"That's my uncle. He's the one who lifts things." -- Jessica. 1 hour ago
"Nobody is too smart. Except Superman if he was alive." -- Jessica. 1 hour ago
"Don't litter! That's not how you help the earth!" -- Jessica. 1 hour ago
Nothing to say in face of real tragedy. Keeping myself sane by revisiting classic quotations from my five-year-old niece. 1 hour ago
RT @DiaboliqueMag: Diabolique Discussion! Werewolves, Zombies and Vampires made their way to TV, so what subgenre do you want to see next o… 13 hours ago
@DiaboliqueMag I have to wonder if there is tween romance to be mined in the evil ventriloquist dummy genre. 13 hours ago
If you were disappointed in STAR TREK, I'm sorry, but at least now you know how I felt when Justin Timberlake was in a Clint Eastwood movie. 14 hours ago
Check out this trailer to GO GOA GONE, which is the first Indian stoner comedy I’ve ever heard about. It’s a KUMAR & KUMAR, if you will.
Hey, it’s also a zombie movie! I know, I know. Too many zombie things. But I don’t know if I agree with that sentiment. What are zombies? Zombies are dead people. If you think you’re tired of zombies, you’re kind of saying you’re tired of people. And what kind of misanthrope is tired of people? Now, if you mean you’re tired of shitty zombie stuff, I’m with you brother. I’ve been burned worse than anybody.
That’s why I’m liking this new wave of international zombie comedies. It probably began with SHAUN OF THE DEAD. I’m not the universe’s biggest fan of that movie but I love how it’s been inspiring other countries to offer up their own renditions. The cult success of SHAUN OF THE DEAD begat the cult success of ZOMBIELAND, and now we’re off and running. Norway has DEAD SNOW. New Zealand has BLACK SHEEP. Japan has BIG TITS ZOMBIE. (Oh, Japan.) After many decades of no horror movies at all, Cuba came out swinging last year with JUAN OF THE DEAD, a really enjoyable zombie flick which I really need to write about one of these days.
GO GOA GONE, the first of its kind out of India. Is it any good? Who the hell knows? Will I check it out? Who the hell would doubt it?
“There are no atheists in foxholes,” as the old saying goes. But what about in wolves’ dens? It’s a question I never knew I had. Just one of many reasons why THE GREY, the new thriller from co-writer/director Joe Carnahan, is such an uncommon and splendid achievement is that it asks (and answers) that question.
I had been sold on this movie from the minute I was made aware that it was to be a survival drama where the great actor Liam Neeson faces off against a pack of hungry wolves. “Herman Melville meets Jack London meets Hemingway meets wolves meets Liam Neeson’s fists.” That movie would have been just fine. But this movie is twice as good. It’s got all the thrills and chills you could hope and expect out of that brilliantly direct premise — but on top of that, THE GREYis one of the more profound, dynamic, and uncompromising illustrations of existentialism I have seen on a movie screen in quite a while. This film goes deep — like “straight to the bone, through the ribcage, all the way through to the soul” deep.
For those of us who have been starving for brutal, bruising, uncompromising American cinema, THE GREY is proof of life.
THE GREY marked its territory in my number one spot all the way back in January of 2012, and fiercely warded off all comers with teeth bared. I love all the movies in my top ten and there are plenty still which almost made the list, but THE GREY is the one I really took to heart. For one thing, I am ready to go to the mat on the argument that the storytelling and filmmaking in THE GREY is at least as exemplary as any of the year’s more award-friendly critical darlings.
The score by Marc Streitenfeld is gorgeous and heartbreaking. The cinematography by Masanobu Takayanagi is crisply delineated and winter-clear. The script by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers & Joe Carnahan is perfectly-paced and indelible. And Joe Carnahan’s direction is world-class. I was a huge fan of Carnahan’s movie NARC, and I think his SMOKIN’ ACES and THE A-TEAM, while surely on the cartoony side of the action-movie spectrum, show action chops on par with the best of ‘em. I have been following and enjoying his work for a long time, but THE GREY makes Carnahan a canon filmmaker in my eyes.
I was lucky enough to see THE GREY a month early, so I could watch with fascination as it was received by the public. Considering how thoughtful a film it is, all the simplistic and reductive “Liam Neeson punches wolves!” jokes were almost obscene. Some of the marketing did seem eager to group THE GREY alongside the Liam Neeson action-thrillers of the last few years, and obviously this is a different thing entirely. Interestingly, some religious groups embraced the movie, although I’m not sure it’s saying what they may want it to be saying. And some environmental groups were bothered by the portrayal of the wolves, which is a well-intentioned complaint but misses the point. First of all, Liam Neeson’s character views the wolves above all with a kind of respect. But more importantly: The same way FLIGHT isn’t really about a plane, THE GREY isn’t exactly about the wolves.
Think about the title. Did you look at the wolves in that movie? Didn’t look all that gray to me. They looked almost black. They blended in and out of that night with ease. These aren’t real-world wolves. These are something else. The wolves in THE GREY are an engine, relentlessly forcing the sands through the hourglass. In my reading of the title, “The Grey” refers to that space between existence and non-existence, between the white of snow and the black of death. No, this isn’t a movie about wolves. This is a movie about mortality.
Many fans of the movie have noted how THE GREY structurally resembles a typically horror movie, as the cast of characters are gradually winnowed away, and maybe that’s true, but in that case I’ve never seen a horror movie that treats the ranks of the culled with such care. Most of the characters who die in THE GREY get sent out on a moment of dignity, even grace, or at least as much as can be mustered. (There is one major exception, maybe the most upsetting death in the entire film, but that is the one that prompts the film’s most important emotional moment, so it’s not much of an exception after all.) This is a movie that shows many people dying, yet it is the rare such movie that happens to value life. That is one reason why I am struck where it matters by THE GREY.
There are also personal reasons. I’ve spent the last four years attending more funerals than I wanted to attend in a lifetime. Without any exaggeration and in a relatively short time, I’ve lost half my nearest and dearest. I’ve been living with death. This movie is what that feels like. Wolves and winter – that’s all just visual trappings meant to illustrate an idea. The point is, there may come a time in your life when everybody you know starts dropping like flies at the hands of some relentless cosmic flyswatter, and then what are you gonna do? Pray to God? Good luck there. Worth a try. Maybe He answers your prayers. Maybe He doesn’t answer. Probably he doesn’t answer. Now you’ve got a choice to make. Or maybe there isn’t a choice at all.
“Fuck it. I’ll do it myself.” That isn’t a renunciation. That is, in fact, a profoundly spiritual decision. This movie illustrates that concept so beautifully that if I had the tears to do it, I’d cry them. I thank this movie for existing in 2012, and I thank Joe Carnahan and his cast and crew for braving the cold to make it.
Daily Grindhouse would be pretty much my favorite website even if I weren’t writing for them, but since I am, here’s a collection of all my work so far. It’s some of my very best stuff. Enjoy!
Make Daily Grindhouse your daily destination for genre movie news, reviews, and interviews — there’s a ton of truly great content over there, beyond just the parts with my name on ‘em.
And follow me on Twitter for updates!: @jonnyabomb
This collection has been much-requested and a long time coming. To get at the reviews, just click on the movie poster of your choice. And be sure to bookmark this page, because it’s bound to get updated frequently!
For constant news about updates, follow me on Twitter: @jonnyabomb
And we’re back! Ready for round two. Inspired again by my friend-in-movies at Rupert Pupkin Speaks, I’m re-presenting and reshuffling my top fifty movies of all time. “Reshuffling” sounds a little more extreme than what I’ve done here — most of the titles remain the same, and the order isn’t much different. But there’s a fair amount of new blood, and I’ve updated the links to any movies I’ve written about at length (those are bolded in red.)
This list is absolutely subject to change, so keep watching this space, but while you’re at it, don’t forget to keep watching the skies.
If you’ve seen Sergio Leone’s THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, then congratulations! You’ve seen the greatest movie ever. But even if you’ve seen every Western that Sergio Leone made (which you really ought to), you’ve still only scratched the surface of the vast reserve of wonderfulness that is Italian Westerns. Another Sergio – surname Corbucci – made some of the best-regarded of those movies.
Sergio Corbucci’s THE GREAT SILENCE is about a mute gunslinger nicknamed “Silence” (Jean-Louis Trintignant, maybe not a household name but a terrific actor and still starring in major movies at 82), who tries to help a small community who have been besieged by a band of vicious criminals, led by the cooly genocidal bounty hunter “Loco”, played by the ever-disturbing Klaus Kinski. Loco collects dead bodies like a hunter collects pelts, while Silence only kills in self-defense – to be fair, he does provoke a lot of dickheads to draw down. That way it’s legal. Silence kills bad guys. Loco is the worst guy. Inevitably they’re going to meet up. Sounds like a movie we may have seen a few times before, right?
Not quite.
The main element that drew me to THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY when I first saw it, the element that got me into Italian Westerns for life, and the element that THE GREAT SILENCE has in abundance, is the otherworldly quality of it all. There’s a beautifully weird disconnect that happens when Italian filmmakers use international actors to shoot stories about the American West in (usually) Spain. THE GREAT SILENCE is one Italian Western that doubles down on the otherworldliness. The story takes place in Utah, on a wooded frontier blanketed with snow – even the horses have a hell of a time getting anywhere. The characters are bundled up in layers of animal hides, brown and grey spots in an oppressive blanket of whiteness. And the score by Ennio Morricone is one of the most haunting you’ll ever hear, even by the haunting standards set by the maestro.
THE GREAT SILENCE will stick in your guts, and that’s good because it leaves you with a few things to think about. Corbucci wasn’t the most political of Italian-Western directors (that’d be the third Sergio, Sollima), but there is some clear subtext here if you’re interested in looking for it. It may or may not mean much that the voiceless hero is a Frenchman – maybe Trintignant was just plain the best guy for the job – but I’d say it certainly means something that a blond, blue-eyed German is the monster of the piece, and Loco’s every action in this film bear out that hunch. His monstrousness is familiar, is all I’m saying.
Moreover, it says plenty that the romantic interest, Pauline the vengeful widow who sets Silence on his collision course with Loco, who is the man who killed her husband, is a black woman – Vonetta McGee, who went on to star in several grindhouse-friendly films including BLACULA,DETROIT 9000, andSHAFT IN AFRICA, and in my well-educated opinion is only second to Claudia Cardinale in the ranks of most beautiful women ever to headline a “spaghetti” Western. Race isn’t an issue to Silence, who proves his open mind by engaging in probably one of the earliest examples of interracial love scenes on film, but it most certainly is to Loco, who, in addition to his many other crimes, is blatantly racist. Corbucci couldn’t be drawing the line between good and evil any more clearly, which is why the movie ultimately becomes quite literally a punch in the heart zone.
Non-spoiler warning: THE GREAT SILENCE has probably THE down ending of all time. I’m not going to get into it, but trust me on this one. It’s almost unbearably sad, but it’s also resolutely unique and entirely unforgettable. If you think you can handle the heartache, then I couldn’t recommend this movie any more highly.
THE GREAT SILENCE is screening from Sunday September 9th through Tuesday September 11th at Cinefamily in Los Angeles. This is the world’s only surviving 35mm print. If you want to see this movie theatrically, this is the time.
My friends at Daily Grindhouse just put up my appreciation of the cult classic GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH, which I think is even funnier and crazier than the original GREMLINS. It’s also on my ever-accumulating list of great New York movies. Don’t laugh until you read my reasons!
You can read what I wrote by clicking right here: MOGWAI!
Wanted to clue everyone in to a guest post I did for the terrific movie blog Rupert Pupkin Speaks, which has been inviting all kinds of well-travelled movie writers to contribute their lists of favorite quote-unquote “bad” movies. (It’s all subjective, right?)
I think you’ll enjoy this one. I had a lot of fun putting it together. I’m very proud to be featured on another site I enjoy, amongst some fun people. You’ll have to click through to get to the meat of what I wrote, but I wanted to share some posters, still frames, and YouTube clips also, so scroll down for those.
If you know me or have stopped by my site before, you know that this is hardly the end of my voyage into tremendous cinematic badness. It’s only the beginning.
Film Forum’s phenomenal “Spaghetti” Westerns series comes to a close tonight. It’s been an amazing month of well-known and adored consensus-classics, seldom-screened rarities, and near-forgotten oddities. As expected, I didn’t have nearly enough time to get downtown — as you may have noticed, I haven’t even had much time this month to write about movies, let alone see them. Here are my expanded notes on A Fistful Of Dollars and Django, and please be on the lookout for my upcoming piece on Sergio Sollima’s vastly-underseen 1966 classic, The Big Gundown, to which I am trying to pay the kind of tribute it deserves.
Tonight the festival ended with a quadruple-header of Duck, You Sucker!, Death Rides A Horse, Django, and my personal favorite anything, The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. I’ve written about this big, beautiful, belligerent odyssey before, and if you haven’t read that yet, please take a minute to do so…
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What can you say about your favorite movie? This one is mine.
There is literally nothing I can write about The Good The Bad & The Ugly that hasn’t already been written, and by more famous names. It’s not exactly an underrated movie. It’s certainly the most straight-ahead entertaining Great Movie that regularly makes the greatest-ever lists. (It clocked in prominently on my own all-time top-50.)
Watching it again last Monday, I was struck by the fact that it’s not a movie with much of an agenda beyond pure storytelling. It’s not a grand statement on humanity or history. It’s a story. As the poster’s tagline (one of the best ever written), “For three men, the Civil War wasn’t hell. It was PRACTICE!” Sure, for some characters in this demented picaresque, war is hell, but for the three leads, those monosyllabic archetypes in the title, war is just an appropriately chaotic backdrop for their self-involved quest. The whole thing is about three guys looking for buried treasure!
Good, Bad, Ugly: Does it really matter? They all have the same damn goal.
The Good The Bad & The Ugly is a callback to the previous Leone classic, For A Few Dollars More, in that it stars the blond/brunet tandem of Clint Eastwood (The Good) and Lee Van Cleef (The Bad), although it escalates the setting and the scale (and the running time) to an operatic degree. What’s really fascinating to me about this movie the more I watch it is that Eli Wallach (The Ugly) is truly the star of the movie. The movie begins and ends with him, and he seems to have the most screen time by a wide margin. After the first introductory scenes of The Good and The Bad, I don’t think either of them have a scene that doesn’t also include The Ugly. He not only has a first and last name, but a ton of middle names (Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez) AND an alias (a.k.a. The Rat), and he is the only one with the backstory (a life of crime begun to aid sick parents, which has now alienated him from his brother the priest). Meanwhile, Clint’s character has a name but probably one that Tuco gave him – “Blondie” – and Van Cleef is referred to as “Angel-Eyes” – which is hilarious if it was also given him by Tuco, but either way is still an alias. The Good The Bad & The Ugly is really Tuco’s movie.
Again, the underrated scriptwriting of Leone and his staff and the accurately-praised career-highlight score of Morricone, along with the cinematography of Tonino Delli Colli, have everything to do with the perfection of The Good The Bad & The Ugly, but the importance of the casting of Eli Wallach to the tone of the movie should not be underestimated. He brings a wealth of serious training to the role, but also a go-for-broke sense of humor. There’s a real mischievous sparkle in Tuco’s eye – he’s a quintessential survivor and a classic rogue. Wallach really commits to this role – you couldn’t call him handsome in this movie, and his accent is as solid as any gringo has ever pulled off. And he’s funny. God DAMN. Holy shit. This movie is so damn funny, without ever losing its mythic grandeur.
It’s weird though – for a movie that defines its three main characters in such rigid terms, “good,” “bad,” and “ugly,” the morality (or faltering degree of such) isn’t remotely as rigid. Clint’s character doesn’t do much good for anyone outside of offering and lighting a couple of cigars, and even Angel-Eyes, as unrelentingly violent as he can be, clearly operates under a certain code of behavior. Tuco doesn’t seem to have any rules or boundaries or philosophy – just greed, gluttony, and self-preservation – but at least we have a faint suggestion of how he became that way, so even he isn’t strictly “Ugly.” So it’s not a morality play. It’s just a story. It’s just a story, but it’s the one I’d watch all the way through, any time of night or day, right now if I could.
Wrote this routine three years ago, still enjoy it, hope you will too.
There is something very wrong with me.
I saw the G-Force trailer for the first time the other day, and have been obsessed with this movie ever since. It opens tomorrow. I live in fear that the demons that drive me will drive me to the theater and force me to spend precious money on opening-weekend admission tickets. Take a look:
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G-Force is about a team of specially trained guinea pigs who work as covert operatives for the government. They can talk and they like to have adventures and also, to fart.
This is a high-concept so incredibly shitty that I am entirely drawn to it. It appeals to the most childish and irresponsible side of my imbecilic nature.
Smarty-pants comedians always bring this up, but movies like this truly ARE why the terrorists hate us. Only in America could many millions of dollars be directed not towards curing cancer or feeding our homeless, but in animating, producing, and marketing [everywhere] a movie about farting guinea pigs.
Well, the terrorists are dicks, and they’re always pissed off about something anyway, so screw ‘em if they can’t take a joke. Bring on the farting guinea pigs! As long as you know, they don’t make me think about those sick or poor people.
The terrorists also hate this movie because somewhat insanely, this premise isn’t too far from reality. Periodically, the eagle-eyed news reader will notice various articles that mention various U.S. military attempts to use animals in warfare. I’m sure that real-world verity was on the minds of the makers of this movie!
Here are some reasons to rejoice in the impending arrival of G-Force:
1. Besides guinea pigs, it stars Zach Galifianakis! Yay! You fell in love with him after The Hangover, America – now watch a brilliantly original stand-up comedian stumble sleepily through a loosely-scripted, massively-budgeted Hollywood monolith. (In all honesty, this IS something I would like to watch.) Also, Zach Galifianakis kind of looks like a chinchilla already, so I guess it’s appropriate casting.
Other talented people who will get a paycheck out of G-Force: Will Arnett, Steve Buscemi, Jon Favreau, Tracy Morgan, Bill Nighy, Sam Rockwell, Loudon Wainwright III (Undeclared fans represent!). Whatever keeps people like these working can’t be an entirely bad thing. Hopefully the G-Force money allows them the freedom to do other, more interesting things – particularly Buscemi and Favreau, who are directors who have made movies (Trees Lounge; Made) that have inspired me in the past.
2. Featuring the voice of Penélope Cruz! Yay! Of the diverse possible reasons to like Penélope Cruz, I would have ranked her phonetic aptitude and her comedic timing close to the bottom of the list, but okay, maybe she’s been waiting for this exact movie to display those deeply-buried talents.
3. Also featuring the voice of Tracy Morgan! Yay! This is a win-win for comedy fans and for film producers, because if Tracy shows up, you get the benefit of his unhinged delivery, and if he gets distracted and wanders away from the ADR studio, you can hire underground rapper Kool Keith to do the voice and still advertise with the bigger star’s name.
Seriously, if you closed your eyes, could you entirely tell whether you were listening to Tracy or to Keith? Two different talents, one similar voice.
4. Directed by Hoyt Yeatman! Yay! Another visual effects supervisor getting a shot at directing a feature film! Why take a chance on one of the thousand directors in Hollywood who have been studying cinematic storytelling for decades when you can get an ace VFX guy? At least the guinea pigs will look believable! (Until 3 months from now, when the outdated CG will look archaic and clumsy.)
5. Screenplay by “The Wibberleys”! Yay! Even the credits are adorable! Actually, a quick IMDB search for The Wibberleys reveals that they are a married couple who have provided the scripts for some of the most awful big-budget sequels of the past decade. I don’t enjoy criticizing fellow writers, but the fact remains, they’re hacks. Is it a criticism if it’s a fact? Like “that mud is dirty” or “that fart smells bad”?
I bring up farts, of course, because farts are a major selling point in the G-Force trailer. I’m as immature as the next guy, but when I calm down for a minute I like to picture the writing session that birthed such moments:
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“EXT. SUBURBAN STREET – DAY…
The G-Force are riding at super-speed in a space-age exercise ball. One of the guinea pigs lets out a thunderous FART that would shock even Carlos Mencia.
GUINEA PIG #1
Yuck! Disgusting!
GUINEA PIG #2
Roll down the window!
TRACY MORGAN GUINEA PIG
These things don’t have windows!”
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Dang! Look at that expert screenplay construction. Take that, Charlie Kaufman!
Please note: The Wibberleys are Writer’s Guild members who command multiple-figure salaries, and I am not. Who you gonna listen to?
Sometimes life is so ridiculous that a sane man’s only recourse is to take a break from the fight and just enjoy the senselessness of it all.
