Chappie

I'm glad my parents aren't hyper-criminals
who are also Die Antwoord.

"I am discovery. I am wonder. I am Chappie."

I feel like this tagline is a bit misleading in terms of the movie's tone, but then again I've never especially gotten the impression that tagline writers have any idea what movies are about. Welcome back to THE Tagline, where robots get set on fire just to watch them burn. Over the weekend I got out to the movies, because there was something that I actually wanted to see, and that was Chappie, the latest from South African-Canadian pain artist Neill Blomkamp, a man romantically involved with cinematic misery, and also science fiction I suppose. His last fictional foray was the aggressively unpleasant and almost completely unnecessary Elysium, a film where Matt Damon portrays a low-life who enlists the help of bigger low-lifes, to bring down the biggest, meanest, low-lifes of all, who live on a magical paradise in outer space. What you may be detecting is I didn't think much of Elysium. While still kind of a bummer, I found District 9, his first major theatrical release, to be substantially less shitty, and so with these two experiences from the director behind me, I figured that I had a 50/50 shot of either liking or hating Chappie, a movie about a police robot that gains sentience, in the caldera of violence and shittiness that is Johannesburg. How did I end up liking it? Well things went about 50/50. Let's start off with the basics.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Pink Hotel.

""

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Tagline. The week is new, and at last we can almost see the ground, emerging from the hellish permafrost that I feel has engulfed us for an eternity. I know that February is the shortest month out of the year, but I swear it dragged on for months. Enough about that though, let's focus on what's going on inside of movie theaters specifically. today I will be talking the recent effort from that most...I don't know what word I'm searching for, but it falls somewhere between pretentious and whimsical, of directors, Wes Anderson. I am talking of course about The Grand Budapest Hotel, a film that was recently nominated for nine Oscars (four of which it won, although best picture eluded it). I wouldn't take it too hard though Wes, this is the same academy that last year nominated Gravity for best picture, which I feel the need to reiterate, I FUCKING HATE. I'm not sure this is a body you can trust, though I guess it's better than the AACTA, which actually AWARDED best picture to Gravity. That's awful, but don't worry, that's enough about that garbage. Instead we will talk about The Grand Budapest, a film starring Ralph Fiennes as Monsieur Gustave H, the concierge at the Grand Budapest. This story is a framing story, within another framing device, being a story that an author is telling, about a story he was told by the owner of the Grand Budapest to him in the 60s, about when the OWNER was a young lobby boy in the late 30s.

Dracula: Untold

Anyone who says that's not a cool poster is lying.

"Every Bloodline Has a Beginning"

It's that time again my children of the night, time for The Tagline: Untold. Today as promised we will be travelling to Transylvania, where there are lots of spooky mountains and forests and it appears to be a creepy twilight almost all the time. This spookiness is obviously the perfect place for an awesome castle, and also VAMPIRES. So by that rationale was Dracula: Untold made, a story about the man who became the monster, or something. Dracula Untold stars Luke Evans (who you probably recognize best as Bard the Bowman in the Hobbit movies) as Vlad, the infamous impaler. After being sent away as a hostage and soldier for the Turks, Vlad returns home to take his place as the prince of Transylvania, has a wife who has a bad habit of being drained by vampires in film (Sarah Gadon, also see The Moth Diaries for her turn with Lesbian Dracula) a son and a host of loyal retainers who are certain to be dead in the following hour and a half. Things are going hunky dory until envoys arrive from the Ottoman Empire. The sultan, Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper you know Tony Stark's dad), demands in addition to his usual tribute of lots of ducats (10,000 ducats to be precise) that he be given 1000 boys to train as soldiers for his Janissary battalions. This is the same thing Vlad's dad did to him, and it looks like he's about to go for it and acquiesce, until the Turkish officer taking away Vlad's own son get's kinda lippy at him. Then in the space of I'd say ten seconds Vlad takes the guys sword and then kills all six of the Turkish soldiers with it. We must remember that at this point in the story he is just a man. A very scary man.

Mindscape

Join Mindscape now free for 3 months.

"Don't Let Her In."

Hello children, gather round for another edition of the Tagline, the only blog where I personally write about what Vanilla Ice was doing in 1991 and then make awkwardly sexual comments about members of the Avengers (haha members GET IT). Anyway this week was SUPPOSED to be kung-fu week, but due to some unforeseen acquisition challenges instead it's going to be random crap like every other week-week, but I can't bust out a gem like Cool as Ice every day so instead I'm going to be reviewing a movie that WASN'T a massive joke. After experiencing some challenge actually locating the movie, because the original name was different than the American title of the film, I tracked down Mindscape (called Anna in the US) a film reinforcing my already dubious impression of Taissa Farmiga. This film features Mark Strong in one of his rare roles as not a sneaky bad guy plotting to murder you, or an upfront bad guy who is nonetheless still trying to murder you. Instead he is John Washington, a sort of psychic detective, who can use a kind of hypnotism to enter the memories of others. This memory investigation is the principal conceit of the movie the "one thing" that's different from what is otherwise our world. John is down on his luck as the movie opens, due to a trauma in his past, that sometimes intrudes on his sessions and had previously caused him to have a stroke. The memory investigating and the way a person's own memories can intrude seemed a lot like the dream stuff in Inception, but it was distinct enough that it didn't feel like they were just ripping off that movie. Anyway, John is out of money to spend on booze, and so goes to his boss Sebastian (Brian Cox AKA Hannibal Lecter AKA William Stryker) looking for a job. He is offered one, in the form of Anna (Taissa Farmiga who as you may or may not know is a witch/ghost/member of the bling ring) who is on a hunger strike, and also maybe a complete psychopath. She's the daughter of incredibly rich parents, and is super smart but also extra strength weird, and is on a hunger strike. She eventually reveals that this is because she fears being drugged by her step-father, who wants to have her institutionalized. Ten minutes of her in the movie and I could really see where the guy was coming from, even if he WAS a douche.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

This would be hotter with Jeremy Renner
in front.

"Revenge is sweeter than candy."

Hey everyone, welcome back to The Tagline, with a fresh week filled with movies about shooting things for reasons. Today, as long promised I will be delving into less than stellar cinema once again, this time with the obviously dubious looking Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. This was the sort of movie that I was honestly surprised was getting a wide movie theater release, but then again I suppose it has actors in it who need to be paid in real money so I shouldn't be too shocked. Even then you're almost surprised they'd even attach themselves to a movie about Hansel & Gretel that looks like Van Helsing. That in itself is pretty damning, as Van Helsing was a total train wreck of a movie, even when compared to other pulpy cinema. So with all of that weighing on my mind I didn't enter into this movie with very high expectations. Let me set up the premise for you, parts should be familiar. Hansel & Gretel are left in the woods by their dad. They find a gingerbread house, a witch who lives their plans to eat them, but they get the drop on her and burn her in her own stupid oven. Following this event, Hansel is left Diabetic and has to take regular injections or else he'll die (Naturally. They didn't have insulin shots in the 1800s but I guess I have no real idea or really where this movie is taking place so probably don't let that trip me up). Together he and his sister become renowned witch hunters, killing tons of witches in no small part because they seem to be immune to the dark magic they employ. At the movie's outset the two arrive in who-the-hell caresville where the sheriff is a real dildo, and the mayor is less of one. The mayor hires Hansel and Gretel to try and find out why children are disappearing (hint it's witches). Before they do that though they have to take a moment to stop sheriff jackhole from executing some hot chick that they think is a witch. Hansel explains that witches can only pretend to be hot, and are actually gross, whereas this girl is actually hot. This is all really advanced high-class stuff so try and keep up guys.

Man of Tai Chi

Get it because Yin and Yang.

"No rules. No mercy. Pure fighting."

Hello friends, it's magic hour again, time for more brilliance from The Tagline! While I was working on some stuff over the weekend I decided to take a peek into Netflix once again, and spin the big roulette wheel of garbage, just to see where it would land. While I was browsing I couldn't help but notice that there was a movie with Keanu Reeves on the cover, and then I saw that the movie was called Man of Tai Chi, which was somehow even more preposterous seeming to me than his roll in 47 Ronin. With the intention of ridiculing both Keanu and the movie he was in, I started Man of Tai Chi, and as is almost universally the case after I utter the words "there's no way this could be any good" I found myself watching a movie that was drastically different than I had presumed, and it was actually pretty decent. At least partly to blame was that I saw a movie with Keanu Reeves attached, and naturally assumed he would be the protagonist. I was wrong about that. Keanu, in addition to being the director (and I will talk more about that) is the primary antagonist  of the film, whereas the protagonist is Chinese stuntman Tiger Chen (who did stunt work for the Matrix movies, hence his acquaintance with Reeves) who plays a character of the same name. Tiger is shown to us as an honest and hardworking individual, and also the sole pupil of Master Yang, a master of Ling Kong Tai Chi. Tiger wants to prove the martial use of Tai Chi, and so is participating in a local Wulin tournament. Sounds like he's living a pretty normal kung-fu life right? WELL WAIT A SECOND.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Sexy... kinda.

Films first screened at the Cannes Film Festival need no taglines, that's for those tacky plebes making movies all about boobs and explosions! I guess! Anyway, today I'm going to be talking about Only Lovers Left Alive, a film about how depressed and gothy Tom Hiddleston is. Okay so it isn't really ABOUT that, but it does kind of come into play at points. I'm talking of course about Only Lovers Left Alive, a 2013 film that is just now seeing circulation here. This film is a moody, languid, romance story about two very old vampires, Adam (Tom Hiddleston, aka every 13 year old girl's boyfriend Loki) and without a hint of irony his wife Eve (Tilda Swinton, who I just can never get over how weird she is seriously she weirds me out big time). The two live separetely, with Eve in Tangier and Adam living on the outskirts of Detroit as a reclusive musician, with little contact to the outside world. This works for him just fine, as Adam sports a growing disgust for the human world at large, thanks mostly to what he refers to at one point as their "fear of their own imaginations." Over the centuries Adam has been influential in the lives of many scientists and engineers, and is especially bitter about the way the great minds of past generations were marginalized and destroyed. Adam's house is powered by a device he created from parts of various Tesla inventions, and so he is an island in the way that I've heard no man is. Of course even island guys need to head inland sometimes, and so Adam deals with rock scene kid Ian (Anton Yelchin), paying him to run various errands and to find him rare and vintage musical instruments, among other things (like a wooden bullet he considers using to kill himself).

22 Jump Street

I want a gold plated gun too.

"These undercover cops are going to party like it's their job."

Hi everyone and welcome to a shiny new week at The Tagline! Over the weekend I flipped a coin and decided to see 22 Jump Street, the sequel to the most unexpectedly enjoyable movie I saw in 2012. Before I talk about the movie that I actually saw though, I really feel like I need to talk about the previews before the movie, which reminded me of something maybe I'd forgotten: most comedy movies are really terrible, even in their conception. The idea with trailers seems pretty straightforward to me. Before a movie you show trailers for movies that are similar, and that gets people to keep seeing new movies that are likely to be appealing to them. Only sometimes you go to see a movie that belongs to a genre you aren't generally wild about, and then you end up seeing previews for a bunch of movies that look incredibly terrible. I saw a preview for that awful looking Dumb & Dumber sequel, I saw some movie with Melissa Mccarthy being "funny fat lady" robbing like a fast food place or something equally offensive. There was a movie where Seth Rogan and James Franco bromance their way into North Korea? It was a rough ten minutes for me, and I was beginning to wish that I had been a little late and showed up to the movie just as the previews were concluded.

Godzilla (2014)

The biggest, lizardiest building of all.

".."

Hey folks, hope your weekend was full of low altitude drops into extremely dangerous situations! I know mine certainly was, and it's all thanks to the arrogance of man, whose hubris knows no bounds. Welcome back to the Tagline, today I will be talking about the new Godzilla film that was just released, which I approached with a mixture of hope and deep fear. Much like any person who had endured a traumatic incident, I was fearful to approach something that was so reminiscent of the place where I had previously suffered. If you would like my complete thoughts on the matter, then please feel free to look over here. Anyway this film cuts a different path entirely, and is actually about a thing that you'd expect a Godzilla movie to be about, and not a bunch of assholes trying to blow up some weird looking Tyrannosaurus or something. This showed us that clearly the makers of 1998 Godzilla had no idea what the fuck they were doing. In addition to the 8 million other reasons why that movie was total shit, it was doomed from the start due to an inherent lack of understanding, about what people like about Godzilla. To wit, no one wants to watch a movie where Ferris Bueller and Leon the Professional team up to murder Godzilla and a bunch of Jurassic Park raptors. NO ONE WANTS TO SEE THAT MOVIE (okay someone might, but that's a totally different movie). It shows that the creators of that movie didn't know shit about Godzilla. Godzilla is not the bad guy. No one wants to see Godzilla get killed. We want to see him beat up OTHER MONSTERS and the city just sort of gets annihilated in the crossfire, because he's really big, and the other monsters are also big. Godzilla is the hero of the movie, make no mistake. Sure he maybe kills a lot of people, but he isn't TRYING to kill them. They're probably assholes anyway, why are they hanging around downtown with a 30 story tall lizard bearing down on them?

The Purge

Why are they all wearing masks to
look like the guy from Aphex Twin?

"Survive the night."

Hey everyone welcome to a new week at The Tagline! Is there... anyone still out there? I guess even the most dedicated can't care about my crappy taste in movies all the time, but alas THAT WILL NOT STOP THE TIDE, nothing can stop the irresistible deluge of garbage that I will churn out into the ether. Today I will be talking about when you take home invasion to the A league. I'm talking about The Purge, a film that takes a look into what is probably the near future of America. The basic premise is that in a near-future America wracked by crime and unemployment and other problems that we have in abundant supply right now, the government decides to implement the purge. What is that? Well a bunch of reprobate social scientists decide that humans are just such violent fucks that they can't exist without a release valve involving committing insane acts of violence. To help alleviate this need, the government institutes a once a year 12-hour window where all crimes are legal and all emergency services are suspended. They of course make provisions for super rich people and the government folks (if you try and kill them it's lights out for you) but otherwise it's basically open season. Some people suspect that this system is just a means of keeping the poor down and killing off the unemployed and homeless, and other unseemly demographics, but fortunately no one cares because people are all fucking animals anyway. If you're sitting there thinking "no way that would never happen!" Well... I'm glad you feel that way. 

Odd Thomas

DUUUUUUUUDE MONSTERS.

"In Odd We Trust"

Hello all, welcome to a new bright definitely not super rainy spring week at The Tagline. Today I'm going to be talking about a film I'd nearly given up the hope of ever seeing, ever, for a variety of reasons. First it was caught up in a bizarre legal battle, and then shelved for years. Then last month, it received an extremely limited theatrical release, bringing it exactly nowhere near me (like I would have been going into a different state to see it). Finally after all that it was released this month on DVD, allowing me to at last see Odd Thomas, the movie adaptation of the Dean Koontz novel of the same name, the first book in a series about a character named... Odd Thomas. Odd Thomas is odd because he can see the dead, and is drawn to solve murders of those who died unnaturally, and bring their killers to justice. He lives in the small town of Pico Mundo, which is a desert sort of nowhere. He has the sheriff there backing him up (Willem Dafoe not playing some kind of heinous villain is just weird to me) and by day works as a short order cook at a local diner. He is dating the weird but really hot and awfully named Bronwen "Stormy" Llewellyn, because Dean Koontz considers his job incomplete unless everyone has a completely idiotic name. In addition to all this, Odd sees one other thing, a race of horrifying shadow monsters he calls bodachs, that seem to lurk wherever a bloody disaster is about to happen, and apparently exult in such disasters. Odd intimates to us that if the bodachs caught on that he could see them, they would probably kill him, which is a nice thought isn't it?

The Last Stand

Awww yeahh.

"Retirement Is for Sissies."

Hello again, and strap in for more Tagline action, where the Governator takes it to the streets to stop a small town on the Mexico/US border from being torn up as a drug lord attempts to escape across the border in a souped up race car. That's right, today I'll be talking about The Last Stand, a 2013 action movie starring Arnold Shwarzenegger as a small town sheriff and his deputies trying to keep a super fast corvette driven by a druglord from shooting through town and over the border. I had missed this movie when it was released in theaters earlier this year, but I discovered on Sunday that it's been on Netflix for a while, so I decided to give it a watch, figuring that at the very least I would get to watch some stuff get blown up or a car chase. The movie did not disappoint in either respect. One does have to wonder why Johnny Knoxville was billed over Forest Whitaker on the movie poster, but I guess that's just one of life's great mysteries. What is not mysterious is that clearly to help keep the budget trim there were some deals made with Chevy, because basically every vehicle to appear in this film is a flipping Chevy. WHICH I'M FINE WITH I just wanted to mention that, because y'know like a rock or whatever.

RoboCop (2014)

If you think he looks like Judge Dredd
now, just wait until he starts shooting.

"Crime has a new enemy."

And by new here of course we mean torn from an 80s movie. Hello everyone welcome back, this week I'm going to start off by talking about the recently released reboot of RoboCop, the story of a Detroit cop in 2024 named Alex Murphy (Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman), who gets blown up in the line of duty and is brought back as RoboCop, because literally all they manage to save out of this guy are his heart, lungs, most of his head, and one of his hands. It was a pretty good sized explosion suffice to say. The purpose of his reconstruction is of course far from altruistic, and part of a gambit on the part of Omnicorp CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton, playing a wealthy person who is not Batman this time) to repeal an act keeping him from selling humanoid robot peacekeepers as law enforcers in the US. The movie treats us to a brutal look at how efficient the Omnicorp drones are at killing people in foreign countries, which I'm sure is not alien to anyone who keeps even remote track of real things happening in the world right now. With air drones blowing up targets with impunity right now in contested areas, it isn't too difficult to imagine what sorts of killer mechs we'll have cooked up in ten years. Will they better at killing people than other people? I don't know, but I'm sure they'll be at least okay at it. That's besides the point though, let's get back to RoboCop.

Insidious 2

Baby kidnap GO!

"It Will Take What You Love Most."

Good morrow to you my fair friends! It's that time again! Today's Tagline comes from the horror quadrant. Today we'll be talking about Insidious: Chapter 2, the sequel to the 2011 film Insidious (see my thoughts on it and some other films I enjoyed here). Released this past September, Insidious: Chapter 2 picks up immediately after the end of the first movie, when Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson, see him also here in The Conjuring) had to cross over (with John Edward) to retrieve his astrally projecting son. Unfortunately something followed him back, and murdered his friend and super badass medium Elise (who has a lot of juice in the supernatural department). Things have calmed down since, except for perhaps the ongoing investigation around Elise's death. That being said, it doesn't take long for weird shit to start happening in the house the Lamberts are now occupying (the house Josh grew up in, which is spectacularly creepy looking). You know the kind of stuff, pianos playing themselves, stuff getting knocked over. Just the regular routine. His wife Renai (Rose Byrne here she is as a crazy person) starts to notice something is up as well (given that all the poltergeist shit is happening mostly to her) and decides to seek help.

Riddick

Musclesandbald Man.

"Rule the Dark"

Hello everyone, welcome back to my humble corner of the internet, where it's all movies all the time, except when it's awkward personal stories that tie into movie watching, though I guess it's still KIND of about movies. Anyway, today I will not be regaling you with weird sad stories about how I once ran across my college campus in the dark and fell into a pond and then had to go back to my room so no one would know. This isn't about that, it's about Riddick, the much anticipated by someone I'm sure sequel to The Chronicles of Riddick, which was the not anticipated sequel sort of to Pitch Black, a movie about people being killed by monsters on a planet that gets dark. One has to wonder when watching these movies why anyone would want to go to any of these awful planets, but I guess if we only had people on safe planets there wouldn't be much to watch in the way of movies. Anyway, Riddick takes place directly after the events at the end of The Chronicles of Riddick, and if you hadn't guessed from his name appearing all over the titles of both of those movies, this movie is fucking about Riddick okay. If you haven't figured that out yet I must assume you cannot actually read, but you're welcome to keep looking at the pictures I guess. Anyway Riddick (portrayed by the stoically bald Vin Diesel) has become king of the Necromongers who are like really bad murderer guys I guess, I'll be honest I only half paid attention to The Chronicles of Riddick. Being the rebel he is though, Riddick gives two fucks about these clowns, and so decides to look for his home planet Furya, which the Necromongers had thoughtfully blown up when Riddick was a baby, specifically BECAUSE of him (a prophecy said he'd kill the Necroboss). Huge dicks that they are, the Necrodouches double cross Riddick, and leave him for dead on some nowhere planet, probably because Keith Urban didn't really want to be in the movie all that much. His loss I guess.

47 Ronin

They fit all the unimportant parts
of the movie onto one poster.

"Seize eternity."

At long last, as promised I will be talking about 47 Ronin today! This film, released on Christmas day, is an extremely fictionalized western take on an already heavily fictionalized series of event that make up one of Japan's most popular stories from the Genroku era, about a group of Ronin (masterless samurai) who seek revenge for the death of their master, who was forced to commit seppuku after attacking an official of the shogunate while in Edo Castle. The ronin planned carefully to slay this official, before then all committing seppuku themselves, as was demanded to satisfy honor. Granted, official records and most versions of the story don't involve witches, dragons, or demons, but the general story is there. This version of the story, like most fan fiction, inserts a totally bad ass OC who is a super fighter who was trained by demons and is all angsty and shit and also has a love story with the daughter of the Ronins' lord. Also this guy is white, because come on HOW COULD HE NOT BE LET'S GET REAL HERE. I'm seriously not kidding though there is a character in this movie that is all of those things and he is played by Keanu Reeves and his name is Kai.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Prepare to be desolated.

"Beyond darkness... beyond desolation... lies the greatest danger of all."

Good morrow to you hobbits and dwarves, it's time for The Tagline! As promised, over the weekend I went to see the Hobbit, despite the fact that there was a snowstorm in progress. Actually, the snow was rather fortunate, because it meant that instead of going to see the movie in a theater packed with people, my two friends and I had the privilege of seeing the movie in an empty theater, save for ourselves. This is my ideal viewing situation, because while I like watching movies in a theater, I prefer that there be no other people present, because I don't like them and also like to imagine that the theater actually belongs to me, but that's probably a conversation to have with a therapist. ANYWAY, we made it through the snow and began our viewing of THE HOBBIT PART TWO: REHOBBITING aka The Desolation of Smaug (the number of times we said SMAUUUWWWWGGGG throughout the evening would probably be sufficient to warrant an act of violence against us). I was relatively open (on my blog if not in person) with how I felt about the first Hobbit movie. Me and fantasy in general have a kind of contentious relationship, because fantasy is frequently accompanied by 1) camp and 2) whimsy. Those are two things I have zero fucking interest in (particularly the whimsy) I liked the Lord of the Rings because it was bleak, and dark, and there were constantly things getting decapitated while the characters trudged through the rain and mud, and lamenting how hope had abandoned the world. That was what I liked about it. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was incredibly long considering that the first hour and a half was spent in Bilbo's house (At least it was about that mark before he LEFT) and I could have done without the whacky dwarf singing. Even the "action" had a fair amount of capering about while goofy goblins chased the dwarves through their gobliny lair. From the very beginning of The Desolation of Smaug, you can tell that this movie is going to strike a different, darker tone, for which I was very grateful. The movie opens in that rat pisshole of a town Bree, where Peter Jackson likes to look surly and eat carrots, and things start dying very shortly after.

Ender's Game

Time to stare out some viewports.

"The future must be won."

Good evening all and welcome back to The Tagline! My apologies for the late review, but it's been... kind of a week. No doubt you have all languished in agony in the intervening hours, wondering what I was doing, and why I had not shared my ESSENTIAL opinions about film with you, on this, the designated day. WELL FEAR NO MORE I'm here now to talk about Ender's Game, based on the iconic science fiction novel of the same name, written by Orson Scott Card (Who has entertained the idea of adapting the book into a movie for some time, I'll get into that a little bit later. Ender's Game, for the uninitiated, is not about a game really, but it is about a boy who has a spectacularly stupid name (Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, ouch mom and dad) who is training to be a strategist. You see, it is the future, and a race of bioelectric charged space bugs tried in the past to colonize the Earth, but were repelled by the combined forces of the human race, and some guy named Rakasakam Robot or something stopped them by crashing his plane into their mothership. The bug aliens (The Formics they're called because they are flying ant-like) have retreated back to their home planet, but the Earth government, fearing their return, is determined to launch a preemptive strike to wipe them all out. At the outset of the movie Ender is seconded for training in battle school, by Colonel Hyrum Graff (Harrison Ford) who believes that Ender is the brilliant strategist they have been looking for.

The Heat

This is kind of awesome.

"Good Cop, Mad Cop."

Hello friends, neighbors, and internet recluses! It's a new week, and that means more movies, straight from my basement, out to you on the www. Today I thought I'd talk about a movie that I'd heard was funny, but still didn't go to see, because it starred people I didn't like very much. That movie is The Heat, a buddy cop comedy (or not so buddy at the beginning I guess) starring Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock as a vulgar and violent beat cop named Mullins and a prim and proper FBI agent named Ashburn respectively (WOW THAT'S TOTALLY ORIGINAL RIGHT) who must team up for a variety of contrived reasons to fight drug guys and murder guys and other unsavory criminal types. For anyone who has lived for a time on the planet Earth, during an era where film exists, this plot probably sounds slightly less than original, and I'm not going to stand here in front of you and try to insist that THIS TIME things are different because they've CROSSED THE LINE. I'm not a voice over guy for movie commercials in the early 90s. Whenever you watch a movie like this (or like say 21 Jump Street) you are not watching because the originality of the premise is so fantastic. That can be true of a lot of movies though, certainly I wouldn't imagine that fans of romantic comedy watch the movies because they suspect that this time things will be different (though it would be funny if say the romantic conclusion was spoiled by an atomic apocalypse or something similar). The Heat managed to accomplish the best that basically any buddy cop comedy can hope, which is to be pretty consistently amusing and not painfully grating.

The Conjuring

I'm not really sure what they conjured.

"Based on the true case files of the Warrens"

Welcome to Halloween everyone! As promised, I will continue my reign of terror, or rather terror will continue to reign over us all, with my last horror post for a little while, I hope, because I am sick of watching horror movies (I'm not that super into them to begin with so I definitely need a break). Today I will be talking about The Conjuring, which was BASED ON TRUE EVENTS AND HAPPENED NEAR WHERE I LIVE WOOOOOOooOOOOoooOO (Well it's a ways away in Rhode Island, but it's less than an hour from my hometown. Also the real life Warrens, who I will say mean things about in a little while, have their home/occult museum in Moroe, CT, which I'm also pretty close to). As always I will open by exploring the "based on a true story" angle of the movie, and move on from there. I'm not saying oh yeah this totally happened (especially considering the by most accounts totally bogus Amityville Horror case, which was also first investigated by the Warrens). So how much of this is based on things that were at least reported to have happened? Well the details evidently are very different, but the basic premise is based on reported events. The Perrons are a real family, they really lived in a house in Harrisville, and they reported a lot of paranormal stuff happening to them in the farmhouse where they lived for some 10 odd years. The Warrens really did pop up one day, and they performed a seance (not an exorcism) that by all accounts of present parties went completely fuckballs. The Warrens and Perrons in real life did not part on super terms, reportedly the Warrens being around just made stuff worse. Andrea Perron, the oldest daughter, has written two books on her experiences and has a third planned. The details of the haunting are substantially different than the movie, but unlike my reading into The Amityville Horror, there's no obvious confession that it's entirely made up. So there that is.