The Last Movie You Watched

[Athene]

Drifted in and out of sleep watching The Perfect Storm.
Kinda depressing. 

Would've been a bit more enthralling if it hadn't starred Mark Wahlberg, I think.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

The Old Man And The Gun

A very nice little film about career criminal Forrest Tucker, who (in his 60s) robbed more than sixty banks after escaping from San Quentin prison in a homemade rowboat.  Some liberties are taken with the actual events on which the film is based, but fewer than usual for this sort of film.  Robert Redford is as charming as he was in his youth, and is perfect in this part.

Also has Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tom Waits and Casey Affleck.  Worth a look.  7/10

Boru

[Gawdzilla Sama]

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World. The capper to the trilogy. These movies are special. You can watch them with your children without dying of boredom.

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: The Devil Ins- The facts surrounding the Rossi case remain unresolved. Visit therossifiles.com for more information on the ongoing investigation. 

Okay, now for the actual film:

• That opening scene looks way too good to be a VHS tape recorded a few months before I was born.
  
• Amazingly, it looks like the filmmakers took the ballsy choice to have Aileen Wuornos play the part of our main character's mother. No, seriously, they show footage of Aileen Wuornos' trial and pass that off as the Maria Rossi Trial. Of course, she does appear in the film later played by a different actress. And it seems like her accent keeps shifting every line, from some sort of Italian accent to Jewish-American mother accent to a more neutral one to Irish (during her possession).
  
• The first few scenes of the present-day actually looks like a fairly decent documentary. And just so we're clear, despite this being lumped into the "found footage" category, but I disagree. I think found footage, I imagine unedited (by the putative makers) footage of things happening. I think Creep, I think Paranormal Activity, hell, I even think The Visit. This feels far too professionally edited to count as found footage, lacking the long, time-scuplted shots that should theoretically be inherent in the format. This is a mockumentary. If this is a found footage movie, so is Best in Show.
  
• You know what, I simply cannot imagine an American with an NGBRI verdict over their heads for crimes committed in America being allowed to be transferred to a facility in another country.
  
• And, of course, it takes 24 minutes for the first scary moment of the film (apart from the opening scene), and it's just a random scream that just happens out of nowhere. No build-up, just a jump scare. 
  
• Also, there's rogue exorcists. An interesting idea for a film, people exorcising demonic possessions outside of the Church. Of course, this film sucks balls, so that means people might not be so willing to try it. Then again, they claim that it's important to recognise the demon's full name and place in the heirarchy. In actual Catholic exorcism (take this with a grain of salt), the practice is to utterly avoid that specifically because it plays into their egos and that they should be treated as "the Devil, an enemy of Christ."
  
• Splattering a camera with menstrual blood. Classy.
  
• Exorcism in the name of St. Barnabas? You know what, I feel like there should be a Vicar of Dibley joke in there somewhere.
  
• Inverted Crosses are actually not blasphemous, at least in the eyes of the Catholic Church. According to tradition, when St. Peter was sentenced to death, he specifically requested to be crucified on an upside-down cross because he felt like he didn't deserve to die the same way Christ did (not sure if the Roman legal system would allow for that IRL, but that's the legend and that's what's important in this mythology) As a result, the inverted cross became known as "The Cross of St. Peter" and became a symbol for him and his successors (Read: THE FUCKING POPES.) It turns out that it first became associated with blasphemy in the mid-19th century. I know it's been associated with Satanism for long enough that the Petrine Cross is obscure and needs to be explained to people, (this interpretation is so backasswards that if it wasn't appropriated by metal bands specifically to get a rise out of of Christians being offended by the imagery to this extent, I'd gladly use the Richie Cusack clip) but seriously, if you're trying to create a fucking exorcism movie, at least do your fucking homework on Catholicism.
  
• So, the devil possessing Maria Rossi lays dormant for a while, and she even falls asleep when the two priests come to confront her. What would be the best strategy in this case?  Wait until the priests are gone and then literally raise Hell? Nope, just do a fucking jump scare.
  
• The exorcists getting pissed off at the Church's habit of covering everything up... and of course the childfucking isn't mentioned once. 
  
• The priest baptising a baby boy, it's just so obvious that he's going to drown it in the baptismal font. Is there any reason it would be in this movie if it wasn't going that way?
  
• Seriously, between Master of Disguise, Captain America, and this, how many shitty fake Italian accents am I going to have to deal with by the time I'm done with The Project?
  
• The ending: Holy fuck, the ending. Just as the movie's starting to get really interesting, as Isabella is being driven to her possible exorcism, the two exorcists doing so (why the fuck are they driving her elsewhere?) get possessed and crash the car they're in. And then, that fucking card. And that's it. I can remember seeing videos of people in the theaters booing the ending. I can't find it now. And what's worse, that Rossi Files website, well, due to the film's poor reception, they let it expire. However, if you were so inclined to visit the site after watching the film on the day it was released, here it was. And we don't get much new information, anyway.
  
• Also, the credits roll very fucking slowly. The credits take up eight minutes of an 83-minute movie.
  

Well, that wasn't as bad as I feared. Not a decent movie by any means, but not as shitty as I had been dreading. But still, it's no wonder Cinemascore audiences gave it an F. And it's not like Solaris or Mother or Bug, where the advertising promises something very different from the actual film and audiences feel ripped off. The Devil Inside is legitimately a shit film. 

Also, looking up the Cinemascore films that got an F (and FYI, the only other DHP film on the list was Fear Dot Com; Alone in the Dark and Disaster Movie would be there if my local library had copies), why the fuck did Wolf Creek get an F? It was legitimately good, and I don't think there was anything deceptive in the way it was marketed.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Aeon Flux

Watched with some trepidation and expectations of hating it, but I was pleasantly surprised.  I was a fan of the MTV animations, so I was braced for disappointment.

It didn't suck.  Not a bad adaptation of the MTV series, as these things go.  Decent story line, pretty well choreographed action sequences, and reliable (if not stellar) acting.

Add in Charlize Theron's form-fitting jumpsuits, and it gets a 6/10.

Boru

[Shell B]

Toy Story 4. My favorite of the series now. Sad ending, but a funny family film overall.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Aeon Flux

Watched with some trepidation and expectations of hating it, but I was pleasantly surprised.  I was a fan of the MTV animations, so I was braced for disappointment.

It didn't suck.  Not a bad adaptation of the MTV series, as these things go.  Decent story line, pretty well choreographed action sequences, and reliable (if not stellar) acting.

Add in Charlize Theron's form-fitting jumpsuits, and it gets a 6/10.

Boru

"You should try it."

"I like my shoes."

---

Toy Story 4. My favorite of the series now. Sad ending, but a funny family film overall.

The last family film I went to featured the Corleones.

[A Godzilla fan]

GOOOOOO-D-ZI-LA!

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is Battlefield Earth. It's one of the most infamously bad movies of all time, and the hour is getting late, so forgive me for not going into much detail in this first post.

For those of you who don't know, Battlefield Earth was based on the L. Ron Hubbard novel of the same name; before starting Scientology, he was a pulp fiction writer, and the merits of his early fiction are furiously debated (because his batshit insanity clouds the reputation of that early work so hard it's difficult to get a proper consensus, especially as his followers are likely to astroturf glowing reviews). With this novel, he went back to his roots writing pure Sci-Fi (of a less debatably poor quality). Admittedly, there's quite a bit of Scientology bullshit in the novel, but it was streamlined a bit for the movie, the one John Travolta spent 20 years pushing for. And a lot of the bizarre choices made seem to have been demanded by the Co$ (including the constant Dutch Angles, which were apparently done because LRH noticed that the Adam West Batman series often had villain's lairs filmed at an angle and decided every fucking shot needed to be done at an angle.)

I discovered it through the Nostalgia Critic review in 2010, and a few months later, I found a DVD in a record store in Springfield. I picked it up immediately. And I found a copy of 2001 to compensate.

So, here's some shit from the first 25 minutes:

• Our protagonist is introduced yelling "NO!" after being told his father is dead.  This is not a good introduction for a character. This works for better films because we at least got some idea of who the character is before this. And, odds are, the filmmaker is competent enough to at least give the audience some investment.
  
• Speaking of Our Protagonist, he's played by Barry Pepper, and it's like he was told about acting by being told that Daniel Day-Lewis is a good actor and that he should watch some of his films. And the first one he picked up was The Last of the Mohicans and just did an imitation of his Hawkeye and left it at that.
  
• This movie looks like a 90s cable fantasy series and yet it had a $40 million budget. 
  
• You know, I know that having heads that were largely comprised of bone (with a brain that gets pushed down to their spinal column and a heart that's somewhere near their crotches) was going to be really hard to pull off, let alone the fact that they're apparently viruses (with a vaguely humanoid form), but could they really not do better than making them look like Klingons with really bad dreadlocks and unusually huge foreheads? I'd have an easier time taking them seriously if they were all a race of Crablantes!
  
  
  
• And on that, I should also point out that, John Travolta's performance, well, you know how sometimes decent actors get cast in a shitty movie and give a hilariously hammy performance in it to compensate? It's like he's deciding to play it as the worst auditionee for a production of a Moliere play. All the more bizarre when you consider he was the one gunning for this movie to be made in the first place.
  
• Dogs are the superior race to man-animals? Obvious joke is obvious.
  
• And I think I should end on this infamous scene (seriously, why the fuck did they repeat the line "with endless options for renewal" three times?)
  
  
  

[Rev. Rye]

So, I spent most of this morning and afternoon in Sturgeon Bay to get a new car since the transmission is shot. I didn't even have time to do my daily session, let alone do a takedown of all the plot holes in Battlefield Earth. And by the time I did get home, the guest wi-fi turned off and I had to get by on my phone's wifi (and that takes a shitton of power, so I don't want to use it any more than I have to. Since I couldn't type down the crazy shit that happened in real time like I usually do, I decided to take notes on some of the more salient points:

• Not since Homestar Runner stopped doing regular cartoons have I seen such a reliance on the word "crap." The fact that they don't bother with some of the harder swears just hammers in the "mid-90s basic cable fantasy series" vibe. Yes, I know it's a PG-13 film, but they can still use "shit." Maybe even "fuck" once or twice (as long as it's used in a non-sexual manner)
  
• I legitimately did not remember the Clinkos. It's a shame they didn't get mentioned much in the movie, but given that, in the book, they're basically "Me So Velly Solly" stereotypes, having them be neon-coloured aliens with nerdy voices is a step up.
  
• "Never Store Loaded Firearms." Actually a piece of legitimately sound advice from a film as craptastic as this.
  
• Can they please learn other forms of scene transitions other than curtain wipes? It looks grand at first, but after about a dozen times, it just gets old.
  
• Is there any reason the Psychlos haven't bothered to figure out ANYTHING about the man-animals in the millennium since they found them? Seriously, you'd think that they'd figure out how to properly exploit them. Christ, in one scene that was in the original theatrical cut (but removed from later versions), they have apparently only just now figured out that man-animals couldn't even fucking FLY. You know, perhaps using them as a source of expendable labour would have come to them earlier than about a third of the way through the film.
  
• Our Protagonist says that they have better things to do than killing each other for FOOD. Just after almost killing some dude over food.
  
• How does knowing the Psychlos' language make for an effective fighting skill? 
  
• Kelly Preston's scene is shockingly pointless (even if it does include some really ridiculous imagery, like that enormously long tongue.) It's like the only point is to make sure John Travolta can say "See, I'm still straight!" While I don't normally care about what stars are still in the closet or not, it's worth noting that Travolta has been involved in a couple sex scandals, almost all with men. And given that he's been trapped for over 40 years in a cult that's been known to cover up their stars' misdeeds (see Danny Masterson for more detail) and uses information gleaned from auditing as leverage against leaving it, I'm honestly surprised he hasn't been taken down. Even after future Deep Hurting Project inductee Gotti.
  
• What the fuck even is a Planetship?
  
• The governments of Earth fell after a nine-minute fight with the Psychlos. And then, Our Protagonist uses those same millennium-old weapons that were destroyed in nine minutes to defeat the Psychlos. Even the jet fuel, which apparently only lasts two years.
  
• And, honestly, as many times as I was tempted to use the Richie Cusack clip, I held off on it; after all, the Co$ had a tight leash on the creative crew (such as they were), so it was clear how, exactly they fucked that up. But then, 77 minutes in the movie, I finally found a convenient place to use it. You see, in all their searches for gold, somehow, they completely failed to look at Fort Knox.
  
  
  And I used that clip because, apparently, in the source material, IT WAS ONE OF THE FIRST PLACES THEY RAIDED. Yes, even LRH, as thoroughly divorced from reality as he no doubt was at that point (he had documented mental problems even before starting the Co$, including an apparent schizophrenia diagnosis [not confirmed, but alarmingly plausible] and that could not have melded well with the fact that, in the last decade of his life, he was a bigger recluse than J.D. Salinger), knew that it would be fucking stupid for an alien race looking for gold to completely overlook one of the biggest hoards of gold on Earth (apparently, it's not the biggest; the Federal Reserve building in New York contains even more with as much as 1/4 of the gold ever mined lying in its vaults.)
• And for that matter, why are the Psychlos so obsessed with gold anyway? Gold is actually fairly useless, and the only reason it's acquired the value it has is because it's useless (and thus can't be used for other reasons), fairly scarce (so there's some potential for value), and looks pretty (for aesthetics).
  
• Somehow, even dumber than that is the way the Psychlos are defeated; it's not explained clearly in the film, but apparently, the air they breathe has explosive reactions to radiation (of any kind, really). And so they have to wear this thing that looks like a breathe-rite strip and a nose plug to pump in air for them. As someone with some knowledge of radiation, I'm actually well aware that there's always a non-negligible amount of radiation in the air on Earth as is. That Psychlo takeover should have ended like War of the Worlds, where the Martians are destroyed by the common fucking cold, except that should have taken (to use the number Terl used) nine minutes from the first time a Psychlo got first-hand contact with the Earth's atmosphere. "This weird race of aliens just came to Earth and started shooting everything.Then one of them came out of their spaceships and before we could laugh at their Klingons with dreadlocks look, he just spontaneously combusted like he was in Bleak House (the book, not the miniseries). Then they all just started doing it, and the remaining ones that left just figured out it wasn't worth it to take over." There, LRH, I saved you 1000 fucking pages. And if the planet Psychlo doesn't actually have radiatioactive decay, that means it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
  

Okay, one thing I should point out: there was apparently meant to be a sequel. You see, the original book is 1000 pages, but the book only covered about the first 300 of them. It was originally planned to cover the whole book, but the disastrous reception (and the collapse of Franchise Pictures, which was built around bankrolling stars' dream projects in a very Springtime For Hitler sort of way) ensured that that the sequel would never get off the ground. Just thank the Lord Xenu they didn't decide to do the Mission Earth decalogy. I should also point out that there is another film series based around a doorstopper novel that, unfortunately, did get enough funding for enough sequels to cover the whole book. And it's going to be part of the Deep Hurting Project eventually. But not now. No wine before its time. And I highly doubt that I'm going to get a copy of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy in Door County anyway. Speaking of serving wine before its time, next week's wine will be the Bratz movie. It will be glorious. But not now. At this point, I'm watching a movie that's intentionally campy, and not campy like...





At least Serial Mom wasn't bankrolled by a cult, and merely made by a cult director.