out loud during the movie, but I did chuckle a lot. Particularly at:

Mike Tyson's role
The crazy naked guy with the tire iron
The "shed snake skin" in the car
"I'm not supposed to be within 200 feet of a school... or a Chuck E Cheese."
The other Doug and his "floories"
Stu's song about tigers and tweakers
Sofa pizza
The bribe-friendly doctor's directions to the chapel

The REAL question is... what will be movie # 52?

The Hangover: B

The thing that's gonna get me through seeing 52 movies in theaters is the theater down the hill. In that it shows second-run movies, rescuing me from seeing something like "Nine" or "Alvin and the Chipmunks."

"Law Abiding Citizen" isn't dull... but neither is it particularly impressive. Some pretty good traps and surprises rigged by one of those movie villains who seems to be able to be everywhere and do anything except when it comes to the climax when he is required by the screenplay to get tripped up and make stupid mistakes that someone as smart and resourceful as him would never make pretty much sums things up.

The cell phone scene was pretty well done though. If you see the movie, you'll know what scene I'm talking about.

Law Abiding Citizen: C +

"Sherlock Holmes" was MUCH better than I thought it would be... I was half expecting a self-loathing wallow in self-mockery and goofy over-the-top ridiculousness as seen in "Wild Wild West" or "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." But Lo! The movie avoided all of that quite well, and managed to be a well-made, well-acted, well-directed, action spectacle with a cool soundtrack and a plot that was both engaging and fun AND set up a franchise. I'm all ready to go see the next movie in the series!

Some continuity issues (the classic instant-dry suit after someone comes out of the water) and some plot twists that were a bit TOO convenient kept it form being super-awesome. It's merely awesome! 

Sherlock Holmes: A –

I just saw a movie that was close to 3 hours long. I wish it was 6 hours long, because that would mean I'm still watching it. If I say that Avatar is my new favorite James Cameron movie, maybe that will get the point across. This movie is, in other words, incredible. No... that demands ALL CAPS.

THIS MOVIE IS INCREDIBLE!

One of the best parts about it is how it exceeded the hype, at least as far as I was concerned. I did go see the 3D version, and that was the first time I'd seen a 3D movie in a LONG time, and while the 3D effects were top notch... the combination of sitting not in the perfect spot (I was too close to the screen) and the fact that I have glasses that are kinda out of perscription and also have a polarizing film on them kinda made the 3D stuff a bit TOO distracting. After about an hour, I finally got used to the effects and it was smooth sailing from there on out... but damn. This movie may have made me decide to switch back to contact lenses so I could see it without my damn eyes robbing me of the full experience.

As an aside... I'm ready to declare 2009 the year quality Sci-Fi came back to theaters. Avatar, The Box, Knowing, District 9, The Road, Moon... need I say more?

Avatar: A+

Dan O'Bannon, the primary author of the movie Alien, star of John Carpenter's first feature-length movie, and director of The Resurrected and Return of the Living Dead, has passed away.

I can't believe I almost missed seeing "The Box" in theaters. It didn't last long in the first-run theaters, and when it showed up at a second run theater just down the road, I decided to check it out half because it was based on a Richard Matheson story, and half because I had to see SOMETHING to help creep toward 52 movies!

What I saw was a movie that came out of left field and completely caught me off guard, to use a couple of cliches.

The basic premise of "The Box" you know if you saw the trailer. A creepy deformed man shows up at a housewife's home and offers her $1,000,000. All she has to do is push a button on a box he's delivered to her at some point within the next 24 hours. The catch? If she pushes the button, someone she doesn't know will die.

Now, telling you that's what the movie is about is like saying "Planet of the Apes" is about a spaceship that crashes on a planet, or that "The Matrix" is about an office worker who runs afoul of what might be strange government goons, or that "Psycho" is about a woman who's trying to steal money from her employeer. I will not reveal what "The Box" is actually about... but it pleased me quite a lot.

I suppose it's not really a spoiler to point out that the director is the same guy who directed "Donnie Darko," or that it's based on a story by one of Stephen King's favorite writers. But that should give you a clue as to the nature of what's lurking in this movie!

ALSO: Hopefully the soundtrack to this movie'll come out soon. Very Bernard Hermann feeling soundtrack!

The Box: A

So it took until the 46th movie before I acted upon the "movies that release theatrically but aren't available in local theaters can be watched on DVD if the viewing occurs before the end of the year" qualifier... but here it is!

"Carriers" is set what appears to be a few weeks after a devastating super-virus has destroyed most of the world's human population. The movie follows four young survivors on their journey across the apocalyptic world down a long road to an old family beach house where they hope to live in relatively remote safety from big cities. And along the way, they have various distressing adventures that mostly exist to threaten the four surviviors with infection—an encounter with a man and his infected daughter, an encounter with a group of hazmat-suit wearing soldiers who are swiftly losing all contact with civilized society's rules, abandoned houses that might contain supplies and might contain very hungry feral dogs, encounters with their own friends who might or might not be infected, and so on.

The movie itself is pretty similar in basic plot to "The Road." Yet where "The Road" is set in a world blanketed with ash several years after the end of the world, one of the interesting parts of "Carriers" is that it's set not long after the apocalypse, and it's an apocalypse that basically only hurts humans, not the world itself. As a result, much of the movie takes place under bright, sunshiny days—the juxtaposition of "the world shouldn't look this beautiful after such a tragic apocalypse occurred" is an interesting concept. "Carriers" doesn't do MUCH with the concept, but it's there.

"Carriers" is a pretty entertaining but also pretty bleak look at how things might pan out after a superdeadly pandemic—it's not as grim and bleak as "The Road" by any shot, but it takes its central situation pretty seriously and doesn't wimp out with a forced happy ending. It's hindered a bit by having central characters who are pretty petty and unlikable for the most part... but when faced with a situation like they're in, the loss of kindness and compassion when doing so is a good way to get you sick and dead is in itself an interesting subject, I guess. The fact that there's a few scenes where characters behave a bit TOO stupidly just to enable plot points is kind of annoying... but then again, not all movies should be about people making the right choices about what to do. So I guess it's not as depressing a movie because it's about the end of the world, but because in this world, being nice is a good way to sign your own death warrant and that in which only the self-centered and misanthropes will survive.

Carriers: B+

"Armored" is exactly the type of movie I go to see because I dared myself to see 52 movies in theaters this year, and exactly the type of movie I expected it would be. It never really bored me, but neither did it ever really interest me. Meh.

Armored: C+

Hot on the heels of "2012" I see another movie about the end of the world, and it's pretty much as OPPOSITE a movie from "2012" as you can get.

"The Road," for those of you who've read the (deservedly) Pulitzer Prize winning novel, is surprisingly faithful and loyal to the book. Fears that they mainstreamed up the movie can be put to rest; this is NOT an action-packed adventure movie. It's a grim, gritty, depressing, realistic look at what life would probably be like after an unnamed event brings about the end of civilization, if not the world. As in the book, the movie never reveals what caused the apocalypse, and as in the book, the movie is pretty unflinching in showing us what waits on the other side of tomorrow.

The movie was so loyal to the book that I felt a bit like I was watching it for a 2nd time rather than for the 1st time, which was kind of distracting. And also? Robert Duvall is brilliant in how he can pack an entire life of joy and sorrow and fear and regret and defeat and hope into a single sentence.

The Road: A+

PS: Hmmm... If I'm gonna hit 52 movies... I gotta step things up here. 8 movies in 27 days is gonna be tough, especially if I end up spending 5 or so of those days in Point Arena...