Ten Statements About....THE REPLACEMENTS (2000)

"And when I grow up, I's gon' be a football player!"

"Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory lasts forever."

1) Keanu Reeves, quarterback. Yep. That's like me making a football movie now and casting Justin Beiber.

2) But then, I shouldn't be surprised, as this is one of those films where there are two or three 'characters' and a whole slew of types. This movie is technically all about Reeves' Shane Falco and Gene Hackman's Jimmy McGinty. Everyone else in the film, from the cheerleader romantic interest to the team owner right on down to the kicker is a broad stereotype given only the lightest strokes to convince us they're flesh and blood and not artifice and laziness.

3) The one who makes the best of his underwritten role is Orlando Jones' Clifford Franklin--but that's mainly because Jones is able to infuse the caricature he's given (He's a starstruck wide receiver--and he can't catch! Hilarity!) with the same sort of manic energy that made him a standout on Mad TV. He becomes one of the stars of the film not because of the way Franklin is written, but because what he bring to the table is infectious.

"It's not so bad...in ten years, you'll be the A-List Director of
Iron Man, and I'll be The Lizard."

4)...and to be fair, there are other actors who try...really try...to overcome their underwritten roles, and there are moments when they succeed--like when Faison Love and Michael Taliferro do the little football dance when they're hired--but most of the time they fail. It's kinda painful seeing decent actors like Troy Winbush and Jon Favreau struggle to make a silk purse with the sow's ears they've been given.

5) The script by Vince McKewin tackles the unenviable task of trying to make scabs crossing a picket line the heroes by overcompensating. Thus, all the striking players are played so broadly evil (especially Brett Cullen's Eddie Martel) that they're unbelievable cartoons.

6) And speaking of Martel, we keep hearing about how he's one of the best quarterbacks in the league, and how he won two Super Bowl Rings...and yet, when we see him play, he's a total incompetent. I have to wonder if that's because they wanted to make Falco look better than he is, or if it's just that Howard Deutch doesn't know shit about football.

7) You know what else this is? This is one of those films where plot developments just happen because they have to happen, which creates strange disconnect like, let's say, Martel jeering Falco about his relationship with Brooke Langton's Annabelle when there's no way he could have known about it, or the way the strike is proclaimed over with no warning halfway through the climatic game, or the way Rhys Ifan's Nigel understands that the appearance of three generic thugs in the stands means he has to throw the game, or...

You get the idea.

8) It is so fascinating watching Howard Deutch trying to film convincing football scenes when it's obvious he doesn't know anything about football--and it's fascinating and funny to realize Deutch was working with an actual football coach as a consultant for those scenes.

Cheerleaders that are strippers--COMEDY GOLD!

9) You know what else this is? This is one of those films that has so little confidence in its audience that it stacks the deck for every major development until said audience drowns in its intentions. Thus, when Falco and Annabelle finally get to acknowledge they want each other, we not only get a scene of them looking at each other longing ending in a deep kiss, we get The Police's 'Every Breath You Take' on the soundtrack and John Madden doing a play-by-play that is supposed to 'ironically' mirror the romantic action. It's this sort of overkill--especially when it comes to how the film utilizes its pop music soundtrack--that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

10) And then there's that weird ending voiceover Hackman gives at the end about the replacement players weren't going to get a sneaker endorsement or anything, but their participation in greatness would stick with them. It seems arbitrary (to be honest, it seems like it was added on after a test screening) and intrusive when the closing montage should have been sufficient to close the book on this film.

(and let's not forget that in the real world, a couple of these players would get signed by the NFL, much as refugees from the XFL and Arena Football found spots with teams)

Overall...This is a prime example of Film-As-Product, something so forced and broad that there's no room for audience insight or interpretation. Every time I watch it, I wonder why I still enjoy it...but I do.

I guess sometimes you want a piece of product as a switch up from all the actual, you know, movies you usually ingest.

Ten Statements About....BLADE RUNNNER--The Final Cut (1982)

Ford's character owes more to Sam Spade than Flash
Gordon....

"Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More Human Than Human is our motto. Rachel is an experiment, nothing more."

1) Just as Alien was an old dark house horror film, it's obvious that Ridley Scott intended this film to be a film noir detective thriller, and everyone acts accordingly, right down to how pretty much everyone smokes and drinks like their lives depended on it. I particularly like the way production designer Lawrence J. Paull manages to find a way to make the costumes and sets a true melding of futurist and 40's esthetic.

2) There literally isn't a bad performance in the film's 117 minute running time. Even Sean Young. Yes, she's skittish and hesitant like a baby deer and seems a bit emotionally flat--but that's the character. All the identified replicants have broad, child-like personalities that makes them seem off from the identified humans (save Sebastian, but he's set apart by his disease), so in the context, Young's performance works.

3) And here's something I didn't notice until this viewing--there are a number of moments with Young's Rachel, particularly in the major scene she shares with Deckard at the halfway mark, where Scott switches to a Steadicam. Those moments, mainly when it involves Rachel in close-up, display a very subtle unsteadiness not to the insane shakey-cam levels we've experienced recently, but almost subliminally noticable. These shots seem to emphasize Rachel's skittishness as she leaves the sheltered world of Tyrell and enters Deckard.

Damn...they don't make women like her anymore...

4) One of the reasons this film works so well is that outside of Harrison Ford (and even Ford is still in the early stages of his big style stardom), none of the actors are particularly well-known. Even Brion James, who probably had the biggest cv at this point amongst the main players, was known for secondary heavy roles. This creates a veracity that feeds into our accepting the world painted here whole.

5) I miss actresses like Joanna Cassidy, who had an unselfconsciousness about their bodies. There's really no doubt that it's all her in that scene where Dekard runs down Zora, and she is spectacular.

6) I find it fascinating how the Tyrell and Sebastian suss out what Roy and Priss are quickly, and respond not with the revulsion you'd get from Deckard's debriefing scene, but a pleased wonder. I particularly find Tyrell's discussion with Roy, explaining how they've tried a number of things to cure the short lifespan, fascinating...the fact that he argues how Roy should embrace the brevity of his life displays a certain depth corporate questionable types wouldn't display in the many imitators afterwards.

7) The biggest difference between this version and the theatrical one is, of course, the lack of Ford's voiceover. The film is still understandable, as the plot is pretty straightforward and linear...however (and here comes some heresy) the voiceover might not be out of place. This is for almost an hour and thirty minutes a film noir, where the voiceover is a standard trope. However....

His origins may be Frankenstien, but make no mistake--
Roy Batty is the big bad wolf.

8) There's a decided, but not jarring, shift in the film from the moment Deckard enters the Bradbury Hotel from film noir to a horror film. I'd say it becomes an old style horror movie, with Priss and Roy literally playing monster in stalking and trying to kill Deckard. Hell, Roy's howling as he runs around naked save for black biker shorts makes it explicit that this last replicant has become a modern day Wolf Man hunting the prey that seeks to end the life it wants to extend.

9) It's been so long since I've seen this film that it's a shock seeing William Sanderson in such a gentle, repressed role. First off because he looks so young save for the shots where we see all the lines in his face, but secondly because we're so used to Sanderson being hard-asses and assholes. Seeing him play this pathetic figure so starved for human contact that he lets his own death in is surprising.

10) One of my favorite things in this film as a whole? The lighting. Sometimes using natural light, sometimes using color in key ways....and frequently taking advantage of the sweeping spots that seem to permeate the city...it once again gives us another element that makes the film seem alien, but also firmly in a territory we're familiar with.

Overall...a film that I had to grow up a little to appreciate (I actually walked out on it on opening day in 1982 at the ninety minute mark, thinking it boring and plodding), this is another perfect storm of a film, where all the disparate parts come to together to create something unique and wondrous. And hell, it's the only film you can say helped launch an entire literary sub-genre in cyberpunk. Absolutely essential viewing.

Ten Statements About....INVISIBLE INVADERS (1959)

"So I stand here with this test tube and...wait, what are you
doing with that stick of TNT?"

"Long ago we learned to change the molecular structure of our bodies. You cannot see us. I am using this dead man's body so that I can communicate with you."

1) You really can tell the kind of film you've decided to invest your time in when, after we've sat through a 'Voice-O'-Doom' announcer setting the tone, we get a shot of John Carridane appearing all scientist-y...and then John Carradine blows up.

2) ...except that after the film sets up the plot--there are these invaders kinda hanging out on the moon, they're invisible to the human eye, they're coming to possess our dead and wipe us out if we don't surrender--it gets really, really dark. Hell, at points it almost becomes a post-apocalyptic tale.

3) Was John Carradine the kind of guy who just needed to work constantly? I ask this because I do think his propensity to appear in pretty much any film that would have him did his reputation wrong, which is a pity because Carradine is very good as an old school actor. In this film, he pretty much has one scene as the alien-possessed scientist who gives his colleague Dr. Penner (melodramatically assayed by Philip Tonge) the initial warning...and all I could think of is how much more of him I wanted to see of him. Carradine works this one scene and makes the aliens seem rather scary.

4) You positively have to give director Edward L. Cahn credit. This film had to have been made for a budget of pretty much pocket lint and yet through prodigious use of stock footage and narration and repeating key scenes multiple times (in one case superimposing an alien/zombie hybrid horde coming over a hill with stock footage to give greater weight to the narrator's insistence that the Earth has been hobbled by a wave of sabotage attacks) gives it a little more scope than it has the right to have.

"yep...I'm gonna rock your mini-van lovin' world..."

5) That being said, some of the stock footage use comes off as unintentionally hilarious--like when the aliens choose to give their second warning to the world, they do so at a semi-pro hockey game in Syracuse. Good job getting all of the world to pay attention to you there...

6) Boy, John Agar sure is smooth when it comes to picking up matronly daughters of overacting scientists during the zombie apocalypse. He'd be a real MiLF killer if he was alive for the coming one...

7) I love how the fact that no one believes that Dr. Penner has met an alien zombie promising invasion, and that is the lead story in every paper we see. Was this the slowest news day ever?.

"Booo!  I's da Michelin Monsta!"

8) Good idea making the aliens invisible, since our one glimpse of what they look like at the end makes us think we were going to be dominated by a race of Michelin Tire Men.

9) I suspect that this is one of the earliest examples of a Horror Film Disguised As A Science Fiction Film, since after the twenty minute mark this almost comes off as a dry-run for Night of The Living Dead, with a group of survivors holed up in a secure place while zombies sort of mill around outside being menacing.

10) Make no bones about this--the science part of this science fiction film, from its contention that the moon has been inhabited by invisible alien for thousand of years to the solution for killing the aliens (sonics!) is dubious at best...thus my 'Horror Film Disguised As A Science Fiction Film' contention.

Overall...at turns hilarious and pretty damn dark, this is a rather interesting curiosity both as a harbinger of the zombie-crazed firmament to come and as an example of how to approach micro-budgeted genre filmmaking.

Ten Statements About....THE AVENGERS (1998)

NO!  No kissing!  You're supposed to be British!

"A man with an umbrella is a man praying for rain."

"And a man without one in a fool. Never trust the weather, Sir August."

1) Ralph Fiennes was born to play a modern John Steed. From the first moment's walk through the British Village O' Danger to the last scene's champagne toast, Fiennes channels the same sort of calm and controlled charm that Patrick MacNee exemplified in the television series.

2) However, Uma Thurman is...not very good. It's obvious she's trying hard to capture the same sort of sophisticated sex appeal (Or 'man appeal,' which is how Emma Peel got her name), but we never get anything more than the sense that she's a girl playing dress up. Sure, she looks swell in some of the outfits, and there is a degree of chemistry between her and Fiennes, but she never clicks as Emma. One wonders if originally cast Nicole Kidman could have done better.

3) There are two fundamental problems with the film as a whole--and they're both sort of clashing with each other. Primarily, there is the fact that this is a film based on a property whose sole attraction to many of its fans is its inherent Britishness...and yet, distinctly American tropes are being imposed on this very British thing. Thus, the whole 'there's a mole in The Ministry' subplot and, more importantly, the overt romance between Steed and Peel feels very, very out of place. Hell, the big kiss in Act Three practically screams out how wrong it is in the context of what came before it.

4) But arguably a bigger problem is that director Jeremiah S. Chechik obviously loves the television series a lot--so much so that he painstakingly retains so many of the quirky elements of the series, not realizing that what we're able to accept in forty-five minute doses (street scenes totally devoid of people; a determination not to place the locations in any sort of context save for when absolutely necessary; set pieces for no reason except that they're set pieces) can seem strange and bizarre in a ninety-minute dose. In making the film seem like an episode of the regular series writ large, Chechik ends up making the film impenetrable to anyone not intimately familiar with the source material.

5) Wow...you cast Eddie Izzard, an incredibly talented comedic actor with a wonderful voice...and you stick him in a role that maybe amounts to ten minutes and one line (said line being 'Oh, Fuck')? Really, movie? Really?

"I Keel You!  I Keel You!"

6) The story goes that Chechik's original cut was two hours and change, and Warner Brothers insisted that he cut the film down to its extant 88 minutes. I do have to wonder if that extreme editing job is the reason the film is riddled with continuity problems where characters appear and disappear at will.

7) I know a lot of people loathe Sean Connery's turn as main villain Sir August deWynther...I rather like him. It's obvious that Connery is having a ball playing a mad scientist who thinks nothing of dressing his employees up in teddy bear outfits. I just wish they concentrated him as a meteorologist and not decided to make him an all-purpose crazy scientist who also cloned Emma Peel as an act of obsession, as that element just muddies the water.

"All those in favor of recategorizing Fuzzy Wuzzy as
not Fuzzy say 'Aye."

8) It's odd that Chechik included the element of Mother and Father, who were more integral to the series' last season, features of the at the time very, very inexperienced Linda Thorson as Tara King (Yes, I know Mother was introduced in the last episode of the Emma Peel run, but that episode was pretty much a pilot for the King run, so....). Yes, I understand that it was so we could have Father be a traitor in one of those uniquely American elements I was talking about, but it still comes off as odd.

9) You gotta give Chechik credit for finding a way to give us a Patrick MacNee cameo in such a way that he interacts with Fiennis while not overshadowing him. Hell, MacNee's scene as Colonel Jones is one of those elements that feels the most like the television series.

10) Maybe because of the aforementioned editing job, there are long stretches where the individual scenes themselves work in and of themselves, but they make no sense narratively when strung together.

Overall...a real mess that, truth be told, I still find pretty entertaining at times...only to be brought down by some of the choices made that were obviously designed to net Warner Brothers a big budget franchise. Pity we'll never know whether to put the blame at the feet of Chechik or the producers....

Ten Statements About....VERONICA MARS SEASON TWO, EPISODE FIVE 'Blast From The Past' (2005)

Admittedly, a chicken outfit is not involved in any of
the fantasies I have about Kristen Bell.

"I'll need an orchid wristlet, preferably in the fushia family, a Rolls Royce limo, and some Kane Software stationary."
"Seriously? Stationary? What for?"

"You're here for your looks. Why don't you leave the heavy thinking to me, sugarpants?"

1) We start a couple of minutes after last episode ended, with Wallace confronting his mother about Nathan. This storyline is coming to a head pretty rapidly, and will result in Wallace disappearing for a stretch only to return in a diminshed role, and Alicia disappearing altogether. However...

2) this is the first 'let's get Veronica and Jackie to bond' episode...and if you've been following my journey through the show, you'll know how much I'm down on that. To be fair, there is another one of these episodes that's a little more effective down the line, and the neat little inversion (Jackie wants to hire Veronica to prove her friend Cora didn't do it in spite of all the evidence, but this outing just doesn't quite rid us of Jackie-stank to work.

This episode is a showcase for Percy Daggs...just in time for
him to be sent away for a while...

3) Boy, Percy Daggs got some pipes on him...and he chooses to rebuke his dad with Motown!

4) You know what I find really, really strange? It's established very early on that this is all taking place during the days leading up to Homecoming--and yet the Bus Crash Overarc is not mentioned at all. It does get brought up elsewhere (as we'll get to in Point 5), but the fact that it doesn't come up during this rather important part of the school year is odd; especially since it could've been solved with a single line of dialogue claiming the Dance is in memory of the Bus Crash dead, or that some students are questioning holding it. A strange misstep for a script crew that's usually spot on.

5) The moment where Veronica listens in to a phone message left by one of The Bus Crash Dead is truly horrifying...and Kristen Bell sells it, and sells it well..

6) I like how director Harry Winer handles Veronica's bugging of Lamb...when she fast forwards through the recording, we cut to the squadroom in fast motion...until, of course, we're hit with the revelation of Terence Cook's secret shame.

7) And here's why this episode does not succeed in getting us more on Jackie's side...by having her get some digs at Veronica through the psychic, she comes off as even more petty and nasty than we've been assuming up to this point...especially given how Veronica has spent quite some time helping her out. Being played by Tessa Thompson doesn't help endear her much, either...

"...and then our growing closer will be stunted by my doing
something petty against you...it's to laugh, right?"

8) Now here's why I am so going to miss Percy Daggs when he is demoted to secondary sidekick soon...there is a scene here where he confronts Veronica and basically gets her dead to rights. It's a brilliantly written scene, all the more so because Wallace is correct in his assessment about the situation. But it would not have worked if Daggs wasn't able to give it the emotional heft it needed. Hell, the contrasting of how he speaks to Veronica, with passion and anger, to the way he speaks to Jackie in the next scene, drives home how close these two characters are.

9) We get another example of Enrico Colantoni's physical acting--the anguish on his face after hearing the phone message speaks volumes about how conflicted he is about telling Veronica he won't use the Bus Crash as leverage to win the election.

10) If you thought wasting time with a Dandy Warhol was a good idea, keep an eye out for the band at Homecoming. That's The Faders, an all-girl group who had the first in a series of...let me check...one hit, getting a rather generous chunk of air time.

Overall...this episode could have been a disaster, but it is salvaged by the reintroduction of the Overarc in the back end. There's some truly choice elements in here, so try to ignore the screechy performance by Erica Gimpel, the hamhanded handling of the Nathan Cook storyline and other missteps and enjoy the diamonds in this pile of chiffon.

Ten Statements About....IT CAME FROM...SOMEWHERE ELSE CHAPTER III (1988)

A visual representation of how I felt watching this movie...

"Your arm is gone!"

"It happens on these country roads. Just proceed home, little minors."

1) You ever gone to a party at a friend's house, and your friend and his pals spend the whole night telling these jokes that make no sense to you, but those others find so hilarious they're rolling on the floor laughing?

That's this movie.

2) I...think I understand the rationale behind this black and white film switching to color during its laughable gore sequences. It's just that said switches don't have the impact I suspect the filmmakers intended it to have. The same goes for the redheaded woman stripping in the middle of the government office.

3) So you think you've earned the right to do a take-off on Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, movie? I hope the ghost of Kubrick has been paying you nightly visits to disavow you of that belief.

Later in life, Joe Don Baker let himself go badly and became
convinced he was Asian...

4) You know, just dressing a character up to resemble Mr. Rogers or Gilligan and letting that be the joke (at least in the later; the former does have another 'gag' attached to him) isn't enough.

5) Look, I know this is an amateur production pretty much populated by friends and family of the filmmakers (one of the reasons why I'm not going to go into the acting much), but at least have the decency to have an actual story to tell with a beginning, a middle and an end. If you can't be bothered to do that, make this a sketch comedy film.

6) You can intentionally emulate a bad film and produce a good film...but you have to put thought into giving the audience something to make them look beyond the badness of the surface. These filmmakers seem to think the emulation is joke enough. And speaking of which...

7) If you're actually going to recreate a 50's science fiction film, you need to go all in and not include all the foul language. It just pulls the audience (I imagine there were three of them...and a dog) out of the sense that they're watching some lost B movie.

8) Maybe, but maybe, this film could have benefited from streamlining all the craziness, thus giving the 'story' more focus. Throwing in a spacecraft that never actually lands, spontaneous human combustion, nuclear waste, kung fu fighters, an improbably indestructible Mr. Rogers clone and so much more just muddies--and confuses--the waters.



This had nothing to do with this film, but it did come up
when I looked for film stills on Google and both the girl and
the horse headed goof is better looking than anyone in
the film, so...



9) Oh, and this movie is concrete proof that everything is not made better with ninjas. Sometimes, it remains crap, even with ninjas added.

10) At least it's only an hour and ten minutes...even if that hour and ten minutes feels like an ten hours and one minute.

Overall...a prime example of how a cult film can not be consciously created, this is a sad, sad little movie that shows no potential of being anything other than a bunch of kids trying to put on a show in a typically hamfisted way.

Ten Statements About....BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997)

Boy, those attempts to make the NHL appeal to new
viewers have gotten...weird.

"In the universe, there is only one constant...everything freezes."

1) The best way--some would say the only way--to view this movie is by accepting that this is a film that has surrendered itself so totally to the marketing department that it has ceased to have any connection to character, place or reality. This film is not so much telling us a story but stringing a long succession of scenes together in the hope of getting us to buy stuff.

2) Poor George Clooney, cast at the last minute, is obviously overtired throughout the film, sporting a perpetual five o'clock shadow. Yes, he tries very hard to keep up his energy, but he fails to give us anything more than a Batman who seems to have hit the vicodin a lil' too hard. That being said....

3) His best moments, and the best moments in the film, are the ones between him and Michael Gough as Alfred. There's a genuine connection between the two, so much so that you believe wholeheartedly that this is not employer and employee, but father than son. It is the through line between the two that provides what little grounding this film has...at least until the whole 'Oh, noes, I gots da McGregor disease' development drops Alfred from the second half of the film.

In her off-time, Alicia Silverstone looks for an earlier
version of the script that actually makes sense while
pretending to have a stroke...

4) Here's something heretical--yes, Arnold Schwarzeneggar's incessant ice puns do detract from the movie, but there are some lines of dialogue that Mr. Freeze has that actually make sense and would have been effective if, you know, it wasn't being muttered by a guy with a thick Austrian accent who looks so much bigger than the Clooney Batman that he wouldn't need a suit of armor designed for a Broadway musical to beat his ass. It's those blink-and-you-miss-it brief moment that make me think that yes, at one point, there was a movie that would have been entertaining.

5) Movie, just because you can drag Vendela and Viveca A. Fox and Coolio into your orbit for a few moments in nothing roles doesn't mean you should have.

6) And while we're on the subject, movie...when Elizabeth Sanders' Gossip Gerty and the Neon Skull Gang have both more screen time and more lines of dialogue than Commisioner Gordon and Chief O'Hara, you're very severely flawed.

7) I'm absolutely convinced that of all the people involved in this movie, Uma Thurman was the only one who realized how far down a hole this film was falling and threw all caution to the wind. It's the only way I can explain how she chose to play Poison Ivy as Mae West.

8) You know what the problem is with Alicia Silverstone in this movie? It's that, as an actress, she seems incapable of being serious without doing these weird gurning movements with her face. Watching her emote as Barbara Gordon is like watching a claymation version of her; between the wiggling of her eyebrows and the chewing of her lips from side to side, she comes off as a grotesque.

"You know, in a previous incarnation, I was actually
articulate..."

9) Good job taking Bane, a character who is even more overtly the dark mirror of the Batman, someone whose intelligence and strength embody the nature to Batman's nuture, and turning him into a monosyllabic bull in a china shop.

No, wait. NO IT ISN'T.

10) That total lack of reality I cited in statement one extends to this version of Gotham, which simply is a city that Can Not Possibly Exist. There is no sense of place, just a bunch of crazy items (statues that hold buildings up miles over the street! Insane asylums that have cages up on bridges over the ocean! Factories that are condemned yet still have vats of non-decayed, still soft ice cream out in the open air!) that facilitates set pieces.

Overall...this is not the Worst Movie Ever. It's not even The Worst Superhero Movie Ever (anyone who lobs that charge at this film hasn't seen, among other things, Pumaman or Ghost Rider--yes, Munn, I said it). What it is is a gigantic mess of ulterior motives, bad decisions and miscues drawn together in what has to be a perfect storm of nonsense. Could be worth watching as an example of a franchise crashing down under its own weight.