Film

Have you ever watched an entire episode of that Ghost Hunters TV show? Neither have I. I've tried, but it just doesn't interest me to watch a bunch of pansy-ass nerds walking around with a bunch of gizmos acting like they're going to piss their pants around every corner. Maybe if they actually pissed their pants we'd have something.
I wish I could say the same about the Paranormal Activity franchise. The third installment is now crushing it at the box office and all I can say is that I miss Saw. At least the Saw franchise is an intricate series and we know that each episode perfectly sets up the next installment. Paranormal 3, however, is just a repetition of the same tricks, only ever so slightly embellishing on the franchise's previous hand-held camera “found footage” scare-fest. But tricks aside, this is still a one-way ticket to Dullsville.

For the past several months, whenever I went to a movie with my mom and we saw the trailer for the new Footloose remake she would grumbled about it. “He's no Kevin Bacon,” she would say to the screen.
For as long as I can remember, my mom has counted the original Footloose among her favorite movies of all time. In fact, one day when I was home for winter break during college she found out I had never seen it and made me sit down and watch it. When the remake rolled out this fall, I knew, despite my mom's reservations, I had to drag her out to see it.
Even as a devoted fan of corny '80s movies, I still I thought the premise of the film was ridiculous. Five teens die in a car accident after a party and in order to prevent this from happening again the tiny town of Bomont, Georgia, outlaws minors from, among other things, dancing. Really? OK, I can understand a curfew, but seriously, dancing?

People booed. Some walked out. One guy even cursed at the screen as the credits rolled. I laughed my ass off during The Thing… nothing like a shameless rip-off of an already shameless remake.
Suffice it to say, this is my kind of movie.
I was primed to hate this movie, mostly because I'm so familiar with the material. As a kid I used to watch the original Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks classic every Halloween afternoon on TV, sifting through all the slow-moving technical scientific mumbo jumbo to get the big scary “Thing” payoff at the end. And the 1982 John Carpenter version's over-the-top gore quickly became one of my all-time favorites.
This prequel takes all its cues from the '82 version and fills in the storyline gaps. Down in Antarctica, a Norwegian expedition team finds an entity encased in ice that looks like the Donnie Darko bunny or an evil lobster claw. Soon, the fun starts. The combination of blood spewing, gut churning, high camp and seriousness that so defined Carpenter's version remain intact in this prequel. The “Thing” can enter and hide in any human host and from there wreak havoc, so it's always a cat-and-mouse game of who could be infected. It can only be killed by fire, so obviously, the weapon of choice is the flame thrower. Let the charring begin.

Pretty boy George Clooney gets a bad rap, ranging from attacks on his liberal politics to jealous jabs at his good looks. The problem with this is that Clooney is a really good director and couldn't care less what people say. Clooney is also a damn fine actor, so it's no surprise that Ides of March, although driven by political force, is all about the acting.
Touting a superb cast and based on Farragut North, a 2008 play by Beau Willimon, Ides tells the tale of an idealistic political staffer (Ryan “I'm in every movie” Gosling), who gets a crash course in dirty politics during his stint on the campaign trail working for a presidential candidate (Clooney). Unfortunately, not much transpires that we've not already experienced in the political movie realm. Nothing new is revealed. There's no surprise when we see the inner workings behind political wheeling and dealing. We're supposed to have enormous feeling for certain characters, but as the film progresses, you feel more inclined to hate just about everyone in this flick. Maybe that's the point.

I had the great pleasure of filling my entire weekend with some truly incredible independent films at the eighth-annual BendFilm Festival. There was, of course, plenty of partying and other fanfare to be seen over the course of the weekend, but for me, it was about the movies. Here's a roundup of what I saw.
How to Cheat
Strangely enough, half of the movies I saw this weekend dealt with infidelity and crumbling relationships. How to Cheat takes an honest approach to showing the insides of a messy modern marriage. The husband in a couple that’s struggling to conceive goes to the internet with hopes of finding a woman to have an affair with. The film, which won Best Narrative Feature and Best Acting (Kent Norton), could have been a bit more polished, but I did like the ending.

OK, here we go again with another entry into the haunted house genre. You know, the ones with “haunting” and/or “house” in the title that are all but destined to suck. This flick is no exception to the sucking rule, but guess what? It's not a haunted house movie, which now leads me to believe anything with just “house” in the title sucks.
Beginning with scary, angelic music, Dream House introduces the new inhabitants to a strange and creepy house with a shady past. Things creak, squeak, and go bump in the night all in the hopes of making A-list film stars (Daniel Craig, Rachel Weiz, Naomi Watts) crap their pants. But all that changes midway through with a twist from the “is this all real?” Shutter Island school of twists, detouring into ridiculous hallucinations, visions, questionable sanity and, yes, murder.

As someone in her mid-twenties, I, fortunately, haven't had to deal with one of my best friends being diagnosed with cancer, though I do have a friend who has. It's one of those things you never want to think about, but something we'll all have to deal with eventually. It seems there are few, if any, films for someone in such a situation to relate to. Until now, that is.
I recently read an interview with Seth Rogen and 50/50 writer Will Reiser, whose own battle with cancer became the basis for 50/50. The two admitted writing the movie because when they found out about Reiser's illness they had no movie to reference. If you scan through the Netflix library, you're bound to find films about mothers and fathers, children, grandparents, the very young, the very old and their families dealing with cancer. Reiser's film tackles the concept of how people in their mid-twenties tackle a crisis through a buddy-comedy approach, which may seem like an unconventional way to approach the topic, but it works well.

Taylor Lautner's abs put on an excellent performance in Abduction. Seriously, his abs have never looked better.

Baseball is known as America's pastime for a reason. Despite its long games, lack of instant excitement and outrageously lengthy season, baseball has captured our attention for nearly a century and a half, gaining the interest of generation after generation. And there's no better baseball than playoff baseball. With the postseason quickly approaching, Moneyball is a great film for fans of our nation's oldest major sport to begin their autumn ritual. Based on Michael Lewis' best-selling book of the same name, Moneyball tells the true story of how one general manager broke the mold of traditional player scouting in order to field a team with the best players that his small-market organization could afford. The action takes place in 2002 when computers began displacing professional baseball scouts and in doing so challenged the conventional wisdom that had guided scouting and player evaluation for more than a century. As such, it's a story that's bigger than baseball. It's a tale of how an industry wrestles with the forces of change.

Without the genius of director Sam Peckinpah, there would be no John Woo or Walter Hill movies. There would never have been The Wild Bunch, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia or Straw Dogs without Peckinpah. Now we have Straw Dogs without Peckinpah. Some may say “homage,” I say “blasphemy.”
Peckinpah's 1971 Straw Dogs was his most enigmatic, open wound of a movie, complete with commentary on bigotry, racism, social and religious dysfunction, (and if you look deep enough, health care). Peckinpah's hard drinking and hard life influenced his filmmaking style and perpetual “last man standing” theme, be it against the changing time, the protection of one's home or the preservation of self-respect. It wasn't just the stories; it was Sam's vision through cinematic styling that made his films shine with a kind of dignity. He has every right to be spinning in his grave.