Med City Movie Guy

"The Blind Side"

Read the review in the Post-Bulletin.

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"The Twilight Saga: New Moon"

Read the review, exclusively here, online!

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What you won't see in "The Twilight Saga: New Moon"

What you won't see in "The Twilight Saga: New Moon"
by Chris Miksanek
The Med City Movie Guy

This is no phlebotomy joke: vampires are coming to the Med City. At Midnight tonight, scores of teens will line-up to howl at the New Moon, the second film in the rabidly successful Twilight series.

     Serious fans of the series, “Twi-hards,” they’re called, already know what to expect. Edward and the rest of the Cullens leave Forks. This drives Bella to a reckless pastime: motorcycling. She gets into a bind and is rescued by childhood friend Jacob Black and the foundation for a love triangle is laid. No surprises, to be sure, that’s all in the book. But readers don’t know the whole story.
     As in every other film ever made, there is plenty of material left on the cutting-room floor -- parts left out for any number of reasons. Perhaps they were technically flawed or superfluous to the plot. Maybe they were simply nonsensical, like these scenes you won’t see in the final cut:

• When it becomes obvious that their outdoors baseball games have become too dangerous, the Cullen family stays in and plays Wii tennis together. (cut for time)
• At a sports bar, Carlisle attempts to explain Sammy Sosa’s pallor. (no explanation for cut)
• In a scene originally championed by PETA, a matronly nutritionist visits the Cullens and says, “nice that you’ve evolved to live on animal blood, but you should consider humane alternatives like Hemopure, Ringer’s lactate, or V8.” (cut after an Edwardian focus group whined)
• Midway into the third act, Bella says, “We’re good friends, Jacob, so I can tell you this: You use way too much volumizer.” (background howling spoiled audio track)
• Before leaving Forks, Edward delivers an Oscar-worthy Shakespearean front-porch plea for tolerance, “We expected to be welcomed with open arms, instead, you welcome us with pitchforks and torches. Hath a vampire eyes? Affections? Passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed? Wait a second, I guess we do not.” (cut for time)

Bold artist, wherefore are thou?

When artists get together to laud each other’s work, lofty attributes like "bold," and "courageous" are frequently exchanged. But, as it turns out, many of these “artists” are just a bunch of little scardeycats.

     Roman Polanski, faced with paying a debt to (our) society, ran like a frightened 13-year-old girl from a creepy spider (or from a creepy 43-year old man). More recently, Yale University Press cowered -- so shook with “serious concerns about violence,” that nowhere to be found are “The Cartoons That Shook the World” in their publication of the same title.

     Now scifiwire.com reports that, in 2012, not *exactly* the whole world will be laid to waste. St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican and the famous Christ the Redeemer statue (Corcovado) in Rio de Janeiro are destroyed, director Roland Emmerich says, “Because I'm against organized religion.” But when he considered wrecking a structure in Mecca, he balked, telling the website, “You can actually ... let ... Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol … ” Well, you get the idea. He’s not against *all* organized religions, just the ones who’re easy to pick on. That’s too bad. If his off-limits approach to other religions was rooted in respect for diversity it would be admirable. Instead, it’s merely cowardice.

     Bold artist, wherefore are thou?

“2012” director Roland Emmerich says he’s “against organized religion” but you get the impression he’s praying that they’ll organize to protest and give his film some free publicity.

"The Men Who Stare at Goats"

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"Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg"

      A well-researched and presented biography of Gertrude Berg, "the Oprah of her time." Television clips are intercut with interviews of entertainment and social luminaries like Norman Lear and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who describe the impact her show, “The Goldbergs,” had on the culture of the time.
      It's not obvious how PBS's iconic "Pioneers of Television" series missed this phenomenon unless it’s because Berg's contributions (writer, actress, activist) and persecutions (the show was a victim of a the notorious "Black Listing") command a feature unto themselves.

     “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” is a joy for fans of radio and television history.

Trailer and more info: http://www.mollygoldbergfilm.org

(Disclosure: the film’s producers provided a complimentary DVD of this feature)

"Amelia"

Read the review in the Post-Bulletin.

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...And see what else the Med City Movie Guy is up to here:
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"Michael Jackson's This Is It "

Read the review in the Post-Bulletin.

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Halloween Films

So you’ve outgrown the traditional Halloween slasher films like Friday the 13thand you’re afraid that after the new uber-frightening Paranormal Activity you’ll have to drive home checking the rear-view mirror every few seconds to make sure the back seat is still empty? Then check out these holiday DVD classics, any of which are a better alternative to donning an Obama mask and begging door-to-door for miniature Milky Way bars.

Tales From the Crypt (1972)
A classic horror anthology. In one short, Joan Collins is stalked by a maniacal Santa Clause, in another, a car-crash victim realizes he was only dreaming but awakes to find that he was dreaming while at the wheel and veers into an oncoming vehicle. The others are better: an old man harassed by a neighbor sends the bully a personalized Valentine and a memorable poem; a woman makes a poor choice wishing that her husband is brought back to life; and a blind man exacts clever revenge on a heartless hospital administrator.

Horror of Dracula (1958)
With apologies to Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula is probably the most ominous in this retelling of the classic Bram Stoker novel from Britain’s Hammer Films. Peter Cushing’s archetypal Van Helsing exquisitely counter-balances Lee’s evil omnipresence. Co-stars a gaggle of busty burial-shrouded women.

The Glass House (2001)
Leelee Sobieski, Diane Lane and Bruce Dern star in this Hitchcockian thriller about a brother and sister who are adopted by friends of the family after their parents die in a car crash. But are their benefactor’s motives as selfless as they seem? Unimpressive at the box office, but worth a midnight screening. Don’t confuse it with the 2006 follow-up.

Poltergeist (1982)
“They’re heeeeerrrr!” Steven Spielberg’s tale of a family who moves into a new home that just happens to be a portal to the afterlife is just as chilling the second time around. Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams are the parents who setout to retrieve their daughter from the cold grasp of a cadre of ghosts attracted to her youthful energy. Spooky, of course, but for my money, not nearly as disturbing as Robbie’s clown.

The Lady in White (1988)
Lukas Haas stars as a 9-year-old who, locked in his grade school’s cloakroom, encounters the ghost of a little girl killed there years earlier. It effectively modulates between suspense and mystery (and at times is downright unsettling) as the details of the crime unfold and mesh with town legend. Don’t be fooled by its reminiscent “Wonder Years” feel, this one is quite possibly the creepiest film ever made.

 

...And see what else the Med City Movie Guy is up to here:
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"Law Abiding Citizen"

In the intense new drama Law Abiding Citizen, Gerard Butler plays a resourceful inventor who uses abject brutality to right the crimes against society. Memo to those of you who take two brochures from the “please take one” display rack: you had better start sleeping with one eye open.

     After his wife and child are savagely killed, Clyde Shelton (Butler) is understandably incensed. One of the perpetrators is sentenced to death, the other cops a plea offered by wunderkind prosecutor Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) who believes “some justice is better than no justice.” Shelton finds no consolation in that philosophy and believing neither punishment is commensurate with the crime, metes out his own.
     He makes quick work of the perps -- one’s lethal injection cocktail gets a little more kick than a bleeding-heart liberal might have served, the other is the leading man in his “this is what happens to bad guys” After School Special. Shelton doesn’t stop there. After he’s arrested for exacting vengeance, he targets the flawed judicial systems and those he believes were complicit in his family’s deaths: the defense attorney, the soft judge, legal assistants, and ultimately, the mayor. But how is Shelton orchestrating the hits from his prison cell?
     The revenge genre is one of the few guilty pleasures left. While we openly abhor violence and the cruel and unusual punishment of its purveyors, we somehow find it incredibly satisfying when Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey blows away the scum of the city in Death Wish, a gender-neutral phenom, by the way, as Jodie Foster demonstrated in The Brave One. In both of those films, the system was impotent and the hero merely dispensed quick justice. Those films worked.
     Unfortunately, Law Abiding Citizen goes too far. We can empathize with Shelton’s grief, acknowledge the inadequacies of the judicial system, and even support the position Matthew McConaughey espoused in A Time to Kill that “the only problem with the death penalty is that we do not use it enough.” But when Shelton’s executions turn sadistic, he loses us.
     Plot holes don’t help, either. Midway through the film, we learn Shelton has some special government training that lets him kill from a distance -- a prison cell, for instance -- which makes this a sort of Silence of the Lambs only without the overhead of an excellent script.
     To be fair, Jamie Foxx does a fine job and the film is riveting and intense, but it takes a strong stomach to get past the violence, even when it’s justified.

2 ½ Honks
MPAA Rating: R for several good reasons.

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