Podcast Episode 54: ROAR Is The Most Insane Thing I've Ever Seen

Some movies defy explanation.  Defy logic.  Defy reality.

And then there's Roar, a movie that was directed by fucking lions.

The story of Roar's production seems so unhinged from reality that you wouldn't believe it really happened if the film itself wasn't there to taunt you with the proof of its own deranged existence.  Writer/director/star Noel Marshall, his wife Tippi Hedren, their sons John and Jerry and their daughter Melanie Griffith spent the 1970s living in a sprawling California estate surrounded by over 100 wild lions, tigers, panthers and leopards.  Their unique lifestyle was part of their fervent support of wildlife conservation and the ethical treatment of large jungle cats, and they felt these issues were so important that the best way to bring them proper attention was to shoot a feature film starring themselves and their extended feline family.  So they embarked on a decade-long cinematic journey in which no animals were harmed, but most of the humans suffered grievous bodily injuries.  Director of photography Jan De Bont (who would go on to direct Speed) was fucking scalped and had to get 220 stitches in the back of his head.  That's what happens when you try to shoot scenes with a hundred untrained lions.

This really happened.  In this universe.  If you think I'm making it all up, just take a look at this trailer, courtesy of my personal idols over at Drafthouse Films who have recently re-released this long forgotten scrap of madness into theaters.

How do you not want to immediately watch that movie?

Bart returns for this week's episode of the podcast and I threw him right into the deep end with a midnight screening of Roar, a movie that's basically ninety minutes of terrified humans being chased by giant killer animals.  It is both the most entertaining and the most horrifying thing I've seen in a theater this year.  We were so dumbfounded in fact, that it actually turned into a pretty short conversation on the relative scale of this podcast, so we changed gears about halfway through to catch up with Star Wars, Batman v. Superman and our first look at Jared Leto's incarnation of The Joker.

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or SoundCloud and we will love you forever and bring you cookies!

Next Week: Avengers: Age Of Ultron, obviously.

Gaze Upon The Second STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS Trailer!

Star Wars: Celebration is happening right now in Anaheim.  I am in my cubicle in Boston.  This makes me sad.  You know what doesn't make me sad?

THIS FUCKING TRAILER.

HO.  LEE.  SHIT.

I literally love everything about this.  Standouts include:

Derelict Star Destroyer.
Luke Skywalker's familiar voiceover.
BB-8 peeking around a corner.
Vader's melted helmet
Every shot of John Boyega.
Robot hand!
That chrome stormtrooper.
Old school lightsaber being handed down
Cool masked villain.
And of course, THAT FINAL SHOT!

Seriously, that final shot put the biggest, stupidest grin on my face and made me instantly pump my fist in the air, perfectly in time with the music sting I might add.

Suffice it to say, my excitement over this movie just became legit.


PS - J.J. Abrams announced on stage today that the desert planet we've been seeing is not, in fact, Tattoine, but a new world named Jakku, which hilariously set off a 20 minute Twitter firestorm among bloggers about how to properly spell it.

No Shit: Disney Likes Chris Pratt For INDIANA JONES

After the disastrous misfire of Crystal Skull*, we all collectively decided that Indiana Jones was probably better left alone.  Everyone except Disney that is, who bought up the franchise rights in a package deal with Star Wars back in 2013 and have been looking to reboot the series with a charismatic new star.  While Star Wars is on pace to dominate theaters this coming Christmas, things have been fairly quiet on the Dr. Jones front aside from some unsubstantiated rumors of Bradley Cooper's involvement.

Now we can add Chris Pratt's name to the list.  Deadline's story just says that Disney is pursuing Pratt, which feels like a no-brainer to the point that I question how real this might be.  After the success of Guardians Of The Galaxy and with Jurassic World on the way, there is no doubt that Pratt is at that top of every studio's casting wish list for at least one major franchise.  Short of also sending Andy Dwyer to a galaxy far, far away, Indy is probably the next biggest pre-sold property Disney is developing at the moment.  It would be stupid for them NOT to be pursing Pratt.

Sidenote: What if Pratt ends up cast in one of the Star Wars stand alone films?  If they're really looking at him for Indy, they MUST be considering him for young Han Solo.  Could Pratt pull off the Disney trifecta of Marvel, Star Wars and Indiana Jones?

Do we really need a new Indiana Jones?  Of course not.  We also don't need new Ghostbusters nor do we need a new Snake Plissken, but there's simply no stopping these things now.  Until they secure a writer and/or director, it remains to be seen whether or not we'd get a total reboot of the character or if we'd just get further adventures of Indiana Jones which maintained some continuity with the previous films.  Conventional wisdom would say a full on reboot, but I think Harrison Ford would totally show up as older Indy to bookend the film.

I'm not entirely sure that I'd buy Burt Macklin as an archaeology professor, but at the end of the day, we could do much worse than Pratt.  We could end up with Bradley Cooper.




*I finally rewatched this recently and I maintain that while the film just does not work, I still appreciate what Spielberg was going for.  There's no way to ignore Ford's age in that movie, so setting it in the 50's and telling a story filled with the iconography of that era - atomic bomb tests and flying saucers - is hardly the worst decision they could have made.  The worst decision they could have made was casting Shia LaBeouf.

Podcast Episode 43: Newsbusters Spinoff Pilot

I mentioned in last week's podcast (at the suggestion of my much wiser counterpart Jamie) that it might be time to shake up the format of the podcast a bit.  I recognize that a 90+ minute podcast might be a bit much for some people, so we're trying something different this week.  A bit more digestible.

So Episode 43 is just shy of 50 minutes and deals only with the movie news of the previous week.  Bart and I discuss the new Mad Max trailer, the fallout of the Sony leak, Ghostbusters casting rumors, Star Trek director departures, Star Wars character names and Godzilla's return to Japan.  We also dig into Marvel's Agents Of Shield, which Bart just recently finished binge watching.

I'm hoping to also lay down a movie-only podcast with Jamie in the next few days covering The Imitation Game, although scheduling may get in the way.  We're still working on a name for this new podcast spinoff show, tentatively titled Newsbusters.  I'm open to suggestions.

Podcast Episode 41: FOXCATCHER Wrestles With Facial Prosthetics

It's been a long and fretful week over here, which means that I didn't get last week's podcast cut together until Thursday night.  Now here it is Friday before I'm finally able to write anything up about it.  On top of that, Bart a.k.a. my podcasting Kato will be out of town this weekend, meaning that the podcast will likely be pre-empted next week.  Ah well, sometimes them's the breaks.

Anyway, this week we talk about Foxcatcher, a movie full of strong, Oscar-caliber performances that are somewhat mired in a fairly weak story.  The big three here are Steve Carrell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo and I really love all three characters in their own peculiar ways.  Still, it's hard to top Steve Carrell's Giant Schnoz inexplicably wearing a revolutionary war jacket or referring to himself as Golden Eagle.  That's just some top notch shit right there.

We also delve into last week's big trailer releases, particularly Star Wars and Jurassic World.  These are old news now, but whatever.  You still get to hear Bart's impression of the talking velociraptor from Jurassic Park III.

Next Week: Remains to be seen!

The STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS Trailer Is Here!

The first teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens now officially exists!  It's currently located exclusively over here at the Apple Trailer site, which means I can't embed it here.  It also means you can't currently watch it in full screen, which kind of blows.  I remember back when Apple was the best place to watch trailers in high definition and all YouTube videos looked like garbage.  Oh how the times have changed.

UPDATE:  Well that didn't take long.  Here's a spiffy new embedded version.

Anyway, there's not a whole lot to see here, as it's just a first teaser.  Particularly, there are no classic Star Wars characters to see.  No Han, no Leia, no Luke.  That's a little disappointing, but not altogether surprising.  I imagine they're gonna draw that reveal out as long as possible.

How do we feel about that new school lightsaber?  I don't understand the need to re-invent the wheel with with one of the most iconic weapons in all of cinema, especially in a way that seems so impractical.  Seriously, a hand guard made out of lasers?  How has that guy not sliced off all his fingers already?  Also, the evil voiceover (which sounds SO MUCH like Benedict Cumberbatch's Smaug as to be distracting) is a little on the fucking nose and belongs in one of those montages of people awkwardly saying the title of the movie they're in.

But that little soccer ball droid is adorable.

Podcast Episode 40: MOCKINGJAY PART 1 Kicks Off The Revolution

I couldn't help but walk out of Mockingjay: Part 1 feeling a bit disappointed.

The first Hunger Games movie left a real bad taste in my mouth, but Catching Fire actually kind of won me over with its liberal dose of sassy Jenna Malone and its promise of legit rebellion and the outright warfare to come.  That's the shit I was all excited to see in the first half of the final installment of this franchise.  Sadly I was let down on both fronts, with Malone sidelined off screen for all but five seconds of the movie and the rebellion whittled down to two and a half skirmishes spread out over two hours of screen time.  Those skirmishes are pretty cool in their own right, but I would have gladly taken more scenes of rebellion in the districts over Katniss staring pensively out over a brook.

There's plenty to like here, including Katniss's inability to perform in a propaganda video (I refuse to acknowledge this franchise's inane fixation with Suessian lingo), every word out of Elizabeth Banks' mouth, a well staged rescue operation, a horrific field of corpses and one last chance to enjoy Philip Seymour Hoffman.  But the biggest problem with Mockingjay: Part 1 is that it simply doesn't feel like a complete story.  We're not quite in Deathly Hallows* territory here, but everything that happens in this movie is merely the prologue to whatever's coming in Part 2.  It's enjoyable, but not exactly satisfying in its own right.  It reminds me of Episode 7 from any season of Game Of Thrones, one of those episodes that's more about moving the chess pieces into place so they can strike the killing blow later on down the road.

Bart and I talk to avowed Hunger Games fanatic Jamie about all this as well as her own wild-eyed theory that Peeta is secretly the boring version of Johanna. (I'm paraphrasing here.)  We also talk about the recent Peanuts trailer, the upcoming Star Wars trailer and casting rumors for both Jean Grey and Jessica Jones.

Next Week: Foxcatcher and/or Horrible Bosses 2


*Or, as I call it, Harry Potter And The Campsite Of Sadness

Oscar Isaac Is Your New Apocalypse

Right around this time last year, Oscar Isaac was totally blowing my mind as the titular character of the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis.  I'd enjoyed his work in movies like Drive and the sweet but under-seen 10 Years, but it was his turn as the talented yet mopey folk musician that truly won me over and convinced me that this guy is destined to be a perennial Oscar contender for at least the next decade.

In the meantime, Isaac has been a hot commodity for every major film franchise under the sun.  He recently finished shooting a leading and possibly roguish, Han Solo-esque role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and he's been on Marvel's short list to play Doctor Strange for ages now.  But instead Isaac has planted his flag over at Fox, signing on to play Apocalypse in Bryan Singer's next X-Men film.  Solely from a logistical standpoint, this makes a lot of sense: the guy's gonna be pretty busy in a galaxy far, far away for the next few years, so taking the lead role in another major franchise would likely burn Isaac out and prevent him from shooting the kind of adult, artistic films that he truly loves.*  By playing a one-time villain in a very isolated series, Isaac gets to collect a comic book paycheck and still keep the door open to appear in either the Marvel or DC cinematic universes somewhere down the road.

I will say I was expecting Singer to go with someone with a more imposing physical presence (Tom Hardy's name was bandied about quite a bit) but, based on the picture above, I expect that the character will eventually be realized with the aid of quite a bit of motion capture.  I'm also curious to see just how far they go with Apocalypse's giant purple cheek-lips, as it's one of the few facial features that distinguishes him from Darkseid and Thanos, both of whom will also be getting some serious screen time in the next couple of years, inevitably leading to some poor kid getting the wrong action figure for a future Christmas.


*I talked to Isaac for a few minutes following a Llewyn Davis screening and he was both polite and gracious as I asked him to recommend some titles for my movie-a-day project.  He offered up some rather obscure Russian art films that I eventually tracked down but did not get a chance to watch before my year was up.

Podcast Episode 38: INTERSTELLAR Is Mostly Alright, Alright Alright.

I wanted to love Christopher Nolan's Interstellar so, so much.  A great cast, a talented technical filmmaker at the top of his game, hard science-fiction, space travel, and an exploration of the human condition...this is hitting all my pleasure points.  So it's hard not to feel the crushing weight of disappointment when I say that I only mostly enjoyed the film.  I think it's a beautiful film, expertly shot, featuring largely serviceable performances yet hampered by a script that's too often thematically blunt, emotionally overwrought and narratively adrift.  There's certainly plenty to like and, on the relative scale of Hollywood blockbusters, Nolan's latest is still far better than most.  Complaining about Interstellar seems like an outright luxury in a year in which Transformers 4 will almost certainly remain the highest grossing film in the world.  And yet, Interstellar is simply not the home run I was hoping for.  It's probably more like a double that's been stretched into a triple thanks to fielding error.

Bart, Jamie and I all walked away from Interstellar with very different feelings about the film, making for a pretty good podcast discussion if I do say so myself.  We also talk about the newly minted title for Star Wars Episode VII, Jared Leto's potential run as the Joker, Toy Story 4, The 6 Billion Dollar Man, and the interesting strategy for Hans Zimmer's upcoming score for Dawn Of Justice.

We also discover and immediately dispel the premature rumors of Macaulay Culkin's demise, which quickly devolves into an examination of the gender politics of the Talkboy. 

Next Week: Big Hero 6

Podcast Episode 28: SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR vs MACHETE KILLS! Robert Rodriguez Double Feature!

If you'd like to become completely disenchanted with Eva Green's breasts and the female form in general, boy have I got a movie for you.

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is an ugly film from top to bottom.  Soulless and lacking any of the thrills of its predecessor, it strands too many talented actors on screen with hackneyed dialogue and plots that go absolutely nowhere.  There's no joy to be found anywhere in the movie.  At least in the original film, you could tell that folks like Clive Owen and Brittany Murphy were really digging in and having a ball.  Here, Josh Brolin and Jessica Alba feel completely lost in the wilderness.  Not even a heroin-addicted Christopher Lloyd or Stacey Keach as a potato mutant (!) can save this grim, disgusting retread.

Bart and I were so depressed walking out of the theater that we decided to pair it with another movie for podcasting purposes.  We landed on the opposite end of the Robert Rodriguez spectrum with Machete Kills, which is easily the director's best movie since the first Sin City.  It starts out fairly straightforward, with Danny Trejo's ex-Federale character Machete getting drafted by President Charlie Sheen to track down a madman with a nuclear missile, but it eventually winds its way into a completely insane sci-fi revenge flick chock full of the kind of Itchy And Scratchy-level cartoon violence that I can't help but fall in love with.  I found the first Machete film more than a little disappointing, but Machete Kills actually left me hungry-bordering-on-desperate for the promised third entry.  This is a movie that demands to be seen with lots of friends and lots of beers.

Episode 28 of the podcast finds Bart comparing Eva Green's Sin City performance to the water level in Sonic The Hedgehog and hatching a scheme to bring Danny Trejo into the Expendables universe while I somehow end up lamenting the lack of full frontal penis shots.  We also talk about Ant-Man finally starting production, The Rock as a possible Shazam and some potentially spoilery rumors regarding Star Wars: Episode VII.  The news remains at the top of the episode for those of you who are still waiting to see the movie(s) in question, but at least when it comes to A Dame To Kill For I feel like our 30 minute discussion is probably more entertaining than the actual film.

Next Week: Ghostbusters 30th Anniversary Re-Release and another movie TBD.

Podcast Episode 20: TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION Falls Down Like A Fat Ballerina

"Some things should never be invented."

Sunday morning I was cleaning up around the house and I found The Sting playing on TV.  It's one of my all time favorite movies and the best Newman/Redford pairing - Butch and Sundance are fine, but they're no Hooker and Gondorff.  It's also got one of the single greatest scripts in the history of movies, full of smart narrative twists and clever dialogue.  ("Relax kid, we had him ten years ago when decided to be somebody.")

So it was probably unfair to follow that up by going to see Transformers: Age Of Extinction, a movie that is aggressive in its lack of plot or character development.  It's almost three hours long and the overwhelming majority of it consists of car chases, fight scenes and action sequences that are completely untethered from any semblance of storytelling.  Characters both human and robotic all run around blowing stuff up with absolutely no motivation for any of their actions.  Shit just happens, and it keeps happening until it stops happening and then something else happens while the audience is completely overwhelmed by sensory overload.  You almost don't have time to realize that nothing you're seeing makes any damn sense and it isn't until the two hour mark, when Tiny Negro Transformer sits everybody down and describes the plot that's apparently been happening entirely off screen, that you full appreciate the full measure of insanity to which you've subjected yourself.

But Bay doesn't give a shit about things like "story" or "character development."  He cares only about awesome things being awesome and in that regard he does not disappoint.  Age Of Extinction brings new meaning to the phrase, "sit in the theater and turn off your brain."  This is three hours of pure, uncut id, outright pummeling the animalistic pleasure-centers of the human brain through spectacle and imagery devoid of any context or meaning.  The fact that this is (and continues to be) one of the most profitable franchises of all time only proves that Bay is satisfying some kind of carnal craving by theater-goers worldwide.  But from an intellectual standpoint the whole thing is endlessly fascinating and from a cinematic standpoint, doubly so.  You simply can't argue that Bay is incompetent.  He knows exactly what he's doing and what he's doing defies all logic and reason.  You need only look at the IMAX presentation, in which he constantly changes the aspect ratio not just from scene to scene, but from shot to shot.  A single exchange of dialogue will haphazardly swap from full frame to widescreen so many times it will make you dizzy.  But each individual shot is composed with such care and precision it's absolutely remarkable.

Is Transformers: Age Of Extinction a good movie?  No.  Not at all.  Not by any appreciable metric of filmmaking.  But is it an entertaining experience?  Weirdly, yes.  This isn't a case of "so bad it's good."  This is a case of "so wrong it's right."

The 20th (!) episode of the podcast goes into all this and a lot more.  This week we welcome certified film scholar Jason Michelitch to the show and we try to wrap our heads around just what sort of madness Bay hath wrought.  We also introduce our new Trailer Of The Week feature (because The Rock as a lion-hatted Hercules simply demanded it) and discuss the future fate of Predator, Pacific Rim 2 and Harrison Ford's legs.

Next week we'll be talking about Snowpiercer and I cannot wait.

READY PLAYER ONE Gets An Extra Life With Writer Zak Penn

The weather was beautiful this past weekend, so the wife and I walked to the beach that's conveniently located a mere two blocks from our apartment and features a lovely view of the planes taxing around the runways at Logan Airport.  After feasting upon a small mountain of fried clams, I pulled out my Kindle and finally set about the task of re-reading Ernie Cline's fantastic sci-fi novel Ready Player One.  It's an engrossing read to be sure and once again I find myself unable to put the thing down.  It only took me about ten pages before I found myself wondering whatever happened Warner Brothers' proposed film adaptation.

This morning that question was answered.  According to The Wrap, Zak Penn has been hired to do a rewrite of the original script by Cline and Eric Eason.  Warners won a significant bidding war for the project way back in 2010 and we haven't heard much about it since then.  But it seems that the studio is gearing up to shop the project around to directors this fall.  In a perfect world they'd capitalize on Disney's colossal fuck up and hire Edgar Wright for this, post haste.  Sadly, I doubt we live in that world.

Penn has writing credits on a number of geek-friendly properties that are not exactly what you'd call highly regarded by their target audiences, stuff like X-Men: The Last Stand, The Incredible Hulk and Elektra.  But he also wrote PCU and has a story credit on The Avengers, for what it's worth.  That geek sensibility is crucial when it comes to Ready Player One, which centers around a teenager who navigates through a virtual reality simulation (the Oculus Rift is modeled after Cline's OASIS) searching for clues that will lead him to a vast fortune hidden by the simulation's creator.  The virtual world is actually a whole universe made up of different regions drawing on popular sci-fi, fantasy and video game properties; the Firefly universe resides next to the Star Wars universe, which neighbors Star Trek, Dungeons & Dragons and Lord Of The Rings.  

The whole thing is a pastiche of every great genre franchise in the past 30 years, which makes any proposed film adaptation an intellectual property nightmare.  According to Cline, he had such a miserable experience with his first film Fanboys that he intentionally wrote Ready Player One as something that no one would ever try to adapt for the big screen, but anyone who's read the book can tell you just how incredible it could potentially be if someone could somehow manage to pull it off.  Plus I expect that folks like Nathan Fillion would totally be up for a fun cameo.

I had the chance to meet Cline briefly at South By Southwest this year and he's both down to Earth and totally hilarious.  He signed a copy of the book for me, asking "Star Trek or Star Wars?"  You can see my answer below, as well as an extra postscript he added once I showed him my then days-old Ghostbusters tattoo.  If he trusts Penn to take a pass at the script (and Penn was apparently his choice after meeting him during the recent New Mexico excavation for long lost E.T. Atari cartridges) then I'm inclined to trust Cline.  Besides, if this project ever does come to fruition, its success will truly rest on both the choice of director (seriously though, Edgar Wright) and what properties the studio can gain the rights to feature.  If they half-ass it, then what's the point?

Podcast Episode 19: Jenny Slate Shines In OBVIOUS CHILD

"Your head is spinning because you played Russian roulette with your vagina."

It's a hell of a thing, seeing people you know in real life appearing on the giant silver screen of your local multiplex.  For me it's always a little bittersweet, as it's a sharp reminder of my past life in the entertainment industry, but that doesn't mean I'm incapable of appreciating the success of my peers.  That appreciation comes even easier when it's a movie as good as Obvious Child, in which my former high school speech teammate Jenny Slate plays Donna, a struggling Brooklyn comedian who loses both her boyfriend and her day job, only to inadvertently get knocked up by arguably the nicest human on planet Earth.  Slate is terrifically funny as always, but she also imbues Donna with a tremendous sense of heart and grace.  There's a reason that multiple reviews have labeled this as a star-making turn for her; it's not easy to be graceful while calling someone "pee-farter".

What sets Obvious Child apart from films like Knocked Up or Juno is the no-nonsense approach it takes to the subject matter.  Donna quickly decides that an abortion is the only appropriate course of action and from that point on there's no emotional hand-wringing or second-guessing.  Abortion is presented as what it is, a perfectly safe and reasonable response that's been undertaken by millions of American women.  Donna's decision certainly isn't humdrum, but it's also not "the most important thing that will define her life forever."  It's dramatic and emotional without being a statement on her personhood or the morality of our society at large.  In that way Obvious Child feels incredibly refreshing, taking all the bluster and posturing out of a hot button political issue and instead focusing on the human reality, reminding us that there are real people at the heart of the matter that are too often overlooked.

Bart, Jamie and I discuss the many pros and cons of the film in the latest episode of the podcast, along with a brief trip down the rabbit hole of hilarity that is Movieguide.org's staid Christian film reviews.  We also ponder the implications of Rian Johnson taking over the new Star Wars trilogy, celebrate dodging the bullet of Father Of The Bride 3 and lament yet another pitch for the ill-advised Ghostbusters 3.  We forgot to talk about it at the end of the recording, but next week we'll be tackling the latest Transformers film.  Hopefully we'll make it through the whole thing without gauging our eyes out.

Enjoy!

Rian Johnson Will Probably Take Over STAR WARS

Let's get right to the nuts of the thing.  According to the folks at Deadline, director Rian Johnson is being tapped to take over the main Star Wars trilogy, writing and directing Episodes VIII and IX once J.J. Abrams has completed his entry currently in production.  This is still technically unconfirmed, but I expect it'll be verified sooner rather than later.

I am incredibly torn.  On the one hand, Rian Johnson is a tremendous step up from Abrams, and that's coming from someone who's largely an Abrams fan.  All of Johnson's films are absolutely required viewing.  Brick, The Brothers Bloom, Looper...these are each impeccable films that are expertly crafted both on the page and on camera.  I'm excited at the prospect of Johnson directing a Star Wars film, but I'm absolutely ECSTATIC at the idea of Johnson writing a Star Wars film.  His scripts are all sharp, intelligent and most of all entertaining as hell.  And the guy's got geek cred oozing out of his ears.

On the other hand, I'm depressed at the thought of Johnson being stuck for the better part of the next decade laboring on a pair of giant studio films on which I expect he'll have very little creative leeway.  The main trilogy is going to be a HUGE moneymaker for Disney and they'll almost certain exert a crushing amount of control over this part of the franchise.  (see: Ant-Man.)  I'm excited that Johnson will get to play in the Star Wars sandbox, but I'd have rather seen him take on one of the standalone films where he'd have a bit more freedom get funky.  He'd fit in nicely with Gareth Edwards and Josh Trank.

Mostly I'm dismayed at the idea that we're not going to see an original Rian Johnson film until at least 2020.  That's an absolute travesty.  Then again, I'd be more than okay to see Johnson mainstays like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Noah Segan playing a couple of badass Jedi.

Podcast Episode 17: Dangling From The EDGE OF TOMORROW

Against all odds, Tom Cruise seems to have found himself as the underdog of the summer.

I almost feel sorry for Cruise at this point.  The guy's personal life could be generously described as "suspect," and more bluntly described as "nine kinds of crazy."  He's certainly toned down his behavior since famously jumping up and down on Oprah's couch and subsequently arguing with Matt Lauer about the evils of psychiatry, but that shit stays with people and makes it hard to distinguish his on screen performance from his off screen antics.  I get it but I don't agree with it, mostly because I couldn't give less of a shit what an actor does in his personal life short of committing a crime.  Cruise can believe in all the Thetans and Xenus he wants and I'll still go see him in the theater so long as he keeps giving layered and compelling performances.  And rest assured that despite his advancing years, Tom Cruise has not lost a step.  Sure he might not disappear into a role like some of his peers, but the guy still has undeniable charisma and is the living embodiment of sheer, blunt-force entertainment.

In truth, it's been a while since he had a resounding box office success outside of the Mission: Impossible franchise.  But he hasn't been solely responsible for any huge bombs either, leaving him as one of the few stars left whose mere presence can bring just about any movie he wants a guaranteed green light.  (Will Smith is still being dragged kicking and screaming out of this club.)  Personally, I love that Cruise is utilizing his star power to make interesting, thought-provoking sci-fi spectacles.  It's like we can see his inner nerd showing, and that's incredibly endearing to me.  Last summer Cruise starred in Oblivion, a visual feast that proved to be mostly empty calories.  But I at least appreciated the effort.  Based on the somewhat lackluster marketing, you'd be forgiven for writing off this summer's unfortunately titled Edge Of Tomorrow as simply more of the same.  You would, however, be wrong.

Edge Of Tomorrow, which can essentially be boiled down to "Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers" is a surprising amount of fun.  Cruise brings a lot of depth to the role of William Cage, a military PR shill who's been drafted into service against an alien horde and gains the ability to relive the day of an epic D-Day-esque battle over and over again.  But he's nothing without Emily Blunt's Rita Vrataski, a.k.a. The Angel Of Verdun, a.k.a. The Full Metal Bitch.  How big of a badass is she?  She carries a sword made out of a helicopter blade.  Yeah.   Cruise is good, but it's Blunt who really elevates the proceedings, crafting a character whose hardened exterior protects a bruised psyche and a shattered history.  We learn very few real facts about her, but every glimpse we get is utterly fascinating and leaves the audience wanting more.  The same can be said of the film's setting.  Much like Vrataski, we don't get to see a whole lot of life outside the embattled beaches of France, but director Doug Liman has managed to craft a world that feels lived in and left me curious about the events happening off screen.  What would be going on in the States during the collapse of Europe?  I imagine there would be more than a few refugees taking up residence...

Most importantly, the time loops are extremely well executed, utilizing repetition to great effect both in terms of action and humor.  Much like Bryan Singer in Days Of Future Past, Liman is able to mine a lot of fun out of the ability to keep killing his characters in violent and surprising ways and then resetting the clock to bring them back for more.  Many have been quick (and correct) to praise the film for perfectly capturing the feeling of playing a video game in which you have to learn the enemy's movements by rote memory, frequently fucking it all up and committing suicide in order to start over.  You might think that would grow dull after a while, but the script by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez & John-Henry Butterworth keeps the audience smartly off balance, never allowing us to be sure whether we're seeing Cage perform some task for the first time or the 37th time.

I've seen a lot of criticism for the film's ending, and while I think it's a fairly big miscalculation, it's not enough to completely derail the film.  The word of mouth is overwhelmingly positive, and yet Edge Of Tomorrow finished a distant third in its opening weekend behind YA sensation The Fault In Our Stars and Disney's Maleficent.  Those target audiences are certainly very different demographics, and yet with 22 Jump Street and Transformers looming on the horizon, it seems all but certain that Tom Cruise's latest will at most be regarded a minor success.  That's a shame.  It deserves much better.

Episode 17 of the podcast features myself, Bart and Jamie chatting about all things Edge Of Tomorrow, including Tom Cruise fatigue, Emily Blunt badassery, fully realized action hero homo-eroticism and the film's somewhat nonsensical ending.  We also discuss the apparent conclusion of the Ant-Man director drama, Josh Trank joining the Star Wars universe, the merits of the Wachowskis and the feminist failings of Stripes.

Podcast Episode 16: Bryan Singer Saves The X-MEN By Burning Down The House

(SPOILERS ensue.)

The X-Men gave birth to the modern era of comic book superhero blockbusters.  It might be easy to forget that considering the franchise immediately went on a decade long decline into not just mediocrity but outright terribleness.  The tide turned three years ago with Matthew Vaughn's excellent X-Men: First Class, which shifted the action back to 1962 in order to tell the story of how a charming young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) first met with the angry Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and curated a team of young mutants to prevent World War III.  But that movie played fasts and loose with the established continuity of all the previous X-films set in the modern era.  Did these younger incarnations represent a cleansing of the palate, a clean slate from which to re-introduce beloved characters in a brand new universe?  Or was this a still a prequel to Bryan Singer's original films?

Days Of Future Past has an answer to that question, and the answer is both.  And neither.

Bryan Singer returns to the franchise for the first time since X2, and he's brought a handful of familiar faces with him to tell one of the all-time classic X-Men stories in which a member of the team (originally Kitty Pryde, but here it's Wolverine because Hugh Jackman) travels back in time to prevent a post-apocalyptic future from coming to pass. That means that Singer (and the audience) gets to have its cake and eat it too, using X1-3 and the two Wolverine standalones as the backstory for this distant hellscape and making the whole movie about trying to erase all of those movies from existence. That's kind of a brilliant way to course correct when you think about it, simply turning into the skid and saying, "Man, we killed and declawed (literally) everyone's favorite characters and left the franchise in a terrible place. So let's just embrace that and turn the world into a complete genocidal horrorshow so that we can undo the whole thing in a way that might make everyone happy again."

It's mostly effective because it feels like the proper sendoff that those characters never really got, both from an emotional and storytelling perspective.  With the exception of the seemingly ageless Hugh Jackman, I expect this is the last time we'll ever see any of those original X-Men cast members returning to these roles.  (Although I'd be psyched if they could ever find a reason bring in Stewart and McKellan again, especially since both Magnetos never get to share a scene together here.)  And that's the way it should be.  It's time to let a new generation of talent bring those characters to life, and I'm psyched at the prospect of seeing a young Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler, Gambit and Jean Grey join the fold.  It remains to be seen exactly how that's going to be executed, as the end of Days Of Future Past firmly establishes most of these characters as alive and well in 2023.  In a way that actually feels limiting, as it means we can't meet a teenage Cyclops in the next film (set in the 80s) because that would make James Marsden 58 years old at the end of DOFP.

That's why I say this film both is and isn't a total reboot.  Yes, we've thrown out 95% of what's come before First Class and Days Of Future Past, but by giving us even just a fleeting glimpse of what the future holds for Professor X and friends and by tying that future back to a group of actors that we're likely to never see again, we're left with a destination for these characters and stories that will likely exist only to torture continuity nerds like me. As for how Fox plans to handle the bevy of potential spin-offs, I simply have no idea. 

In Episode 16 of our podcast, Bart, Jamie and I discuss all of this as well as the moral turpitude of Bolliver Trask and how Bingbing Fan is most definitely not Saoirse Ronan, along with Gareth Edwards's entrance into the Star Wars family and Edgar Wright's departure from Marvel's upcoming Ant-Man.  Enjoy!

Podcast Episode 14: ATTACK THE BLOCK Or The Power Rangers Vs. The Gorilla-Wolf Motherfuckers

"Allow it."

Last week we talked about John Boyega leading the cast for the new Star Wars trilogy and Bart mentioned that he still hadn't seen Joe Cornish's incredible freshman film Attack The Block.  This week we decided to rectify the situation.  In truth we didn't actually end up talking about the movie for very long before the conversation steered its way onto a number of other topics, including Roberto Orci potentially taking the reins for the next Star Trek film, the inherent narrative problem with most prequels, the future of comic books on television (this fall will bring us Gotham, Constantine, Flash and Agent Carter to go with new seasons of Arrow and Agents Of SHIELD), and who should take fill Patrick Swayze's surfboard for the upcoming Point Break remake.  We also discuss the recently announced Power Rangers movie, and I somehow get painted as some kind of secret hardcore fanboy.  I'm still not really sure how that happened.

Don't take our lack of proper attention as an indictment of Attack The Block's quality.  We all loved it unreservedly and it's one of those movies that I will totally watch at the drop of a hat.  If you haven't seen it, I can't recommend it enough.  Think Goonies vs alien monsters, but British and in the 'hood.  Sadly, the film is not currently streaming on any major services, but you can get the DVD from Netflix or you can buy it on Blu-ray from Amazon for a paltry $15.

That being said, I'm rather fond of the meandering nature of this week's episode.  We cover a lot of different ground and it feels representative of my favorite kind of conversations about movies.  We're quickly entering the heart of summer movie season - Godzilla and X-Men hit theaters the next two weeks and then it's June and we're pretty much off to the races.  Still, I'm working to try and balance the content of these sessions so the movie of the week and the general discussion of cinematic current events is a little more even.

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or SoundCloud, rate us and review us.  And if you have any questions you'd like us to answer on the air or suggestions for topics you want to hear about, leave them in the comments below!

Podcast Episode 13: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 Swings Straight Into A Brick Wall (Literally)

"I AM THE RHINO!"

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 might not be as muddled and incoherent as its predecessor, but at least it's a lot more boring and silly.

That's a real shame, because I can't shake the feeling that there really is a very good Spider-Man film trapped underneath an imposing mountain of stupid.  The chemistry continues to crackle between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone and is the closest thing to a grounding force this franchise has going for it.  While his Peter Parker remains far too mopey and not nearly smart enough (he literally looks up YouTube videos to learn how batteries work), Garfield totally kills as Spider-Man, bringing an infectious sense of energy and joy to the screen whenever he dons the mask.  Tobey Maguire always made the web-slinging feel like a burden, whereas Garfield truly comes alive when he's facing down baddies and tossing off clever one-liners.  Webb really nails most of the action beats too; the opening chase/fight scene featuring Paul Giamatti's inexplicably cartoonish Russian gangster is absolutely magnificent to behold in IMAX 3D and from a purely visual standpoint, Jamie Foxx's Electro makes for a really cool and dynamic physical threat to Spider-Man.

Unfortunately the story remains dull and bloated, clocking in at over 2 hours and 20 minutes yet still leaving you feeling as if nothing much actually happened.  Electro isn't really a developed character with clear motivations and a plan of action so much as he is a walking special effect designed to make the trailers more exciting.  In fact, if Electro had simply been a autonomous robot or a natural phenomena, there would have been almost no impact to the way the plot unfolded.  Meanwhile Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan), who by all rights should have been the misunderstood victim turned ruthless criminal mastermind, comes off as little more than an afterthought, an aimless dick who exists solely to literally swoop in at the eleventh hour and act as the mechanism for the latest overly foreshadowed tragedy in Peter Parker's life.  Say what you want about The Lizard, but at least that guy had an evil plan that needed stopping.  And don't even get me started on the unmistakable streak of absurd silliness running through the whole movie.  Bad puns and mustache twirling are the order of the day if you're a Spider-Man villain; Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze would be right at home here.  If nothing else, I'm now outright terrified at the prospect of the upcoming Sinister Six film, which now feels destined to be nigh unwatchable.  If you think I'm exaggerating, just know that at one point Electro tries to kill Spider-Man via nursery rhyme.

The latest episode of the podcast goes into all that and a whole lot more spoilery detail, so I don't recommend listening before you've seen the movie.  I suspect that many of you have already subjected yourself to this nonsense however, so tune in and perhaps find a bit of catharsis.  We also chat about the Star Wars casting and the bizarre announcement of a Beverly Hills Cop "reboot".


(Point Of Order: In my excitement to make Ronny Cox joke, I mistakenly identify his BHC character as "Andrew Bogota" instead of the correct "Andrew Bogomil."  I also realize that I fudged the details of the famous Gwen Stacy scene from the comics, but I wasn't able to cut around it.  My bad.)

Podcast Episode 9: The Resurrection Of VERONICA MARS

"It actually does sit on a hellmouth."

I came to the Veronica Mars series fairly late in the game, speeding through the entire show on Jamie's DVDs a few years after it had gone off the air.  But like any good detective noir, once Veronica got her hooks into me, there was no going back.  When creator Rob Thomas launched his now infamous Kickstarter campaign to finally bring Neptune to the big screen, I was an early and vocal backer of the project, excited at the opportunity to catch up with all my favorite characters and see that enthralling world brought to life once more.

Exactly one year and one day after the start of that campaign , the film hit theaters and Jamie and I were there to see it.  I actually could have gone to the premiere at SXSW, but I promised the wife that I wouldn't see it without her.  Then we had tickets to a backers only screening the night before it opened, but Jamie's parent-teacher conferences forced us to give away our tickets and by the time we realized our scheduling mistake, the only tickets we could get for opening night required a lengthy (by Boston standards) drive to the only other theater in the area that was showing the film.  So after work on Friday we piled into the car and hauled ass to the north shore, where we pounded beers and Buffalo Wild Wings before running into the packed theater and grabbing seats in the bottom row.

We also brought Bart along for the ride and I was very curious to see how the film would play out for someone who knew absolutely NOTHING about Veronica Mars walking into the theater.  I knew that Thomas had essentially done a fan service movie, cramming in as many references and characters from the show as possible in order to please the folks who forked over their hard earned cash in order to get the movie made in the first place, but I hoped that perhaps the clever dialogue, crazy mystery, noir style and palpable chemistry would be enough to sustain a VM virgin's interest.

Apparently my hopes were a bit high.

Having now watched the film twice, Bart's totally right.  A lot of the really strong emotional beats, whether they be humorous or tragic, are predicated on the deeper love and understanding of the characters and their relationships that only comes with having been immersed in them for three television seasons.  Without all that, it's easy to feel like you're just constantly not in on the joke.  Not that the movie is hard to follow on its own merits, but it does probably fall a bit flat in some of the bigger moments.  The story functions fine, but Thomas tries to squeeze in so many peripheral characters that the integral ones don't make quite as big an impact if you're unfamiliar with them.  (The best example is pretty spoilery so I've relegated it to the footnote below.*)  It's a fair point and I hope we'll get a chance to see a sequel in which we can focus more on Veronica being a badass and less on making sure we catch up with Korny the pizza boy and his duct tape wallet business.

Bart, Jamie and I dig into all this and more in the ninth episode of our (now weekly!) podcast, along with some thoughts on the Man Of Steel/Captain America scheduling non-controversy as well as the latest casting rumors for Star Wars Episode VII.  Suffice it to say, we're all pretty nervous.

Don't forget to subscribe on iTunes or Soundcloud so you can get the latest episode delivered unto you automatically each week!  Next week we'll be talking about Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, so feel free to leave questions or comments below and we just might talk about them on the digital air.

*It's easy to see the tragedy in reformed biker bad boy Weevil getting shot while trying to help a stranded motorist, but it all plays very differently if you know who Celeste Kane is as well as Weevil's history with the Kane family, none of which is touched upon in the movie.

Still Living In TREK NATION After 47 Years

"Star Trek is more than just a show.  It's a philosophy."

Last week was the 47th anniversary of the birth of Star Trek, which first aired on NBC the evening of September 8, 1966.  Anyone who knows me can attest to the profound influence that show has had on my life.  (I've read the Star Trek Encyclopedia cover to cover.  Twice.)  It hooked me when I was young and it's never really let go since.  I may not have gone to a convention in a while, but I still identify myself as a Trekkie without a nanosecond of hesitation.  In fact, since moving back to Boston, I've happily reconnected with a group of guys that I essentially became friends with in back 6th grade because we were all obsessed with the franchise.  I still have a signed copy of Leonard Nimoy's I Am Not Spock from the time we all went to see him speak at Berklee.  Even though we're all now adults (relatively speaking), we still talk about Trek with the same nerdtastic glee we had in middle school.

For me, Star Trek served as the gateway drug into the larger world of science fiction.  I was a brainy, unpopular kid attending a Catholic elementary school and not quite buying into this whole "God and Jesus thing."  While I certainly enjoyed the hell out of Star Wars, I loved Star Trek not only for its optimistic view of the future, but for its strong roots in the complex scientific theories that truly fascinated me.  The only things I'd ever learned in a science class up to that point had been about the water cycle and diagramming the different parts of a flower.  It makes me drowsy just remembering it.  Aliens, time travel, alternate universes, faster-than-light spacecraft...this was the good stuff!  More importantly, it felt real and immediate, while Jedis and The Force were a bit too mystical for my tastes.  Once I sunk my teeth into concepts like evolution and the Big Bang, it was as if something clicked in my brain and I was irrevocably hooked.  Thanks to Star Trek, I gobbled up all the science I could find, and once I got to high school I was eventually able to take fascinating classes like Cosmology, Advanced Physics and Astronomy.

Gene Roddenbury was the mastermind behind Star Trek, a show which he initially pitched as a sort of outer space western. ("Wagon Train to the stars" is a familiar phrase to any serious Trekkie.)  Trek Nation, a documentary produced for the Science channel but now available on Netflix, details the journey of Roddenbury's son Rod as he visits conventions and interviews family friends, die hard fans, writers, producers and cast members in an effort to better understand the father who was beloved by millions but felt so distant from his own family.  By Rod's own admission, he was never a very big Star Trek fan as a kid, a fact reinforced by old family photos of his multiple Star Wars themed childhood birthday parties.  Rod never really understood the appeal of Trek; to him it was just the job that kept his father away from home for 12-14 hours a day. That youthful rebellion continued into Rod's high school and college days, as he moved east, took on the appearance of a surfer with long, bleached hair and studied to become an astrophysicist, only to discover he had no aptitude for the field. (I chuckled watching his older family friends politely refer to this period as the time when he was "off doing [his] own thing," as opposed to getting involved with the family business.  Ironically, I assume this is how some of my own east coast family members refer to my time in Los Angeles.  I guess that shit truly is universal.)  Sadly, it wasn't until after Gene Roddenbury's death in 1991 that the younger Roddenbury really started to delve into the world of Star Trek in order to understand just how much his father's work meant to so many people across the globe.

My biggest criticism of Trek Nation is that it really feels like a documentary made for TV.  It's way too trigger happy with its chyrons, constantly identifying people on screen multiple times when only one or sometimes even no ID is necessary.  (I think Nichelle Nichols is named about six times.)  The film also covers a lot of history that any Trekkie worth his salt should already be very familiar with and it often feels very disorganized, moving in a vaguely chronological order without ever feeling like it's telling an actual story.  Obviously Rod has a lot of unresolved issues when it comes to his relationship with his father, and while he often says that his conversations with the fans helped him to better appreciate his father and Star Trek in general, we never really get to see any of that happening.  It's mostly just a collection of short clips of Rod wandering around conventions and talking to strangers in costume.  It's a real shame, as it feels like there's a lot going on just under the surface that never actually ends up on camera.  Rod almost has the demeanor of a guy trying to evolve from being a privileged, angry youth who always thought his father's greatest achievement was totally lame, but by focusing more on the history of Trek than on his own personal journey, the film suffers from a lack of any true emotional throughline.

Trek Nation does make some great use of old interviews with cast and crew members as well as a lot of great archival footage, including some truly fantastic images of the very first Star Trek convention that I'd never seen before.  It looks like a truly wacky event filled people wearing homemade costumes, often of generic aliens and creatures that aren't even Trek-related.  And while I would have liked to see more of Rod's sense of discovery, we do get a lot of really great material featuring his late father, including multiple archival interviews and audio recordings.  Rod even managed to sit down with both George Lucas and J.J. Abrams, who are each briefly entertaining but neither really contributes very much to the larger conversation.  There is, however, a great moment where Rod shows Abrams an old interview in which Roddenbury says that he wants someone to eventually step in and revive his characters and the larger franchise almost exactly the way Abrams has done, much to the chagrin of all those Trekkies who love to hate on the rebooted Abrams-verse.  It's not all hero worship though; Roddenbury frequently cheated on his wife Majel Barrett (who portrayed Nurse Chapel, Lwaxana Troi and the voice of every Federation Starship computer starting with The Next Generation) and he was notoriously difficult to work with, particularly in his later years.  Rod doesn't shy away from any of the dark shadows on his father's personal or professional lives and, as Rod himself says, digging into Roddenbury's flaws actually humanizes the man who's reputation and personality were always larger than life.

I often feel that I owe the man a personal debt of gratitude.  If not for Gene Roddenbury, I might never have been exposed to the wonderful writings of Hawking, Einstein and Feynman, or the musings of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ronald Mallett and Carl Sagan.  If not for the Starship Enterprise, I might not have become so enthralled with computers and technology, a field which is currently paying my rent.  And if not for the great storytelling and dynamic characters, I might not have studied acting and directing in college, leading me to move to Los Angeles and eventually meet my wife.

So thanks, Gene.  You always dreamed of making the world a better place, and in my case you certainly succeeded.


---------------------------------------
Title: Trek Nation
Director: Scott Colthorp
Starring: Rod Roddenbury, Majel Barrett, J.J. Abrams, George Lucas, D.C. Fontana, Bjo Trimble, Rick Berman
Year Of Release: 2013
Viewing Method: Netflix Instant (Laptop)