Drive

Hey Ryan, those are some nice gloves!

"Some Heroes Are Real"

Hello and Happy Halloween! You're getting an early Thursday post, because I still have no power, and so had to seek an alternate location for posting! I want to also give a quick shout out to the like 400 people who visited my blog today searching for The Crow, I assume because it is Halloween! Thanks for stopping by! Anyway, I've been meaning to write a post about this movie Drive for a long while now, but I always ended up doing something else instead. No more! Today I give Ryan Gosling his due, and talk about this movie, which came out of nowhere one September day to dazzle and then horrify me. Starring Ryan Gosling as the nameless Driver (no one ever refers to him by his name). He is duh a driver, stunt by day and criminal get away by night. He doesn't seem to do this because of any particular ambitions, other than to be the best driver (like no one ever was?) He works as a mechanic with his... friend I guess Shannon (Bryan Cranston, who while he wasn't being in Breaking Bad was in Total Recall) who does have aspirations that get him into trouble. Driver meets a girl (Carey Mulligan, who is British I guess? News to me) and her son, who live in the same building as him, and we see a gentle side to this otherwise hardened criminal.

Silent HIll: Revelation

It's like T2. In this one Pyramid Head's
the good guy?

"Prepare for a THREE DEEE RIDE THROUGH HELL"

Happy Tuesday everyone! For those of you in the path of the hurricane, I hope you're not dead! I'm setting this to autopost in case my power's out, so who knows, maybe I'm sitting in the dark, and the situation has devolved into cannibalism! If so, then what more fitting movie to talk about than a Silent Hill film in THREE DEESSSSS. For the record I did not see this movie in 3D, because I hate 3D movies and really REALLY don't want to pay 13+ dollars for a movie ticket. That sucks. Silent Hill: Revelation is a direct sequel to the original Silent Hill movie (if you missed it I reviewed the original on Thursday) following Chris, now Harry (Sean Bean) and Sharon now Heather (Adelaide Clemens), who are on the run from a mysterious group, who want Heather for some sinister purpose. This movie is clearly intent on hedging very closely to the plot of Silent Hill 3, and that is to its credit. Like I said on Thursday, in my opinion Silent Hill 3 was the best one. So how did this movie stack up to the original?

The 5 Dumbest Horror Movie Sequels

Happy Saturday everyone! Apparently the world is going to end in a horrific hellstorm for those of us living on the east coast, so I figured I should finish up my life's work today, by running down a list of the worst sequels to horror movie franchises ever. This has been my lifelong ambition. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but that is what I'm going to do today! Horror movie franchises are renowned for being not good, but some in particular take the cake. As franchises grow stale, and movie producers grow desperate to turn a dime, things take a turn for the really really dumb. These movies are all so worthless that I will list them in no particular order. They are all #1.

The 5 Worst Horror Movie Sequels

Silent Hill

Look at the time...

"Welcome to Silent Hill"

Happy Thursday everyone! We're still in the thick of October, and a new Silent Hill movie, Silent Hill: Revelation, is hitting theaters this Friday, so I thought now would be an appropriate time to talk about the original Silent Hill movie, a movie which surprised me by not sucking ass. You might recall that I did a two part list of the shittiest game movies ever made (here and here) and mentioned that there was a short list of movies that fell into that category and were not absolutely awful. Among those was this movie, released in 2006. Based loosely on the games of the same name, Silent Hill starred Radha Mitchell (you might remember her from the science fiction/horror film Pitch Black), Sean Bean (to a lesser extent than Radha Mitchell, we don't see as much of him) and also Laurie Holden (most recently she has portrayed Andrea on the AMC original series The Walking Dead) portrays the police officer Cybil Bennet. Jodelle Ferland (she appeared in the Twilight sequel Eclipse as Bree Tanner) portrays the requisite creepy little girl.

The Crow

Looks serious right? it is.

"In a world without justice, one man was chosen to protect the innocent."

Hello everyone, welcome back to The Tagline after my short weekend away! I did NOT give away a copy of The Crow to anyone, but now I will review it for all of you. It seems appropriate with the approach of Halloween! You see, there was a time once called the 1990s. During this time, now lost to history and left only in fable and myth, everything was super deadly serious, no matter how ridiculous it might have seemed. Paradoxically no one cared about anything, because that was super uncool. Out of this fertile bed of alternativeness sprang The Crow, a film direct by Alex Proyas, who also later directed Dark City, the first movie I reviewed on The Tagline in its current incarnation. The Crow was loosely based on a comic series of the same name, about a musician named Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) who is murdered, along with his fiance on October 30th, in a urban gothic hellscape version of Detroit (slightly worse than real Detroit).

Almost Heroes

Like Tommy Boy, if it were
about Manifest Destiny

"Almost History... Almost Legends... Mostly Ridiculous."

Hey gang, welcome to Thursday at The Tagline! Today I thought I'd pick from a genre I more seldom address, and review a movie that most audiences that saw it enjoyed, and that virtually every critic who reviewed it hated: Almost Heroes. For those who were about 10 in 1998 when it came out (and I was 11) Almost Heroes starred Matthew Perry as the foppish explorer Lesley Edwards, and Chris Farley as his boorish partner Bartholomew Hunt. Together, the two set out in search of the western edge of North America, following in the wake of Lewis & Clark, in the hopes of beating them to planting a flag on the beaches of the Pacific. This endeavor is hindered by the fact that Edwards is a dandy, and Hunt is a drunken imbecile. Also the crew accompanying them includes some of the most incompetent simpletons one could hope to find. Among them is a crazed Frenchman and his indian woman (their group's version of Sacajawea), a priest, a dumb guy who loses several limbs, and Edwards' man servant (played by Bokeem Woodbine, you saw him in Total Recall) who is essentially the only person in the group who isn't braindead, except maybe the indian woman. Along their way, Edwards and Hunt are waylayed by their own stupidity, the French guy being really jealous of anyone looking at his Indian lady, and also an insane conquistador named Hidalgo, and his henchmen. Yadda yadda hilarity ensues.

Evidence

Evidence that guys with cameras will get
you killed.

Welcome to Tuesday at The Tagline! Today I'm going to talk about a movie I watched on the Netflix last week: Evidence. This continues my horror movie tear (I guess this is the time to do it right?) Evidence was an interesting film, shot on a very small budget and using the "found footage" approach to movie making that was first popularized in horror by The Blair Witch Project, a movie which bored my pants off with its boring woods scenes. As the name might indicate, the film itself is the 'found footage' shot by 4 friends filming a documentary in the deep woods, when things go wrong. Really wrong. The footage serves as evidence of the bizarre experiments that seemed to be conducted in the area. There were a lot of neat ideas on offer here, and certainly I was impressed by how far they managed to stretch their budget, but the movie had plenty that was wrong with it too, and I'm not going to gloss over it. Warning for everyone, I have to spoil some stuff to explain some of my criticism.

My 5 Favorite Spooky Spirit Movies

Welcome to Saturday on the Tagline! As we move towards Halloween I decided it would be appropriate to talk about some horror movies. For me one of my favorite types of horror movie to be freaked out by are movies that involve ghosts, spirits, and possession. I know what you're thinking, why those? Well I know some people are not big fans of movies involving spooks, and I realized it's because they don't believe in ghosts! Now believe might be a strong word for me. I wouldn't say I believe in them, just that the thought of an invisible intangible thing that can take control of my body while I sleep, drag me off and then make me kill myself and everyone around me is more than slightly upsetting. Once you allow for that as an even distant possibility, well then horror movies about spooky spirits become a lot less corny and freaky as hell. So I give you

My Top 5 Movies That Made Me Not Sleep For Weeks on End

The Losers

Zoe Saldana in a cowboy hat.

"Anyone Else Would Be Dead By Now."

Welcome back to the Tagline! Today I'll be talking about a film I saw a couple years back that I feel really didn't get noticed, the vertigo comic based The Losers. The movie follows a group of special forces operatives burned by the mysterious CIA spook "Max" as they attempt to get revenge and clear their names. This more or less follows the premise of the comics, albeit in a movie shortened fashion.  The Losers stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan (who I recently talked about in The Possession) as Clay, who is the team's leader. Supporting cast include Zoe Saldana as Aisha (Her best known role was probably as Uhura in the Star Trek remake) and Chris Evans as Jensen (You are probably familiar with him, he was most recently Captain America in The Avengers). The team travels from Bolivia to the U.S. where they perform a variety of dangerous, suicidal, and very illegal operations all in an attempt to find Max, so that they can kill him. Max meanwhile has his own plans, and is attempting to use next generation weapons of mass destruction to start a war, in order to influence world events and 'steer the world back on track'. You know, your typical megalomania villain fare.

Looper

Not to be confused with 12 Monkeys

"Hunted by your future. Haunted by your past."

Welcome to a fresh week of The Tagline! Over the weekend I got out to the movies and took in the new Bruce Willis/Joseph Gordon-Levitt flick Looper. Taking place in the year 2042, Looper stars JGL as Joe, a specialized assassin used by criminal syndicates in the future. Because it's very difficult to discreetly dispose of someone in 2072, the syndicates instead use illegal time travel tech to send the people into the past, where loopers (the assassins) wait to kill and dispose of the future people. The victims are sent back with the loopers payment strapped to their backs in the form of silver bars. There's a catch for the loopers though. To keep loose ends tied up, loopers sign a contract, agreeing that their last assassination will be of themselves from 30 years in the future. As the movie begins, many loopers are having their contracts terminated all at once. The prevailing rumor is that a new crime boss, known only as "the rainmaker" has suddenly seized control of all criminal operations, and is terminating the contracts of all loopers. When Joe's future self is sent back, he manages to evade past Joe's attempts to kill him, and seems intent on finding the "rainmaker" and killing him/her (he doesn't even know that much) before he/she can ever become a threat.

Keanu Reeves Hall of Shame

Hey guys, welcome to the weekend at The Tagline! As promised, today we will take a moment to honor Keanu Reeves, and the numerous ridiculous roles he has played. For those that have somehow missed out on the heartthrob sensation that is Keanu "The One" Reeves, he had his first breakout hit on the big screen as a stoner named Ted in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. After that he was... still Ted for a while, in a tv series, and also a sequel to the original movie. That's a lot of Ted! After that he was in other movies, where he wasn't Ted, but he still often seemed like a stoner, because well... he's one in real life. Perhaps his best known role was as Neo in the in-retrospect-not-nearly-as-cool The Matrix. But I'm not going to talk about that (not the first one anyway). So without any more gilding of the lily, let's get to exposing Keanu's great shame, with his 3 worst movies. I could've made it 5, but I really want to tear into just these special 3.

Keanu Reeves' Hall of Shame

21 Jump Street

He'll beat your dick off with both hands!

"They're too old for this shift."

Welcome to Thursday everyone! Today I'm going to be talking about the 2012 movie adaptation of the 80s tv show 21 Jump Street. The movie stars Channing Tatum (I think he just played a male stripper in Magic Mike? Yeah that was weird) as the good looking, athletic, and dumb Jenko, and Jonah Hill (who found his breakout in Superbad) as the not so good looking, less athletic but very smart Schmidt. With their powers combined, the two of them form almost one functioning police officer. Almost. After they completely screw up an arrest, mostly because Jenko doesn't know the miranda rights, the two of them are turfed to 21 Jump Street (which is in a Korean Church) where they are tasked with posing as high school students to discover where a new deadly designer drug is coming from. What follows is a less than textbook perfect operation, that involves distributing alcohol and drugs to minors and stealing a couple cars. While it might not be good police work, it is really funny.

Inception

I haven't seen this poster before. I don't
care for the title font, it's stupid looking.

"The Dream is Real"

Welcome to the first post of October at The Tagline! As I teased on Saturday, today I will be talking about a movie with Ken Watanabe in it: (albeit as a supporting character) Inception. I had previously avoided reviewing it because I felt like I couldn't get away from people talking about it, but now I think it's okay to share my thoughts. For those of you who did not see Inception (I suppose someone might not have), it's a movie about people who use some manner of made up technology to enter other people's dreams, so that they can... do stuff to them. Typically they're trying to steal information right from the person's mind while they are sleeping. Among them, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is considered one of the best, and is called upon to help a rich businessman (Watanabe) prevent another company from obtaining a complete monopoly over the energy market, by convincing its new CEO that his father's dying wish was to break up the company. They will do this by performing a supposedly impossible feat known as inception: planting an idea in a mark's mind and convincing them that it was their own. Cobb assembles a team of friends and associates to help him perform this monumental and risky mind operation.