You're Next

Add disco lights and it's Hotline Miami.

"Did you remember to lock your door?"

Hello and welcome to Thursday at The Tagline! I know I promised you a psychedelic disco dance through a garden of bedazzled banana hammocks today, but I saw another movie on Monday night and decided that I'm not quite ready to relive the horror of a cut-rate 1980 musical. So you all get a stay of execution, while I talk about You're Next, a movie where no one gets a stay of execution. Whenever a horror movie manages to claw itself out of the 10-30% range of critical reception, I sort of feel compelled to go see it, if only to deduce whether the positive reviews are stemming from the movie being good, or the movie being just pretentious enough to garner favor. When a movie makes the jump from film festival to wide release, that also gets my attention. So it was with You're Next, a movie first screened in 2011 at the Toronto International Film Festival, that presents itself as a home invasion movie, and then... takes a bit of a turn. Like any good movie about people being murdered in their home, this movie takes place in the middle of nowhere, at the home of the Davisons. The very huge, one might almost say palatial, home of the Davisons. To be more specific, the vacation home of Paul and his wife Aubrey, where they plan to host a reunion of sorts with their three sons, their daughter, and whatever spousal refuse they track in with them (like Ti West in a hipster scarf for instance. Gross). Things are going to get really spoilery under the cut, so prepare yourself and you've been warned.

Kick-Ass 2

I heard a mom calling this comic
Kick-Butt to her small child in a comic
shop last month.

"You Can't Fight Your Destiny."

Hello everyone, welcome back to The Tagline! Today as promised I will be talking about Kick-Ass 2, the sequel to 2010's film Kick-Ass, itself based on a comic book series of the same name, originally released in 2008. Kick-Ass 2's plot line vaguely coincides with the events of the Hit-Girl and Kick-Ass 2 comics, though the differences in detail are substantial enough that I won't be using the events in the comic as a metric for what goes on in the movies (and that's okay to do get over it seriously it's an ADAPTATION not a SCREEN CLONE). The film chronicle's Kick-Ass' attempts to step up his game and become a "real" superhero, joining the ranks of costumed do-gooders who were inspired by his actions in the original film. Meanwhile Mindy/Hit-Girl is forced into retirement by her adoptive father Marcus, and is subsequently drawn into a Mean Girls style high school nightmare. While all this is going on, Chris D'Amico, formerly Red Mist, has vowed revenge against Kick-Ass, and so assumes the persona of The Motherfucker, forming his own group of supervillains using the considerable wealth left to him by his dead father. What follows is every bit as violent as you would be led to expect from the first film.

Halloween (2007)

I can tell from the grainy filter shit just
got REAL BITCHES.

"Evil Unmasked."

Welcome back to The Tagline! I DID see Kick-Ass 2, and you'll hear about it soon, but while I compose my thoughts about it, I'll talk about a Rob Zombie movie instead. No it is not House of 1000 Corpses. I'm talking about the 2007 re-boot of the Halloween franchise, attempting to recover from the Busta Rhymes fueled crapstorm that was the 2002 Halloween: Resurrection (which I heartily recommend you see if only to watch Busta do Karate at Michael Myers). With Rob Zombie at the helm, we could all rest assured that it would be filled with blood, boobs, and people's butt cracks. Lady butts more specifically. His wife's butt most MOST specifically. Because he's just a classy dude like that, and his wife portrays Michael Myers mom who is a pole dancer also. So there's something right off the bat to look forward to! I guess! As mentioned, this film re-imagines the origin story of Michael Myers, starting with a flashback to his childhood, where we first see how shitty his life is, and then get to watch him massacre most of his family in a variety of seriously grisly ways. This sequence makes a good argument for never getting so drunk that you don't notice someone duct taping you in place to your recliner so he can slit your throat. After this charming sequence and a fair amount of boobs and butts, we spend some time observing the troubled young lad's therapy sessions in an asylum, with Dr. Loomis (Malcom McDowell, who I have a tough time not finding creepy no matter what). Then he kills some more people, but there are no butts in this part, so generally that was kind of a let down. We do get to see that the kid is a real aficionado of mask making. Paper mache in particular. He is a really talented fellow in that regard, if you want a horrible nightmare mask to wear around. Which naturally everyone does right?

G.I. Joe: Retaliation

Go Joe or... go home?

"Retaliation."

It's another splendid August day, and time for more movies of questionable quality, value, or cultural significance. In the wake of a battery of really negative reviews for Kick-Ass 2 I am dragging my feet to go out and see it, and so now instead have started chipping away at my block of "movies I downloaded that have The Rock in them". Today I'm going to be talking about G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the sequel to 2009's Rise of Cobra. The first movie was... certainly a movie with characters in it. It had Marlon Wayans in it so you can probably use your own discretion there to deduce the overall quality of the film. It also had Channing Tatum, an actor who I find is actually pretty good at being a funny sort of meat head in films (see my review of 21 Jump Street). Here he was leading man/ new G.I. Joe Duke. Inexplicably it had Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander, and that was sort of difficult to wrap my head around but hey there it is. Together under the command of Dennis Quaid these characters stopped Destro and "The Doctor" (soon to be Cobra Commander) from using nano-machines to take over the world (yes this is G.I. Joe so the bad guys want to take over the world obviously).

Elysium

This is not Halo... okay well it sort of is.

"He can save us."

Hello everyone, welcome back to The Tagline! As promised, yesterday I went to the movies to see Elysium, and I got a lot more than I bargained for. Starring Matt Damon as Max, a former criminal now factory worker, Elysium is set in the future, in the year 2154. The Earth as far as we see is an almost entirely dessicated rock, overcrowded and completely polluted. The wealthy elite live in a space habitat called Elysium, where they have magic tubes that keep them from aging or being sick, and they live in opulent space luxury. Meanwhile on Earth people struggle to survive, and mostly seem to be failing. Max is among these people and let me run you through a quick day in the life: Leave early for work, get hassled by some bangers about working. Get stopped by robot police, make a sarcastic joke, have your arm broken by said robot police. Report to a robotic parole officer, who adds eight months to your parole, and does the robot equivalent of telling you to piss off. Offers you pills for your anger. Finally get to awful dangerous factory job, get docked half a day's pay for being late because robots assaulted you while waiting for the bus. The next day, basically be forced into a radioactive pressure cooker, be exposed to a lethal dose of rads, get given some pills by a robot and told you're dead in 5 days. Welcome to the future.

Pitch Perfect

AW YEAH LOOK AT THOSE GLASSES.

"Get Pitch Slapped."

Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Tagline! It's another week and I have more movies, more rambling, maybe more anecdotal evidence that my life is an ever-changing landscape of humiliation and debasement. Okay, so there are DEFINITELY movies at the very least. Last week, people all around me reminded me that Anna Kendrick was having a birthday. Now for those of you who neither know nor care who Anna Kendrick is, well she is the leading lady in Pitch Perfect among other things. I know I shouldn't mention that she was a supporting character in the Twilight movies, but I'm going to, she did that, and now we all have to live with the repercussions of her actions. That being said, I was trying hard not to hold that against her when I went into this movie. Besides, she was also in Up in the Air, and that was a pretty good movie, something that Twilight movies wouldn't know anything about, on the grounds that they are all uniformly horrible. Well that's not true, each is awful in a special way but I'm getting off track here.

Super 8

I'd never seen this poster before. Cool.

"It arrives."

It does! Welcome back to the Tagline, where I am constantly feeling like I already wrote this review, but I find no archive of it, leading me to believe that I experience an alternate version of my blog as I sleep. Anyway, last time I savagely attacked Cloverfield, much as the monster attacked New York, and Hud attacked human decency. This was a movie produced by J.J. Abrams, about a big monster killing people. That being said, J.J. didn't write it, and he didn't direct it, so it doesn't seem fair to stick him with all the blame. For the sake of fairness, I thought I would give him a fair shake and talk about Super 8, another movie where some people have a camera and film a monster, and then stuff happens. Super 8 is a very different movie though. For starters, it doesn't use a found footage contrivance, and so at times the characters can not have cameras without it ending the movie. Also, Hud is not in the movie, and that makes it a lot better overall. If you are wondering, it may be several more days before I stop commenting about what an unbelievable chode Hud is. I'll try to reign it in but I can't make any promises. Anyway, Super 8 takes place in the 70s, and follows a group of kids who are trying to film a low budget zombie movie. This effort is spearheaded by the group's fledgling film buff Charles, who wants to film a shot at a train station in town, to add authenticity to a scene in the film. They want to get a shot just as a train is coming through. When they are filming this shot, a truck is driven onto the tracks, causing the train to derail and explode and almost kill them all. They discover that the man driving the truck was their biology teacher, who warns them to get scarce. They do right before a bunch of government vehicles swarm the scene.

Cloverfield

Experience the mild motion sickness...OF THE YEAR

"Some Thing Has Found Us."

With an intelligent tagline like that, we HAVE to be in for something good right? Welcome back to THE Tagline everyone, today as promised I will spill all of my negative feelings about Cloverfield a movie about love, a giant monster, and some asshole named Hud. Cloverfield is a film that,is shot in the "found footage from some guy who was there" style, just like the much better Troll Hunter, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. This is a nice place to start, because while they use the same style to film, in one movie that makes sense, and in the other it is a strained, and then later patently ridiculous device that makes absolutely no sense in the context of the movie. This is of course one of many elements of the movie that are either stupid or totally nonsensical. I bet some of you who have had the good fortune of not viewing this movie are wondering what it's all about? Well that's why I'm here. To hurt you that way.