Mockingjay: Part 1

Get ready for more dead children.

"The courage of one will change the world."

Hello all, welcome back to the Tagline! Today is finally that magic day, the day I will be reviewing the Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 1:The Almost End: Subtitles Forever. No but seriously what the fuck we get it, maybe consider a bit more of concise of a title? At any rate, Mockingjay picks up right after the conclusion of Catching Fire (check out my thoughts on that one over here) with Katniss coming around inside a bunker beneath the bombed out ruins of District 13. Naturally the first thing she does is freak out, because she recalls that during the final fateful moments of the Quarter Quell, Peeta was left behind, as the District 13 rebels extracted Katniss, who is valuable to them above all others as a symbol and inciter of revolution. Katniss of course is a wreck of human being, having been now in not one but two hunger games, and separated from the only person that allowed her to hold herself together through it all. That said, the leader of District 13, President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore in one of her less insane recent roles, I mean compared to Carrie's crazy mom for instance) doesn't have time for any of that nonsense, and so together with Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, this movie together with its part 2 were his final performances) and so go to considerable lengths to motivate Katniss.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Horseape Gun: The Movie.

"One last chance for peace."

I mean, they say that but really was there EVER a chance for peace, for anyone? I sincerely doubt it, if people were looking for peace they'd probably have fewer tanks. Anyway welcome back to The Tagline! As promised, today is honorary emotional about primates day, and I will be talking about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the sequel to the 2011 film Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which you can read more about here. If you recall (or just read that link) Rise of the Planet of the Apes covers how the apes become super smart, and makes you really depressed in the process. This movie details the growth of the fledgling ape civilization, even as human society is crumbling in the wake of a devastating virus (the same one that made the apes so damned smart). Before I actually talk in earnest about the movie, I first need to quibble about the notion that a very small population of super-intelligent apes would proliferate and survive in the wild, as a species. incidental illness alone would make them genetically unviable as a population, and machine guns killing them by the hundreds would definitely make their dominance super unlikely. YES in a movie about super smart apes my problem is that I find the number of apes and their opposition to make dominance an unlikely outcome. Otherwise I am totally on board with these apes learning to talk and building a community based on mutual trust. Well, for the most part that's true.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Is it his greatest battle? I'm not sure.

"His greatest battle begins."

Hi everyone, welcome back to The Tagline! It was a sunny warm weekend, which was just terrible for me, you know how much I just HATE that, but on the upside I finally saw The AMAZING SPIDER-MAN TWOOO with returning star Andrew Garfield once again donning the Spideysuit to protect New York from crime in whatever form it chooses to take. Also returning as his smarter than him girlfriend is Emma Stone, as the always awesome Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield are an item in real life, and I think their natural chemistry really carries through to the screen). In this particular outing Spiderman faces off against Electro, who if you couldn't deduce from his name is made out of electricity (well he's actually just like a living capacitor, but he is FULL OF electricity). Originally an overlooked and forgettable nerd who was downtrodden and abused at Oscorp, Max Dillon becomes a force of nature after a horrific incident involving some power lines and electric eels or something. Dillon is portrayed by Jamie Foxx, who does a credible job as an awkward weirdo power nerd, instead of a gunslinging badass. Added into this already complex situation (especially because of Peter Parker's conflicting emotions relating to how he promised Gwen's dead dad he'd leave her out of his shit, and then PROMPTLY DIDN'T) is Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan, remember when he kissed Harry Potter, or when he was an insane proto-super villain?) who was Peter Parker's best bud, but now is rapidly spiraling down into crazy land because of a terminal condition he inherited from his asshole dad, who everyone hates anyway so let's all celebrate now that he's dead. As you may have already guessed if you're familiar with the comics, Harry is about to go goblin.

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?

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.

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.

Star Wars Holiday Special Nightmare

Feel the magic! and the fear.

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."

Yeah that's right, I'm going there. Even though it is not a movie, technically speaking, it altogether runs for about two hours, and it is...holiday themed I guess, so I'm going to make you all sit there and listen to me recall a dark thing that happened to me one time when I was young and foolish in college, and thought it would be funny to watch the Star Wars Holiday Special. Back then the full extent of internet proliferation had not quite taken root, and so it was actually kind of tough to find a digimal version of the Holiday Special. This is principally because it only ever aired once. Eventually though I did manage to secure a copy and what I found filled me with regret. As it turns out, for a fan of Star Wars, or indeed any other creature that could perceive their surroundings, it was not so funny. What it was, in fact, was one of the most traumatically bad segments of television I have ever experienced, and it is generally regarded as being one of the worst pieces of television ever created. You see Christmas is a special time, when we celebrate with our families, but I think sometimes it's important to be given a grim reminder of things past, and so I'm here to be the ghost of Life Day Past, and remind us all of the holiday that was.

Chronicle

They will later fight on the Space Needle.

"It's all fun and games until everybody gets hurt."

Hey all, it's time for more movies at The Tagline. Today I'll be reviewing a movie that falls under my list of "movies I swear I reviewed already but apparently I didn't because they are not in my archives." This is a phenomena that has led observers to believe there is a near parallel universe, where everything is the same except I reviewed some different movies. At any rate, when it was released in February of 2012, I went to go see Chronicle, a found footage style film that sucked way way less than Cloverfield (and not only because it was devoid of the legendary douchebag Hud). Starring Dane Dehaan as Andrew Witmer (who throws up on his long-time girlfriend and now wife Anna Wood during the film) Chronicle follows three high school dudes(Andrew, his cousin Matt, and Matt's friend Steve) who discover a mysterious hole in the ground, in the woods near a rave... in a barn or something. Descending into the hole, they find a mysterious pulsing blue stone, that turns red, causing them to drop in pain and get nosebleeds. Later they discover that they have gained telekinetic abilities from the rock, and things sort of grow from there. Steve is a very driven and popular student, and Matt is a pseudo-intellectual high school douche. Andrew in comparison is a maladjusted loner, with a mother dying from cancer and an alcoholic father, who has a fascination with power and predatory behavior. So you know, basically exactly the sort of person you'd NOT want to have telekinetic abilities, or any kind of super powers, or even a motorcycle permit. maybe this movie is different though, and he won't abuse his abilities?

Special

He certainly IS special, that's for certain.

"He's not your ordinary superhero."

Welcome to another week at The Tagline! Today I'm going to be talking about Special, a movie made in 2007 and part of the growing genre of movies about delusional people who think they are superheroes/have superpowers/get seriously injured. The interesting thing about entries into that genre is that they all tend to put a different spin on the idea. Is it a mostly funny thing, that turns out sort of okay? Is it a social commentary, on the desperate plight of the modern man? Or is it the single most depressing thing I watched all week? In the case of Special, we are looking at door number three. Special is about a guy named Les (Mike Rapaport) a meter maid who is picked by a corporation for a trial of an experimental drug that seems like its for anti-depression or something. What actually happens is Les starts to trip balls, and is convinced he can levitate, and read people's minds, and an increasing host of other delusional beliefs. The company's owners, a pair of brothers, become increasingly concerned over the well being of their own sorry asses, and being sued by Les, though Les is obviously not thinking about that because he's too busy running at full speed into solid walls (because he thinks he can go through walls).