End of Days

We're gonna party like it's 1999.

"Prepare for the end."
Hello everyone! I thought since this is more of a approaching the new year movie that I would post it early, though I suspect you won't be reading it until sometime on Tuesday night when you wake up from New Year's Eve festivities. We already saw over the past week and change what I think of when I think of Christmas, but what do I think about New Years? I think that the only proper way to celebrate it is for the Terminator to fight Satan in a battle for the fate of the world. That brings me to today's review: End of Days. Now I don't know what it says about me that apparently holidays all remind me of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies but... there it is. Let me set the scene: It's 1999. People are convinced that the laziness of computer programs is somehow going to precipitate the end of days, and not just make some computer clocks think it's the wrong day. Having just survived another apocalypse related to people keeping track of what day it is, we can all easily relate. Cashing in hardcore on this collective seizure of brain function, Universal Studios produced a movie about the devil making a bid at birthing the Antichrist, using the only vessel appropriate for a movie produced at the end of the 90s (...I guess): Robin Tunney.

Rise of the Guardians

He looks like kind of a creeper to me.

"Legends unite."

Hi everyone! How was your Christmas? Today I'm going to talk about the seasonably appropriate Rise of the Guardians, which does prominently feature Santa Claus (Only a big sword wielding Santa, voiced by Alec Baldwin). Mostly it is a movie about Jack Frost (Chris Pine, aka Kirk in the recent Star Trek movie) though, a young (appearing) spirit who likes to freeze stuff and be a dick to everyone by freezing their stuff. Jack is depressed because no one can see or believes in him, and he doesn't know why he was dragged out of a frozen lake by the man in the moon (who never like... talks he just sort of... shines at people.) Meanwhile, the scary mean spirit Pitch Black (aka the Boogie Man, voiced by Jude Law, who's good at sounding evil) sets out to wipe out all the good dreams and hopes of children and replace them with fear and nightmares, because he is a real jerk-off. To do this, Pitch plans to knock off the four guardians, who include Santa, the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher, who I really liked as that psycho in Wedding Crashers) The Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman, the australian bunny, who recently appeared when I reviewed Real Steel) and the Sandman (who has no actor attached to him, he's weird and animated and never talks). Around the time Pitch begins his attack, a new guardian is chosen by the moon to protect all the lil' chilren of the world: Jack Frost. Not everyone is on board (especially the Easter Bunny, he's a contentious sort) but Jack goes along with it, in the hopes that he will find out who he is, and why he was chosen.

Off-day

I didn't take Christmas off, so I am taking today as an off day. I'll be back with a review on Saturday, and here with an end of the year/new year review on Tuesday. It's been about half a year since I started this blog up again, and I never thought I'd have so many people reading it. So thanks to everyone for supporting my blog, and I hope you'll continue to stop by!

This is how happy I am right now.

Jingle All the Way

Put that cookie down! Right now!

"Two Dads, One Toy, No Prisoners."

Hello all and Merry Christmas from The Tagline! What better way to ring in this magical day, than with a movie where Arnold cold-cocks a reindeer in someone's living room. I'm referring of course, to the ridiculous Christmas movie Jingle All the Way, starring the Governator himself as Howard Langston, an absentee father (which is apparently the preferred protagonist for these movies) who has forgotten to buy his son Jamie (the nauseating Jake Lloyd) a Turbo Man action figure, the hot toy for the Christmas season, and the television super hero that Jamie looks to as a male role model in the vacuum left by his actual father, who is too busy selling... I'm not sure what I don't think you find out really. Realizing that he has forgotten to get this really shitty looking action figure for his son on Christmas Eve, Howard sets out to try and find one last minute, while his sleazy neighbor Ted (Phil Hartman God rest his soul) puts the moves on his wife Liz (Rita Wilson). Along the way, he encounters a postal worker also trying to get a Turbo Man figure at any cost, named Myron (Sinbad, yeah that's right), and the two become embroiled in a bitter race to obtain a Turbo Man.

Christmas Nightmare Double Feature

Hello all! Christmas is right around the corner, so I had decided I wanted to do a list of Christmas movies that were bad or just scared me. Then I realized that there were really only two movies I wanted to talk about. One was bad, creepy, and depressing. The other was just plain creepy. Actually I found it so unsettling that I didn't even want to watch it again for this post. Alas, duty drove me to it, so now I will share with you all:

PRE-CHRISTMAS NIGHTMARE
DOUBLE FEATURE

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

ホビト輪とてもすごいです！

"From the smallest beginnings come the greatest legends."

Hey everyone! As promised, today I will review The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Based on the Tolkien book, The Hobbit, Unexpected Journey is the first part of a three movie arc adapting said book into epic movie form. This particular film follows Bilbo (Martin Freeman, most notably he plays Watson on the BBC Sherlock) as he sets out with the party of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage, who you might know if you watched the BBC Robin Hood show, he was Guy of Gisbourne) and his dwarven companions. Also Gandalf is there (Sir Ian McKellen, of course). The group sets out with their eyes set on a grand prize, the lost dwarven kingdom of Erebor, to which Thorin is heir. Erebor resides inside a massive mountain (The Lonely Mountain to be specific) and is the lair of the massive and vicious fire drake Smaug. Bilbo is roped into this enterprise, despite his initial reluctance, by Gandalf, as a potential infiltrator, because hobbits are just that easy to ignore and overlook. Their journey carries them through a countryside that is gradually growing darker in aspect, as sinister forces long dormant begin to stir across Middle Earth.

The Long Kiss Goodnight

You know it's a movie, because Samuel L
Jackson is in it.

"What's forgotten is not always gone."

Hey everyone, welcome back to The Tagline! I thought today I would eaaase us into Christmas with a movie that... well isn't about Christmas but takes place around it. For that purpose I decided to dig up an entry from my pile of "movies no one remembers or possibly ever saw in the first place The Long Kiss Goodnight. You see, Christmas is about family, and togetherness. It's about giving, and love. Also it's about a mild-mannered suburban mother and schoolteacher, who is actually an amnesiac killing machine who used to work for the CIA. That's what this movie is all about. Starring Geena Davis (Of Thelma & Louise and Beetlejuice fame) as Samantha Caine, a woman who was found 8 years before the events of the movie, washed ashore with no memory. Also she was pregnant. She has attempted several times to hire private investigators to figure out who she is, but there's been absolutely no trace of her previous life. The latest P.I. she's hired is Mitch Hennessy (Samuel L.) who despite being of questionable ethics, seems to be proficient at his job, So, then what happens?

Lord of The Rings: A Retrospective

Hey everybody! Congrats, you survived another week of holiday season, and now it's the weekend. Today I want to take a moment to look back, at the original Lord of the Rings movies, in anticipation of The Hobbit, which hopefully I will be able to elbow my way into some time in the coming week. As I reflect, I will remark on plot, comparison, color commentary, and weird recollections about my high school life that I associate with these films (because I was in high school when they came out, and saw them... more than once let's say). Reviews and first hand reports about The Hobbit are already filling up the internet, but I'll reserve judgement until after I've seen it myself. So journey back with me now, into the distant past (about 11 years exactly) as I relive The Lord of the Rings.

The Lord of The Rings: A Retrospective

Can't Hardly Wait

I like this dumb movie so much it's embarrassing.

"Yesterday's history. Tomorrow's the future. Tonight's the party."

Hey everyone! It's Thursday, you've almost survived the whole week! I was going to wait until late in the Spring to post about this movie, but my friend sent me some choice video clips, and that got me to thinking about it. So today I will be talking about my favorite party teen movie of the 90s: Can't Hardly Wait. Starring (primarily) Ethan Embry as awkward high school grad Preston Meyers, on the night of a big post-graduation party. His long-distance, all high school crush Amanda Beckett (Jennifer Love-Hewitt) has just been dumped by her high school boyfriend Mike Dexter (Peter Facinelli). Preston sees this as his big chance to finally confess his feelings, before he misses it, and so heads off to the part, dragging along his reluctant friend Denise (Lauren Ambrose) along with him. At the same party, bullied super nerd William Lichter (Charlie Korsmo) plans to exact his ultimate revenge on Mike, for a lifetime worth of abuse, and awful gangsta' wannabe Kenny (Seth Green) is planning... perhaps somewhat fancifully, to score before the night is out. What follows is a post high school cluster fuck of a party, that leaves everything forever changed... or not changed.

30 Days of Night

30 Days of Pee Your Pants Terror.

"They're Coming!"

They sure are! Welcome back to Tuesday at The Tagline, a lovely, gloom soaked Tuesday. Winter gets a boy thinking about snow, and naturally the only thing that recommends itself when you think snow is endless night populated by frenzied blood drinking monsters from your darkest nightmares. That's what got me to thinking about 30 Days of Night. As background, 30 Days of Night came out in 2007, before the Twilight craze robbed the vampire genre of any semblance of credibility for at least the next five to ten years. Based on a comic mini-series of the same name (which later spawned a number of other iterations) 30 Days of Night takes place in Barrow, Alaska, well above the arctic line, where something called polar night occurs. That's a wonderful phenomenon where sometimes the sun goes down and doesn't come back up for a long loooong time. During this time, a wonderful, magical thing happens to the inhabitants of Barrow. A shipload of murderous blood drinking fiends shows up on a ship, and sets about massacring everyone in town. Basically they show up and decide to throw their own little blood orgy. Why not right? Enter Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett, remember I was just talking about him!) the town's sheriff, who along with his ex-wife-to-be and several other survivors, attempt to last out the long night while the vampires set about butchering everyone in town.

Unorthodox Buddy Cop Movies

Hello everyone! You've made it, it's finally the weekend, and for a rare few of you that might mean you don't have to work. For the rest of us, I have a special Saturday post, after two weeks of slacking off and just reviewing a third movie. I've been thinking about movies with cops in them, and that got me to thinking about the "buddy cop" genre in general. For those unfamiliar with the particulars, a buddy cop movie is at it's core about two dudes (usually law enforcement of some kind as the name implies) who team up to solve a crime or otherwise bring down the bad guys, despite dispositions or backgrounds that put them at odds with each other. This is a theme present in a ton of movies, though in more recent years it has almost exclusively appeared in either remakes, spoofs, or unusual entries into the genre. As fate and chance might have it, those movies which play somewhat against form tend to be my favorites. So now I will enumerate some of my favorite buddy cop movies, and everyone can keep their opinions about Lethal Weapon 4 to themselves.

On Latter Day Buddy Cop Movies

Airheads

Totally badass. Or something.

"The music. The legend. The hostage situation."

When I did my top 5 Adam Sandler movies (that's here) I mentioned this movie in an off-hand fashion, but now I want to talk about it a little more in depth. In Airheads, Chazz (Brendan Fraser, making it onto my blog for a movie that isn't causing me to throw up) Is the front man for a band (a band called the Lone Rangers oof that hurts), trying to get their music on the air. The problem is, everywhere they go they find doors slamming in their face (because really who would listen to a band called the Lone Rangers, fronted by metalhair Brendan Fraser?) After being thrown out by his girlfriend for being a loser (Which in her defense he is) Chazz decides with his bandmates Rex (Steve Buscemi) and Pip (Adam Sandler) that the best way to get their music out there is to sneak into local rock radio station KPPX and persuade the DJ to play their demo. After sneaking in behind a station employee, the three get into the studio with DJ Ian "The Shark". When station manager Milo barges in to tell them that they're all trash (Rex specifically) He finds himself on the wrong end of an Uzi. Oh did I say Uzi? I meant water gun filled with pepper sauce that looks like an Uzi. Oops.

The Raven

Rebel Without a Clause. I'm sorry.

"The only one who can stop a serial killer is the man who inspired him."

Welcome to another week at The Tagline! I'm going to resist the urge to start my holiday coverage quite yet, but rest assured that you will be seeing plenty of Arnold Schwarzenegger before the end of the month. Today however I will be talking about the suspense/horror film The Raven, starring John Cusack (who has his own post here) as a fictionalized Edgar Allan Poe. I say fictionalized because, while perhaps a vulgar, high functioning alcoholic prone to ravings, he at no point marries any 13 year old relatives, and seems generally pretty lucid, just a little odd, and so that gives him serious advantage over historical reports of the real Edgar Allan Poe. This movie follows some of Mr. Poe's final days, as he partners with police to try and identify and capture a serial killer who appears to be using Poe's literary works as inspiration for his murders.

In Time

In Time FOR WHAT JTIM?

"His crime wasn't stealing time. It was giving it away."

Hello all, Welcome to Saturday at The Tagline! I've been hitting my movie backlog so hard lately that for the past few weeks I've felt compelled to do 3 reviews rather than a special Saturday post. Today I will talk about In Time, a Dystopian Sci-fi film starring Justin Timberlake (of smashing N'Sync fame) as Will Salas, a poor guy who becomes a rich guy, and then almost becomes a dead guy. The movie premise is a such: In the future, people stop aging at 25, but after that have only a year to live. In addition to being used to indefinitely prolong life, time is also currency in this future, and so the very wealthy are effectively immortal, never aging and never dying. In stark contrast, the poor live literally from day to day, dying in the streets as they bottom out. One day Will meets a rich guy who is sick of living, and gives him 100 years worth of life before dropping dead off a bridge. Will, after losing his mother (played by Olivia Wilde, who in real life is actually four years younger than Timberlake) by being seconds too late to share the wealth, decides he's going to "stick it to the man" as it were, and goes on a vague warpath that eventually entangles Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried, of Mean Girls fame) the daughter of perhaps the wealthiest man alive.