Popcorn Kernels: Teamsters

In which we release mini-reviews of two films that pit two teams who have a lot in common against one another.

X-Men

Year: 2000

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen 

Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Metal-clawed Wolverine and life-sucking Rogue discover the X-Men, a team of mutants who want to stop the metal-controlling Magneto from carrying out an evil plot against the government, which is considering implementing a Mutant Registration Act.

You know the fiery hellscape of superhero movies that Hollywood has become? For better or for worse, our current boom of caped crusaders can be traced directly back to X-Men, director Bryan Singer’s first foray into comic books. X-Men was hardly the first Marvel movie, but it was the film that resurrected the brand, leading to the dizzying heights of Spider-Man and Iron Man and the crushing lows of Zack Snyder’s parade of half-cocked abortions.

But let’s scrub all that history and all those feelings away to come face to face with X-Men. The comic movie landscape has been quiet as of late. Hugh Jackman is not yet a megastar. Bryan Singer barely knew that Superman existed. It’s the turn of the millennium and the U.S. has survived the potential horror of Y2K, yet is about to be plunged into a long national nightmare the following September. But for now, the world looks fresh and full of potential. Nobody seems to have noticed yet that George W. Bush is a wee bit kooky. The Backstreet Boys are still a thing. For the time, the world seems pretty OK.

Enter X-Men. For a time of such (relative) peace, this film is starkly political, which was pretty much unheard of for comic adaptations. You see, although America was coasting along alright, there were plenty of minority groups that weren’t getting the TLC they deserved, one of which Bryan Singer had personal attachments to: the LGBT community. A group that was despised for something they were born with and couldn’t control, feared following the AIDS epidemic in the 80’s, they mapped almost perfectly onto the X-Men’s own persecution, updating the series’ original subtext, relating to the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s.

It’s a bleak, gray film with a sharp political edge, which makes it great. But it’s also a fun action film with engaging characters and the birth of Hugh Jackman’s meteoric rise to stardom, which made it massively successful. Mind you, it’s no masterpiece. As fun as the characters are to watch, there are plenty of X-Men who are choked out by the Big Guns (Wolverine, Rogue, Professor X, Magneto…) so they don’t get the development they sorely need, and everything about Halle Berry’s Storm is a head-to-toe misstep from her eviscerated South African accent to her battering ram dialogue (Do you know what happens to a blogger when he has to listen to that line about a toad being struck by lightning? The same perplexed disgust as everyone else.).

With a relatively low budget and certain pieces in place that wouldn’t fully begin to pay off until later entries in the series (*cough cough* Sabretooth), X-Men is better as a pilot for the franchise than it is as a work of cinema, but it’s still tremendous fun. From a mind-numbingly on-the-nose battle atop the Statue of Liberty to Ian McKellen’s James Bondian over-the-top gravity (including a massive mutation machine and a decked out Evil Lair), X-Men is a lurid comic book movie on top of its substantial political agenda, and I greatly enjoy both of those things.

Rating: 7/10

Bring It On

Year: 2000

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku, Jesse Bradford 

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

When a high school senior becomes cheerleading captain, she discovers that her predecessor had been stealing routines from an underprivileged school. As she makes peace with an edgy newcomer, will she lead the team to a literal victory at the National Cheerleading Competition or a moral victory?

You know those zeitgeist movies that all your friends were quoting in middle school but you just never got around to watching? Bring It On is one of mine, and while I’m glad to have finally seen it, being immune to the nostalgia factor is like peeping behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain. It’s not really as great as everyone would have you believe, though it’s hardly an awful movie. It’s just that, rather than being a gut-splitting, generation-defining work, it’s a decent wisp of teen fluff.

If you’ve seen any high school movie from the 90’s, you pretty much know what to expect here: Lots of emphatic teen acting that’s more Disney Channel than Uta Hagen and a heaping helping of fabricated slang that visibly begs for entry into the popular lexicon: “We can’t mack in front of the parentals.” “She puts the whore in horrifying.” This stuff practically carbon dates he film, as if the mix tape that’s actually on a cassette and the teen girl begging for a private phone line haven’t already done it well enough. It works as a cheesy glimpse into times gone by, but it’s a pretty routine film.

The story isn’t so much an organic arc as a 90-minute long montage of haphazardly-placed teen movie scene, but I would like to give it credit for having a surprising amount off grace when handling the topic of race relations and white privilege in the public school system. I can’t say I expected that in my cheerleading movie, but for the most part, bring it on is a little too concerned with the trivialities of cheerleading competitions to be of particular interest (although, amusingly, Glee would cop this movie’s exact formula for nearly every season finale).

Weighed down by too many tropes (the edgy girl who learns to embrace her femininity, the gay BFF who has almost zero interaction with dudes), Bring It On limps across the finish line in vaguely amusing but generally unimpressive style. The one scene that really did stand out to me is an awkward slumber party flirtation between Kirsten Dunst and her character’s best friend’s brother while brushing their teeth. It’s a perfect little microcosm of awkward teen romance. Their oddly competitive dental hygiene is effortlessly cute and terrifically acted, but it’s also romantically charged in a way that the rest of their interaction is patently not.

If I had to sit through the rest of this OK film in order to earn one sterling scene, it’s not a half-bad tradeoff. It’s just not an all-good one, which is disappointing.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1102
Reviews In This Series
X-Men (Singer, 2000)
X2: X-Men United (Singer, 2003)
X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006)
X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)
X-Men: Apocalypse (Singer, 2016)

Splatter University V: A New Beginning

Here we are again at the start of yet another promising and terrifying semester for Yours Truly. To cope with the sheer amount of work I have looming in the distance (including six consecutive 12-hour weekend shoots), what else is there to do but write reviews of crap we watched in my horror class (for which I am now TAing - the student has become the master)? And so it goes.

Warlock

Year: 1989

Director: Steve Miner

Cast: Julian Sands, Lori Singer, Richard E. Grant

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Dave Twohy, the director of the Riddick trilogy wrote the screenplay for this late 80's fantasy horror picture shortly after graduating from California State University, Long Beach. Evidently he was too lazy to return to his alma mater and talk about his early career. For that reason, there shall be no further mention of him in this blog.

I'd rather talk about Steve Miner, anyway. This man resolutely refuses to leave the hallowed halls of crap horror and has thus ended up on this blog more than any other director save Wes Craven. Although Miner is certainly less talented than Ol' W. C. (as House and Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D can attest), he is always a welcome presence around these here parts.

The plot goes like this - an evil Warlock (Julian Sands) is imprisoned in the 16th Century and the unpredictable magic he uses to procure his escape lands him smack dab in the middle of 20th Century Los Angeles - 1988 to be precise. Although perhaps we need not be so precise, considering that the girl who lives in the apartment he crash lands into looks like a cross between Run Lola Run and LeeLoo from The Fifth Element.

I don't normally post screencaps in mini reviews, but come on. How could I deprive the world of this?

She teams up with a 16th Century warrior (Richard E. Grant) sent to defeat the Warlock in order to lift the curse of aging he has placed on her. Also, there's a whole thing about uniting the separated thirds of an ancient tome that will reveal the true name of God, which - if uttered backwards - can undo Creation.

It's a whole thing, I won't get into it.

Original fantasy horror like this would soon be lining video store shelves in the early 90's (Leprechaun, anyone?), but Warlock is better than most. Sure, it's a hunk of cheese big enough to trap Mickey Mouse, but it's such a loveably batty and low rent thriller that it never fails to charm.

And for once in this kind of film the comic relief consistently lands, making up greatly for the tepid horror (which falls flat in spite of some frankly terrific original ideas). In fact, it can hardly be distinguished as a horror film what with the brightly lit setpieces and largely inconspicuous music. Only one scene can be counted as truly horrific, but it's a doozy - genre veteran Mary Woronov is possessed by some sort of orgasm devil and it is grand and melodramatic in the best way.

All in all, it made me excited to watch more crappy DTV horror, which is always a good(ish) time for me.

One last thing before we go: Apparently God's true name is Rakisha, which seems a little ghetto for an omnipotent deity but you won't catch me complaining.

Rating: 7/10

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Year: 1992

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Winona Ryder, Gary Oldman, Keanu Reeves

Run Time: 2 hours 8 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Why oh why does this kind of thing keep happening? The Dracula story is over and done, simple as that. The story is centered around a real estate agent and hops back and forth between Britain and Transylvania so many times that the characters spend more time traveling that actually doing anything. All the sex in the world couldn't spice that narrative up.

Sorry, I've been sitting on that one for a while now.

At least Francis Ford Coppola's retread of the classic work has a daring visual aesthetic that challenges and creates a thoroughly moody and lovely horror backdrop. Unfortunately I am not the type of film major that can be won over with visuals alone, practical effects or not (and yes, this film displays a truly impressive amount of in-camera effects - in fact, all visual effects but a screechingly obviously fake blue flame were done the old fashioned way and it's a major credit to Coppola that he stuck through such an arduous task around the beginning of the mainstream acceptance of computer generated imaging).

So yes. Visuals. And effects. Yay. And an immense theatricality which would be welcome in a movie with literally any other cast. Gary Oldman fares well as the aged and decrepit Count Dracula, but mysteriously falls flat as the handsome young swain he becomes. Winona Ryder fumbles hopelessly at the role of Mina and Keanu Reeves just plain never was going to work, was he?

Although he is perhaps the only actor alive at the time who could convincingly portray just how unfathomably stupid the character of Jonathan Harker really is.

It really doesn't help that Van Helsing was played by Anthony Hopkins in one of the first of his many subpar post-Silence of the Lambs roles. If every Van Helsing scene in the film was cut, it would still make just as much sense. And it would still be too long.

In a just world, Coppola's vision of a bloody, sexy, colorful, melodramatic Dracula would have been a smash success, but so many of the pieces fail to fall into place that the film is stuffy by the first minute and dull by the halfway point. A swing and a miss.

Rating: 6/10

Interview with the Vampire

Year: 1994

Director: Neil Jordan

Cast: Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Kirsten Dunst

Run Time: 2 hours 3 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I watched this film for the first time in class on Monday. It's really quite interesting to see how many plot and character elements were lifted wholesale from this film and the novel it's based on to piece together the literary wreckage that is the Twilight franchise. But enough of that. It's uncouth to kick a franchise when it's down, no matter how repugnant or obnoxious it may be.

The most important takeaway from this film is that Kirsten Dunst is a BABY. Here I was obliviously expecting her to be a love interest, not having noticed the year on the back of the DVD case. But no. She may as well be a fetus. It's insane.

Interview with the Vampire tells the story of one Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt), a grieving American colonist who succumbs to the curse of vampirism as offered by the fiery Lestat de Lioncourt (Tom Cruise). Louis struggles to accept his newfound thirst for sexy sexy blood and manages to avoid killing actual humans for a while, but finds that his Cullen-ness doesn't pay off in the long run. 

Also Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt's hair colors are switched for this film and it trips me out something fierce.

The two enter a loving partnership long-term companionship that leads them across America and eventually to the creation of a vampire child, Claudia (Kirsten Dunst). Basically the first act is Dracula and the second act is a vampire version of The Kids Are All Right.

And the third act is Harry Potter Book Five, all angsty and brooding.

I'm really avoiding intense analysis of the film because it is a towering obelisk of pop romantic filmmaking. Interesting and pretty to look at, but lacking the depth that (possibly? I wouldn't know) might be contained in the books.

It's largely entertaining for what it is, although it does drag in it's second hour. Man, do I loathe second hours.

And I might just have to create a new custom tag for my blog posts - "homoerotic vampire movies" - because this is the most recent in a string of many, starting with The Lost Boys. Remember how the brothers in that film couldn't talk without staring into each others' eyes with the intensity of a thousand suns? Well Brad Pitt speaks directly into Antonio Banderas' mouth.

It's pretty hot.

The end.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1387