The Gallows generic, visually dynamic

Posted on July 13, 2015 by reelentropy

The Gallows also relies on a lot of the same stage-magic gimmicks with people moving like ninjas in long shots to scare viewers, but they do a lot of cheating with the hangman ghost flickering in and out with static. It’s a shortcut, but it’s at least a little kind of impressive how steady the camera is for these shots. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

The Gallows is generic found-footage horror, but in the end it’s quite a likable addition to the endlessly self-replicating subgenre.

The film opens with the original 1993 Beatrice High School production of “The Gallows,” which ends tragically when Charlie Grimille (Jesse Cross), playing the lead after another player backed out, is accidentally hanged for real. The film then cuts to 2013, in which a morbid 20th anniversary showing is being put on starring Reese Houser (Reese Mishler), a football star and hopelessly poor actor only doing it to impress the female lead, Pfeifer Ross (Pfeifer Brown). When they discover a backstage door that doesn’t lock, cameraman and fellow football star Ryan Shoos (Ryan Shoos) convinces his girlfriend, Cassidy Spilker (Cassidy Gifford), and Houser to sneak in and take down the set so that Houser can get more time to practice his lines without disappointing Ross, but the obviously haunted school is obviously haunted, and obvious haunting shenanigans ensue.

The set design in this movie is absolutely fantastic. There are nooses everywhere in this school, whether or not they are actual nooses. The best example is one of the first, when the gang is trapped backstage and being lead down a dark hall to a plot point. Their light can’t pierce all the way down the hall, and as they walk slowly forward, a power tube running straight down the ceiling is the only prominent shape in the frame. The light catches on a break in the tube, giving the entire thing the appearance of a dimly lit noose awaiting the group in the distance for a split second.

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ILLUMINATI CONFIRMED

Posted on July 13, 2015 by reelentropy

Minions was enjoyable enough. It was exactly what everyone expected it to be — a two-hour romp with your favorite characters from Despicable Me, but none of the plot or understandable dialogue. For better or worse. Photos courtesy Universal Pictures.

There’s been a lot of noise about the McDonald’s Happy Meal toys cursing, exposing children to language that their virgin ears just shouldn’t hear. What they’re really saying is far more sinister.

The toys in question are tied in to the movie Minions, a spin-off from the Despicable Me franchise. The movie chronicles their passage from the dawn of time to their meeting of Gru (Steve Carell), their master in the first movies. After millenia of wandering the earth, inadvertetly killing every master they attach to, the minions are in self-imposed exile in the antarctic, but without a master, they fall into a clan-wide depression. Three — THREE — minions, Kevin, Stuart and Bob (Pierre Coffin, who also co-directs with Kyle Balda) venture to America to work for Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock), a legendary thief, who can’t be bothered to steal the Crown Jewels herself and sends the minions to do it for her. The plan backfires when Bob withdraws Excalibur from the stone and becomes the rightful king of England.

It is important to note that while the other minions have two eyes, Bob, the king, has one. You know what else has one eye?

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New stripping movie all talk, no strip

Posted on July 4, 2015 by reelentropy

In the climax, Mike (Channing Tatum) and this other random guy they picked up along the way (Michael Strahan) do this bit where they each give a lapdance on the opposite sides of an empty mirror frame, performing the exact same moves in a lengthy, highly choreographed dance. Impressive, with someone you met a day ago and never talked with onscreen. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

In the title Magic Mike XXL, the XXL is supposed to mean extra extra large, implicitly referring to the lead character’s penis. However, at an astounding 130 minutes, about 10 of which is stripping and about a million of which is lame, stiff dialogue scenes, it’d be more accurate if it stood for extra extra long.

The sequel to the 2012 hit, ostensibly about Channing Tatum’s life as a stripper before he achieved stardom, isn’t much of a sequel, with none of the four principle secondary characters returning. Characters like Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello) and Tarzan (Kevin Nash), background characters who the first movie left undeveloped, take center stage. As such, this movie is easier to watch and much better when viewed as its own independent story, which coincidentally has characters that feel really underdeveloped.

Three years after “Magic” Mike Martingano (Tatum) left the drug-filled, sex-crazed dead end world of stripping to pursue his passion, furniture sales, he gets a call from Tarzan recruiting him on a last ride to the stripping convention in Myrtle Beach. On the way, the estranged Martingano rekindles relationships with his old colleagues, and they all face private demons related to loneliness and growing old.

Then, suddenly, Donald Glover!

First thing’s first — ladies, you will be disappointed. Magic Mike XXL is a movie about stripping the same way Star Wars is a movie about awarding medals. It all happens at the end after a bunch of other stuff you don’t necessarily care about that doesn’t connect with the stripping scenes in any way. It’ll all be on Youtube soon. If abs are the reason you want to see this movie you absolutely should not go.

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Terminator series no longer trying at this point

Posted on July 4, 2015 by reelentropy

So, Matt Smith is in this as the physical embodiment of Skynet — a celebrated terminator, essentially — and he fights with John Connor’s group to try and capture the time machine before they can send the first Arnold Schwarzenegger back. How did he get there? Skynet communicates as a hologram later and that hologram looks like Matt Smith, so it’s clearly a preferred form of the program and not a real person who was turned into a terminator like John Connor was. Did they hit the green light on a highly sensitive military operation with this guy nobody knew? Had he already infiltrated the resistance without being noticed like every other terminator? If so, why didn’t he just waste everybody before they won? What’s going on here? Photos courtesy Paramount Pictures.

After fans refused to take to Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003, the series was to be rebooted into a new trilogy for a new generation with 2009’s Terminator Salvation. When fans didn’t take to that either, it was rebooted again into Terminator Genisys, which is also advertised and clearly thought of as part one of a trilogy. The Independence Day release is already bombing, and without a doubt, another reboot that will also be supposedly part one of a trilogy will hit sometime in the early ’20s.

Terminator Genisys branches off from the original movie’s timeline, sending Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to 1984 to protect a very different Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), one who had already been attacked by machines from the future years earlier and had been saved by her own personal terminator, “Pops” (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Pops had been sent back by parties unknown to protect Connor from an as-yet unheard of 1973 attack, and they’d been planning to prevent Skynet from causing the apocalyptic world Reese grew up in by stopping the scheduled nuclear apocalypse in 1997. However, as Reese is traveling to 1984, he sees an alternate past, one that he never lived through, which tells him Skynet pushed its timetable back to 2017, for some reason. After the trio fight off the T-800 — and the T-1000, which is also in 1984, again without explanation — they travel to 2017 to stop Skynet, but are faced with a foe they weren’t prepared for.

Wait, they spoiled that? Wow, what a bunch of idiots — it’s John Connor (Jason Clarke). Sarah’s son and legendary leader of the resistance has been turned into a terminator by this new, weird flesh-infecting virus Skynet developed. They also changed it to where he wrote the Skynet program himself and nobody else could understand it, despite it being achieved 20 years earlier when he was just a little kid in previous movies, and to where they’re already playing with time machines and that liquid metal stuff pre-apocalypse.

OK, so this plot is really half-baked and there are a ton of things that are distracting and wrong with it, and we’re going to go through all of them because fuck this movie.

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A less chaotic state: 1984’s Terminator

Posted on June 30, 2015 by reelentropy

Photo courtesy Orion Pictures.

The 1980s were a bit of a hey day for action stars. Over the course of the ’90s, blockbuster appeal transitioned to Independence Day-type mass disaster movies, and when action movies came back to the top of the mountain over the course of the ’00s, it was in the form of masked marvels like Spider-man and Iron Man whose stars never needed to be involved in the action at all. Both of these genres require less from their leads in the way of fighting and glistening musculature and more in the way of drama and character acting. The modern superstar is someone like Will Smith or Robert Downey Jr., actors who draw people in with their sharp delivery and raw emotion, guys who wouldn’t be out of place doing Shakespeare. There wasn’t any place for Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom people really couldn’t understand even when they did take a witticism heavy script.

The rise in dramatically capable blockbusters coincided with a decline in sequel quality. Back when all people wanted to see was Stallone kicking ass, fourth and fifth sequels weren’t a stretch because it wasn’t about continuing a plot, it was about continuing and expanding on stunts and aesthetics. Taking the same crew and sticking them in a completely different setting, like the comedy group that stayed mostly together for Ghostbusters, Caddyshack and Animal House is still a better option, but it didn’t make much of a difference at the time. With modern action series, it does. Some, like Mad Max and The Fast and the Furious, have adjusted well to this new paradigm and have managed to spin stories for several movies without getting too old, while others, like The Matrix, crashed and burned when faced with the task of producing sequels that brought back more than just the action.

The Terminator didn’t do anything to change or start or impact any of this, but it exists at a unique and uncomfortable intersection of these two dynamics.

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