Bedknobs And Broomsticks

I'm pretty sure I'd seen Bedknobs And Broomsticks once or twice before but it was so long ago I may as well have been watching it for the first time today.
It's the story of a woman, Miss Price, who has been volunteered (basically) to care for three orphaned children during the war (World War One, I think?). She doesn't want to be their care taker and they don't really want to be her wards, so they decide to sneak out and head back to London. But on their way out the window they see Miss Price flying on a broomstick, figure out she's a witch and the oldest kid, Charlie, decides to blackmail her into being nicer to them. Or into not making them wash for supper or something.
Anyway, Miss Price is merely an apprentice witch and her witching school has just closed down, before she receives her final lesson. So she and the kids ride a magic bed to find her school's headmaster so she can get her final spell for Substitutiary Locomotion.
Bedknobs And Broomsticks is more than two hours long and I spent the whole movie feeling happy and small and nostalgic. Nobody makes movies like it anymore. Every "family" movie these days is CG animation and fart jokes, and if there are any musical numbers they're usually pretty terrible.
I love old Disney movies. Love them. Love them.
It was pretty cool to see David Tomlinson as a sort of incompetent P.T. Barnum instead of a rich, stuffy, uptight dad. And I love Angela Lansbury in just about anything.
Side note: Wouldn't it have been cool if Angela Lansbury and Peter Falk had a kid? It'd be a an unstoppable crime solving machine!
The other thing old movies (...well, some old movies, but this one certainly) used to have that don't seem to exist anymore was child actors who actually seemed to be human. Nowadays it doesn't matter how young the kid is, they always have Angelina Jolie lips and a plastic sheen and human emotions seem to be completely lost on them.
The kids in Bedknobs And Broomsticks, though, looked like people. They acted like people, they had emotions and I bet they did things like go to school and play ball games with friends. At one point I noticed the girl looked like what Jennifer Lawrence would look like if she was twelve years old and had life in her eyes and a genuine smile.
More than any of that, though, Bedknobs And Broomsticks is just fun. It's ridiculously long but I didn't mind that. If there was any part I didn't like, interestingly enough it was the animated part, which was the only thing I had any memory of from when I was a kid. It seemed sort of ... I don't know, rough maybe? None of the animals were very nice and it went on too long.
There's something about Bedknobs And Broomsticks (and in some ways, old live action Disney movies in general) that really ... I don't want to say it gets under my skin because that sounds negative, but that's really the only phrase to describe it. It just makes me feel so calm and happy. It's a good story, a well told story, it's funny without being "funny" (forced goofiness and fart jokes) and it's appropriate for all ages without being saccharine, pandering or false-edgy. It's more honest or something. It wants to entertain you and your family so it has children, witches, cartoons, singing and dancing, flying beds and clothes that dance by themselves.
It's wonderful. It could be a little shorter, but it's wonderful anyway.

End of line.
-Sally

Red Dawn

I never saw the original Red Dawn, so if you want some comparison study, please to be going elsewhere.
Red Dawn starts with news footage, people talking about political stuff, war type stuff, North Korea type stuff. And I was thinking "This may not be the movie for me." Then it cuts from news footage to teenagers playing football and I thought "And I'm done." If there's one thing I hate more than politics, it's teenagers and football. (That's two things.)
Okay, so the Douchebag brothers, Thor and Really Really Ugly (like, proof we evolved from cavemen; Michael Phelps and this guy are the missing link) are hanging out at a bar after the football game when all the power goes out and I have to fight every one of my natural instincts to keep from screaming "Oh no! Commies!" in a crowded theater.
The next morning, the commies invade Spokane and the Douchebag brothers drive through a bunch of backyards in a failed attempt to rescue Really Really Ugly's girlfriend, Equally Ugly. Then their dad tells them to "go to the cabin" and I think "All right!" because in the past, all the movies I've seen that feature Chris Hemsworth in a cabin turn out amazing.
Turns out, Red Dawn is the opposite of The Cabin In The Woods.
(Also, I find it interesting that I don't really like Chris Hemsworth (I don't necessarily dislike him; I just don't like him) and yet have seen every movie he's been in this year. Admittedly, I wasn't planning to see Red Dawn, it was just the only option tonight, timingwise.)
Anyway, the Douchebags and their friends Hunger Game and First Token Black Guy head out to the cabin, followed by Untrustworthy Guy, Vaguely Ethnic Chick and Vaguely Ethnic Chick's Brother Who I Don't Think Has A Single Audible Line In The Whole Movie.
So Mister Douchebag (I feel bad calling the dad that because he's probably the most likeable character in the movie, but I decided his sons's last name is Douchbag so their dad must be Mister Douchebag) gets killed in the head by the Lead Korean and the Douchebag brothers and all their friends (including Second Token Black Guy and Butterface, who turn up at some point) decide to lead the revolution, calling themselves Wolverines because that's their high school mascot and they have no imaginations.
From that point on, Red Dawn goes in a pattern: action sequence (guns and explodiness!), sappy scene (serious faces and "emotional" speeches). At one point Really Really Ugly rescues Equally Ugly from a bus of prisoners, which is great for them, but really douchey in a "good luck everybody else" way. That bus was full of people and he didn't even hand off the keys to one of the other prisoners before ditching them with his hideous girlfriend.
I will say, though, that the one thing in the movie I thought was really effective was the giant sign in the internment camp that Equally Ugly had to be rescued from. It said "You deserve to be here." Wow. That's fucking harsh. Good job.
The sappy sequences were just ridiculous if for no other reason than they give the audience no fucking reason to really care about these people and their "emotional" speeches. There's no real character development, I don't really relate or sympathize with their situation. Those scenes are just there because the screenwriter thought they were required. "Oh, now it's time to move the story along," or "now it's time to make the audience feel something." Except the movie has no real story and I feel absolutely nothing for any of these people.
At least the explosions were cool. And the movie was nice enough to only kill off characters who they didn't bother to give names.
Also, I have a really hard time believing that a douchey high school football player in 2012 would be a Dinosaur Jr fan. Sorry, costume department.

End of line.
-Sally

BIG, BIG SPOILER! STOP READING RIGHT NOW IF YOU CARE ABOUT SPOILERS!
At least, they didn't kill off anybody with a name until almost the end.
What is it about Chris Hemsworth dying abrupt deaths that makes me laugh so much? His death in Cabin In The Woods makes me bust up every time and when he gets suddenly, warninglessly shot in the head in Red Dawn I had to bite my hand to keep from laughing ridiculously loudly in the theater. (Most of the audience seemed to actually be enjoying the movie and I didn't want to ruin it for them if they actually thought that part was sad.)

End of line again.
-Sally

The Three Caballeros

This isn't a review so much as it is a theory. I've been stewing on it for a while and, inspired by Cracked's article today on fan theories about children's cartoons, I have decided to share it with the internet, where it will be promptly ignored.
The Three Caballeros seems to be a movie about Donald Duck's struggle with his sexuality.
The premise of the movie is that it's Donald's birthday and he has received three gifts.
Gift One is a projector and films about birds, including a penguin who doesn't fit in with the other penguins, the flamboyant Aracuan and a scissors bird who gives another bird a new hairstyle.
Gift Two is the charming, well dressed Jose Carioca, who sings Donald a beautiful song and takes him on a trip to Baia, Brazil. There they meet a woman who sings, sells cookies and is constantly surrounded by men. (Donald is infatuated with the woman but so are all the other guys in the scene. Except Jose, who seems to be annoyed and amused by Donald's affection toward the woman.)
Gift Three is Panchito Pistoles, another flamboyant bird, who leads Jose and Donald in the title song, featuring a line that translates to "We're three men, three gay men." He then gives Donald a pinata which bursts open into a full-on Disney Acid Sequence where Donald chases beautiful women, only to have them turn into Jose and Panchito when he kisses them.
Sure, it's a flimsy theory but it's something that occured to me when I was rewatching The Three Caballeros a month or so again and once I thought of it, I could not shake it.
All I'm saying is if Donald isn't at least bisexual why would he want a charming, well dressed man to take him to Brazil for his birthday?

End of line.
-Sally

Sinister

The friend I went to see Sinister with thought it was pretty much the stupidest movie of the year. I didn't hate it as much as all that but I do wish I'd enjoyed it more than I did.
Sinister has moments of genuine creepiness but they are few and far between, because the director or editor or composer decided creepy moments are useless without being drowned out by an infinite series of jump scares.
Good job, movie, you startled me. Too bad you didn't scare me at all.
Ethan Hawke plays a writer who movies his family into the home / crime scene he's writing about. Four members of a family of five were hung in the backyard in an admittedly ingenious way (it's actually the first thing shown in the movie; the family were tied up with nooses around their necks, which were attached to a tree branch, which had a sawing mechanism attached to it. When the branch was sawn through, it fell and hung the family) and the fifth member of the family went missing.
Ethan Hawke is keeping it a secret from his family that they've moved into the murder house (and the tree, broken branch and all, is still standing in the backyard; I honestly doubt they'd leave that tree up if they were reselling the house) and he finds in the attic a box of home movies labeled "Family Hanging Out," "Barbecue," "Pool Party," "Sleepy Time" and "Lawn Work."
Golly, I wonder what those could be.
Okay, this begins the first in a series of illogical actions on behalf of the lead character. When he sees how Family Hanging Out ends, he not only watches it again, but watches all the other videos, too. Why the hell would he do that?
And if the power in my house suddenly went out and then I thought I heard footsteps coming from the attic, you know what I would do? Either read by flashlight or go to bed. Same things I do when the power goes out and I don't hear footsteps in the attic. You know why? Power outages are creepy and they make me tired and the hell with them, I'm not doing anything. If there are weird noises, I'll investigate them during the day when the sun is up and it's bright out.
That isn't a jaded horror movie fan talking, by the way, it's a full on coward.
Anyway, yeah, several jump scares, blatantly obvious plot clues and a couple uncredited cameos by Vincent D'Onofrio on Google Chat later, the movie gets to its conclusion which, honestly, would have given me the creeps if I wasn't so busy giggling at it.
Take from that what you will.

End of line.
-Sally

Pieces

Back in 1942, a little boy killed his mother with an axe and then used a chainsaw to cut off her head because she got really, really mad at him for putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a naked lady.
Now it's 1982 and the female students at a generic university are being horribly chainsaw murdered. Clearly there's a connection.
The police are baffled but the audience is clearly supposed to think the killer is either the squinty gardener or the mustachioed anthropology professor. They enlist the help of the boyfriend of one of the victims (who should probably be a suspect but clearly he isn't because he looks kind of like Mark Lynn Baker) and the police department's resident tennis star (every precinct has one) to try and find the killer.
Pieces is hilarious. The dubbing and dialogue are awkward, the kill scenes are fun, there's a random kung fu guy for no good reason, the forty year old blood on the murdered mom's clothes is still bright red and it's just an all around entertaining movie. I'm surprised it's not more popular.
My favorite scene involves the killer going after a girl in a swimming pool. He catches her head in a net that she could easily duck under and swim away from, but instead she grabs onto the side of the net, mildly complains that she can't breathe and lets him drag her out of the water. Then, rather than attempt to make an escape while he leaves her by the pool to get his chainsaw, she stays by the pool and patiently waits. It's comedy gold, I tell you!
Great. I just gave away the funniest scene in the movie. Sorry, guys. Don't worry, though, that happens fairly early on and it's still worth seeing.
And, if you would like a more in-depth and well-researched review, check out what Justin Case has to say on the subject.

End of line.
-Sally

Looper

I'm sure I'm not the only person to complain about it, but the creepy Bruce Willis Face prosthetics that they put on Joseph Gordon Levitt for this movie are fucking creepy. And it's always unsettling when they give dark-eyed people light-eyed contact lenses. For some reason, though, the other way around isn't true. They should've just given Bruce Willis dark contacts, foregone all the creepy prosthetics and called it a day.
There. Now. Onto the movie itself.
All the really good moments from Looper's trailers are in the first fifteen minutes or so of the movie.
In fact, Looper is a movie that starts out amazingly. It sets up its premise in a voiceover that actually is just helpful, rather than annoying the way some voiceovers are. I didn't mind it in this movie, which was nice. Its premise is interesting and they even begin to address some of the mindfucky confusion that I think not enough time travel movies really deal with.
Looper also has some bursts of craziness and violence, which are almost always awesome in my book (a couple of scenes made me flash back to Killing Zoe, though I'm not entirely sure why), and one sequence near the beginning genuinely disturbed me. Words cannot describe how horrible it made me feel.
The movie sets itself up really well, shows how Joseph Gordon Levitt turns into and then meets Bruce Willis. There's a chase, a shootout, and then!...
all the characters just kind of go do their own thing.
Bruce Willis is determined to accomplish something in the hopes of changing his future past.
Joseph Gordon Levitt is determined to kill Bruce Willis by waiting around at a place that he knows Bruce Willis is headed.
One annoying Gat Man (as the boss-guy's lackeys are called) is a whiner who really, really, really wants Jeff Daniels to pat him on the head and give him a treat, so he keeps showing up, trying to kill people and really annoying me.
There's a lady on a farm who just wants to keep her kid safe and the kid (MINOR SPOILER) just wants to be a weird, creepycute little kid bent on revenge.
I hate it when movies start out awesome, then kind of peter out and decide to go hang out on a farm for the rest of the movie.
None of the characters (except maybe Jeff Daniels but he's barely in it and is supposed to be a bad guy) are particularly likeable. Bruce Willis does some stuff that's flat out reprehensible, Joseph Gordon Levitt is (as his future self describes him in the movie) an arrogant, cocky, selfish, annoyance (okay, I guess those exact words aren't used but it's close enough), and that one Gat Man guy just makes me throw my hands up in exasperation for being a cliche and slowing the movie down.
And at one point Farm Lady smokes an imaginary cigarette but she doesn't light it first, and that really bugs me.
(ANOTHER MINOR SPOILER) And a sort of passing thought I had, related to not much of anything, near the beginning of the movie ended up being kind of the way the movie ended. So I guess I predicted it, sort of, if you squint. I hate when I can predict where a movie's going, even if it's an accident and / or a passing thought that I forget about until an hour and a half later when I realized I called it.
Looper had potential, Looper had promise and Looper wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. It started off awesome, introduced a lot of interesting ideas, and then never really did anything with them because all the characters wandered off.

End of line.
-Sally

House At The End Of The Street

Before I say anything about the movie, I just want to say to the general public (since I don't have the gumption to say it in person to the people to whom this rant is intended):
I don't give a flying fuck's ass what rating a movie has on Rotten Tomatoes. I could not possibly care less. The amount I care is already in the negative numbers and falling rapidly. I don't care. I don't fucking care. Stop fucking telling me what rating movies have on Rotten Tomatoes. Because I don't motherfucking care.
I started this blog so other people could equally not care about what I have to say. Let's all form our own opinions, shall we, and not let the internet affect our expectations.
There. That's out of the way.
House At The End Of The Street was a royal letdown. You know why? Because it was marketed as a horror movie. You can't take a soap opera, slap on a crazy person and call it a horror movie. That's bullshit.
House At The End Of The Street is a soap opera. It goes something like this:
Four years ago, a crazy girl killed her parents. Now, in the present day, Fake Renee Zellweger and her mom, Fake Sheri Moon Zombie (Elizabeth Shue, giving the only decent performance) move in to the house next to the one where the murders happened. Fake Renee Zellweger almost has a crush on Fake Dave Franco, but he's sleazy. Then she meets Fake Chad Michael Murray, who lives next door and is the brother of the homicidal girl, who went missing after the murders. Officer Fake Matthew Broderick is the only person in town who likes Fake Chad Michael Murray.
Meanwhile, in a subplot that goes nowhere, Fake Renee Zellweger is a "really amazing musician" who makes friends with Fake Jena Malone and is invited to sing in Fake Somebody I Can't Quite Place's band. (He really did remind me of a Young Somebody, I just never figured out who Somebody was.) I cannot stress enough how much this subplot means nothing. I think it was just thrown in there in a MarySue kind of way; whoever wrote this thing fancies her(him?)self a singer and threw that in there to make her(him?)self feel cool.
It was really just annoying and painful to have to watch / listen to.
Just like the rest of the movie.
So Fake Renee Zellweger has a crush on Fake Chad Michael Murray and Fake Sheri Moon Zombie wants them to stay away from each other because she's nervous about the whole double murder thing. Like you do.
Does any of this sound remotely scary to you? If it does, I pity you.
Yeah, okay, fine, double murder, whatever. But that's no different than your usual soap opera fare. Everybody's always killing everybody. This movie had way too much plot and not nearly enough murder by hammer.
In the last twenty minutes or so House At The End Of The Street suddenly remembers it was marketed as a horror movie and not a very special episode of Dawson's Creek so it makes one of the characters take some homicidal maniac pills and hope that the people in the audience forget about the first five hours of the movie where people just bitch and moan about their "problems."
And if you're the eleven year old girl this movie was made for, you might actually be scared by it. If you're an actual horror fan, you're just going to be mad.
Really, really mad.

End of line.
-Sally