Street Fighter Music Video with MC Hammer and JCVD

A buddy pointed this out to me and so now I'm pointing it out to you. It's from the Street Fighter soundtrack but I don't remember hearing this song in the film.  Whatever, Van Damme looks like he's having a good time and he even gives us some more of that infamous dancing (check out Kickboxer if you don't know what I'm talking about).

The Return of the Living Dead Part II

The Return of the Living Dead is considered a classic zombie film and a great artifact of pure 80’s cheese (I mean that in the best possible way).  It basically took the Night of the Living Dead premise and put a couple of new twists on it.  Instead of a group of people being trapped in one location there are two used, the zombies seem a little more tenacious and specifically want brains to eat and the cause of the dead returning to life is explained.  The effects and gags are all done really well and it’s a pretty spectacular directorial debut from veteran screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (Alien, Total Recall).  It’s a great movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously which I imagine is the reason it has a following.  So as long as you’re not in the mood for a completely serious horror picture, this one’s definitely worth your time.  And as good as The Return of the Living Dead is I just might like the sequel even better.

For the next installment the filmmakers decided to more or less do the same movie again (although apparently the script was not originally intended to be the next Return of the Living Dead movie).  This time though they decided to take the show on the road.  A 12 year old boy named Jesse stumbles upon a barrel in a sewer pipe while running away from some bullies.  They see that it’s from the military (in fact it is because we see it roll off the truck during the opening credits) and that it contains a zombie but they get scared and run away.  Later the bullies go back and open up the barrel which releases the gas that makes the dead return to life.  Various other characters including, but not limited to, Jesse’s sister, a doctor and two grave robbers all have to ban together in order to escape the clutches of the undead.

The reason why I think this one might be better than the original is because it moves a little quicker, there seem to be more zombies and I like that our group of heroes try to ditch the zombies but at every turn they keep showing up.  They don’t know how to kill the things either so it’s not like they can stand and fight them.  This gives the feeling that there truly is no way out the situation and that they’re fucking trapped.

The teen protagonists are actually likeable and don’t bumble around for most of the movie.  It was a good move to throw two middle aged guys and a little boy into the mix so that we get different reactions to the situation.  I also like that none of these people really know each other (except Jesse and his sister and this other couple).  It’s not your typical group-of-friends-go-on-a-camping/road-trip-together-only-to-stumble-upon-an-unspeakable-evil.  Even though these characters are strangers they know that they need to stick together in order to stay alive.  That seems to be not unusual for zombie movies but it still feels nice to see instead of nothing but self absorbed high school or college kids.

The zombie makeup and effects are top notch too.  There are a lot of good bits in this like a zombie hand gets loose inside a car with our group, there’s a scene with a really impressive zombie head that comes to life with eyes, eyelids, mouth and tongue all moving as one of our guys pulls it out of a bag and one zombie even gets blown clean in half but his legs still walk around while his upper body tries to get back up.  And it all looks so good because they actually did these effects for real using models and animatronics ‘n shit.  You won’t find any bad CGI or terrible editing of action sequences that involve nothing but close-ups so you can’t tell what the fuck you’re looking at here.

With all of that said I probably should warn you that there is some comedy in this piece as well.  But I’m telling you guys, it’s just the right kind of humor and never gets in the way of the sense of danger that our characters are constantly in.  Ok, the Michael Jackson zombie took me out of the movie for a second but believe me, the comedy only accents the good time that this film is.  The filmmakers must have had a ball making this thing because it really comes through.  You can tell that these guys were very excited to be making a zombie picture and that they wanted to see a lot of zombie action.  They kept the background and character development efficient and to a minimum so that once they could throw undead people in your face they could keep them there until the credits.

Between the refreshing mix of characters that you don’t normally find in a horror movie, the various locations (graveyard, hospital, streets), the very matter-of-fact wit and the kick ass zombie designs and encounters this is a real gem.  I can understand why the original The Return of the Living Dead has a cult following but I think this one can stand toe to toe with it.  Return II doesn’t need a preamble so it doesn’t really matter which film you start with.  I prefer the sequel (only slightly) but it looks like I’m in the minority.  Whichever you pick, they’re both perfect for a Halloween get together.        

And does anyone else think that using roman numerals for your sequels is an awesome idea?  It looks so much cooler than regular Arabic numbers.  I guess with the Halloween II remake sequel they did it but I don’t think anyone else has done it recently.  Filmmakers and studios should start doing that again.    

The Bowler and American Juggalo

The Bowler is a great short documentary about an old bowling hustler named Rocky Salemmo.  It's hard to believe a character like this exists in real life but here he is.  And he has a ton of good stories to tell.  It's only about 14 minutes long but it's some of the best 14 minutes of documentary I've seen.




The reason why I put these two together is because they were done by the same guy, Sean Dunne.  This is his latest one and it's another very well done short documentary.  He turns his focus to juggalos this time.  And for those that don't know, a juggalo is a hardcore Insane Clown Posse fan.  They like to put face paint on, drink faygo, party and say "whoop whoop".  I really like that Dunne gives these people a fair shake and lets them speak for themselves so you can draw your own impressions.  This one is a tad longer at 23 minutes but just like The Bowler it's well worth your time.

The Ninth Gate

Johnny Depp (Don Juan DeMarco) is Corso, a book expert and detective, and he gets hired by Balkan (Frank Langella (Junior)).  Balkan has a book called The Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows and he wants Corso to authenticate it for him by comparing it to the other two known copies.  Corso goes to Europe to check it out but at almost every turn someone’s trying to kill him and/or steal Balkan’s copy of The Nine Gates.  The book is supposed to have been co-written in 1666 by Satan so people go a little nutty for it wanting to worship it and all.

When this came out in 1999 I was real hot to trot on it.  I liked the mystery of the whole thing and how seriously this movie treated the Devil and how to conjure him up.  I also liked the Corso character because he’s a real scoundrel and will scheme his way into getting what he wants.  There are a bunch of good characters that you don’t know much about but you do know that they’re up to no good and that lends to the sense of danger.

However, upon my revisit to this film the other day I found that it wasn’t quite as good as I remembered it.  The biggest problem is that it drags at times and that’s because it becomes kind of redundant.  You see Corso finds out that all three copies of the book are authentic but there are differences in the engravings.  Each book has nine which means there are twenty seven in all.  But some are signed by the “official” author of the book, Aristide Torchia, and some are signed LCF as in Lucifer.  So Corso goes through the process of examining each Nine Gates book three times.  By the time we get to the third one we already know what he’s going to find so there isn’t much surprise or suspense.  Corso also gets jumped several times by a couple that’s trying to steal Balkan’s copy of the book but those scenes are never filled with enough danger.  Each time he makes it out relatively unscathed so you know how each encounter is going to end.  So because of the problem of redundancy the movie feels longer than it needed to be.

But I don’t want you to think that there isn’t good stuff here.  Probably the coolest thing about this picture is the film noir feel it has.  There are classic trademarks like Corso is acting like a detective on a case, he’s not well respected and a miscreant but damn it he’s one helluva book expert guy, he constantly drinks and smokes (there’s one scene where we almost see him eat something but he’s just chewing the last bite as we cut to him) and the audience is just as much in the dark as Corso is, not knowing what’s what until the very end.  I also like that the whole thing is from Corso’s perspective so we have no idea what other characters are up to unless Corso is in the same room with them.  This is a crucial aspect of the picture too.  It’s because we don’t know what’s going on totally with other characters that make everything so cryptic.  For instance there’s one part where Corso gets knocked out and as a result the screen goes black.  We wake up when Corso wakes up and to a nasty sight of the room on fire.  We have no idea who started it or why. 

After watching it this time I think The Ninth Gate is kind of similar to Eyes Wide Shut.  Not necessarily in story or even so much with the characters but with the overall feel.  Both feel like a dream.  Like the worlds in these movies are a little off.  The stories don’t really go from bad to worse but rather laterally.  In Eyes Wide Shut Tom Cruise sneaks into some fucked up orgy party and it didn’t seem like Cruise was in a normal part of his life before that (the OD’ed hooker scene for instance) but things don’t get better or crazier.  They just stay in this really weird space.  In The Ninth Gate Corso finds his friend and business partner murdered in the beginning of the film and he keeps running into other corpses with a constant threat of being the next one.  So things seem pretty weird from the start and stay that way without really getting better or worse.  His situation is always bad.  And I guess there are a couple of other similarities that these two movies share like both involve sneaking into a mansion late at night to witness some sort of cult gathering, the whole thing is told from the view of our main character, things are left fairly ambiguous leaving the audience to figure most things out for themselves and the soundtracks are awesome that contain both haunting and playful themes.  And I mean all of these comparisons as compliments.  I love Eyes Wide Shut and it’s strange to come across another movie that kinda feels like it.

Roman Polanski is such a good director and this is no exception as to how well he can put a film together.  This could have been his “other Rosemary’s Baby”.  Both are about the Devil and cults ‘n shit. And both are barely horror movies involving more atmosphere and assumptions rather than mass killings or gore.  But there are a couple of things that hold this one back from being really great.  And it’s a shame because you can see the potential that this movie had of being a classic.  I guess a good way to describe it is a cross between Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby but at the same time not being as good as either of those. 

It’s hard to recommend this one because I think most people will find it too slow (it is about books after all).  I’m split on this one.  The good stuff is really well done but it can’t keep a good pace going.  If you’re a Roman Polanski fan then you really should check this out.  Other than that I guess it’s worth seeing if you’re looking for a different type of horror film.  You know, like a horror noir.

Dinner with a Vampire

I saw this one last year and had a really good time with it.  It’s from Italian horror director Lamberto Bava who also did Demons (which I highly recommend checking out, it may take a bit to get going but once it does it’s almost non-stop action).  It’s a plot title so you don’t need to know much else, there’s a vampire and people have dinner with him.  He ends up trapping his guests in his house so he can pop up every once in a while to try and bite them. 

I think I like this one because it’s not too heavy.  Even though it’s a horror picture with dusty dungeons and a vivacious vampire (sorry for the alliteration kick there) there’s also the over the top house that the vampire lives in.  Each room is filled with so many different colors and architectural designs that there’s always something interesting to look at and wild for our characters to stand in front of and interact with.  And you know what?  I found myself caring for the old vamp, his Igor type assistant and I didn’t totally hate the twenty somethings that are supposed to be our heroes.  I wanted to see them all get along which they kind of do at first when the vampire toys with them.  Yeah, the ol’ bloodsucker even tells his wife character that he’s having the time of his life.  I guess vampires do enjoy their work on some level but it seems this guy hasn’t been able to for years so it’s nice to see him happy. 

This is a neat little film and if you’re looking for a sort of feel good vampire picture (also with zombies) then this is for you.  

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth

A few years back Stephen King was (famously?) quoted as saying, “I have seen the future of horror, his name is Clive Barker”.  That was in about 1984 and it seems that he was sort of right.  Most people know who Clive Barker is or have at least heard the name.  After some good book sales and that very nice quote from Mr. King Clive Barker was able to gather enough clout to direct Hellraiser in 1987which is based on his own novel.  The movie doesn’t tell us but I would say a hellraiser is someone that raises some hell.  And in the case of these films that’s literal.  Anyway, it’s a pretty good movie and I was intrigued to find out that Coil was originally tapped to do the soundtrack but were eventually decided against.  Fortunately the band did release the Hellraiser music in 1995 for all to hear but it’s surprisingly conventional and not nearly as awesomely bat shit crazy as their usual work.  And I wonder if Barker rejected it for that reason.  Anyway, the sequel to Hellraiser, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, is also pretty good and probably on par with its predecessor.  But the third installment just might be the best.

A down-on-her-luck reporter named Joey (she’s a woman actually), played by Terry Farrell (Red Sun Rising), is at a hospital covering a story when all of a sudden they wheel in a guy with chains attached to his body dripping blood all over the place.  Her journalistic instincts kick in and she thinks she might have a story.  There’s a young girl that also comes in with him all freaked out trying to defend herself to these doctors that are a little preoccupied with saving the guy’s life.  She’s Terri (Paula Marshall (lots of TV shit)) and Joey tries to get her story from her but Terri runs away before anything useful can be pried out of her.  After some snooping around Joey figures out that there’s something fishy going on at the Boiler Room nightclub and it turns out that the dirtbag owner of the club, J.P., found Pinhead’s statue thing along with the puzzle box.  If you haven’t seen the first two Hellraisers then I’ll just tell you quick that the puzzle box is like Jason’s hockey mask or Freddy Kruger’s knife glove thing.  It’s the iconic emblem of the series that makes you know you’re watching a Hellraiser film.  The box summons Pinhead and can also destroy him.  But this film goes in kind of a different direction with that whole thing because J.P. unleashes Pinhead somehow using the statue.  So of course once he’s out hell on earth begins.  And it’s up to Joey to stop him because she gains procession of the box from Terri.

Throughout the movie we get some really great deaths like a woman gets her skin ripped off, a guy’s head explodes and another lady gets impaled with a block of ice through the mouth.  And the specialty cenobites (the evil creatures that Pinhead turns people into) are probably the most creative of at least the first three Hellraisers if not the whole series.  There’s a DJ guy that flings CDs into people’s heads, a camera guy that zooms his lens through someone’s head and a bartender one that uses his cocktail shaker to throw gasoline on people and then he spits fire on them.  The designs for these were done real well and look fucking crazy.  Even though they all have to wear some sort of black bondage attire and have scars ‘n shit all over their bodies and faces there are endless possibilities for these characters.  And I love that this series has something built in like that that can change with each installment.

Alright, now to describe one of my favorite parts of the movie.   At one point Joey runs into a church because the cenobites are chasing after her and she tells the priest that there are demons loose.  The priest tells her that there really aren’t such things as demons and they’re used as metaphors.  Pinhead then walks into the church and Joey turns and says, “then what the fuck is that?”  I love that she says exactly what the audience is thinking.  Then to top it all off Pinhead proceeds to take pins out of his head, stick them in his hands, strike a Jesus Christ pose and laughs maniacally while the stained glass window behind him blows out and the candles on the alter burn with fire.  This film has vision.

The effects budget must have taken up at least half of the total because there are tons of explosions, fire and what must have been hours and hours of makeup and costume design.  It all looks incredible and like people put a lot of work into this thing.  They even had to stage scenes involving Vietnam and World War I.  It’s pretty amazing the filmmakers could pull off what they did with what I’m sure was a small budget.

This one’s down and dirty with few peripherals to sidetrack it.  The story moves quickly and the deaths are plentiful and varied.  I loved it.  The only unfortunate part is that you do kinda need to see the first two Hellraisers to totally get this one, especially Hellraiser II.  But I wouldn’t look at that as so much of a con as an opportunity to get acquainted with the Hellraiser series.  I think they’re real fun movies and I’m not sure why they haven’t got as big of a following over the years like the Halloweens or the Friday the 13ths did.  And it’s because of that lack of interest that caused the Hellraiser series to go direct to video after the fourth one.  By the way the fourth installment is not very good.  But the third one is a gem and a picture I think you guys should check out.

Moneyball

People are really loving this one but I’ll tell you right off the bat (get it?) that I didn’t think it was so great.  And the two major problems I had with it are the way it praises this new system of recruiting players while putting down scouts and also that it was too damn corny.

Just to be clear I haven’t read the book so I won’t be doing a comparison on the two nor did I follow the real life story at the time.  I’m mostly commenting on what I was shown in the movie.

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt (Cool World)) is the general manager of the Oakland Athletics and at the end of the 2001 season he loses his top three players.  But he still wants to win real bad despite not having the money he needs to get decent replacements.  Beane discovers Peter Brand (Jonah Hill (Knocked Up) who’s really stiff in this) when he tries to make some trades with the Cleveland Indians and realizes that this kid might know something about numbers and baseball and how to put the two together.  Brand convinces Beane that it’s all about a stat called on base percentage and if they just get players that have a high OBP then they should win a bunch of games.  And they do.

Ok, I’m gonna start with the corny part first.  To my surprise this movie focuses mostly on Billy Beane himself intertwining his sordid career as a player and his now pretty successful career as a GM (even though they want you to think that he’s down and out but I’m getting ahead of myself).  Brad Pitt was good in this role and seems to wear it naturally.  Beane can be colorful at times with his shoot from the hip kinda attitude and that was fun.  But there are way too many shots of Brad Pitt’s face almost entirely in shadows looking like he wants to hang himself.  It was annoying and kind of insulting after a while like the filmmakers thought we would constantly forget that Beane is haunted by his past and that he’s taking a gamble on something no one has done before.  They make it seem like Billy Beane just can’t win no matter how hard he tries.  But you know what?  In 2001 his team made it to the second round of the playoffs.  They came close to making it to the World Series and that’s pretty damn good if you ask me.  So Beane has some success under his belt.  It’s not like while he was GM they never had a winning season.  They had at least one.  So I think the filmmakers were trying to make Billy Beane seem pathetic but the guy isn’t a fuck up.  He’s the GM of a goddamn major league baseball team.  He’s not some weak figure that can’t get his life together.  Beane knows who he is and sort of knows what he wants (more on that later).  He went from crappy baseball player to general manager and I would think that would be quite an accomplishment.  The man never went to college or held any other job outside of baseball.  Good for him for achieving that.  I really didn’t like that the movie kept trying to convince us that he’s a fucking schmo.

The relationship Beane has with his ex-wife and daughter is typical Hollywood fare (and I mean that in a bad way).  They portray Beane’s ex-wife as kind of nice but also kind of dumb and cold.  There’s only one scene with her but it’s designed to make you like Beane more by showing that the ex-wife remarried someone who’s very un-macho, doesn’t know anything about baseball and got Beane’s 12 year old daughter a cell phone without discussing it with him.  They try and make Beane look cool and level headed by contrasting him with this other guy.  And again, part of the goal of this scene is to paint Beane as a guy that everyone throws off to the side as if to say, “even his wife didn’t want anything to do with him.  Why couldn’t she see the potential in Beane and believe in him?  Clearly he’s better than this other schmuck that she married.  Why don’t people give Billy Beane a chance?”     

The daughter is in this thing to make Beane look like a responsible father, a caring person and an all around good man.  It wasn’t totally necessary because I think all of that stuff comes through with his other relationships in the film, especially with Peter Brand who’s only 25.  But I guess it was to show that he’s not all business all the time.  And not that Beane’s daughter plays a big role in this or has a lot of screen time but having her play and sing “The Show” by Lenka (which is pretty much identical to “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz) not once but twice was two times too many (just as a side note, I can’t stand CGAF songs). 

Alright, now on to the baseball stuff and the problem is that there isn’t enough of it.  There are a lot of very short clips of games (pretty sure they’re the real games) but we don’t get to know the team and how they work.  I thought this movie was supposed to not only be about how this motley crew was put together but also how they worked together to win games.  There’s a bunch of the former but none of the latter.  As I said before this is a film really about Billy Beane and the players and their accomplishments take more of a backseat.  The only time the team gets some real attention is when the A’s go on an unparalleled winning streak and we see some of the final game that if won would break the record for most consecutive wins in history.  But even that’s handled clumsily as it’s shown in a montage of messy plays by the A’s and the scoreboard giving us the latest update.  I would’ve liked to have seen key plays in certain innings that made the difference.  And Beane has a weird response to the streak too by calling it meaningless.  He says that he wants what he’s doing to mean something.  But his A’s going for a record amount of wins is really impressive and does mean something.  I don’t understand what he’s looking for out of his rag tag team.  They’re doing incredibly well.  If this isn’t good enough then I guess he wants a championship but he doesn’t explicitly say that.

But the biggest problem I have with this picture is how it puts down all the people that don’t understand what Billy Beane is trying to do.  Beane has a whole panel of scouts that he meets with to help put his teams together.  After the 2001 season his three superstars left and of course he couldn’t afford to replace them with equals.  His scouts know this so they try to find the best players for the budget that they have.  After Beane hires Peter Brand and adopts the OBP approach his head scout comes up to him and tries to convince him not to go that way.  The scout gives a speech about how you can’t just ignore twenty plus years of experience, knowledge and intuition and that he’s getting players that look like shit.  He’s trying to say that a computer can’t look at a human and say if he’s going to be a good ball player or not, you need another human to help make that judgment.  Mainly to look for intangibles that can’t be tallied as a stat.  This speech is supposed to make the scout look like a bad guy and an idiot because he’s going against Beane and we, the audience, know better looking back but the thing is I pretty much agree with him.  This movie doesn’t say outright that other stats like batting average, home runs, RBIs, etc aren’t important but I think it is saying that you can reduce just about every player to OBP.  And if you want to win get the players with the highest OBP.  Apparently it doesn’t matter how you perform defensively either (I guess expect for pitching) just as long as you get on base.  I have a very very hard time believing that other stats, defense and just human emotion and makeup don’t really matter and not only won’t but shouldn’t be taken into consideration when putting a team together.  This movie makes what scouts have been doing ever since the game was invented look like the complete wrong thing and that they themselves have become somewhat irrelevant.  I don’t buy that man.

I don’t think the approach of just looking at OBP is wrong or anything.  I want to make that clear.  If teams with tiny budgets want to do that that’s perfectly fine.  In fact teams with small budgets probably should adopt that method because apparently it works.  What I don’t like is how the movie makes it out to be the be all and end all of baseball and makes scouts look like total buffoons that can’t find their ass with both hands.  They also make the manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman (Twister)), seem evil because he doesn’t understand what Beane’s doing either.  Just like the scouts he’s trying to put together the best team possible with the players that he has but the film makes him seem like a saboteur when he doesn’t play Beane’s crappy players.  The problem is Beane doesn’t communicate effectively to Howe what his grand plan is and he even admits that himself at one point.

At the end of the movie Beane is offered to be the GM of the Boston Red Sox for a record salary and is told by the Red Sox owner what Beane himself just accomplished like he forgot or wasn’t paying attention.  He goes on to say that anyone that doesn’t use the OBP approach is a “dinosaur”.  As if having a ton of money to buy high profile players suddenly became ineffective.  And this coming from the Red Sox is especially ridiculous because they had a budget of about $108 million in 2003.  That’s a far cry from the $40 million budget the A’s were dealing with in 2002.  Ok ok I get that Boston didn’t mean that they were going to stop buying expensive players, they just meant that they were also going to take other overlooked players that have a high OBP into consideration.

You know there are a ton of questions that could be asked about baseball that we could discuss here like is it unfair that teams with money will always be able to afford high profile players and teams without a lot of money will almost never be able to afford the same players?  Do ball players get paid too much in general?  Should there be a salary cap?  Etc.

If you want my two cents here it is.  Whether you have a $100 million team or a $40 million team it’s all kind of a crap shoot.  You never know how players will perform from year to year and even from month to month.  Baseball has a long ass season so anything could happen.  But, of course, you want the best odds so you game the system as best you can whether it’s buying up expensive players or finding guys with high OBP.  I don’t think you can put a good team together only going with your gut and I also don’t think you can put a good team together only crunching numbers.  This movie is saying that all you need are numbers.  I mean Beane was able to get his moneyball team to the playoffs but just the year before he managed to do the same thing with a slightly lower budget and without moneyball tactics.  So no system is perfect or totally predictable.  I think you need both numbers and gut.  I wouldn’t say the gut makes up the majority of your mind but it should play a small role.  For example if you have a player that has a high OBP but he just got a divorce then he might not play as well because he’s going through a tough time emotionally.  It’s gotta be hard to just shut that part of yourself off when you step on to the field but you make that call based on experiences that you’ve dealt with in the past and if you think the player can handle it.  And that’s why I found it so strange that the head scout and the manager are the bad guys in this picture.  Usually in movies we want to see both machines and humans go through a change and become more emotional and less removed like Pinocchio or some scumbag CEO in an action movie that’s willing to hurt people because it’ll save him/her money.  We want that puppet to be a real boy and we want that CEO to ignore the numbers because it’s not right to harm a bunch of people to make some extra bucks.  This film goes the other way and champions removing human involvement in recruiting players.

Overall I didn’t think this was the great The Social Network of this year type movie.  It really dragged at times, I didn’t understand what the goal of the whole thing was (have a winning season, win the world series?) as it gave me no frame of reference where I was in the course of the scheme and it was too much about Billy Beane.  The filmmakers thought that a movie only about baseball playing and baseball theory would be too technical and wouldn’t sell tickets so they compensated way too much and made it more of a biopic.  That was pretty disappointing to discover.  But I guess I’m all alone on this one because people are eating this picture up.  Maybe if this was made as a documentary it would’ve been more about the team?  I dunno.  I’m all moneyballed out.