Film

It's been a weird summer for blockbusters. I should know. I've watched most of them, 95 percent of which were superhero movies. After being bombarded with Green Lantern, Thor, Captain America, Conan and Cowboys and Aliens, I was starting to get this nagging suspicion that I was a stupid grownup and couldn't get sucked into these worlds like I once did. What I didn't realize is that the reason I wasn't enjoying these movies was because they didn't have any characters I felt invested in. After watching Drive, not only did I feel like I'd seen a true superhero movie, but I felt like I'd seen the best one made in my lifetime with a hero I truly cared about… even though he's sort of a sociopath. A super anti-hero, if you will.
Drive is a throwback to every mid-to-late '80s character-based action film like William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. or Michael Mann's Thief. It makes the city of Los Angeles just as much of a character as anyone while exploring the hidden nooks and crannies of a city that never gets shot like this anymore. Director Nicolas Winding Refn shoots L.A. like it's a crumbling empire, still at the height of its power, yet rotting underneath its façade. Anyone who is interested in the language of film should study Drive as well as the earlier works of Refn like his Pusher trilogy, Bronson and Valhalla Rising. This guy is our next Kubrick, Cronenberg and Peckinpah rolled into a hyper stylized ball of genius.

New horror movies give me hope and, from the looks of it, Creature had guilty pleasure, drive-in homage stamped into its very existence. At first, it seemed like my prayers had been answered, but to my dismay, this flick proved to be a lame, excruciatingly cheap slasher with no soul and one ridiculous, disjointed scene after another.

If I had it my way, I would go my entire life without seeing Gwyneth Paltrow's skull sawed open and the skin on her head peeled back. But this is what happens as doctors performed an autopsy on her Contagion character, Beth Emhoff. It's the kind of moment where you put your hand up in front of your face to block the disgusting sight, but still kind of peek around your fingers so you don't miss what's going on in the movie. Contagion, which has been marketed as an action/thriller about a global disease pandemic, kind of misses its target audience, aside from revealing the inside of Paltrow's forehead.
Here's how Beth ends up getting her skull chopped in half: she returns home to Chicago after spending time in Hong Kong for business and what she thinks is jet lag ends up sending her into seizures and taking her life within merely a few days, along with that of her young son. The unknown disease spreads fast, as these things tend to do in the movies, and soon reaches epidemic proportions. Meanwhile, at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) contracts a team of highly skilled doctors to identify the disease, identify the first patient and develop a vaccination.

We all have to make choices. Like if someone tells you a story and says it really happened, you choose to believe it. And if it's an especially good story, well even better. If it's embellished, all over the map and totally unbelievable, but ultimately makes you laugh, well, then all the better.
If you want to believe, go ahead, but Apollo 18 quickly sheds its “found footage” concept and just digs deep into delivering some excellent horror movie goods. Please note that there are credits to Apollo 18. In other words: this shit ain't for real.

I know you're not going to see this movie, but I'm going to review it anyway. Just to spite you. So, Shark Night (not to be mistaken for Shark Knight, the aquatic adventure film starring Martin Lawrence and Mo'Nique that follows the exploits of a chivalrous mako shark and his… I've just been told that movie doesn't exist and I made it up. Back to reviews of real movies).

My love for Paul Rudd started at a young age when I saw him in Clueless. He's got a certain kind of every-man charisma that makes him relatable in just about any role he takes on. If you take a look back at his career, you'll notice he doesn't really do fantasy or sci-fi. Rudd has made a career out of finding comedy in reality, which for me personally is the best kind of humor. Yes, of course, he's swayed into the gross-out comedy genre at times, but Rudd hits his stride when he's honest and relatable – just as he is as Ned Rochlin in Our Idiot Brother.
The film begins with Ned, the so-called idiot brother in reference, selling pot to a uniformed police officer. After returning from jail, Ned has been kicked to the curb by his former girlfriend Janet (played by Kathryn Hahn, who I've been mistaking for Saturday Night Live alumna Ana Gastyer for years). Ned decides to couch hop between his sisters' homes in New York while trying to get back on his feet.

It's safe to say that visionary filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy) makes a pretty good living off things that go bump in the night. The director of the upcoming Hobbit films produced and co-wrote one of this summer's only notable horror films Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. His decision, or whomever's decision it was, to let new-comer Troy Nixey lead this 1973, made-for-TV revival was the only noticeable flaw to this well-made remake.
The story follows a little, raven-haired girl named Sally who goes from her unloving mother's care in Los Angeles to Rhode Island where her father (Guy Pearce) and his lady-friend (Katie Holmes) are renovating a deceased painter's home that holds a demonic little secret. As if depressing family issues weren't enough, poor Sally can't even turn the lights off once her curiosity gets the best of her.

Being on vacation can change the way you think. After being nestled in the tiny comfortable city of Cianciana, Sicily for a week, all calm, relaxed and really hot, a chance to take an hour bus ride to visit the ruins of Agrigento sounded cool. But it was even hotter there so the opportunity to grab a gelato and take in the cinema at the main piazza sounded even better than half-destroyed ancient Greek columns. I was more than willing to watch Horrible Bosses in Italian, if not for the experience, then for the air-conditioned escape from the 110-degree heat wave that was bearing down. Alas, this was not to be. The movie's running time overlapped with the bus ride back. So in anticipation of my next movie review, I rifled through the upcoming shows in an internet café and came upon Fright Night. I fired off a trans-continental missive to my editor and got the green light for the 2011 remake of the 1985 horror flick that seems to run on every other channel in the weeks leading up to Halloween.
Fright Night is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, but it has some funny problems and I think that's its point. The easy-to-overlook inconsistencies surrounding this film can be put aside. Just go with the goofy flow of this flick that relies on part cheese, part ridiculous and, well, part fright.

Over the last week, I've been hearing that the new Conan the Barbarian is not just a bad movie or crappy end-of-the-summer blockbuster, but an actual stain on the name of Robert E. Howard (author of the original Conan stories) and an offense to filmgoers everywhere. Now, I've been known to drop hyperbole bombs to and sometimes fro, but I've got to say, while Conan the Barbarian is not a freckle on the original Conan the Barbarian's undercarriage, it's streets ahead of Conan the Destroyer (sorry, Grace Jones and a PG rating make The Destroyer dead to me). Conan is a badass for the first two-thirds of its running time, but then turns into yawns.
Easily the best thing about the new Conan is Jason Momoa (who owned in Game of Thrones) since he's much closer to Howard's vision of Conan than Arnold was. I was raised on Howard's books and I never forgot how Conan was described as moving like a panther, whereas Arnie moved like a bull crossbred with an Austrian bodybuilder. Momoa not only moves like a Panther, he moves like the whole jungle is in his bones. There is no other modern actor who could have pulled off this role and, if you don't believe me, I'll whip out some more nerd knowledge bombs (after I put away my hyperbole bombs) and take you all out with me.

In 2010 the Deschutes Country Library chose Kathryn Stockett's New York Times best selling debut novel, The Help, as the “Novel Idea… Read Together” program's book for the year. The program, which just wrapped it's eighth year, started based on the question, “What would happen if everyone in Deschutes County read the same book?” The Help's theme of racial segregation in the 1960s made the 2010 title even more interesting and important to read together because in the novel, just as in life at the time, the characters couldn't read the same books. Yes, they could read the same titles, but before the Civil Rights Movement really kicked into high gear, blacks and whites couldn't check out books from the same libraries or do a number of other things in the same facilities.