Pay the Ghost (2015) - Review

This post will conclude the reviewing of movies that my wife and I watched while we were out of town some weeks ago (I am posting somewhat in advance to avoid as many conflicts with classes as possible). I'm thankful to have a supportive partner that is willing to suffer alongside me. Coincidentally, both Knowing and Pay the Ghost see Nicolas Cage defy fate and the natural order as a mild-mannered professor - a fact that I have become ignorant over the years. I have seen both movies before, but did not make the connection until his profession was made to be a plot point in both works. This is concerning for me as an aspiring instructor in my field of study (thankfully not film-related) - that I will take elements of either film's eccentric professors and incorporate them into my own teaching style. This is in jest, because I want to have a long and rewarding lecturing career. The moment I start chasing ghosts or bible-code inspired documents is the moment that I know that I've truly lost it and might be in a similarly contrived movie.

Knowing (2009) - Review

My wife and I watched Knowing while I was ill at the tail end of one of our engagements out of town last month. We had started watching Pay the Ghost, a review of which I will probably post this Thursday, before we had left and wanted to support my perplexing mission of reviewing each Nic Cage movie. Enough background discussion, let's get to the meat and potatoes!

Army of One (2016) - Review

Army of One is an ... interesting movie. I'm not even sure I can give a review an honest try. I never try to be objective when I'm writing an opinion piece, like reviews are, but I'm not even sure that there is enough substance to me to give to a formal critique. Frustrated American Gary Faulkner (Cage) has a mission delivered to him by flash of divine inspiration from God (Russell Brand) to travel to Pakistan to capture, but not kill, Osama bin Laden. There's no technical aspect that makes this movie special, and the script leaves a lot to be desired; reading the synopsis of real events that happened in the movie was a lot more interesting than seeing Nic Cage torture himself with a high-pitched, nasally voice and undergo a series of extraordinarily uninteresting events as he makes multiple attempts to cross into and traverse Pakistan to hunt the infamous international pariah. 

The longer the movie went on, the more I asked myself who this was for - I find this to be a really banal line of criticism, so I use this very judiciously. The comedic elements of the movie were very dull and for most of the runtime led me to feel secondhand embarrasment for everyone involved. There is a scene in a sporting goods section of a store where Faulkner purchases a hanglider, but not before he leans on a display of several canoes and makes it crash to the floor. There's not even an attempt for the actor playing a store clerk to chastise Faulkner for not only his clumsiness but making the rest of his day miserable reassembling the display. The scene carries on for some time and feels as if it might have been better placed in a hidden camera prank show instead of this movie's insistence at portraying this delusional man's story as a comedy of errors where the errors usually bring about some failure upwards. Granted, this is based off a real person's life where success does not happen in this venture, however the movie needed a compelling reason to tell this story.

Look, I do not and will not assign a rating to movies, and this is no exception. I even go out of my way to find something that I enjoy in movies and praise them for that, but I can't muster one reason to enjoy or watch this one ever again. I don't regret watching this movie but I will not recommend that someone put themselves through the misery of doing so.

USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage (2016) - Review

USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage is a disaster movie in more than one sense of the phrase. The story follows groups of soldiers before deployment on a mission to deliver materials for the Hiroshima atomic bomb, during that mission, and the aftermath. The ship was hit by Japanese submarine fire on its return journey home, but due to the top secret nature of the mission and other incompetencies, the surviving crew were stranded at sea for 4 days before being rescued. 

I did enjoy the story of the movie, the strongest parts being the off-water scenes. The water scenes were not particularly offensive story-wise, however, another disaster was set squarely during these moments. The special effects are horrendous given the serious and somber tone of the movie. Given the nature of the sailor's location, the South Pacific, I have seen criticism of the CG being compared to the television feature Sharknado and after looking at some comparison footage, the comparison is not far off. The CG planes and boats are more jarring than that of the sharks which are tinged with a blue hue (being underwater, like sharks are).

It is a real shame that the movie is plagued with budgetary issues - as stated above, I believe that the story is fairly moving, if not heavily abbreviated. I had a deep emotional connection to the sailors on the boat that were struck by such tragedy - I had 2 great-uncles (on opposite sides of my family) both present at Pearl Harbor at the time of the December 7th attack and survive. It is disappointing to me that the depiction of such a tragic event is mired by the poor attempt at CG.

Grindhouse Double Feature: Trailers (2007) - Blog

Double Feature Poster

The trailers included in the Grindhouse Double Feature collection (2007) are masterworks completed by directors that understand the genre well. Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the S.S. includes a stinger for Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu, the brief moments of his appearance show an unashamedly unhinged Nic Cage hamming it up for the audience. Don't is a simple short showcasing various horror cliches with the titular warning directed toward the characters and ultimately the audience. Thanksgiving is by far my favorite trailer in the collection, filled to the brim with slasher-related puns for the holiday themed slayings such as my favorite: "White meat, dark meat, all will be carved", which has permeated my family's Thanksgiving festivities for nearly 15 years.

Seeing the trailers for Machete and Hobo With a Shotgun, with the announcement earlier this year of Thanksgiving being fully produced, show audience engagement and the lasting power of their popularity 15 years later. I had lobbed criticism toward Drive Angry of the creative team behind it not understanding the allure of the grindhouse genre, and it was truly a testament as to how a movie evoking the same style can go so wrong if care isn't taken to preserve elements that audiences enjoy. I hope for the success of Thanksgiving and what it could possibly do in reviving production on Werewolf Women of the S.S.

211 (2018) - Review

Movie Poster

211 is a drama/crime film starring Nicolas Cage as Mike Chandler, a policeman who has seemingly lost everything in his life after the passing of his wife and has thrusted himself into his work at the expense of other relationships in his life, especially his daughter, Lisa (Sophie Skelton). Chandler's partner, Steve MacAvoy, is Lisa's husband, and tries to help repair the estranged family's relationship by announcing their recent pregnancy. They are assigned to have a bullied black high school student, Kenny (Michael Rainey Jr.) participate in a mandated ride-along as punishment for being caught fighting his bullies back. Meanwhile, four mercenaries plot to rob a bank for a sum that they feel is due to them from a man who burned them in Afghanistan. This money was intentionally sent to a bank inside of the U.S. before the mercenaries could steal it in Afghanistan. These parties intersect each other while the robbery has commenced and the two officer's focus is to remove the student from the scene safely.

From the synopsis alone, it can be gathered that there is a lot in this movie. Chandler is close to retirement, MacAvoy are expecting a child - motivations for characters that usually indicate that they might not make it out of the film alive. These tropes are laid on thick, possibly to ratchet up tension in the audience. Kenny, who does not seem to be trusting of the police, indicated by him filming a routine call to a gas station where it seems the two police target a black adult out of nowhere and the student records the police interaction on his cell phone. This is after he is punished for standing up for himself against bullies (all white) shoving his head in a urinal, the school authorities (teacher and principal both white) threatening to expel him for the incident, and his mother expressing her concern that the punishment is her child placed in the back of a police cruiser for an unjust "zero-tolerance" policy. Recording this interaction echoes to an earlier interaction between the two police partners where Chandler complains to MacAvoy that policework is getting more complicated and burdensome with more accountability put into place, one of the many motivations for his consideration for retiring from the police force. 

The mercenaries that are robbing the bank have the operation down to a "t" and is going smoothly until the police decide to investigate their getaway vehicle for a parking violation in front of the bank. Their loyalty to each other is never questioned, and their robbery would have succeeded if not for the police intervention into a minor traffic violation. The police all have the sense of family as well, holding down the scene for SWAT backup as they move in lock-step, supporting one another despite the bank robbers gunning them down with military weapons. 

211 is unflinching in its want to portray the ties that families have. There are 2 sets of bonds that the movie focuses on: Familial bonds - Husband/Wife, Father/Daughter, Father/Son, Mother/Son - and camaraderie - police and military. Cage's performance of Mike Chandler feels surprisingly authentic. His unyielding commitment to his job as a policeman, to protect and serve not only Kenny, but his family as well. Even though he gives the kid in his charge a difficult time about the official reason he's riding along, he shows heart while Kenny is detailing the ways that he has been wronged. I can see many different story beats that this film could focus on, but it finds itself too busy. Busy enough that there has been no mention until now of an INTERPOL agent (Alexandra Dinu) who travelled from Afghanistan to Massachusetts to assist the arrest of the mercenaries. There has been no mention of her to this point because I cannot piece together what the character contributes to the story. There is an insistence in using her character as much as possible, but again, I cannot be sure what the value add to that strategy is. 211 tries to be a jack of all trades, but is a master of none. Not even a strong performance from Cage can salvage this plot in the span of 87 minutes.

The Gas Station Movie Section

There is nothing that I miss more about movies than being able to peruse the selection of movies that gas stations have failed to sell over the years. I went out of town with my wife recently and she asked me what took me so long buying a few drinks for the road. After buying everything we needed for the drive, I took a moment to scope the entire floor and felt a tinge of sadness that this gas station showed no trace of any movies. I briefly considered going to the manager, who had just checked out my items, and sheepishly asking why there weren't any DVDs being sold, but my anxiety whispered in my ear and told me the truth, "That man doesn't care about stocking DVDs".

I used to drive across the United States to visit friends quite a bit in my early twenties. As a result, I spent quite a bit of time needing to stretch my legs after locked into place for hours on end. These movie sections were a source of entertainment for me as I compared the titles remaining on the shelves, seeing if I recognized anything. I never intended on purchasing any, but I remember seeing The Convoy Collection on the shelf and feeling a compulsion to indulge in this bootleg experience - I did a lot of things as a joke, and this was one of those situations.

I have spent a lot of money on movies and hate the fact that I haven't invested equal energy to watch them. I mentioned in my last post that I lost my last database created to catalogue my movies and TV shows, as I have lost many more, but it wasn't until my latest venture that I became serious about using collection management software. The software is very much a godsend! The developers include the ability to search various databases for information to include with the movie in the database and this functionality showed me that these movies included with the Convoy Collection are mislabeled. The misattribution is ever so slight, but slight enough that I was forced to do some detective work.

Trucker's Women is actually Trucker's Woman, but more confusingly has also been released as Truckin' Man. Moonfire Trucker is Moonfire [sic], a movie with a delightful sounding premise of truck drivers fighting Nazis in Mexico. The Concrete Cowboy  is simply Concrete Cowboys, aka Highway Action, aka Nashville Detective, aka Ramblin' Man - a Tom Selleck & Jerry Reed movie that seems fairly decent from what little I can gather.

I truly do miss the loss of the gas station movie section, but I do recognize the unattractiveness of items that do not sell to individuals responsible for financial success of a business already operating at paper-thin margins. Realizing the loss of the DVD bins/shelves at my local gas stations gave me a tinge of sadness, giving me a sense of melancholy as I remember VHS phasing out early in my childhood, the rise of the DVD and the supremacy of Blu-Ray over HD DVDs. I don't know if I'll ever watch these movies, but I do appreciate them being bundled together if not for the rabbit hole that properly tagging them in my current database sent me down and the recollection of memories that I had purchasing them. Time does march on, maybe a little faster than I would like.