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.

Taken 2

Badideas.com

"They want revenge, They chose the wrong guy."

Now there is a true Tagline. Hi folks, welcome to the Tagline, where I needed to take a break to actually watch some damned movies so I could go back to REVIEWING those same damned movies. Today I'm going to do what I do best, and talk about a movie where a guy kills a whole bunch of other guys. Think back a ways, to 2008, and you'll remember Taken, a film where Liam Neeson plays former CIA operative turned private security Bryan Mills. One fine day his daughter goes on an unsupervised trip to godless and lawless Europe (France specifically) where she is abducted by sex traffickers. That probably seemed like a great idea to them, but Bryan happened to be on the phone with her when it happened, and despite the taunts of her kidnapper (who only says "good luck") he DOES in fact have good luck. See sometimes you kidnap a girl and her father is a professional murder man. As a no frills action/vigilante revenge fantasy movie, Taken was wildly successful, grossing well over 200 million worldwide on its 25 million dollar budget. As such, they could hardly be expected to risk making a sequel (or two actually). Taken 2 brings us back into the world of Bryan Mills, trying to be a less shitty dad while still doing security on the side. This film opens as Albanian mobsters, relatives and associates of the MANY people Mills killed in the first film, commend what's left of their friends and family to the earth, and swear revenge on the man who put them there. Now, if you've seen the first movie, this probably instantly strikes you as a not awesome idea on their part, but hey, they're used to having it good and probably don't know any better. But they're going to learn.

The Cable Guy

HYSTERICAL AM I RIGHT?!

"There's No Such Thing as Free Cable"

A point I feel Comcast is constantly trying to establish by alternatively letting my cable go out and then increasing rates. I feel like I should pay them for 2/3rds of the month, which is the percentage of the time that I actually have functioning service. BUT THAT IS A STORY FOR SOME OTHER TIME. Welcome back to the Tagline, where I am the submissive and you are all my dominant. Or something. I assume there will be a point in the future where I stop ridiculing 50 Shades for being the worst piece of garbage ever, but that time friends is not now. In the meantime let's talk about something else. Have you folks ever seen the Cable Guy? You know, that movie about the guy and the cables? Well we're talking about that today, so tune in and listen up. The Cable Guy is weird from beginning to end, and goes to a dark place... a place many of us have been really. For starters, this movie was directed by Ben Stiller (who also appears in the movie... twice technically) and produced by Judd Apatow, which probably explains why Leslie Mann is here. Also Jack Black but back to the movie. The Cable Guy stars everyone's... favorite guy Matthew Broderick as Steve Kovacs, who following a failed proposal is on the outs with his girlfriend Robin (Mann) and so moving into his own apartment. He gets some questionable advice from Jack Black about convincing his cable guy to let him steal some movie channels on the cheap, but his cable guy Chip (Jim Carey) hooks him up, making him a "preferred customer". He also convinces Steve to hang out with him the next day. Shit pretty much goes all downhill from there.

Batman Forever

Batman for... a while at least.

"Courage now, truth always...."

I know, I've been working up to this for a while, and now here it is! A special Saturday Tagline for you all today, and I'll be talking about a very difficult topic that we all have to try and cope with. Sometimes it can be difficult to admit to yourself that an old, trusted friend has become somebody else, and it can be even more difficult to confront THEM about it. That's how I think we all felt when we saw Batman Forever. We were two good Batman movies in, maybe felt like we could rely on those good times, and then... this happened. Thank Warner Brothers for that. They decided after the release of the fantastic Batman Returns that it hadn't grossed enough money, and that if it were more "mainstream" it would do better. To this evil end, they gave Burton and his Gotham City the boot out of the director's chair (though Burton had been lukewarm about even doing a second Batman) and tapped Joel Schumacher to direct, with Burton restricted to producing. This film struck a completely different tone from the previous two, with villains so flamboyant that they make Jack Nicholson's turn as the Joker look positively subdued. This movie also introduces the character of Robin, portrayed here by Chris O'Donnell, although originally Marlon Wayans was cast. Presumably he was replaced because Hollywood is intensely racist. Anyway, the most important swap out here was Michael Keaton, who opted not to appear in another Batman because he didn't like the new direction (though apparently he still considers himself to be the ONLY Batman), was replaced by Val Kilmer. Now I enjoyed Top Gun at least as much as the next guy, but that is not an equation with equal values on both ends of it. That being said, Val Kilmer is still a much better Batman than George Clooney. Squaring off against the new caped crusader are Two-Face (portrayed in explosively red tiger-striped fashion by Tommy Lee Jones) and The Riddler/Edward Nigma (here played by Jim Carey). It seems like the common wisdom is that unless the primary villain is the Joker, there must be at least two villains on the stage at any given time (and in The Dark Knight even there was still Two Face) Okay, the stage is set, now let's talk about this FANTASTIC MOVIE

Big Hero 6

If this were Star Wars it would be Big Hero
5, because droids don't have souls or rights.

*fist bump* "balalala"

Hello all, welcome back to The Tagline! Where sometimes we don't have taglines at all because poster makers can't even be bothered to half-ass their job. Instead they like... quarter ass their job. If you guys are wondering "From the makers of Wreck-It Ralph" is not a tagline! Do you even need a tagline anymore... I don't know did we ever? It's just sad, because it gives me one fewer thing to taunt for being terrible. Regardless, today is a brand new day and we'll be talking about a brand new movie! While I visited the NYC, and before I succumbed to the inevitable sickness that overtakes me as soon as I return, I went to the movies with my friends to go see Big Hero 6, because it looked fun and I like movies about robots fighting bad guys. Even robots that look like fat marshmallows! Who am I kidding, ESPECIALLY robots that look like fat marshmallows. So Big Hero 6 was a no-brainer for me, and I have to say I was not disappointed. So here's a little background. In this confusing post-comic future we live in, where Disney owns Marvel, the lines blur and even as people complain about the movies being full of nothing but sequels and remakes, the possibilities to me seem to be expanding. This is the case with Big Hero 6, a movie made by Disney, based on a Marvel comic of the same name (albeit pretty loosely). The movie focuses on Hiro, a 14-year old super genius who uses his talents mostly to hustle people out of their money in robot fights. Tadashi, his older brother, is concerned that Hiro is wasting his talents, and so helps to convince him to apply to the robotics program at his university. Hiro comes around to the idea pretty quickly, and submits an innovative microbot system as his application project to the university. This is great but certain events (that I don't want to spoil too much) derail his attempts to enroll and Hiro's bots end up being lost/destroyed. Hiro ends up befriending the medical robot his brother created, Baymax, and then accidentally discovers that his microbots still exist, and are being mass produced towards some nefarious end by a mysterious man in a kabuki mask.

Batman (1989)

Classic.

"..."

It's that time again! Welcome back to The Tagline, where movies are queen and I'm also a queen and we're all queens I guess. I don't know look... it's been a long week okay guys? Don't worry about that stuff though with queens, because really what it's all about today? Is fucking bats. Listen, I know it's an upsetting subject no one wants to talk about, but bats are all around us. Flying around at night? Those aren't just weird night birds, those are fucking bats okay? That guy driving the weird car he parked in the middle of traffic? Bat. The weird airplane shooting missiles at parade floats? Also a bat. That's right, those the Batmans are all around us, and we don't even notice it all the time! Recent years have been good to the Dark Knight, but it wasn't always that way. I can direct you to my grisly review of Joel Schumacher's war crime Batman & Robin. Then again, Batman Begins wasn't the first good Batman that ever happened either. There were some very different, but still good times with the Batman under the direction of Tim Burton believe it or not. I know I find it tough to believe too. Even more surprising is that neither of the Batman movies directed by Burton feature like... a Riddler played by Johnny Depp or Helena Bonham-Carter as... Poison Ivy? Catwoman? I don't know I'm gonna try to put it out of my mind. At any rate, today I want to talk about the very first Batman, starring Michael Keaton as the Bat, and Jack Nicholson as the Joker. This movie just recently found its way to Netflix, and so naturally I wanted to check it out and see how it stood up after all these years.

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.

Repo Men

Certainly looks edgy right?

"For a price, any organ in your body can be replaced. But it can also be repossessed."

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Tagline, where it's all pulp sci-fi all the time apparently. Today I am going to be talking about Repo Men, a movie that is not Repo: The Genetic Opera. Are they similar? I don't know, I haven't seen that, because I didn't want to so sue me. This movie has Jude Law in it, so that instantly made it more interesting to me, also it looked pretty violent. I was not disappointed in THAT regard for sure. Repo Men is another science fiction story set in a dystopic future where artificial organ technology has advanced wildly, so that virtually any organ can be replaced. The caveat is that distribution of these organs is controlled by a company that charges astronomical prices for them, because its the shitty future, and people often are coerced into getting these organs because otherwise they'll die. Then again, the average person can't pay 750,000 dollars for a new heart, and so they end up going into delinquency and then it gets kicked over to collections. As you've probably deduced, that's where the repo comes in, If someone misses enough payments, the property gets repossessed. Out of their chest cavity. You might have guessed that having a guy stun you and literally carve your heart out often results in a distinct case of death. They have that whole Temple of doom thing going on, ripping the heart right from your chest, only with less lava I suppose.

Tombstone

Back in black?

"Justice Is Coming."

Hello friends, welcome back to Tagline: Guest Suggestion Edition! On Tuesday we all had the great pleasure of experiencing Hackers, a movie that had about as much in common with real hackers as I have in common with a Tyrannosaurus. Today we're going in the total opposite direction, back to the old west with Tombstone, a movie about Wyatt Earp (Played by Kurt Russell, maybe the only man to live who looks MORE ridiculous with that mustache than the ACTUAL Wyatt Earp) that has as much historical truth to it as more or less any other Wyatt Earp movie or story I suppose, which is to say not very much. This particular film focuses on specifically Earp's time in the eponymous boomtown of Tombstone, where people mostly seem to busy themselves by getting drunk and then shooting each other, which doesn't seem like a sustainable enterprise. Meanwhile, leaving behind life as an officer of the peace in Dodge City, Wyatt and his brothers Virgil and Morgan are trying to go into business for themselves. They decide to do this in the most obvious way they can think of, by becoming promoters at a saloon, and (presumably) this includes things like running the in-house gambling and also being pimps. Sounds like good old-fashioned American heroes to me! Along with the Earps Doc Holliday (Portrayed here in an awesome performance by Val Kilmer) rolls into town as well, to be sickly and look like he's about to die from Tuberculosis, but still scare the ever-loving crap out of everyone because he's so great at shooting people (Historically he mostly seemed to have a record of challenging African-Americans to gunfights with little to no provocation so try not to think about that I guess)

The Purge: Anarchy

Of course these guys aren't that important.

"An American tradition"

What a tradition it is! Welcome to the Thursday evening installment of the Tagline, where I unveil the second feature presentation of the week. Today it's going to be The Purge: Anarchy, a sequel to 2013's The Purge, a mostly home invasion movie about a family trying to survive the night during a government sanctioned 12 hour period of murder and mayhem, where nearly anything goes (except killin' the government elite OBVIOUSLY). That film, while presenting an interesting original concept, was still a fairly paint by the numbers home invasion movie (unlike say You're Next). In contrast, the sequel is a much more ambitious and adventurous entry, giving a wider, roaming view of the devastation and insanity that is part and parcel of The Purge. The film principally deals with Sergeant Leo Barnes, a police officer heading out into the purge festivities armed to the teeth, with a singular mission that is clearly revenge, though we don't learn exactly what kind until later in the movie. As he cruises down the streets in his armored pimpmobile he comes across a scene where Eva and her daughter Cali are being dragged off by high-tech armed paramilitary agents. Despite his need to accomplish his own grisly end, Leo stops and in a spectacular show of precise violence kills the men attempting to abduct the two women. He then returns to his car to find he's picked up two more lost and scared individuals, Shane and Liz, who for some COMPLETELY UNFATHOMABLE REASON decided that they needed to do some fucking grocery shopping or something like an hour before this bloodbath started. Leo attempts to lead these four to safety, so that he can then resume his mission (he is promised a car by Eva in return for his help, because his gets shot up). Along the way he takes them on a merry tour of the darkest corners of the human psyche.

3 Days to Kill

Wyatt Earp pose.

"From the Planet that Brought You Waterworld" (I made this tagline up because there were none)

Hey folks welcome to a new week and more thrills from the Tagline! As I had subtly threatened last week, I'm going to start off this week right, with some Kevin Costner action. As many of you know, I have on at least one occasion been an apologist for a Kevin Costner movie  (and I stand by my position, people need to get a fucking grip) but that doesn't mean that I think every movie he's in is cinematic gold. That said, I do regard him as a trustworthy, father-figure who makes the most of sometimes very bad situations, and that is I suspect what happened with 3 Days to Kill, one of the more perplexing movies I watched this month. This film stars Mr. Costner as Ethan Renner, a CIA Cleaner (that's code for person killer) who is assigned as part of the team cornering and eliminating "The Wolf." Renner's part of this job is to kill a creepy dude with no hair or eyebrows called the Albino, so you know he's a bad guy. We get to watch him crush a lady's head under an elevator car too, so that cements his bad guy status pretty firmly, I mean look how weird and evil he is! Anyway, Renner's kicking this dude's ass into next Tuesday when he suddenly collapses. He wakes up and is told he has like hyper-cancer or something, and that he has only a few months left to live. The CIA gives him a cheap looking watch and tells him his pension is on the way, and then tell him to piss off. Deciding that he needs to make the most of the time, Ethan returns home to Paris, to try and make amends with his estranged wife and daughter. Just as he is awkwardly trying to do that, he is approached by Vivi (Amber Heard, stringing together cinematic disasters one-after-another but hey at least she's pretty right?) a super-sexy assassin that wants Ethan to help her take out The Wolf, because he is the only person who has ever seen him. To try and entice him into this job, Vivi offers a Mcguffin: a experimental magic drug that will help him live longer. naturally, with such an enticing and totally ridiculous reward on offer, Ethan is obliged to accept, if only to get more time to spend with his pathological liar daughter (Hailee Steinfeld, who you can see also in True Grit and Ender's Game). Who would want to miss out on that.

Death to Smoochy

A heartfelt comedy about murder and cocks.

"Get ready for an unexpected hit."

Hello friends, welcome back to the Tagline, where movies are king and I am dubious about some of these taglines. I almost picked a different tagline for this movie, because there were some posters apparently circulating with "He's Big, He's Blue, He's Smoochy... and He's got to DIE!" which is funny because Smoochy is, in fact, pink/an argument could be made for light purple. What he is not is blue. That being said, the desire for his death definitely seemed to exist in this 2002 film about the corrupt dealings behind the children's entertainment business. Death to Smoochy stars Edward Norton (remember Red Dragon?) as Sheldon Mopes, a children's entertainer (and also smackhead entertainer) who hits the big time when he is hired to replace Rainbow Randolph (Robin Williams) who is fired after being caught by the FBI making deals with children's parents to get them on the show. The network decides to hire Sheldon, or more specifically Smoochy the Rhino, because he has a reputation for possessing unimpeachable integrity. This incidentally is not all rumor or speculation, the guy is a real boy scout. It can be difficult to keep up that squeaky clean shine though when you're in showbiz, especially with the guy you replaced plotting your downfall and the mob trying to muscle in on your game so that they can skim a tidy profit off of your success. Sheldon certainly finds this to be the case, and struggles to maintain both his personal integrity, and the quality of edutainment in his program, while the executives and criminal elements all close in on him.

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.

Zodiac

Based on a really bad poster.

"There's more than one way to lose your life to a killer."

Hi all, welcome back to The Tagline. Exciting news, over the weekend The Tagline broke 100,000 lifetime hits! Thank you to everyone who helped make that happen by tuning in and listening to me babble about movies. Your continued readership is genuinely appreciated, and I hope we'll enjoy a lot more movies together! Today I decided to celebrate this momentous occasion by talking about a serial killer they never caught, and the men who drove themselves insane in their attempts to pursue him. That's why today's movie is Zodiac, a 2007 release that is based more or less faithfully on the real life events surrounding the victims of the so called Zodiac killer, and the investigation that attempted to identify and apprehend him. In particular this movie is adapted from the books written on the subject by Robert Graysmith, who was working at the San Francisco Chronicle when the first Zodiac letters arrived. Before I go straight into the movie, here's a little mini-history lesson about the Zodiac murders. The Zodiac killer was a serial killer who operated in northern California, primarily between 1968 and 1969, though several other suspected victims would have been attacked as late as 1971. Zodiac sent a number of letters and also cryptograms to various bay area news outlets, (of the four cryptograms sent only one was ever definitively solved). While a large number of suspects were interviewed and investigated, no person was ever convicted of the Zodiac killings, and the case remains open in a number of California jurisdictions, including San Francisco, Napa County and the city of Vallejo. Robert Graysmith, in his book Zodiac, advanced the theory that Arthur Leigh Allen was the Zodiac, based on an array of circumstantial evidence that could have implicated him in the attacks. Now that we have a little background, let's talk about the movie itself.

The Frozen Ground

Look at those heads starin'

"The hunter becomes the hunted."

Hello everyone, welcome back to another gripping, touching, murdering in the woods edition of The Tagline! Today, with the weather constantly warming up I figured that it would be nice to cool down, and take a trip up to the frosty north, where young girls go missing and wind up as frozen, desiccated corpses in the Alaskan tundra after being tortured and hunted for sport. If that sounds like your kind of thing, well then I have to please ask you to leave, and I'm calling the cops. If it sounds like the plot of a movie you might watch, well then congratulations, I'm bringing the goods today. Today I'm going to be talking about The Frozen Ground, a film released to limited theatrical and on-demand availability in August 2013, based on the real life hunt in the 1980s for Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen, who was a real life person, who killed other real life people, in Alaska. Unlike in real life, the guy who is desperately trying to find him despite little in the way of manpower and resources, is Nicholas Cage (his character's name is Jack Halcombe, because I guess that sounds cooler than the real investigator's name Glenn Flothe, which is admittedly not a super cool sounding name). Unfortunately the search becomes less of a police fueled manhunt and more of a Nicholas Cage fueled manhunt, as Jack has virtually no one offering help or leads, except for 17 year old prostitot Cindy Paulson, who is incidentally portrayed by Vanessa Hudgens. Was that weird? Yeah, it was pretty weird, we'll get a little more on that later, but anyway, I guess the question you have left about casting is who's playing Robert Hansen, the twisted killer extraordinaire? Why none other than JOHN CUSACK OH YEAH BABY. Bringing back the dream team from Con Air, this film pits Cusack against Cage in a WINNER TAKES ALL FIGHT TO VANESSA HUDGEN'S DEATH.

Red Dragon and Manhunter

So 80s man.

"Enter the mind of a serial killer... you may never come back."

"Before the Silence, there was the Dragon"

Hello everyone, welcome to a new week filled with creepy murderers and their half-eaten victims! Today I'm going to be doing something a little bit different, and instead of talking about a single movie I will be talking about two different movies that were both adaptations of the same novel. The first is Manhunter, released in 1986, and the second is Red Dragon, which was released in 2002, as the third and last film in which Anthony Hopkins portrayed Hannibal Lecter. While based on events from the same novel, the two present very different takes on the same plot, in terms of theme and overall tone. This is partially because they were made during very different time periods (the mid 80s have cinematically essentially nothing in common with 2002) but also due to the context in which they were released. Manhunter was released simply as an adaptation of the novel Red Dragon, whereas Red Dragon was released as the third "Hannibal Lecter" movie, and the cultural import of that character had a real impact on the way the movie's plot was framed and presented. Both concern special agent Will Graham as he is brought back on with the FBI in an attempt to stop a serial killer being called "The Tooth Fairy", due to the distinctive bite marks he leaves on his victims. To help him get into the mind of the killer and prevent further victims, Will seeks the insight of Hannibal Lecter, who was the killer behind Graham's last case, before he went into retirement, due to the strain of assuming the mindset of killers to deduce their motives. Lecter of course is a genius and a madman, and has his own motivations for assisting Graham. Now that the basics are established, let's compare and contrast!

R.I.P.D.

This makes it almost look not dumb.

"Defending Our World One Soul at a Time"

That is open to debate and remains to be seen. Welcome back to The Tagline, and pardon my Tuesday/Thursday late post earlier this week, it was the result of forgetfulness and being away in Boston all weekend. Incidentally, today's movie takes place IN Boston, and was actually shot, at least in part, on location there. I know this for a fact because there is a modestly lengthy sequence in the middle of the film that was clearly shot in the Hynes Convention Center, which is where I was in Boston for the entire weekend. The scene is supposed to be a finance convention or something, I have no idea. I was definitely not attending a finance convention. ENOUGH OF THAT THOUGH today I will be talking about R.I.P.D. a movie billed as a supernatural comedy film released last summer, based on a Darkhorse comic book of the same name. The film stars Ryan Reynolds (here taking his fourth bad turn as a comic book character by most people's reckoning, though I honestly didn't think Green Lantern was that terrible, and I think Ryan Reynolds was a perfect Hal Jordan) as imminently deceased police officer Nick Walker, and Jeff Bridges (AKA The Dude/Obadiah Stane I guess) as very deceased former U.S. Marshall Roy Pulsipher, as they work out their sentence in the Rest In Peace Department so as to improve their chances of not ending up at the big barbecue down below (that's Hell kids. I'm talking about Hell). Nick of course still has unfinished issues to work out with his violent death, where he was killed by his partner Bobby (Kevin Bacon, here as a ghost monster and not a pretend Nazi) after deciding he was going to turn in his portion of the gold they found during a drug bust. Nick is also worried about his wife, and just generally is dealing well with having been shot off of a balcony in a burning warehouse.

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.

The Wicker Man (1973)

Is he... making the touchdown sign?

"Flesh to touch...Flesh to burn! Don't keep the Wicker Man waiting!"

Too true wicker man, too true! Welcome to the Thursday/Wednesday night if you really want it edition of the Tagline! As promised, today we're taking a wacky trip back to the early 70s, to experience this cult classic, considered by many to be the best movie of 1973. Not having seen many other movies that were released in 1973, I can't be sure if that is saying much or not. Maybe 1973 was a great year for movies let's see... okay there's no way The Wicker Man was the best movie of '73, it apparently WAS a pretty good year, and if nothing else The Exorcist came out in '73 and that was a much better horror movie. I'm getting sidetracked though so BACK TO THE TOPIC AT HAND which is The Wicker Man, a 1973 film often categorized as "Folk Horror" which was sort of a thing for a little while and then it really wasn't anymore. Starring television actor Edward Woodward as British police cop Neil Howie, The Wicker Man follows his journey to the Hebridean island of Summerisle after the reported disappearance of a young girl. What he discovers on the island is a community wary of outsiders, and devoted to pagan, Celtic practices, all the while attempting to divert his investigation, and claiming the girl, Rowan, never existed at all. Despite what a sane person who enjoyed living might choose to do, Sergeant Howie doggedly pursues the case, and his belligerent means of doing so ends pretty much how you would expect, except okay maybe you wouldn't predict he gets burned alive in a giant wicker man (spoiler alert).

Flowers in the Attic

Look at this beautiful art.

"."

Hello ladies and gents, welcome back to The Tagline. Today I have a real treat for you, that I want you to experience because I was forced to experience it. I'm going to tell you a little story, and that story actually involves a fair amount of incest. In the 80s there was this book, Flowers in the Attic (well it was published in '79 I guess) that became very popular. My girlfriend tells me for some reason all the girls she knew had read it in high school. The book was apparently really popular, it managed to sell something like 4 million copies. This book is about a family living the American dream, until the unexpected death of the father. After that, the mother Corrine (Heather Graham,  takes her four Aryan children back to live at the house of her parents, revealing that though she had been estranged from them they are letting her come home. Also they are apparently very, very rich. Of course, everything isn't well in paradise, and so as soon as the kids and Corrine arrive it's clear that shit is not right. The children are rushed into a spare bedroom in secret where they are told that they must stay "just for a while", but also that no one can know they are there. That strikes as somewhat weird. Also their grandmother is really not the nice kind, and she is really religiously obsessed, and has some very disparaging things to say about how all of Corrine's children are the spawn of Satan and have evil lurking in their hearts. The kids feel about the same way about that as I do, weirded out, but they don't quite get it all the way until a bit later.