PODCAST: Screening Episode 50 - FURIOUS 7 Brings Flying Cars And Teary Eyes

 

I will admit it.  I totally shed a single tear at the end of Furious 7.

Is this the best entry in the unlikeliest of all blockbuster franchises?  No way.  Not by a long shot. Fast Five is still the best single film in the franchise in terms of quality storytelling and character work.  At the same time, Furious 6 is definitely the most entertaining movie overall, due mostly to a healthy dose of the The Rock playing an ally as opposed to an enemy.  Also, The Battle On The Infinite Runway at the end is the best action sequence of this or most any other franchise.  But what Furious 7 lacks in sharp storytelling or non-stop action, it makes up for with steady entertainment value and an emotionally devastating coda.

This franchise has been incredibly nimble, striving to redefine itself with each entry.  The latter half of the series has effortlessly transitioned from cops & robbers to a heist flick to a comic book story and now, with part seven, we are solidly in globe-trotting secret agent mode.  Amazingly, this feels like the franchise's destiny all along, particularly with the always great Kurt Russell playing the team's jovial yet badass handler.  The story feels a bit half-baked ("Let's give them a MacGuffin to chase and be done with it.") but each component of the story works fine on its own.  The entire mountain chase scene, featuring cars parachuting out of a cargo plane, is an absolute franchise all-timer.  Seriously, it's incredible.  But it happens pretty early on in the proceedings and none of the set pieces that follow ever really surpass that scene in terms of action or pure excitement.  Dom and Brian driving a rare and expensive sports car mid-air across three different skyscrapers in Abu Dhabi does come pretty close though.

I was really looking forward to Jason Statham stepping in and lending some real weight and menace to the villain role, something a lot of these movies tend to lack.  And while Statham's silent force-of-nature routine is pretty effective, it somehow pales in comparison to Luke Evans' turn as the younger Shaw brother, mostly because his impassive "Everyone is a cog in my machine" approach feels like a more direct counter point to Dominic Torretto and his fierce family loyalty.  Also, the revelation in the opening scene that Evans somehow managed to survive the last film really deflates Statham's need for vengeance.

But all of these issues (along with a Michelle Rodriguez subplot that falls flat and a significant squandering of Djimon Hounsou) feel totally minor and didn't really start to bother me until long after I'd left the theater.  For most of the film's running time I was having WAY too much fun to get bogged down by any of this stuff.  And by the final scene, I guarantee that you just won't care.  Credit must be paid to director James Wan (who brings his own visual flourishes without alienating the film from the rest of the series) and writer Chris Morgan for pulling off the impossible in the wake of Paul Walker's death.  It would appear that Walker had already finished filming the vast majority of his scenes before his passing and most of the body doubling/digital face-swapping absolutely works on screen.  That's not to say you don't notice it, but it still feels mostly organic to the story and the effects work is not so jarring as to grind the movie to a halt.  And that final scene...man that final scene.  It's just a killer.

We ended up taking an accidental two month hiatus from podcasting but the snow has melted and we're officially back in business. For our first episode after the break we've got a great five-person round table of returning guests, all of whom have varying levels of affection for the Fast & Furious franchise as a whole. Also, at different points we inadvertently confuse Jason Statham with Jason Segal and Eugene Levy with Elliott Gould. True story.

As always, make sure to subscribe on iTunes and/or SoundCloud!

Next week: Ex Machina!

The FURIOUS 7 Super Bowl Spot Is Preposterously Awesome

It's been two days since the Super Bowl and I'm still having some trouble believing that the Football Gods actually allowed my Patriots to win that game.  Whether you believe in all that Deflategate nonsense or not, I think we can all agree that the ratio of game-based excitement to ad-based entertainment was incredibly lopsided this year.  I think the best ad I saw the whole game was for avocados.

But we also got a crop of mini-trailers for big upcoming features, including Terminator, Pitch Perfect 2, Tomorrowland and Jurassic World.  But the only one of these worth really talking about is the spot for Furious 7.

What unholy deal did Vin Diesel make with Beelzebub which allows each of these movies to be better than the last one?    How is this possible?  Was Paul Walker collateral damage?  Somebody get the Vatican on this, STAT.

I don't even know where to begin.  The importance of family has become the prevailing theme of these movies, so I love seeing that same theme play out on the villain's side as well.  The Toretto house explosion is pretty baller, and I would have expected this to be the kind of thing used to write Walker out of the series but it looks like it happens right up front and sets the rest of the movie in motion.  The Rock saying "Daddy's gotta go to work" makes me happier than decorum should permit.  But that car jumping from building to building though...holy fuck.  That absolutely silenced my Super Bowl party.

My only disappointment with this (and all) trailers is not enough Kurt Russell.  Here's hoping I don't walk out of the movie with the same complaint.

On a related note, Amazon currently has EVERY Fast & Furious movie available for $10 or less per Blu-ray.  You can also get the whole thing as a box set for $50.  Happy early birthday to me!

Netflix Takes You Out To The Ballgame With This Trailer For THE BATTERED BASTARDS OF BASEBALL

Team USA's dreams of World Cup victory came to a screeching halt yesterday, which I suppose means that most sports fans' attentions will swing back to focus once again upon the great American pastime of baseball.  In a baseball town like Boston that's pretty easy business, even if the Red Sox are currently looking pretty dismal in fourth place.  But for those of you who need a little reminder why baseball is so damn great, Netflix has got you covered.

Starting next week you'll be able to stream The Battered Bastards Of Baseball, a documentary about the independent minor league Portland Mavericks.  It's a great underdog story about a bunch of muttonchopped, mustachioed dreamers who just wanted to play ball.  It's even got some star power in the form of the one and only Kurt Russell, who once played for the team that was owned by his father Bing Russell after a long acting career of his own back in the glory days of the Hollywood western.

At this point it seems inevitable that we'll eventually get a narrative adaptation with Russell playing the role of his father.  It remains to be seen if that will play as fun as Mario Van Peebles playing his father Melvin plus Melvin's onscreen alter ego Sweet Sweetback in Baadasssss!  Unlikely, but you never know.

Brattle Theatre Watch-A-Thon Day One - Let's Get Culty!

I’ve spent the last month or so raising money for the Brattle Theatre so I could take part in their Watch-A-Thon Weekend, two days of back to back cult and classic movies from noon midnight.  Thanks to some of you wonderful folks, I raised over $300 for the Brattle, which means my weekend was effectively booked.

I arrived Saturday at noon and received a lovely gift bag for participating, including a pass for unlimited popcorn and soda as well as some gift cards for local eateries meant to encourage me to venture out into the world between screenings.  Sadly these enticing culinary offers came just as I had re-embarked upon my pre-wedding diet meant to combat my ever expanding waistline.  As it turns out there was only one other person participating in the Watch-A-Thon with me, and it just so happened that while my preferred seating position was down in front, his was up in the balcony.  We settled into our respective seats and prepared for out cinematic adventure, kicked off with three shorts: Mr. Bean Attends A Premiere, Nick Park’s infamous claymation Creature Comforts and one of my personal favorites, Duck Dodgers From The 24^th And A Half Century.  I hadn’t watched that in years and it was the perfect way to kick off the festivities.

BEETLEJUICE:

"I've seen The Exorcist about 167 times and it keeps getting funnier EVERY SINGLE TIME I SEE IT!"

First up was Time Burton’s Beetlejuice, celebrating its 25^th anniversary.  This is a movie I’ve seen a number of times, but it had actually been a while since my last viewing.  I forgot just how little Michael Keaton is actually in that movie; he’s so totally great you just assume the movie is wall-to-wall Keaton, but he's really used very sparingly and doesn't even fully appear until about halfway through.  I love the sheer banality of the afterlife’s civil servants, and Wynona Ryder is at her most adorably droll here.   At this point, watching stuff like Beetlejuice and Edwad Scissorhands depresses me more than anything else, since Tim Burton hasn’t made a movie this good in years.  At least not a live action one.

In the middle of the movie I suddenly remembered that I used to watch a Beetlejuice Saturday morning cartoon in which Beetlejuice was actually a good guy who got into weekly adventures with young Lydia.  That's a serious departure from the film where he’s a Loki-esque force of uncontrollable chaos.  Was Beetlejuice a big hit with kids when it was released?  It’s certainly not a family film but I can see the wacky appeal to kids.  It’s like the Ghostbusters cartoon, where Slimer was suddenly their lovable pet.   So weird.

THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN

"Smells mighty like a polecat!"

Speaking of weird.  Tiny Town is a 1938 musical western starring all midgets (their word, not mine). 

AND IT’S AWESOME.

Here’s the thing about Tiny Town.   While the actors are small of stature, they’re all clearly adults, with some of them sporting wrinkled, craggy faces that have seen some serious mileage.  But even still, most of the cast has fairly high pitched voices, so when they’re not in close-up it gives the visual impression that you’re watching children playing cowboy.  That’s all well and good I suppose, that is until we get to the scene with a sexy saloon singer crooning a tune about “when I make love to you.”  Then it gets super creepy, super quickly.  

That sense of proportional disconnect is amplified by the fact that, while everyone in the film is small, everything in the town is normal sized.  The saloon is particularly entertaining: there’s a big step in off the street that’s so high that one character has to use his arms to literally hoist himself up, the swinging saloon doors hang far enough over their heads that the cowboys can practically duck under them, and the bar is so tall that they had to build a platform for the actors to stand on.  In reality this is a budgetary matter; the studio surely had a stock “old west” set that they shot the film on to save money.  But within the context of the film it makes no logical sense at all.  If this was a town consisting entirely of little people then they surely would have built everything according to their own specifications.  So what’s the deal?  Did these little people take over a normal sized town?  Did the buildings come ready-made in some kind of Old West kit?  Are there bigger people elsewhere that we just don’t see, or is this movie set in a universe of entirely little people?  If that’s true then why is everything so damn big?  It’s the same problem I have with Pixar’s Cars, in which the cars are clearly alive and yet their world is clearly constructed for human beings that are never seen or discussed.  Is Cars secretly post-apocalyptic?  Did the cars evolve and overthrow their creators?  I NEED TO KNOW.

EIGHT DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER

"Kill!  Kill!"

A classic Shaw Brothers kung-fu film about a clan of seven brothers, simply named No. 1 through 7, all masters of the long-poled spear who are betrayed in battle.  All but two are killed, and while No. 6 returns home completely unhinged, No. 5 immediately goes into hiding at a Buddhist temple.  He’s determined to renounce his name and his violent past in order to become a monk, but the order won’t have him.  They refuse to shave his head and brand the traditional six dots onto his scalp, so in a moment of fierce determination he takes a knife, dry-shaves his own head and then brands himself.  The monks allow him to stay and he demonstrates his skill at pole fighting, the monk’s kung-fu of choice.  They practice against wooden wolves with metal teeth, but rather than destroying the wolves they practice defanging them.  This sets up the final scene in which No. 5, after learning that his sister (No. 8) is being held captive by the man who betrayed his family, takes on an entire army using only his spear and a cart full of bamboo poles.  And just when he gets cornered and all looks lost, his fellow monks show up and proceed to literally defang the enemy soldiers, ripping their teeth straight out of their jaws.

It’s super entertaining and full of absolutely gorgeous production design.  And the fight scenes are all totally great, a mix of both the hilariously exaggerated and the legitimately kickass.  The enemy soldiers are armed with staffs with specially designed coiled ends that act like bungee cords (although they look kind of like bendy straws) that can wrap around spears and limbs alike to immobilize and disarm their opponents.  It’s cartoon-level stuff but it totally works, providing the opportunity to have men suspended midair in any number of uncomfortable positions.  It’s also clearly a favorite of Tarantino, as the lead role is played by Gordon Liu and the villain’s name is Pan Mei, which sounds a lot like the kung-fu master Pai Me that Liu played in Kill Bill Vol. 2.  I’d never seen a proper Shaw Brothers film before and this made me want to watch a dozen more.

DINNER BREAK!

The next film was I, Monster, a Jeckyll and Hyde-esque story starring Christopher Lee, but I skipped it to meet the wife and some friends for dinner at Grendel’s Den, a German restaurant just around the corner from the theater.  It was Oktoberfest weekend in Cambridge, and Grendel’s is our favorite place to celebrate each year, as they’ve got great imported beer on tap and tasty brats all for super cheap.

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA

"It's all in the reflexes."

I returned to the Brattle at 8:00 for my next movie, which was originally supposed to be Zardoz.  Fortunately for me it was replaced at the last minute; I don’t think I could have taken another viewing so soon after my last.  Instead I was treated to John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China.  I had seen some bits and pieces of this over the years and I thought I had a pretty good handle on what the film was all about.  Kurt Russell as a truck driver who gets mixed up with some Chinese gangsters?  Sounds good to me!

I was WAY off.

How did I not realize this was a movie about ancient Chinese magic?  Talk about a game changer!  And Carpenter doesn’t do anything half-assed.  Not only are there ancient sorcerers, but there’s a floating eyeball creature and even a sort of giant Wookie demon.  Throw in Kim Catrall at the peak of her hotness and Kurt Russell doing a crazy John Wayne impression and the whole thing becomes a big ball of crazy in the greatest way possible.  I mean, wow.  This thing is paced breathlessly, like Carpenter was so anxious to get from one batshit crazy set-piece to the next that he didn't have time to stop and try to connect any of the dots.  I feel like the whole movie can be summed up in this single exchange:

Jack Burton: What's in the flask, Egg? Magic potion?

Egg Shen: Yeah.

Jack Burton: Thought so, good. What do we do, drink it?

Egg Shen: Yeah!

Jack Burton: Good! Thought so.

In other words, never let the plot get in the way of a good story.

I’m so grateful I got to see this in a theater with a vocal crowd, as I imagine that if I had been at home on my couch I would have just sat there in slack-jawed bewilderment wondering how I had gotten that movie so wrong for all these years.  So much fun.  I can’t wait to see what Russell does in the Fast & Furious movies.  Can I watch that right now please?

SECRET SCREENING!

All we were told about the final show was that it was a sci-fi classic and that, like Beetlejuice, it was celebrating its 25^th anniversary.  I looked up what movies filled that description and came up with a list that included The Blob, Short Circuit 2, Mac And Me, Critters 2, Alien Nation, Killer Klowns From Outer Space, Earth Girls Are Easy and My Stepmom Is An Alien.  Any of those would have been just fine with me.  My money was actually on They Live, which would have made a for a fantastic Carpenter double feature, but it was actually the anime classic Akira.  I’ve been meaning to watch this movie for years, especially since I suspect I actually saw this once as a young child but I’ve never really been able to confirm it.  Sadly, I had stayed up very late the night before recording a new podcast, so my brain simply didn't have the ability to handle subtitles that late in the evening.  I drifted off about 30 minutes into the movie and by the time I came to I had no idea what the shit was going on anymore.  Oh well.  I'll have to watch this again some other time.

Coming Up: Watch-A-Thon Day 2 - UFOs!  Seuss Pianos!  WHERE'S THE FALCON?!?! 

Someone Should Take A Flamethrower To THE THING Prequel/Remake

"So I'm gonna die because I floss?"

What a waste.

John Carpenter's The Thing is one of my absolute favorite movies of all time, although I admit that I was pretty late to that particular party.  It's simply wonderful in every single regard.  The Antarctic setting is at once expansive and claustrophobic and the story is twisted in such a way that keeps you guessing till the very last moment.  The cast is top notch: a great collection of familiar faces like David Clennon, Donald Moffat, Richard Masur and T.K. Carter, one of the all time great Kurt Russell performances, Keith David at his most badass, and WILFORD FUCKING BRIMLEY.  Plus, being a devout worshiper at the altar of 80s cinema, I have an undying love for great practical creature work, the gooier the better.  The Thing itself is simply astonishing, the true stuff of nightmares.  To be clear, I'm not a digital effects hater, but I've yet to see a digital werewolf transformation that's nearly so compelling as An American Werewolf In London and that shit's over 30 years old.

The idea of revisiting The Thing seemed to fall somewhere between unnecessary and foolhardy.  Prequels in general suffer from a critical flaw inherent to the very concept: we already know how the story has to end, so that automatically diminishes all the stakes.  That means that, unless you're going to leave us with something that alters our perception of what we thought we knew from the original, you've got to have either a story or a hero that is INCREDIBLY compelling to make it worth our while.  Otherwise there's simply no point.  You could do a straight remake, but with a film as iconic and borderline perfect as The Thing, why on Earth would you want to?  It's not like you're going to improve on what came before.

The Thing (2011) ends up trying to do a little bit of both, and all of it's just plain bad.  The fact that it has the same title only led to confusion among audiences as to exactly what kind of story they were trying to tell.  Watching the movie probably didn't help.  Ostensibly this new film is pitched as a prequel, detailing the story of the Norwegian outpost that first discovered the Thing frozen out there in the ice and there's certainly some potential in that concept.  We could learn more about the Thing itself and its ancient ship.  Perhaps the Norwegians had some nefarious intent, looking to control the creature like the Weyland-Yutani corporation from Aliens.  Hell, even if we got a character that's at least half as awesome as R.J. MacReady, at least that would guarantee some fun.

Unfortunately we get none of that.  Instead it's essentially the same story told again, except this time everyone's Norwegian.  All of the incredible creature work is replaced with some pretty half-baked digital effects (the final Thing at the end is particularly bad) which is pretty unforgivable.  Rick Bottin's grotesque original puppetry puts these digital farts to shame; whereas before I could spend all day staring at those monstrosities, their modern CG equivalents only made me cringe.  While the Thing is racking up the body count, the other big villain of the original film is paranoia.  Watching everyone second guess each other, trying to figure out who's human and who's not is half the fun.  Here there's almost no sense of dread, partially because the Thing itself makes almost no attempt to hide itself, transforming and attacking people right out in the open and often in the stupidest situation possible, like a helicopter in mid-air.  It doesn't help that most of the characters are forgettable non-entities, making me not really care who lives and who dies.  Mr. Eko from Lost plays Diet Keith David, while the great Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton are both wasted as half of a watered down version of MacReady.

There are some poor attempts to further our knowledge of the creature, like the revelation that it can't replicate inorganic matter.  Sadly it's a pretty dull devlopment, leading to an almost comical recreation of the infamous blood test scene from the original where Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character shines a flashlight in everyone's mouth looking for fillings.  It's indicative of an unfortunate tendency of most prequels, where they feel the need to revisit every single detail of how things got to be they way you remember them.  For example, at one point Joel Edgerton goes after the Thing with an axe and it gets stuck in the wall.  When he tries to pull it out, Winstead tells him to leave it, and you can practically hear the script screaming, "YOU HAVE TO LEAVE IT SO THAT MACREADY CAN FIND IT LATER!"  Hell, the movie closes with an in-credits sequence (after a truly disappointing finale) detailing how the last two guys ended up chasing the dog to the American camp in the helicopter.  And yet, when the Thing first emerges from its icy sleep, instead of leaving a mostly intact ice-coffin like MacReady discovers, the ice block shatters into a thousand pieces, seemingly for no other reason than "it'll look cool."  Also, let's not forget that this is a movie set in the early 80s.  While the original featured all sorts of great once-futuristic-now-vintage tech like the chess playing computer that MacReady douses with scotch, there's almost no attempt by its lame successor to show off its period setting.  That could have been a lot of fun, but instead it's just another opportunity wasted.

Don't watch this movie.  Seriously, just don't.  The original is streaming on Netflix right now.  Go watch that instead.  It's just like the remaquel (premake?) except that instead of sucking, it's fucking great.


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Title: The Thing (2011)
Director: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.
Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Eric Christian Olsen, Adewale Akinnouye Agbaje, Ulrich Thomsen
Year Of Release: 2011
Viewing Method: HBO HD