*batteries not included

An evil businessman buys off and intimidates residents of an old apartment building that he wants demolished so he can build some new skyscrapers.  The folks living there don’t want to move out even when hired thugs tear the place apart.  So a couple of alien space robots come to the rescue and have the magic power to rebuild shit.  They fix the place up and the evil businessman loses.

The plot’s a little strange because of that alien robot part.  Standing up to some powerful asshole in a suit isn’t anything new.  It’s that our protagonists get help from space is what makes things weird.  They didn’t overcome the conflict on their own in the end.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing though, just not what I expected.  I thought the aliens were going to give the tenants the tools they needed to be able to fight back but that doesn’t happen.

Speaking of strange and leads, our main characters are an elderly couple (one has Alzheimer’s (I think)), a struggling artist, a pregnant Latino woman and an ex-boxer that doesn’t speak.  Not your typical family movie cast of characters.  There isn’t a teen like in Back to the Future or even a face punching explorer type guy like in Indiana Jones.  The old woman is legitimately engaging but that’s because she’s goofy and senile or whatever.  I think the only reason the rest of them come off kinda charming is because the folks that want to toss them out of their homes are scumbags so they look good by comparison.  If the story was just about these handful of people living in an apartment building with no threat of demolition then I wouldn’t give a shit.  I mean I barely gave a shit as it was.

The aliens are what the whole picture hinges on.  They need you to think they’re at least a little cute.  And I will admit that they are.  No explanation is given about where they came from or why they’re there but there doesn’t need to be.  It works fine with these things just flying around while silently rebuilding stuff.

There are a few very strange moments in this film that I need to address.  First off, we see the alien robots have sex.  It’s totally innocent looking though with the two of them flying out of a chimney and embracing.  The next they-really-put-this-in-the-movie-? moment comes when the female alien gives birth to little baby robots.  And if that wasn’t bizarre enough, one of the babies comes out dead.  That’s a helluva thing to put in a family movie.  Eventually the silent ex-boxer brings it back to life but there wasn’t really a need to have this in the film in the first place.  That baby robot doesn’t do anything to help advance the plot.  The last peculiar thing that happens is the apartment building actually gets destroyed at the end.  Ok, ok the aliens rebuild it, of course they do.  But keep in mind that the whole driving force of the story is not letting this building perish.  So the one thing that can’t happen happens.  Sure it’s a fake out ending but they toy with the audience pretty hard.

You know, it may not seem like it but this film makes sense, at least from a production standpoint.  Even though the concept for this piece sounds a bit out there I could see something like this being made today.  It would definitely be animated and not live action but I could see it.  Makes sense considering Brad Bird wrote this and he went on to eventually work at Pixar.  The whole production has a very Spielbergian look and feel and that’s because he produced it.  There isn’t enough here for a feature length picture and that’s because it was originally supposed to be a short for Spielberg’s Twilight Zone type show Amazing Stories.  That explains the good thirty minutes (at least) in the middle where nothing happens.  So this film isn’t inexplicably weird.  It’s just a little weird and probably would’ve worked better as a short.   

Overall I have conflicting feelings about this one.  I can say for certain that this isn’t a great movie, or even good really.  But goddammit this thing has a lot of heart and that makes it hard to not like at least a little bit.  It feels like the people that made this picture were really into it and their enthusiasm rubs off.  Like the special effects still look very good and hold up, you feel for these characters even though they’re not the most relatable or interesting and everything that you want to happen does occur: the tenants keep their apartment building, the evil businessman is forced to build around the apartment, the main henchman turns good, the construction workers turn good and don’t want to bulldoze the apartment building and etc.  All the feel good shit you could ever want they threw in there.

Do I recommend it?  Honestly I’m not sure.  If you want a real cutesy movie with a cutesy goddamn title (I think it’s supposed to mean that the robots are alive, although I still don’t quite get the asterisk part of it) and cutesy characters that say cutesy dialogue and there’s cutesy mini alien spaceship thingies that have cutesy robot babies and you see what I mean, then go for it.  If you’re not into that shit I guess don’t see it then.
    

Cocaine Cowboys I & II

Miami in the 80’s is synonymous with cocaine.  You know, Miami Vice, Scarface and all that shit.  Well this is the real deal folks.  This doc has players from the time tell their stories.  And holy shit do they have some good ones.  They lay out exactly how their operation went, how the police were outmanned and outgunned, how people were killed if they fucked up and how they all eventually got caught.

The whole thing, every detail is incredibly engrossing.  Each individual story would be by far the most interesting thing that ever happened in an average person’s life and these guys have a million of them.  For example this dude named Rivi was at a club one night when he was informed that there was going to be a hit at a particular table.  Rivi then rounded up his crew to get the hell out of there so that none of them would get hurt by a stray shot or something.  However in the process one of Rivi’s guys unknowingly told the man that was the target that night so he split too.  The hit got fucked up accidentally which put Rivi in deep shit.  This leads to him meeting Griselda Blanco, aka the Godmother (she was a billionaire, or at least a hundreds of millions-aire, in the coke biz and she was responsible for something like two hundred murders), who eventually ends up hiring Rivi as her hitman.

Even a little tale like how the Colombians weren’t wrapping the cocaine right in plastic at first which would cause the package to come undone when it was dropped from a plane into the ocean is fascinating.

This is a must see if you’re interested in crime, drugs or even the history of a city.  Miami was the murder capital back then with something like over 600 murders annually in the early 80’s.  And it wasn’t just drug gangs killing each other, innocent bystanders were getting caught in the crossfire.  There were shootings in public places during the day.  These motherfuckers didn’t give a shit.  Like the Godmother ordered a hit on a guy in an airport terminal.  Rivi wisely turned this job down because he knew it was impossible to get away with.  But some other crazy sonuvabitch took his place and was arrested almost immediately after stabbing his target with a bayonet several times.

Apparently at that time you couldn’t go anywhere in Miami without stumbling across a corpse.  It got so bad that special forces had to be sent in.  A combo of that plus the fact that the cartels were just running out of people to kill finally brought this chapter to an end.

I highly recommend checking this picture out.  Everyone in this is very forward and candid about what they did and how they did it.  They don’t hold back on anything.   

Cocaine Cowboys II picks up where the first one left off.  The Godmother is in jail but she gets sought out by an up and comer named Charles Cosby.  He becomes her right hand man on the outside.  Again, it’s more interesting stories from those that lived them. 

One thing about this series that’s refreshing but also a little off putting is the brutal honesty about shit that you feel like you shouldn’t be hearing.  For example in part II they tell you step by step how to make crack.  Not even in Breaking Bad where the entire show revolves around the production of meth do they actually show how to create the stuff. 

Overall part II isn’t as captivating as part I but it’s still very cool.  And with these two parts this all really does feel like a movie and its sequel.  The original was great and is self-contained.  But the studio wants to make another one so they bring back one of the characters while introducing new ones.  It’s a new adventure.

If you liked the first one you’re definitely going to want to see the second one too. 

Undisputed III: Redemption

Pretty good second sequel to the fantastic first sequel to the original I never saw.  Isaac Florentine returns for more and he delivers once again.  Boyka (Scott Adkins (The Expendables 2)) finally stops pitying himself from his last (and only) defeat and wants to enter into the worldwide prison championship tournament.  So this installment follows in the footsteps of Terminator 2 and, well, Undisputed II where the bad guy from the previous episode is now the good guy.  That’s pretty nifty if you can pull it off.

Just about everything is slightly less good (and I want to emphasize the word “good” as opposed to saying “slightly worse” ‘cause I want to keep impressions positive).  The fights, the dialogue, the characters, the directing and so on are all not quite as well done as part II.  The only thing that might be better is Scott Adkins.  He gets more screen time and has to go through a lot more emotional states which he proves he can handle fine. 

It’s unfortunate that the villain isn’t very memorable, the fight sequences kinda blur together (although I really enjoyed the one where Boyka and Turbo beat up the guards in the rock quarry) and overall it’s a cheesier film.  Part II is better but the premise is great and just like its predecessor there’s plenty to like.  

Undisputed II: Last Man Standing

Really fantastic sequel to the original I never saw.  Turns out this one is self-contained enough that it doesn’t matter much. 

Boyka (Scott Adkins (Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning)) is the mixed martial arts champ at this one Russian prison but the problem is he’s a little too good at beating the shit out of other inmates.  There’s no worthy competition and the mob is getting upset because they’re actually starting to lose money.  You see Boyka is such a sure thing that no one bets against him.  In order to spice things up the mob frames ex American boxing champ George “Iceman” Chambers (Michael Jai White (Black Dynamite)) so they can get him into prison and fight Boyka.

Great setup and well executed.  Clear fight sequences and lots of ‘em.  Wonderful acting and directing.  Wise old man in a wheelchair that helps Chambers get through his ordeal and a dude gets flung into a sewer filled with shit.  There’s a lot of good stuff here.  

Star Trek Into Darkness

This isn’t as unadulterated a review as you can get but it’s close.  The only Star Trek thing I had seen going into this one was Wrath of Khan.  I haven’t watched any of the other movies or any of the TV shows (except for some famous bits like Kirk battling that alien in the dessert).  I didn’t read any reviews before or after watching Into Darkness either, so without any influence and very little frame of reference here are some thoughts on this sucker.

Let’s break shit down into three main areas: characters, story and production.

First, characters (only some of the mains because there’s a big cast here).  Kirk is kind of a dick in this movie.  Now remember I’m basing this off of limited Star Trek knowledge so I don’t know if that’s just his character.  But this guy doesn’t really listen to anyone, lies on official reports, goes into situations with either no plan or with one that hasn’t been thought out and puts other crew members in unnecessary danger.  In the beginning Bruce Greenwood (Exotica) strips Kirk of his ship and demotes him for some of the shit I listed above and I agreed with him.  Kirk seems like a pretty reckless dude and the opening scene is a good example of this.  The folks aboard the Enterprise were supposed to just observe this primitive civilization on some planet but Kirk ends up stealing their sacred scroll.  Of course the indigenous people chase after him throwing spears trying to kill him.  Why Kirk did that I have no idea.  He put himself and his crew at risk for no apparent reason.  I mean there’s a volcano that’s going to erupt threatening to decimate the planet but I don’t get what one has to do with the other. 

And throughout the whole film it seems like Kirk doesn’t really know what he’s doing.  Any bad situation he gets in he needs to be rescued by someone else (with the exception of the Starfleet Command attack scene) and that doesn’t seem quite right.  I get that Star Trek is about teamwork but this guy bumbles his way through shit and should’ve died a couple of times like the scene where he shoots himself from one spaceship to another or when he meets up with some Klingons.  This character kind of aggravated me.  I didn’t get the sense that he earned his captainship.  It was more like he’s supposed to be the captain because that’s just how the movie goes.  Wasn’t in love with Chris Pine’s performance either. 

By now the secret’s out that Khan is the bad guy so I don’t think there’s the need to put a spoiler alert up.  He’s nowhere near as fun as the original or as memorable.  This Khan is really somber and fairly broody.  The thing is he’s kinda hard to take seriously because he looks so young.  Actually with all of the characters being so young I couldn’t help but think of Muppet Babies or Tiny Toons where even the bad guys are scaled down to a smaller version.  And the major problem with that (especially with villains) is they end up losing all their presence and you don’t respect them very much because they’re a reduced form of what you know this character can and will grow up to be.  In an attempt to compensate for that the filmmakers made Khan a super human.  He can withstand blows, stun shots, spaceship crashes and oxygen free environments.  I don’t remember the original Khan being like this.  Did they totally change this character?  Anyway the guy that plays him, Benedict Cumberbatch (helluva name), is one foul looking motherfucker.  Is it just me or does anyone else think he has a bad looking CGI face?  I know this isn’t a nice thing to harp on but I found Cumberbatch so ugly that it was distracting.

The brightest spot in the cast however is Zachery Quinto as Spock.  He nailed the character.  And from what I was told Spock plays a bigger role in this picture than the last one which is good.  The filmmakers must’ve realized that Quinto is the best they got so it was only natural to give him more screen time. 

There were a couple of other notables like Karl Urban (Dredd) as Bones (Urban does more of a caricature by gritting his teeth all the time and being upset over every decision that everyone else makes), Simon Pegg as Scotty (who surprisingly wasn’t annoying at all and gives one of the better performances) and, even though I mentioned him already, Bruce Greenwood does fine here too.  Lastly I’ll give a brief nod to Peter Weller as Marcus (RoboCop, Dragon Eyes) who also did pretty well in this.  You know, I think I liked him second best after Quinto.

Moving on to the story, I couldn’t follow it.  I don’t know if it’s me and my lack of Star Trek familiarity but nothing was really explained well or at all.  How did Marcus come across Khan?  Why is Khan super human?  Why does Khan want to kill everyone?  What’s the deal with Marcus?  How is Marcus’ daughter involved in all of this?  And there are a million other questions I could ask.  All I got was that Khan is the villain and that Kirk and his crew are the good guys.  Other than that I don’t fuckin’ know what’s going on.

The other thing with the story is that folks were constantly making shit up as they went along.  Is that a Star Trek thing?  I thought the Star Trek universe was supposed to be grounded in rules and logic ‘n’ shit.  But here whenever there’s a problem there’s always some bullshit way out of it or it’s the opposite where someone will pull an obstacle out of their ass that our heroes suddenly need to overcome.  It was a little frustrating.

But setting all of the shit aside that I’ve talked about already, the thing that probably bothered me the most was how this film was shot.  The camera is constantly moving, lights are being shined into the camera in at least half the shots, everything is so bright, glowy and shiny, and almost every shot had some sort of CGI effect in it.  Ok fine that last one is a little nitpicky considering everything has CGI in it these days.  But the rest of that shit was so fucking irritating to sit through.  J.J., buddy you gotta put the goddamn camera down for a minute and cut way back on the lens flare.  It’s like the movie was shot through a filter of the sun.  If there was more restraint shown in the cinematography I really think I would’ve enjoyed this more.  It’s difficult to accept a picture when it’s physically demanding on the eyes.

Here’s some other miscellaneous shit I noticed:     

• There’s a lot of Earth in this.  Like a lot of scenes take place on Earth.  I thought Star Trek was supposed to be set almost entirely in outer space.

• Did anyone else think it was funny when Bruce Greenwood sits down in the bar decked out in his futuristic Starfleet uniform while everything else in that scene looks like it’s regular modern day including Kirk dressed in his bad boy leather jacket?

• It seemed out of character when Spock loses it at the end and wails on Khan.  The rest of the movie he’s thoughtful and reserved.  Maybe the filmmakers thought it would be cool to see Spock go crazy for a minute?  Well it felt out of place to me.

• (Semi-spoiler on this last bullet point) The main idea of Into Darkness is that it’s supposed to rhyme with Wrath of Khan.  Once I picked up on that I didn’t think they were going to go as far as having Kirk yell the famous “Khaaaaan!” line.  And they didn’t.  They had Spock do it instead.  Was I the only person that laughed out loud when that happened?

Alright, that’s enough of this shit.  To plainly and briefly sum up I thought this was pretty awful.  I had heard good things about the prebootquel so I didn’t go in looking for excuses to dislike Into Darkness.  In fact it was the opposite.  For a long while I was looking for shit to get invested in or to at least think was cool in some way or another.  But from the get go everything is kind of annoying and doesn’t make a lot of sense.  The plot is messy and shoehorned so it can line up with Wrath of Khan, Kirk doesn’t come off all that heroic and the camera moves relentlessly into and out of lights that are being shined directly in your face.  But Spock was cool.

One last addendum: as an outsider looking in this is not getting me on board with Star Trek.  Maybe this was made more for the diehard fans (actually, I’m pretty sure those are the only kind).  I know that The Next Generation TV show is supposed to be the best Star Trek shit out there and from what I gather it’s very unlike Into Darkness which is a schlocky big budget summer blockbuster action flick.  So it’ll be interesting to see what kind of reaction this one gets.   

Ok the absolute last addendum, I promise: not that I was terribly excited for the new Star Wars movie to begin with but now I have no faith that Abrams will craft something even halfway decent.  

Searching for Sugar Man

Not sure where to begin with this one.  I’ve been meaning to check out Sugar Man since it came out and then when it won best doc at the Oscars I made it a higher priority.  Turns out it’s just ok.

So the film focuses on this 70’s singer songwriter from Detroit called Rodriguez.  He made a couple of records but they went completely unnoticed in the States.  In South Africa though he caught on like wildfire selling half a million.  The thing is Rodriguez never knew about this until almost thirty years later.

What’s disappointing is that there isn’t a whole lot to the story.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a sweet tale of getting due credit and recognition.  And Rodriguez himself seems like a real nice and humble guy.  It’s just that there isn’t a lot of meat on the bone.  The guy put out some albums, they went nowhere, but today they’re hailed as forgotten masterpieces and that’s pretty much it.  No real twists and turns.  And Rodriguez is just a regular dude, not an eccentric or flamboyant character.

I thought the whole movie was going to be about trying to find this guy but that manhunt wrapped in the late 90’s when one of his daughters told folks where he was (still living in Detroit).  So this is all a recap doc and not an investigative one.  It seemed like things were going to get interesting when the filmmakers confronted the owner of the label Rodriguez was on.  Rodriguez saw very little, if any, royalties so I thought this was going to be a scandal and there was going to be a lot more to this story but the royalties angle goes nowhere.  I mean the searching part of Searching for Sugar Man is actually a fairly small portion of the whole picture.  It feels like more time is spent on his comeback and first visit to South Africa.

Now I want to make it clear that I’m not belittling Rodriguez or his fame in any part of the world.  It’s a cool story; it’s just not a very interesting cool story.  It doesn’t leave you thinking about it afterwards. 

What’s really strange is that this won an Oscar for best doc.  The other films it was going up against were about real serious shit like rape in the military, AIDS, Israeli counterterrorism and the West Bank.  I know the Academy is all politics but I wonder what the thought behind giving this category to Sugar Man was.  It kinda bugs me that The Central Park Five wasn’t even nominated and it’s a more well-crafted doc as well as a more important story to tell than Sugar Man. 

If you’re into late 60’s/early 70’s folk rock then you might enjoy this more than I did.  There are a lot of breaks where you’re just listening to Rodriguez’s music in here.  And the music has a lot to do with how you’ll view this picture.  I thought the songs were just ok and nothing particularly special so I didn’t care that much that this artist got lost in the shuffle.  If you’re like the folks in the film that absolutely love the tracks (they suck his dick really hard, calling him better than Dylan and say shit like he’s the best/most memorable artist they’ve ever encountered, etc.) then you’ll probably be into the mythology of Rodriguez and the poetic, philosophical lyrics he sings.           

You know, I wonder if the Sugar Man is really Bob Sugar from the Jerry Maguire movie.  They should make a sequel all about that guy.  I would see it, Jerry Maguire II: Sugarland.

Bug

Billy Friedkin directs this really wild and beautiful looking film.  When things start to escalate about half way through shit gets very out of hand.  Eventually we end up in an aluminum foil covered room with the only light source being bug zappers and our main characters are rambling incoherently about who the fuck knows what.

It can be a little goofy at times but always fun.  I think the less said the better.  Very cool and pretty out there.  Check it out.