Showing posts with label Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

HESHER (2010)

[Update 03/23/2021: Need to redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

Like an Americanized version of Pasolini's TEOREMA (or maybe Miike's VISITOR Q), HESHER is the story of a mysterious stranger who briefly enters the lives of a family and leaves just as quickly, but not before changing their lives forever.

Young T.J. is having a shitty life. His mother recently died in a car wreck and the grief has sent his father so deep into his shell that he rarely even gets off the sofa. Then, at school this dork-looking bully beats the crap out of him all the time. Added to that, every time he gets on his bike he seems to wreck. After one gnarly wreck he gets mad at a nearby half-constructed house and breaks out the main window, unknowing that the house is the squat pad for the long-haired, greasy looking rocker named Hesher. After this encounter, Hesher begins following T.J. and eventually starts squatting in his garage. But Hesher isn't a guardian angel sent from Heaven, if anything he make T.J.'s family's life even shittier. But yet, somehow Hesher teaches them how to man up and push through their misery...or something. I don't know, I was too busy setting my house on fire to pay attention.

I liked this movie. It's nothing original or groundbreaking, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt is great, so is Natalie Portman, Piper Laurie, Rainn Wilson, Devin Brochu and honestly everybody in the movie. The story is entertaining, but the acting is what really pushes the film to a higher level. Also, the filmmakers had the good taste to use mostly Cliff Burton-era Metallica songs instead of that satan-awful butt rock they've been shoving down our ears for the last few decades. Definitely worth a rent.

Friday, May 27, 2011

HALLOWEEN H20: 20 YEARS LATER (1998)

I don't really see how anybody involved with this movie could be proud of it. Completely ignoring Parts 3 - 6, Part 7, excuse me, I mean Part H20 picks up 20 years later and explains that Laurie faked her death and is now the dean of a elite private school in California. Nothing wrong with that really, just as long as Michael is an ultimate badass...and he's not. Instead, his mask looks like he's auditioning for a Slipknot cover band and he has zero personality. I've read that the actor who played Michael had never seen a HALLOWEEN movie before so he just decided "to tackle the role blindly". Well, he had about as much success tackling the role as Helen Keller would tackling that chicken from ROCKY II.

On top of the Shitty Michael aspect, the script is weak as fuck with zero scares. Laurie has a 17 year-old son who attends the school. All of the students are suppose to be on a school trip, but the boy and three friends ditch and hide out in the bowels of the school to par-tay. That's a good idea and it could have been used for some real scares.  Instead, Mike shows up, quickly kills a few of them, then Laurie suddenly decides she's fucking Ripley from ALIENS and goes after Michael. I guess this is seen as some kind of closure for Laurie's character, but I would have been happier with some kind of entertainment for the audience.

Worth watching, I guess, if you're a fan, but I was really disappointed. Zero nudity, zero gore, only a few drops of blood, multiple annoying jump scenes, low body count without any memorable kills, Janet Leigh's talent wasted and the ending was foreshadowed way in advance. Boring. Also why didn't Michael kill the people at the rest stop? What a pussy!

Part 1 - Halloween (1978)
Part 2 - Halloween II (1981)
Part 3 - Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Part 4 - Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
Part 5 - Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
Part 6 - Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
Part 8 - Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
Remake 1 - Halloween (2007)
Remake 2 - Halloween II (2009)
Sequel to Original - Halloween (2018)
Direct Sequel 2 - Halloween Kills (2021)
Direct Sequel 3 - Halloween Ends (2022)

Article incorrectly states the original massacre happened in 1968.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

INCEPTION (2010)

Angus McCootybritches is the world's most highly skilled dream theft. But he can't just get into your dreams using hocus pocus.  No, first he has to, in the real world, get a hold of your body, then put you under and infiltrate your noggin. One day, a super rich dude employs him to implant an idea into somebody's noodle. People say it can't be done, but Leo knows it can, because he once implanted an idea into somebody's mind and, well, it worked a little too well. Fast-forward some and Leo has assembled his top-notch crew of dream warriors to sneak in and go multiple layers down into the target's brain.

I liked the movie alright, but I kept expecting more.  I was also very disappointed in just how boring the dreams were! I dream about all kinda of wacky shit: rats with mechanical legs chasing me down the cereal aisle at HEB; an intellectually disabled samurai taking a shit on a child's birthday cake; a demon-possessed pot hole that chases cars down and kills people; Leatherface chasing me around my kitchen with his chainsaw; Jesus getting beaten to death in the restroom of a Waffle House by an assassin boxing kangaroo; Stanley Kubrick being alive a directing this movie; people filming a big budget zombie movie getting attacked by real zombies, but never just sitting around in the bar of a hotel talking.  Then again, I'm a worthless piece of shit that should have been shot to death with a shotgun as soon as I came out of the womb, so what do I know?

Mildly entertaining, but it definitely could have been better.