I’m still getting over a cold, but I felt well enough to travel through the so-so winter weather for the magic of Le Cinema.

What were my choices?

Michael Clayton – I am really not a big fan of the films of George Clooney, whether they be directed by Steven Soderbergh, the Coen Brothers, George Clooney or whoever the extremely talented and important director that made this movie was. Yes, yes, I’m aware that his films are all politically earnest and heartfelt and shit, yes, I appreciate that. Move along now, move along. You’re blocking the remainder of my post.

P.S. I Love You – I don’t even want to know what the hell this is. I want to punch the title of this movie in the nose.

Enchanted – No.

The Golden Compass – Yes, of course!

This is a first for me. My choice of film at the LaGrange tonight was made via unusual means. I’m a fan of the snarky blog post title when it comes to my Two Buck Schmuck feature. When I saw that The Golden Compass was playing this week, I immediately thought, “Ah ha! The Golden Suckass!”

So, I watched this damn movie just so I could use that post title. Pathetic, ain’t I?

Thankfully, this movie sucked ass, so I’m not really giving any false or misleading information.

As we learn in the prologue of the film, there are lots of parallel worlds. Unlike our own world, where the soul of a human resides within the body, in the world of GC the souls walk beside the body in animal form. My oh my was this distracting. In any scene with a lot of people, I compulsively scanned the screen to ensure that every human had his or her own personal lovingly-CGI-rendered animal form. I have a feeling that the techie people forced to render these goddamn creatures were about as annoyed as I was making sure everybody had an animal buddy.

Anyways, Daniel Craig is some royal dude who is a scientist who discovers a portal to another world at the North Pole, and he wants to see if he can cross over. There is an autocratic authority, the Magisterium (not to be confused with Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium), that doesn’t want him to do this, for whatever reason. In fact, we later learn the Magisterium actually *wants* to make contact with other worlds in order to conquer them. I throw my hands up and do not try to understand.

When looking up the spelling for Magisterium, I noted that it is a term referring to the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Then I remember hearing something about how there were some complaints The Golden Compass promotes atheism. If there are Catholics or other religiously-minded people that might feel threatened or offended by the material contained in this film, let me assure you that it does not threaten or offend in any kind of entertaining fashion. All its offenses are quite boring, accompanied by perhaps the worst orchestral score experienced thus far by this humble reviewer. Scratch that — Van Helsing’s score was a tad worse.

Oh, before I forget, there’s some horseshit they go on about regarding “dust”. What is dust, you ask? I honestly don’t really care. But it’s important, essence of life, or some such thing.

So there’s this girl, who is Daniel Craig’s niece, though maybe she is his daughter, and she’s the main character, meeting swarthy foreigners and CGI’ed genital-less polar bears with the voices of Ian McKellen and Ian McShane (polar bears have to be voiced by Ians, apparently).

The Ians’ voiceovers were another source of distraction for me. At one point, McKellen the polar bear and the girl need to cross this chasm over a flimsy icy-rocky bridge. So the bridge collapses as the girl is running across it (McKellen stays back because he’s quite heavy). I could not help thinking of a line for McKellen: “I…. SHALL…. NOT….. PASS!!!!!!”

The girl has a creepy scene with McShane the Polar Bear King, where she is sort of flirting with him. I just thought, man, in Deadwood, a young girl flirting with Ian McShane is a baaaaaaaad idea.

Lessee, who else was in this…. Nicole Kidman is a bad guy in it who may or may not be the girl’s mother. She has a large part that pretty much evaporates in the latter half of the film. Daniel Craig also sort of disappears. He is taken captive by some swarthy foreigners. We learn in a very brief voiceover near the end of the film that he was let go because he bribed them, and now has some underground lab where he is cooking meth or something. There’s danger afoot for Mr. Craig, however — the Magisterium is a-coming to get him but good!

Oh crap, I almost forgot. Sam Elliott has a relatively big role as a Cowboy Aeronaut. The less said about him the better, I think.

There is so much to tell you that I have no intention of doing!

The ending may have been one of the stinkier things about this movie. First some setup I have to unfortunately do:

• The girl and McKellen Polar Bear have rescued some children from a secret lab where they are separating people from their animal souls
• They are riding in Sam Elliott’s cowboy space balloon
• They are going to rescue Daniel Craig
• There is a group of kids that already had their souls separated from them, and nobody knows what to do about it.

So, the last scene of the movie is the girl telling her friend what their next tasks are going to be — “so, we gotta rescue my dad, we gotta do something about those animal-soulless kids, etc.”

And that’s the end. Normally a movie franchise earns a filmgoer’s trust in the first installment, and then shits on them in the second and third (Back To The Future, The Matrix), but this movie has the audacity to assume we’re going to want another gazillion dollar movie made to show this girl hug Daniel Craig. It ain’t gonna happen!

A few inches of snow had fallen earlier in the day, and it appeared a few more inches might fall. The streets were all crappy. For some reason, extraordinarily bad weather makes me want to get out of the house. And get out of the house I did!

What were my choices tonight at the LaGrange?

American Gangster – Hmm, Ridley Scott directing a crime movie, starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe… Sounds tempting, but it starts at 9:30pm and has a long running time.

Across The Universe – I am still smarting from seeing Sgt. Pepper’s when I was eight years old.

August Rush – What the hell is this? I have never heard of it. Is it a beverage? A low-budget illegal drug? Is this even a movie?

The Darjeeling Limited – Okay, I’ll try it out.

Like most sentient beings, I loved Rushmore. Later on I saw Wes Anderson’s first movie, Bottle Rocket, and liked it quite a bit too. Rushmore and Bottle Rocket seemed pulled from personal experience. There was lots of hip pop music floating around, slow motion and self-conscious camera moves, but you felt some genuine emotion underpinning it all. And all these stylistic devices in many cases heightened the emotion of the films.

But then his subsequent films, I didn’t like so much. I felt a lot of the emotion drain away in Royal Tenenbaums and the Life Aquatic. There were glimmers of it, but mostly it was all subservient to preciousness, at some conscious attempt at having quirky characters that related to each other obliquely. The stylistic devices were still there, but without any feelings for the characters, they rang kind of hollow.

I had read some rather unfavorable reviews of Anderson’s most recent film, The Darjeeling Limited, and so went into Theater 4 (the Bob Seger Theater) not looking for much.

Sadly, not much is what I got. The flaws in Anderson’s work were only more in evidence. The use of music, slow motion and cute camera moves and framing only foregrounded the absence of passion and conviction. If I want to see a bloodless movie, I’ll see the latest Woody Allen stinker, thank you very much.

The death of a small child occurs in the middle of the film, but the characters are insulated from it by slow motion and mannered performances. By the end of the movie, it seems they have already forgotten this supposedly life-changing event.

In these reviews, I try and be snarky, so I can live up to my “Schmuck” moniker. But it’s honestly difficult to be snarky with regards to movies like this. I enjoyed this movie probably the least of the movies I have seen thus far at the LaGrange (alright, alright, Fracture was still the worst). Maybe the other movies weren’t as competently made as Darjeeling, but at least you felt that there was something other than preciousness motivating the filmmakers.

In the end, this movie was like a finely-crafted state-of-the-art station wagon. Sure, maybe it’s put together well, but do you really want to drive it? *

* No, you don’t.

I just remembered something not included in my original Halloween review.

There was another celebrity cameo of note — Monkees drummer Micky Dolenz plays a gun shop owner who sells Dr. Loomis a .357 Magnum.

My joke in the review would have been as follows:
“What, Peter Tork wasn’t available?”

I am aware that this joke is not strong enough to support an addendum, but I write this not to be funny, but instead to point out the presence of a haggard Monkee — we must keep track of these people and the Monkee philosophy they are attempting to spread.

Going to see movies at a second-run theater has more than just cheapness as a positive aspect. While the rest of you are despairing about the lack of product leaking out of the luxurious sphincter of Hollywood due to the ongoing writers’ strike, I’ll be munching popcorn while I watch Good Luck Chuck (of course, I’ll still be sobbing in the bitter darkness — how could one *not* sob in the presence of Good Luck Chuck?).

Anyways, what the hell were my choices today at the lovely LaGrange?

The Jane Austen Book Club – Not my cup of tea, probably. I felt pretty crappy after I realized Waitress, a movie I had previously avoided at the LaGrange, was written and directed by Adrienne Shelly, a woman who was recently murdered in NYC. Still, that guilt wasn’t enough to make me feel like seeing this movie tonight. I DO NOT LIKE CHICK MOVIES.

Superbad – I had checked the listings online, but I hadn’t realized this was playing until I was waiting in line with a collection of high school age kids. I half-heartedly wanted to see this, but…

I was already pretty much set on seeing Rob Zombie’s Halloween.

It was a dark, rainy and extremely crappy night as I walked into the LaGrange. There was actually a guy inside who took my ticket and tore it in half, a first for me there — probably due to the fact that it was relatively crowded, being an unusual weeknight before Thanksgiving and all.

The crowd was apparently there for Superbad. Halloween was showing in Theater 4. This theater will henceforth be known as the Bob Seger Theater, for the amount of times I have heard “Night Moves” there waiting for a movie to start. It was for the most part empty. There were just a couple guys to the left of me and a large Latino family (with two small girls!) sitting several rows behind me.

This new version of Halloween ain’t scary. It’s different than the original version in that we spend a lot more time with Michael Myers as a boy. A lot more. A lot, lot more. It attempts to explain the roots of his evil. And you know what? Who gives a crap why he’s evil. That’s what was so great about the original. When Michael’s parents come home to find him holding a bloody knife, it just defies a rational explanation why he would do such a thing, which is one of the reasons why it was scary.

So as we finally get to Myers as an adult, and he escapes a sanitarium to wreak havoc upon the small, imaginary town of Haddonfield, Illinois, I look at the time. Holy crap. They took like 45 minutes to set his crazy badass adult self in motion.

And the thing is, for the remainder of the film, Myers is just this relentless killing machine. I mean, the actor who plays him as an adult is literally seven feet tall. Whatever attempt to humanize Myers in the first part of the film is pretty much thrown away for the rest.

His unstoppable acts of violence actually made the movie kind of boring. Every scene where some character would come up against Myers I kept on hoping *someone* could hurt him, or get away, something. But he’d always just push his head through a wall, grab them and twist off their head like a carny killing a chicken.

Malcolm McDowell plays Dr. Loomis, previously played by the unfortunately now dead Donald Pleasance. There’s a crapload of other cameos which I guess we are supposed to find amusing or interesting. Brad Dourif plays a sheriff with a complicated beard that was apparently sprayed with fake snow, Sid Haig has a small part, as does Dee Wallace, Ken Foree, etc. Sybil Danning plays a nurse who gets forked to death (yes, forked to death), but does not show any boobs. Repeat… Sybil Danning does not show her boobs.

None of the characters really registered on any kind of emotional level for me, even the chick playing the Jamie Lee Curtis part. There was a scene where she was hiding behind a wall as Myers was looking for her. She was keeping her hands on her mouth because she couldn’t stop making noise. What the hell? You can’t be quiet when a psychopath is looking for you? You actually have to put your hands over your mouth to prevent you from making involuntary “Oh my God” sounds? What, does she have Tourette syndrome or something?

So, the movie ends and I walk outside. Thank heavens it’s not raining any more. It’s goddamn snowing.

Has it been over two weeks since I last visited the LaGrange Theatre? Perhaps I should have waited another week.

Tonight, the weather took an abrupt turn into winterville. The wind picked up and the temperature dropped. Part of my drive to the theater took place behind a person barely pushing 25mph. They kicked up a lot of leaves into the beam of my headlights, which both calmed and cheered me, and counteracted my impulse to haul ass and lean on my horn.

As I parked in downtown LaGrange, I noticed that Christmas lights were all strung up on trees, signposts and storefronts. Some people don’t like these early-bird Christmas decorations, but I got a happy feeling from them.

Okay, okay, enough warm and fuzzies, what were my choices tonight?

The Bourne Ultimatum – Seen It!

Hairspray – John Travolta is in it, the start time wasn’t until 9:40pm, and John Travolta is in it.

Mr. Woodcock – No, I don’t think so.

Which left me with:

The Brave One

Oh my. How boring was this movie? Let’s put it in perspective. It wasn’t quite as boring as Fracture, but it was more boring than Ocean’s 13. What I’m trying to say is that the place on the shelf for The Brave One is comfortably bookended by two equally shitty and boring movies.

I mean, c’mon. Look at Jodie Foster in the poster. She looks bored, and she was paid to be in it!

Jodie Foster plays verbose public radio talk show wiener Erica Bain, who, while walking her dog in Central Park with her fiancée (played by Lost’s Naveen Andrews), gets beat up by a gang of generic young toughs. She is badly hurt, but Mr. Andrews gets killed. As the violence unfolded, I thought of a more interesting scene, where instead of these toughs inflicting the beatdown, it was a bunch of fed-up former Lost fans.

“What is with the goddamn smoke monster?!!”
“Why does Locke completely change his motivation every goddamn 3rd episode?!”
“Statues with f*cking four toes??! Are you f*cking kidding me?”

Anyways, Erica Bain physically recovers, but she’s all emotionally on the edge and stuff. She goes to a police station to check on the progress of the investigation of Lost guy’s homicide, but is told to sit down to wait for a detective to come out.

Unfortunately, she waits too long, so like any impatient person promptly goes out and buys a gun. I tell you, the filmmakers are onto something with this — it’s a surefire solution for a long wait, whether at the ATM machine or in the doctor’s office.

She puts on dead Lost guy’s cross necklace and then ever-so-slowly gets to the killin’ of people. One thing I noticed in the poster was that she’s not wearing a cross necklace. What is that, a Freemason symbol?

Honestly, a lot of the killings are done purely in self-defense. The first occurs in a convenience store where a guy is going to shoot her if she doesn’t defend herself. The second is on a subway where a guy is going to knife her if she doesn’t defend herself. Really, Ms. Bain? You expect me to call that vigilantism? I think not.

There are absolutely no shades of gray in this film. It’s made clear to the viewers that everyone killed by Bain had it coming. The main dramatic conflict involves us waiting for Bain to realize she is above the stupid law.

Terrence Howard plays Detective Mercer, who eventually figures out Bain is the one doing all the “vigilante” killings. Yes, he’s fine with what Ms. Bain is doing, thank you for asking.

Okay, so the female Ira Glass that is Erica Bain has been killing loads of one-dimensionally evil New Yorkers, but what about those young toughs that started the whole movie on its boring, mopey course?

Ahh, Detective Mercer luckily gets a tip which leads to the gang. Bain is brought in to identify the suspect. BUT SHE DOESN’T. Oh no. She is going to kill the S.O.B.

As she pulls up to the guy’s apartment building, I got to thinking, I wonder what happened to her dog that she was walking at the start of the film. Sure enough, we see one of the young toughs holding it by a leash outside. Those goddamn dog stealers!

Bang, she kills the guy with her dog. Bang, she kills another guy. She goes for one more guy but he gets the drop on her. Detective Mercer busts in and now once again the “good guys” are in command. So, what does Mercer do?

Of course, he gives his gun to Bain to shoot the guy lying on the floor. Which she does. Then Mercer has her shoot him in the arm with her gun. You see, he realizes that Bain is doing some damn fine work, and he’s going to frame the toughs for Bain’s previous murders, and make it look like they killed themselves, or shot at him, or something. The important thing is, this is the good kind of frameup, folks, not the bad kind.

So he tells her to skedaddle, and she does. Her dog runs after her. I’m not kidding. Her dog runs after her. So everything ends okay. Oh wait, there’s one more thing that could make this ending even a little bit more perfect.

A Sarah McLachlan song kicks in.

Oh, mercy.

I’ll admit it right up front. I broke a rule tonight. An unwritten rule that I guess I will write about now. So, only a recently explicitly written rule.

But first, some background before I write out that rule.

I would have been more than happy to settle in with MizSplotchy tonight, for a nice cozy evening of popcorn and Jeepers Creepers.

The recent experience of Freaky Frights On Forest has raised the joy of Halloween in my blood to near toxic levels (also, I believe they had a Jeepers Creepers display on the southwest corner of Forest). I haven’t seen Jeepers Creepers before, and no, I didn’t know my nemesis Justin Long was in it.

But, alas, MizSplotchy had to study. Since I couldn’t watch a scary movie by myself without gettin’ the night terrors, I decided to see what was playing at the LaGrange.

Here’s what my choices were.

The Bourne Ultimatum
I’ve seen the other two Bourne movies on TV, and they were kind of [shrug] okay.

No Reservations
Some godforsaken shitty romantic comedy starring Aaron Eckhart and Catherine Zeta-Jones. I wouldn’t be so harsh about a movie I haven’t seen, but the tagline for it is “Something’s Cooking This Summer”. See? Shitty.

Rush Hour 3
Haven’t seen the first two, and felt like I would be just swimming in confusion. Why is that black guy talking so excitedly? Why is that old Chinese guy trying to do karate?

Stardust
A fantasy of monumentally magical proportions.

So, hmm. Stardust started earlier, at 8:50pm. I sorta half-assed wanted to see Bourne, but it didn’t start until 9:20pm. Agh, that was a little late for me. The only thing I knew about Stardust was from its trailer, with Robert DeNiro sporting a shit-eating grin as he pilots a large, magic flying ship.

I bring up Stardust’s entry on the IMDB. Wow, it’s got an 8.1 user rating! That ain’t shabby. What the hell. I decided to catch the earlier show of Stardust.

So I have sat down for the showing of Stardust. As it starts out, we see there’s this really old wall in England, and an eighteen year old boy gets by an old geezer who’s guarding a gap in the wall, which is supposedly a gateway to a magic land. And it does indeed turn out to be a magic land. So, the kid goes and has sex with a princess who is enslaved to a witch, and then nine months later back in England said boy has a baby delivered to him, and then eighteen years later that baby is a boy who is in love with this girl, and then a star falls from the sky.

I looked at my watch. 9:12pm. Boy, this movie is kind of cheesy. And I don’t like the special effects. Also kind of cheesy. I don’t know if I can wait for DeNiro’s grinning goofiness. 9:16. The fallen star has turned into Claire Danes.

I get up and exit the theater. I walk into Theater 1 and wait for The Bourne Ultimatum to start.

Mr. Damon? Mr. Damon? Over here!

This is the rule I broke. Stardust might be a perfectly fine movie. Hell, many users on the IMDB who possibly aren’t all complete nimrods thought Stardust was fantastic. In the future, I think that if I go to see a movie, I should stay until the end of it. Unless I don’t really want to.

Okay, so. The Bourne Ultimatum. Kind of pointless. Lots of unnecessary camera motion to keep you from focusing on the lack of a plot. In the end, Bourne supposedly answers the riddles of his life that he’s been struggling for in the last three movies. I still don’t see a happy life for him. One day he’s going to be waiting in line at the DMV, and somebody will look at him the wrong way and he’s going to snap their pinkies off.

I got home and told MizSplotchy I started out watching Stardust, but it didn’t feel right watching it. She replied,”Why? Because you aren’t a big vagina?” Oh, MizSplotchy!

I’m not going to even tell you my choices at the LaGrange tonight. I knew what I wanted to see and I saw it.

I was quite excited about tonight’s movie. It had all the components of a perfect two-buck movie:

1. A white-collar revenge drama bringing unholy punishment on a bunch of dirty gangbangers
2. The avenger is Kevin Bacon.
3. The director is James Wan, the writer/director of the completely ridiculous Saw franchise.

Of course, I speak of the magnificent Death Sentence.

Wow, check that poster out! That’s something. I don’t know what that something is, but it’s definitely something.

What we have in this film is a white suburban male revenge boner fantasy. Wait, that’s really not fair. What we have here is a hacky writer/director’s silly notion of a white suburban male revenge boner fantasy.

This movie was so darned silly and implausible, I heartily enjoyed it.

Kevin Bacon is a well-to-do risk analyst with a loving wife and two kids he adores (well, he loves one of the kids at least – he’s really good at hockey). As he and the loved son head home from a hockey game, Bacon makes the biggest mistake a white person can make when driving a car at night — flashing his headlights as a friendly reminder to another driver that their headlights are not on. BIG MISTAKE, MR. BACON. The next thing you know, he’s watching his #1 Son get his neck sliced open by a gangbanger wielding a machete.

Wait, don’t feel sad! It’s clear that the filmmakers don’t want you to feel any sense of loss. What you need to feel is the white suburban rage coursing through Kevin Bacon’s thetans.

Through a series of incredibly silly plot twists, Bacon goes to machete dude’s place of residence and kills him with a rusty knife. But wouldn’t you know, he was spotted by the sister of a gang member, who fingers Bacon as the rusty knife-wielder.

Bacon gets home and informs his family that the gang member that killed #1 Son was killed, perhaps by some sort of rival gang violence. And please ignore his rumpled clothes and the deep, bleeding slice on his hand! He fell on the driveway!

Meanwhile, the gang members are stewing at their favorite bar, trying to determine whether pouring your drinks on the floor or drinking them constitutes more respect to the departed. What they do agree on is that they are going to kill Mr. Bacon.

So, the following day, as Bacon is walking out of work, the gang members attempt to ambush him. A reasonably exciting foot chase ensues. One thing I found amusing was the chase was the flipside of something you would find in a Friday the 13th movie. In the Friday the 13th films, Jason walks at a steady but unhurried pace after some dimwitted victim. The victim is invariably hauling ass, but it makes no difference. No one can escape the plodding of Jason, despite how close to the speed of light they are traveling. In the chase scene in this film, seven or eight guys in their physical prime are sprinting after the middle-aged Bacon, but they just can’t seem to gain on the fellah.

Bacon manages to get away to his home. Now, you’d think that now that he realizes the gang members are aware that he killed their buddy, and are out for his blood, that he might warn his family, or at least say, “Hey, let’s go on a ROAD TRIP!” Well, you would be wrong. What does he do, the day after he was ambushed at his place of work? HE GOES BACK TO WORK.

A gang member delivers Bacon’s briefcase (he had dropped it in the prior day’s chase) to him, with a picture of Bacon’s family with their faces crossed out. Holy cow! I didn’t take the previous day’s ambush seriously, but they have crossed my family’s faces off! That’s a red flag! My family and me are in DANGER!

Bacon finally calls the cops, who put a car outside his home. No, the detective that keeps on popping up throughout the film doesn’t ask him any hard-hitting questions about why his hand is sliced up, etc. What, is that a detective’s job? Figuring shit out?

There is a brief interlude between Bacon and his wife. She doesn’t give him ANY crap for putting their entire family in jeopardy, and doesn’t give him ANY crap for killing a guy. She says, “No matter what happens, you’re a good father.” HOLY SHIT. What a gal.

Of course, the next thing you know the gang members have slit the throats of the patrolmen parked out front and have entered Bacon’s house. Shortly after they shoot Bacon, his wife and their son. Just remember, no matter what happens, Bacon is a good father.

I have already recounted much of the plot, but I must really stop, to give you something to look forward to. How about John Goodman as a body shop owner and gun dealer? How about a police force that feels no need to arrest anyone in relation to the throat-slitting of a couple patrolmen? You’ll have to wait and see for yourself Bacon’s heartfelt confession to his comatose Son #2 that he really didn’t like him as much as hockey-playing Son #1.

Oh my God this was a cheap movie to warm the heart and soul.