MOVIE: Mirrors (2008)

I actually watched this movie weeks ago, but didn’t get around to writing the review for it until today because, well. . . meh.

And at this point, I confess I barely remember anything about this one because, well. . . meh.

What I do remember is that it stars Kiefer Sutherland as an ex-cop takes a night-job as a security guard at a department store that used to be a psychiatric hospital and was recently gutted by a fire.  Lots of bad stuff happened in that thar building, in other words, and not of it had to do with sales on acid-washed jeans.

Anyway, Kief soon begins to believe the mirrors in the store are out to get him, which they sort of are, except that it turns out not to be the mirrors so much as the escaped demon from the nun lady who was treated for multiple-personality disorder in the store way back when it was a hospital and she was a little girl.  Luckily, even though the hospital was later converted into said store, said store apparently never went down to their own basement, which rather conveniently leaves Kief with the perfect way to solve the problem he’s having with the crazy mirrors.

You see, down in the basement there’s this crazy spinning mirror treatment room — the very same crazy spinning mirror treatment room that the hospital used in an attempt to make the nun lady merge her multiple personalities into a single self, only it kind of backfired when it turned out she didn’t have multiple personality disorder at all, but instead was POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL.  Whoopsie!

Now Kief knows he has to track down the nun lady and get her back in that crazy spinning mirror treatment room, or else the mirrors will, like, destroy the planet.  Or something like that.   I mean, honestly, this movie made less sense than that song “American Pie” by Don McLean.  And, as everyone knows, that song makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.

So, you should be surprised when I now confess I didn’t find this movie to be absolutely unwatchably bad, despite its many myriad flaws.  In fact, I not only watched this movie, I watched ALL of this movie, which is not something I can say about the other two movies I rented that same weekend.  Kief looks good, the effects are decent, etc.  In other words, if it sounds like your kinda thing and you don’t get all het up when you’re asked to suspend so much disbelief you’ve practically invented a new religion, go for it.  You could do a lot worse.

And as evidence of that, I bring you the movie that’ll be reviewed here tomorrow:  Yeti:  Curse of the Snow Demon.  Stay tuned for the hilarious details of that total stinker, as well as some extremely nostalgic drooling over the great Peter DeLuise, of 21 Jump Street and Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon “fame.”  (Dang, he still looks gooooooo-oood!)

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Genre:  Horror
Cast:  Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Amy Smart, Jason Flemyng

MOVIE: Kung Fu Panda (2008)

Sorry the blog has been radio-silent for the last week or so — I went out of town for several days of sunshine, warmth, and adorableness (my 1 year-old niece and 3 year-old nephew and 35 year-old twin sister and 29 year-old mother (hi, Mom!)), and neglected to alert you all to the fact I’d be out of commission for a bit.  Sorry about that!  I had lofty plans to get a lot of reviews written while I was out of town, but at the last minute had to leave my laptop at home (I’m nursing an injured shoulder and it was just too heavy!).  Such is life when you are a blogger with lots of broken body parts.

In any case, I’m making it up to you by telling you to go rent Kung Fu Panda this weekend.  Because it’s HILARIOUS.  And extremely entertaining and fun.  All that AND it stars a big fat panda who does kung fu — voiced by Jack Black!  Things just don’t get much better!

The story is about an evil snow leopard warrior named Tai Lung (the awesome Ian McShane, who is an upcoming Boyfriend of the Week, incidentally) who has just escaped from prison and is on his way to destroy the Valley of Peace.  To protect the Valley, Kung Fu Master Oogway decides it is time to hold the ceremony that selects the Dragon Warrior, a kung fu sooooper genius who, it is believed, will be the only one capable of defeating Tai Lung.

Meanwhile, there’s this big fat panda named Po who works with his dad in a noodle restaurant and spends his days dreaming of being a kung fu warrior himself.  When Po hears Master Oogway is going to hold the Dragon Warrior selection ceremony, he races out of the restaurant to go watch — and soon finds himself sort of accidentally selected!  Even though he doesn’t know any real kung fu!

The rest of the famous Furious Five (kung fu warriors), Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Mantis (Seth Rogan), Viper (Lucy Liu), and Crane (David Cross), are not too impressed with Po but ultimately decide the best way to get rid of him is to try to train him and let him fail.

But, of course, that completely backfires, due to Po’s AWESOMENESS. Something for which he does not charge.

SKIDOOSH!!

My brother told me his five year-old son was laughing so hard at this movie that he was crying and that, therefore, I needed to watch it immediately.  Since I find many of the same things hilarious that the five year-old does (which either means I’m really childish or he’s very precocious — or some combination of both), I thought that was a pretty decent recommendation.

I now pass the same recommendation along to you.  Do with this information what you will.  As long as what you will is to rent and watch Kung Fu Panda as soon as possible.

[Netflix me | Buy me]

Genre: Animation, Kids
Cast:  Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogan, David Cross

BOOK: The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks

I really wanted to like this novel, about a Southern woman whose house is commandeered by the Confederate Army during the battle of Franklin in 1864 and turned into a hospital. I was surprised to read the description of it when I stumbled across the book a few weeks ago because for NaNoWriMo this year, I wrote a Civil War novel myself that involved a house being turned into a hospital (it’s a minor aspect of my story, but I was still surprised and intrigued to find a novel about something somewhat similar!).

Unfortunately, though this book starts out really wonderfully, with the woman, Carrie, suddenly finding herself nursing the near-dead in a house haunted by enough death already as it is, things spiral way, way out of control around the middle, when Hicks tries to throw in a love story that just made me absolutely bananas with its complete lack of sense. One of the patients at the hospital is Zachariah Cashwell, and Zach and Carrie get off to a particularly bad start when he wants to be left to die and she instead sends him upstairs to surgery where his leg is promptly amputated. As she nurses him back to health, they fall in love. You know how you know they fall in love? When she beats him nearly to death and then spends the night outside with his corpse (she thinks he’s a corpse, anyway). And then the author says it was all because she loved him so much.

This is where I blinked twice and said, “I’m sorry — what??”

I’m sure there was supposed to be something deeply symbolic about Carrie and her erratic, insane behavior, which only gets more bizarre from there. But to be honest, whatever it was completely eluded me. I ended up finishing this book as quickly as I could just to see how it was going to come out, skimming huge portions at the end just to get it over with. And tossed the book aside in frustration when I was done — there’s just nothing I hate more than a great idea wasted on a bad novel (Carrie was actually a real person and this novel is based to some extent on things that really happened). Though this book has impressive historical detail and is written relatively well in general, too many important things are omitted (what happened with Carrie and her husband and her kids? I’m so confused!) and then replaced with too many other things that make no sense. Feel free to skip this one, unless you are a masochist.

[FICTION]

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BOOKS: Beautiful Boy (David Sheff) and Tweak (Nic Sheff)

These two memoirs, the first written by the father of the author of the second, offer a unique look inside the world of methamphetamine addiction. When his son Nic became a meth addict, David’s primary mechanism for coping was gathering information. As a non-fiction writer/journalist, it was only natural that that information, along with stories of his experiences as the father of an addict, would be woven together into a book.

Beautiful Boy doesn’t just offer up stories from the parents’ perspective, though. It is also packed with information about both methamphetamine and addiction in general. As David sends Nic to rehab and back again, over and over, we also get a taste of the various philosophies of treatment (12-step, rational recovery, etc.), as well as advice and research information from some of today’s top addiction experts (Richard Rawson, Nora Volkow, e.g.).

The informational aspects of this book will expand your mind; the personal stories will break your heart. Not a bad way to spend a weekend on the couch, all told.

While David was working on BB, his publishers came calling for Nic’s story as well. Tweak tells the same tale, but from the addict’s point of view. It gives us some insight into just what drives an addict to keep returning to their drug of choice, no matter how much they might desperately want to quit, and also offers up the perspective of a troubled teenager trying to contend with parents who keep forcing him into rehab before he’s ready.

Tweak is, however, written by a kid (well, he’s in his early 20′s, anyway), and it pretty much reads like you’d imagine. Nic occasionally turns a profound phrase, but this book by itself would probably have gone relatively unnoticed. In combination with his father’s extremely well-written book, however, Tweak takes on added significance. It’s a unique pairing, and one nobody who is interested in methamphetamine or other types of addiction should miss. All in all, a fascinating, educational, and emotional pairing. Highly recommended!

[NON-FICTION]

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New Rainy Day Gardening Post!

What are you supposed to be doing in February if you live in the Pacific Northwest?  Here’s a hint:  it’s not spending the first truly sunny and glorious weekend watching really tremendously bad movies like I’ve been doing (in my defense, I’m out of commission due to a shoulder injury).

Prune!  Trim!  Put lime on stuff!  And read this post on the Rainy Day Gardening blog!

http://rainydaygardening.blogspot.com/2009/02/hope-for-spring-springs-eternal.html

MOVIE: Black Water (2007)

You know what’s really weird about this movie?  The cover of the DVD.  I’ve probably passed it a gazillion times in the movie rental store and never picked it up.  Why?  Because I’ve been burned a few too many times by really, really terrible snake movies (Anaconda, Python, Python TWO, Anaconda TWO, the list goes on and on).  See that snake on the cover?  Forget it.  Me and killer snake movies are done.  Finis.  Over.  Kaput.

Lucky for us all, though, one of the horror movie blogs I read regularly reviewed this flick recently and said it was actually a very suspenseful. . . CROCODILE movie.  And crocodile movies ain’t never done me no wrong.  So, my next trip to the video store, I picked the box up and double-checked this fact — yep, crocs — and then plunked it into my Netflix queue and waited for it to arrive.

And kids, this flick is DOPE!

It’s about three Australians (Grace and Adam, who are a couple, and Grace’s younger sister Lee) who decide to take a trip to the swamps of Northern Australia to do some fishing.  They charter a little row boat with an outboard motor and hire a guide named Jim to do the driving and navigating.  The day is going well, happy happy joy joy, until something nudges their boat.  Hmmm, what was that?

Whoa, and then that something nudges the boat with a bit more attitude, and the next thing our protagonists know, their boat is upside down and they’re treading water in a swamp while they watch  their guide get eaten by an absolutely enormous and extremely cranky crocodile.

The three scramble over to the nearest swamp tree and climb up high in its branches.  And then — they sit.  They sit there for hours and hours and hours with no idea what to do, arguing, crying, reassuring, all that jazz.  Should they just wait for another boat to come along?  Is it likely that one eventually will?  How will they survive if all they can do is sit in the tree?  Or, wait, should they get back in the water and try to flip their little boat back over and try to use it to get out?  Even though that croc knocked it over with barely any effort whatsoever?  And hey, it’s been hours now and we haven’t seen any movement in the water at all — what if the croc is GONE and we’re just sitting here like a bunch of paranoid idiots?

Adam, espousing the latter theory, decides he’s going to give getting to the boat a try.  And then later, both Grace and Lee try reaching the boat as well.  Only one of them ends up being successful — I won’t say which one.  The rest, I’m sorry to report, end up being croc chow.

Though it sounds like a fairly straight-forward killer monster movie, the likes of which we’ve seen a number of times before, the acting in this film is absolutely stellar, especially from the two women.   There’ s a scene that involves both of them that is just absolutely heartbreaking, and that’s a testament to their acting abilities more than the storyline itself.   There’s a ton of suspense, and a few truly heart-stopping moments (like when the croc jumps out of the water — yoinks!).  I was incredibly impressed by this flick, and definitely am looking forward to watching it again sometime soon.

What’s up with that DVD cover that makes the croc look like a snake, though?  I mean, seriously.  Ridunkulous.  Bad marketing, fellas.  Real bad.  Everybody knows snake movies totally stink.  Crocodile movies, on the other hand, COMPLETELY RULE.  As do shark movies.  And bug movies.  And natural disaster movies.  And zombie movies.  And movies starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts.

Wait, forget I just said that last bit.  I don’t know what came over me.

[Watch the trailer]

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Genre:  Horror
Cast:  Maeve Dermody, Ben Oxenbould, Diana Glenn, Andy Rodoreda

New Boyfriend of the Week!

And voila!  It is done!

See if you can guess who the Boyfriend(s) is/are based on this collection of terms rejected by my spellchecker:

uber-observationalist
putz
overly-schticky
doofusy
Beerfest
awesomest
Karim

No?  In that case, maybe it’s best if you just head right on over to the site:  http://megwood.com.

MOVIE: Appaloosa (2008)

I’m having a hard time with this one.  I actually saw it over a week ago and I STILL can’t decide if I liked it or not.  The film, based on a novel by Robert B. Parker, has all of the elements that I typically love about Westerns: intense male bonding, a smidge of romance, good guys versus bad guys, where the good guys aren’t really all that “good” but aren’t as “bad” as the bad guys so it’s close enough, etc. But at the same time, there’s almost too MUCH of the stuff I typically love about Westerns — which is the exact same problem I had with Parker’s novel, so I suppose this should have come as no surprise.

The story is about two old friends, Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and his “strong and silent type” partner Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), who travel around working as lawmen for hire, helping towns that are having, shall we say, “security” problems.  Their latest gig is in the town of Appaloosa, where the mayor and others  have hired them to battle a bad guy named Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), a rancher who has been trying to take over the town.  As Hitch and Cole settle in, they also become involved with another newcomer to Appaloosa, a young woman named Allison French (Renee Zellwigger), who Cole quickly falls madly in love with.  But Allison isn’t quite the “good girl” she makes herself out to be, leading to a series of complications that make Cole’s job in Appaloosa all the more challenging.

Here’s the thing, though.  As was the case with the novel, I never really felt like any of the characters in this film ever truly came alive.  Of the four stars, I would say Viggo came the closest, but that’s partly because his character’s job was mostly to look serious and occasionally throw out a sentence now and again.  Viggo’s good at that brooding, distant kinda thing.  Harris, on the other hand, was sadly forgettable as Virgil Cole, and that’s despite the fact he had the one role in the movie that involved a degree of wit.  Zellwegger I was more or less bored by, whatev’, and Jeremy Irons?  I don’t know why he was cast in his part to begin with.  He was completely wrong for it.

That said, the film did have its moments.  There’s a slowness about it — a loping easiness, I guess — that brings a nice rhythm to the story.  It’s a quiet movie about two extremely close friends doing their best to make the world a better place, and the relationship between Virgil and Hitch was one of the few that I felt actually had a little bit of chemistry to it.  There’s also a very intriguing lack of violence in this movie, which was a pretty interesting way to make a Western.  The one big shoot-out scene is over in seconds, and the characters even comment on it, Hitch saying, “That happened quick,” and Cole replying, “Everybody could shoot.”  I got a chuckle out of that, because I always find it kind of ridiculous how many times in movies and TV the shoot-em-up scenes last forever because nobody seems like they could hit the broad side of a barn with a tractor.

In any case, meh, I don’t know.  I thought Ed Harris might’ve been able to take the novel and transform it into something with a little more depth (he wrote the screenplay, in addition to starring in it), but I’m not convinced he did.  I mostly felt kind of underwhelmed the whole time I was watching this movie, and it hasn’t really lingered with me at all.  It’s not a BAD movie.  It’s just not that interesting or unique either.  I’ll try it again sometime soon and see if it goes down better the second time around (when expectations are lower, see?).

[Netflix me | Buy me]

Genre: Western
Cast:  Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellwegger, Jeremy Irons, James Gammon, Timothy V. Murphy

MOVIE: ZA: Zombies Anonymous (2006)

Really?  You had a concept like “Zombies Anonymous,” a movie about a support group for zombies who just want to be loved, and THIS is what you did with it?

That’s it.  I’m writing my own script.  Go ahead and sue me when it turns into a blockbuster — I will gladly share the proceeds if it means for your next movie you’ll be able to afford a make-up artist who doesn’t use the 99-cent stuff from Rite Aid.

Lame, man.  I really wanted to like this one!  Great concept, abominable execution!

[Don't Netflix me | Not even providing the option for you to buy this one -- can't have that on my conscience]

Genre: Zombie, Horror
Cast:  Bah, humbug!

BOOK: The Black Tower by Louis Bayard.

This incredibly gripping and brilliantly-written historical mystery gives us a new spin on the old story of Louis Charles, the son of Marie Antoinette, who was imprisoned as a boy when his parents were executed as part of the republican takeover of France in the 1790′s. The boy, only 8 at the time his father was killed, was tortured, forced into labor, and eventually locked in a dark prison cell with virtually no human contact for months. He became ill and died. And the moment his death was announced to the people of France, the rumors of his daring escape came to life.

Bayard’s novel, inspired by those rumors, tells us the story of what might have happened to Louis Charles, both while he was in prison and after his (fictitious?) escape. It begins with the murder of a man with a secret, killed in a dark alley with the name of a young doctor scribbled on a piece of paper in his pocket. The infamous Vidocq, the real-life founding director of France’s Sûreté Nationale, tracks the doctor down — Hector Carpentier — and quickly manages to convince him to help with his investigation. The two men begin to follow the clues, eventually uncovering an incredible tale of Hector’s father, also a doctor, and his attempts to save the life of the famous Louis Charles himself.

Did he succeed? Did Louis Charles live? Damned if I’m tellin’. But man, this book was just REALLY entertaining and extremely well done. Hands-down one of the best mystery/thrillers I’ve read in recent memory, and highly, highly recommended!  (p.s. Louis Bayard’s other historical mystery, The Pale Blue Eye, was one of my top ten favorite books of 2006, so if you haven’t read that one either, check it out!)

[MYSTERY]

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