Characters Actors, Characters, Character...

That Guy Dick Miller (2014), The Interview (2014), 

and The Legend of Barney Thomson (2015)

A Pocketful of Horrors, Some of Them Used...

Citizen X: adapted by Chris Gerolmo from the non-fiction book by Robert Cullen; directed by Chris Gerolmo; starring Stephen Rea (Lt. Viktor Burakov), Donald Sutherland (Colonel Fetisov), Max von Sydow (Dr. Bukhanovsky), Jeffrey DeMunn (Andrei Chikatilo), and Joss Ackland (Bondarchuk) (1995): Solid and somewhat atypical HBO police procedural follows the dogged efforts of a Soviet forensic scientist (Stephen Rea) and his sardonic but surprisingly competent superior officer (Donald Sutherland) as they attempt to track down the (real) Ripper of Rostov, a Soviet serial killer of the 1970's and 1980's who murdered in excess of 50 people, the majority of them teenagers or children.

Citizen X hews fairly close to the truth -- indeed, the major changes come not to the pursuit itself but to the portrayal of the Soviet bureaucracy, heightened here for informational effect as much as dramatic effect. Anyone who's read Martin Cruz Smith's novels of Soviet detective Arkady Renko (Gorky Park being the most famous of those) will recognize the self-defeating levels of the Soviet bureaucratic machine -- and the stubborn investigators who seek justice regardless.

The Ripper's murders stay mostly off-screen and non-sensationalistic. The bureaucratic screw-ups we see aren't only a Soviet problem -- indeed, they'll remind one of many such politically motivated screw-ups in the history of Western police work. Throughout the film, Stephen Rea is perfect as the quiet, stubborn-bordering-on-obsessed lead investigator. 

Donald Sutherland supplies a cynical, sarcastic counterpoint to Rea's character, though Sutherland's C.O. reveals hidden, sympathetic depths as the film proceeds. Max von Sydow delights as the only Soviet psychiatrist willing to help profile the Ripper, and Jeffrey DeMunn is chillingly bland and lucky as the Ripper himself. He's the quintessential serial-killer-as-nebbish, and a welcome real-world counterpoint to all our fictional serial-killing supermen and superwomen. Highly recommended.

Harry Brown: written by Gary Young; directed by Daniel Barber; starring Michael Caine (Harry Brown), Emily Mortimer (D.I. Frampton), and David Bradley (Leonard Attwell) (2009): English riff on both Death Wish and Taxi Driver sees Michael Caine as the eponymous retired, emphysemic ex-Marine go on a killing spree to avenge his friend's death at the hands of a bunch of young hooligans.

The movie's brutal and efficient. Ideologically, it's ridiculous. And while it references the Hell out of Taxi Driver, especially in its score, it's really an English Death Wish. There aren't any moral ambiguities here -- the bad guys are terrible and Harry Brown is awesome, lacking only a scene in which he saves a kitten from a tree to make him perfect. So the movie is dishonest in terms of realism but honest if one sees it as a revenge fantasy for retired people who want those punks off their lawn by any means necessary. Recommended.

The Church (La chiesa): written by Nick Alexander, Dario Argento, Fabrizio Bava, Lamberto Bava, Franco Ferrini, Dardano Sacchetti, and Michelle Soavi; directed by Michele Soavi; starring Hugh Quarshie (Father Gus), Tomas Arana (Evan), Feodor Chaliapin (The Bishop), Barbara Cupisti (Lisa), and Asia Argento (Lotte) (1989): So vaguely based on the M.R. James story "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" that I don't view it as an adaptation, The Church is a highly enjoyable though somewhat disjointed piece of melodramatic, religion-soaked Italian horror. 

After a wild 12th-century-set prologue that verges on Monty Python and the Holy Grail territory, we move to the late 1980's and a historic church with a very big secret buried beneath it. As this is a horror movie, that secret will be unearthed. There's some attempt at a slow build in the first 45 minutes or so. That build goes on a bit too long and a bit too slowly. 

Thankfully, the horror that eventually kicks in is lurid and visually shocking. Michele Soavi is a solid director, and he's working in the traditions of Dario Argento (who helped write) and Mario Bava. Terrible things begin to happen, a couple of them pretty much out of left-field (I'm looking at you, subway train!). All hell's a coming. And the movie shifts its narrative focus in the last third to a totally different protagonist than the first two-thirds. This is strangely liberating, and not something I can recall an American or British horror film ever doing, though I'm sure there are precedents.

Overall, The Church is startling and worthwhile despite the early slowness and what one could charitably describe as somewhat indifferent dubbing in the English-language version. Sometimes it visually quotes medieval woodcuts, sometimes it visually quotes Boris Vallejo paintings. It's that sort of over-heated horror-melodrama. The set design, make-up, and sculpture work are all very impressive and very disturbing. Recommended.

The Guilt Trip: written by Dan Fogelman; directed by Anne Fletcher; starring Seth Rogen (Andrew Brewster), Barbra Streisand (Joyce Brewster), and Brett Cullen (Ben Graw) (2012): Formulaic but well-executed film involves a mother-and-son, cross-country road trip by Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen. There are some comic surprises and enough drama and funny lines to keep the whole thing merrily rolling along. Recommended.

Catching Up

Lemons Never Lie by Richard Stark (pen-name of Donald E. Westlake) (1971): Alan Grofield, occasional co-thief with Westlake/Stark's anti-hero Parker, gets one of his own adventures here, an often grim series of events clumsily but murderously orchestrated by a sociopathic heist planner with no idea how to successfully set up a big heist. Grofield, who needs money for his summer theatre company (!), turns down the seemingly incompetent Myers' offer to join his gang for a brewery heist, thus setting off a country-hopping series of criminal events. Details of the planning and execution of a competent heist not involving Myers are especially fascinating. Recommended.

Neighbors: written by Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O'Brien; directed by Nicholas Stoller; starring Seth Rogen (Mac Radner), Rose Byrne (Kelly Radner), Zac Efron (Teddy Sanders) and Dave Franco (Pete) (2014): Amusing, raunchy tale of a battle between a fraternity run by Zac Efron and young couple Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen, who've just had a baby and now face the horrors of having a frat move in next to them. Could be sharper, but it passes the time. Lightly recommended.

The Giver: adapted from the novel by Lois Lowry by Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide; directed by Philip Noyce; starring Brenton Thwaites (Jonas), Odeya Rush (Fiona), Cameron Monaghan (Asher), Jeff Bridges (The Giver), Meryl Streep (Chief Elder), Katie Holmes (Mother), and Alexander Skarsgard (Father) (2014): Film adaptation plays fairly freely with Lowry's award-winning novel, but nonetheless remains a fairly enjoyable tale of a future dystopia. Jeff Bridges is solid as usual as the literal keeper of memories for a post-apocalyptic society which carefully regulates emotions and emotional attachments. Recommended.

The Superman Chronicles Volume 8: written by Jerry Siegel; illustrated by Joe Shuster, Fred Ray, Leo Nowak, Jack Sikela, Ed Dobrotka, Paul Cassidy, and others (1941-42; this collection 2010): Superman battles an unfrozen caveman and an electrically super-charged Lex Luthor in this volume of his early adventures. Jerry Siegel's interest in science-fiction tropes also manifests in a battle between the Man of Steel and an army of evil mermen, a ray that can age or de-age people, and the electricity-wielding threat of the Lightning Master. Stories written just before the United States entered World War Two feature the Man of Tomorrow battling saboteurs from Napkan (a thinly veiled Japan) and defeating the forces of aggressive European country Oxnalia (an even more thinly veiled Nazi Germany, complete with an Adolf Hitler lookalike as leader). Recommended.

Left Behind with James Franco

This is the End: written and directed by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, adapted from a short film by Jason Stone; starring James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Emma Watson, and Michael Cera as themselves (2013): For an astonishingly raunchy comedy from the wags who brought us Superbad and Pineapple Express, This is the End is amazingly fastidious in its use of the Book of Revelation. It's certainly more "accurate" than end-times thrillers like The Seventh Sign, End of Days, or even the whole Left Behind franchise.

All the actors come together to play versions of themselves, attending a Beverly Hills house-warming party at James Franco's when The Rapture occurs. But only Montreal's own Jay Baruchel, visiting from Canada and disdainful of Hollywood, is initially aware that the Rapture has occurred. He and best-pal Seth Rogen were out buying cigarettes.

Rogen missed seeing the Rapture because he was lying on the floor of a convenience store after an apparent earthquake. Baruchel saw it, though. Then chaos erupted and they fled back to Franco's house, where no one noticed anything amiss because nobody at the party got Raptured up...

Well, it's literally One Hell of a Buddy Comedy, though who the buddies and who the damned will be is in question until the final minutes. The various actors riff, often hilariously, on their personae. Michael Cera shows up early to play against perceived type -- he's a coke-snorting, bathroom-threesome, ass-slapping monster. Jonah Hill is a schmoozing hypocrite who secretly hates Jay Baruchel because he wants Seth Rogen to be his own best buddy. Franco is, well, Franco. Craig Robinson is loveable but befuddled at first. Danny McBride is a complete jerk.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles burns. Pits that lead to Hell open up across the globe to suck up the damned. Demons and spectres roam the Earth. Under siege, the guys barricade themselves inside Franco's house. But they're running out of food and water, and nerves are frayed. Luckily, they do have a lot of booze and recreational drugs.

As with many Rogen/Goldberg movies, improvisation and a certain aversion to tight editing lead to scattershot scenes and lines. If the two ever got really rigorous about being funny, they might be able to make a real comedy classic.

Still, this is a lot of fun. And it has a moral. And very funny exchanges about, among other things, what gluten is, and what particular Deadly Sin dooms one of the characters ("What was that, Vanity?" "Wrath?"). And a great exorcism sequence featuring a crucifix made out of kitchen utensils and the worst use of a blanket to put out a fire ever recorded on film. Recommended.

Giant-Size Movie Thing

Beginners: written and directed by Mike Mills; starring Ewan McGregor (Oliver Fields), Christopher Plummer (Hal Fields), Melanie Laurent (Anna) and Goran Visnjic (Andy) (2011): Set mainly in 2003, Beginners tells us the story of Oliver Fields as he recovers from his father's recent death and tries to forge a lasting romantic relationship.

Fields's father (played by Christopher Plummer, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role) came out of the closet after his wife's 1999 death, and the movie jumps around in time to show us Oliver reacting to his father's public embrace of his sexual identity, his father's lengthy battle with cancer, and Oliver's own search for meaning.

The movie's skillfully structured and maintains a nice, organic balance of sorrow and joy throughout. There's a very cute Jack Russell terrier with some killer dialogue (!), a very cute French actress, some nice little comic moments involving Hallowe'en parties and graffiti, and some beautifully written scenes between Oliver and his father, young Olilver and his mother, Oliver and his father's much-younger lover (ER's Goran Visnjic, bouncy as a spaniel), and Oliver and the actress.

The direction is accomplished without being too showy, and Mills comes up with an effective recurring structural motif that comments on Oliver's state of mind while also reflecting his career as a visual artist. Plummer certainly deserved his Oscar win; McGregor could have at least used a nomination, as he convincingly portrays a withdrawn character in the grip of powerful emotions. Highly recommended.


　

50/50: written by Will Reiser; directed by Jonathan Levine; starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Adam), Seth Rogen (Kyle), Anna Kendrick (Katherine), Bryce Dallas Howard (Rachael) and Anjelica Huston (Diane) (2011): Seth Rogen plays Seth Rogen in a movie about how Seth Rogen's friend battles cancer, based on a true story about how Seth Rogen's friend battled cancer.

Surprisingly dramatic, 50/50 's strengths lie with Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performances, which generally feel as fresh and realistic as perhaps any movie with Seth Rogen can feel. The writing tries to avoid cheap laughs, and the make-up department actually makes Gordon-Levitt look awful as his character undergoes chemotherapy.

Little movie bits do intrude throughout (and even if they, too, are based on reality, they nonetheless become movie bits because we've seen them in movies too many times). Older cancer battlers dispense hard-fought wisdom and hash brownies. A cute therapist becomes a possible romantic partner.

Thankfully, the movie remains capable of giving us non-movie bits as well -- Gordon-Levitt's character really is debilitated by his cancer and its treatment. No character is rendered completely unsympathetic. And Gordon-Levitt himself has become a fine, nuanced actor. With sharper writing, this could have been a revelation rather than simply a surprise. Lightly recommended.

　

The Most Dangerous Game: adapted by James Ashmore Creelman from the short story by Richard Connell; directed by Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack; starring Joel McCrea (Bob), Fay Wray (Eve) and Leslie Banks (Zaroff) (1932): Short, sweet adaptation of one of the most reprinted, most adapted, most imitated short stories ever. 63 minutes!

OK, the movie originally clocked in at 78 minutes, but preview audiences got freaked out by some (then) graphic footage, and the pre-release chopping frenzy ensued. Made before the Production Code but released afterwards, The Most Dangerous Game also featured too much skin (you won't notice), and so wasn't re-released for years after its debut.

On an island with a surprisingly diverse landscape, an evil hunter who has grown bored with hunting animals now hunts the most dangerous game -- man! And he keeps trophies! Can shipwrecked big-game hunter Joel McCrea defeat evil Count Zaroff at his own game?

Well, that's the plot of the movie.

This is a lot of fun in a short package, and you'll probably spend a few minutes marvelling at the bizarre yet effective sets (and trying to spot the King Kong sets -- this movie was filmed at the same time as King Kong, with the many of the same actors and production staff). Recommended.

　

The Rite: suggested by a book by Matt Baglio, written by Michael Petroni; directed by Mikael Hafstrom; starring Colin O'Donoghue (Michael Kovak), Anthony Hopkins (Father Lucas Trevant), Ciaran Hinds (Father Xavier), and Alice Braga (Angeline) (2011): A good-looking, moodily directed movie that has a dumb script, The Rite offers us The Exorcist for Dummies. That young male lead Colin O'Donoghue bears a striking resemblance to Evil Dead 's Bruce Campbell really doesn't help the suspension of disbelief.

A young American priest with faith issues gets sent to the Vatican's Exorcism school. Hilarity ensues as he gets sentenced to do field work with super-Exorcist Anthony Hopkins, playing Anthony Hopkins.

Cats and frogs strike sinister poses -- Hopkins's Father Trevant lives in what looks like a cross between a student ghetto and a small-animal zoo. Are the demons Trevant labours to cast out real? Will faith be restored? Will a character with the name 'Angeline' play a pivotal role? Will possessed people get all veiny, do weird gymnastical tricks, and talk in spooky voices about things they couldn't possibly know? Will there be a demonic, red-eyed mule? Wait, what? Yes. Yes, there will be.

The movie spends a lot of time talking as if it's smart without ever exhibiting much intelligence. It does look good, though, and the director wrings about as much shock and horror out of a pedestrian script as almost anyone could. All of this is ostensibly inspired by a true story. Not recommended.

Four

Stage Fright, written by Whitfield Cook, Alma Reville, James Bridie and Ranald MacDougall, based on a novel by Selwyn Jepson, starring Jane Wyman (Eve Gill), Marlene Dietrich (Charlotte Inwood), Michael Wilding ("Ordinary" Smith), Richard Todd (Jonathan Cooper), Alastair Sim (Commodore Gill), Sybil Thorndike (Mrs. Gill) and Kay Walsh (Nellie Goode) (1950): One of Hitchcock's lesser-known efforts is enjoyable but a bit overlong and draggy. Jane Wyman tries to save ex-boyfriend Richard Todd from being arrested for a murder he says he didn't commit. Shenanigans ensue. The cast -- especially Marlene Dietrich and Alastair "Scrooge" Sim -- is topnotch. Lightly recommended.

White Heat, written by Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts and Virginia Kellogg, directed by Raoul Walsh, starring James Cagney (Cody Jarrett), Virginia Mayo (Verna Jarrett), Edmond O'Brien (Hank Fallon) and Margaret Wycherly (Ma Jarrett) (1949): Classic gangster flick pits undercover cop O'Brien against crazy con James Cagney. And boy, does Cagney's character have mother issues! Some scenes play out like CSI: 1949, as the FBI uses the latest in high-tech tracking devices and crime-solving techniques to find the criminals before they pull off their next big heist. A lot of fun, with great performances by Cagney, O'Brien and Virginia Mayo. Look, Ma, top of the world! Highly recommended.

The Green Hornet, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, based on characters created by George W. Trendle, directed by Michel Gondry, starring Seth Rogen (Britt Reid/The Green Hornet), Jay Chou (Kato), Cameron Diaz (Lenore Case), Tom Wilkinson (James Reid) and Christoph Waltz (Chudnofsky) (2011): Well, I laughed a lot, and I don't give a shit about the original radio-series Green Hornet, so any blasphemies committed upon it by the filmmakers didn't irk me. Seth Rogen makes an unlikely masked hero, but that's sorta the point. Lightly recommended.

30 Days of Night: Dark Days, adapted by Steve Niles and Ben Ketai from the comic book by Niles and Ben Templesmith, directed by Ben Ketai, starring Kiele Sanchez (Stella), Rhys Coiro (Paul), Diora Brand (Amber), Harold Perrineau (Todd), Mia Kirshner (Lilith), Troy Ruptash (Agent Morris) and Ben Cotton (Dane) (2010): This straight-to-DVD sequel to 30 Days of Night contains no original cast members. Good on them. The world's stupidest vampire hunters take on the world's stupidest vampires in Los Angeles. Something's gotta give! The movie may set the record for most aerial shots of L.A. in one movie, or at least in one vampire movie. Mia Kirshner looks sorta cool as vampire-queen Lilith. Not recommended.

Paul

Paul, written by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, directed by Greg Mottola, starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, Jane Lynch and Sigourney Weaver (2011): Pegg, Frost and director Gregory Wright (absent here) have previously given us British metapop confections Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. With Superbad director Greg Mottola subbing for Wright here, the action moves to America, and while things take awhile to really get going, the result is another humourous meditation on American pop culture -- in this case, centered on alien contact and invasion movies.

Pegg and Frost play an aspiring artist and science-fiction writer respectively, delighted to have taken a vacation from England to go to the mega-geeky San Diego Comicon and then onwards for a vacation touring famous science-fiction and UFO landmarks across the Southwest in a rented motorhome. Their characters are more genial and less sharp-edged than we've seen them assay before, fitting for a movie that's ultimately more genial and less sharp-edged than we've seen them do before. The whole enterprise is really quite warm-hearted -- there are villains, but almost no one gets killed. Almost.

Stopping to check out a car wreck in the desert, the two meet up with Paul, an alien who looks like a traditional Gray and talks like, well, Seth Rogen when he's being genial and funny, as opposed to Seth Rogen when he's mailing it in or Seth Rogen in a part Seth Rogen isn't really equipped to play. After much confusion and several faintings, the two agree to drive Paul to his retrieval area.

Paul's been stuck on Earth since he crashed his spaceship near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The U.S. military abducted him then, and he's since been helping both them and Hollywood out with various alien ideas (he consulted on both E.T. and The X-Files) under the mistaken impression that he's a guest of the U.S. government. However, his technological and cultural knowhow exhausted after 60+ years, Paul is now expendable -- the powers that be want to dissect him to find out how his healing and invisibility powers work. Luckily, a sympathetic government agent managed warn him of his coming vivisection; Paul escaped; the government now pursues.

The somewhat unlikely trio proceed to have adventures as they attempt to get Paul off-planet ahead of government pursuit. Along the way, they pick up a fourth party member played by Kristen Wiig -- a socially backward fundamentalist Christian creationist they have to kidnap from a trailer park lest she reveal their location and plans to the government. Luckily, Paul's telepathic powers show her that the universe is actually more than 6000 years old and that "eyes didn't just happen!", and she becomes a foul-mouthed agnostic with a driving need to lose her virginity to Pegg's character.

The whole thing's a lot of fun, especially if you've seen the TV episodes and movies Paul refers to both explicitly and in passing. There are also some nice background bits of business, some surprisingly funny stoner comedy, and maybe a few too many jokes about Paul's junk. Recommended.

I Should Be Drinking A Toast To Absent Friends...

Movies:


Brain Candy, written by and starring The Kids in the Hall (Dave Foley, Scott Thompson, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch) (1996): Critics pretty much universally panned Brain Candy when it came out, and it is indeed a bit of a mess. I do think it's quite funny at times -- the satire of Big Pharm, while a bit obvious, is pretty much spot-on, maybe moreso now than in 1996.

There's very little plot: scientists invent, but don't test throughly, a drug that makes the clinically depressed happy ("It's like the temperature inside your head is always 72 degrees!"); the drug, dubbed Gleemonex, becomes so successful that the pharaceutical company successfully gets it turned into an over-the-counter drug that pretty much everyone on the planet starts taking; civilization as we know it comes to an end ("Crime is down. So is tourism, surprisingly.").

The Kids play pretty much every major character male and female -- never has any comedy troupe, including Monty Python, been so deliriously drag-happy as the Kids in the Hall. Scott Thompson's ridiculously repressed Family Man homosexual provides the most sustained laughs of any of the stories-inside-the-main-story, though Bruce McCulloch's Danzig-meets-Trent-Reznor rock star also shines, especially when he takes the drug and turns into a Dayglo Made-for-TV hippie right out of The Monkees or Laugh-In.

The bottom line is that if you never found the Kids in the Hall funny, you won't find this movie funny. If, on the other hand, you can hum along to "These are the Daves I Know" and can explain why you're the guy with the good attitude towards menstruation, you'll enjoy seeing this. It's aged remarkably well. Brendan Frasier appears in an unbilled cameo, and Janeane Garafalo is apparently somewhere in a crowd scene. Recommended.


Funny People, written and directed by Judd Apatow, starring Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill (2009): Movies about stand-up comics don't appear all that often. Funny People, like Punchline before it, may demonstrate why: it's impossible to make a comedy about stand-up comics that doesn't suck. Scorsese's The King of Comedy was actually pretty good, but any humour in it was the humour of unease and embarrassment, and had nothing to do with the routines of the characters: Robert DeNiro's aspiring comic, Rupert Pupkin, was just a couple tics off Travis Bickle, while Jerry Lewis was astoundingly, intentionally, caustically unfunny as an unsympathetic prick of a talk-show host.

Funny People focuses on Adam Sandler as a stand-up comedian who's now a hugely successful movie star. But he's dying of a rare disease and, additionally, suffers from writer's block. So he frequents comedy clubs, looking for young comics who could both write material for him and hang out with him. Because Sandler's character has no friends! And he pines for the love of his life who's now married to an Australian businessman. Sandler hires Rogen's struggling comic to be his buddy, and hilarious and touching life lessons are learned.

Actually, they really aren't, and the sudden about-face of Sandler's character seems tacked on by studio insistence, probably immediately after they realized that Apatow had delivered a $70 million comedy with almost no laughs in it. Or good lines. Or drama. Or likeable characters. It's like someone gave Broadcast News a frontal lobotomy and changed its focus from TV news to stand-up comics. It's hard to believe that the guy who made The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up made this.

Well, not so hard -- pretty much everyone who always appears in a movie by Judd Apatow (and occasionally in movies only produced by Judd Apatow) appears here, and as with Apatow's two previous hits, brevity remains a problem: the movie's made too long by scenes that either needed serious editing, or to be seriously edited right out -- Sandler and Rogen's visit to the long-lost love seems to go on about half-an-hour longer than it should have, and a Thanksgiving scene just sits there, both dramatically and comically inert. None of the actors are particularly bad in the movie -- it's just that there's nothing much for them to work with, a problem that seems to lead Sandler to ad-lib penis jokes whenever possible. Not recommended.