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Marmaduke (Blu-ray)

"I liked it when Marmaduke farted."
Hannah Dixon, age 8, on Marmaduke

Yeah, that's kind of the review right there.

Kids

Marmaduke, nooooo!

like doggies. Kids like things that fart. Kids definitely like computer-generated critters who talk and line-dance. That's pretty much the magic behind Marmaduke, an adaptation of a comic strip I didn't even know was still being published from the studio who brought you Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel and the Garfield flicks.

Marmaduke is the kind of movie you drop in the DVD player, mash the big button on the remote, and run away as quickly as your stubby little legs will take you. It's not a family movie: it's a kiddie flick. If you're a parent, you know the difference. If you're not a parent, then...wait, why are you reading this again? Anyway, if you haven't read the Marmaduke strip since Jimmy Carter was in office, it hasn't really changed all that much. Marmaduke's a dog. A big dog. He eats a lot. He...actually, that's pretty much it. One panel a day, every day, for 56 years, so that's somewhere around twenty thousand "it looks more like Marmaduke's walking him!" gags. If you're scratching your head wondering how someone could take that and drag it out into an hour-and-a-half movie, the answer's "high school".

See, Marmaduke is pretty much a high school comedy about a slacker teenager, only with...y'know, dogs. Keeping in mind that I don't remember the names of any of the not-an-animal characters, the story goes something like this: Marketing Exec Who Cares More About His Job Than His Family (Lee Pace) lands a ritzy new position out in sunny California. The family's really not all that jazzed about moving up stakes from Kansas to the O.C., which they really do call "The O.C." somewhere around 1,386 times throughout the course of the movie, but they love Dad, so they support him...[read the entire review]

MacGruber (Blu-ray)

So, yeah: MacGruber.

I have no idea

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what I'm supposed to write in a review of MacGruber. I mean, I could recap the plot and all, but no one's really in it for the story. I could try to dive into how hysterical the whole thing is, but then I fall into the trap of awkwardly trying to describe specific gags, wind up making them not sound even a little bit funny, and spoil a bunch of the punchlines in the process. You'll just have to take it on faith, I guess: MacGruber is the third best comedy of 2010. There! I said it. Not taking it back either. Not unless I see more comedies in 2010, at least.

If you were wondering how MacGruber could grab a super-short SNL sketch off the shelf and stretch it out for an hour and a half, then...well, it doesn't, really. There are only three or so MacGuyver riffs in the entire flick, and there's none of that "Toss me that paper clip!" "You got it, MacGruber!"-dom until the climax rolls around. The rest of it's a pretty brilliant spoof of '80s action flicks. I don't mean "brilliant" in the Hot Fuzz sense...cleverly constructed, devastatingly witty, and all that. No, MacGruber's dumb. Gloriously, unapologetically dumb. That's exactly what it's setting out to do, though, so don't take that as a pan. Part of the gag is that so much of MacGruber is indistinguishable from a genuine '80s action flick. Think Rambo III filtered through Remo Williams on a Cannon budget. See, Dieter von Cunth (Val Kilmer) has swiped a nuclear warhead from the Russkies, and he's scheming to nuke Washington because...well, what else are you gonna do with a nuclear warhead? Our great nation has only one hope left: MacGruber (Will Forte)! Too bad he's been dead for ten years. Oh! Wait. His old mentor, Col. Faith (Powers Boothe), tracks the now-way-pacifistic MacGruber to the monastery...[read the entire review]

The Vampire Diaries: Season 1 (Blu-ray)

I know,

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I know. Vampires skulking around in daylight. A pretty, pretty vamp swooping into high school and instantly falling for a girl. You even get to watch him play football a couple of times...maybe not quite the same thing as vampire baseball but somewhere in the same time zone, at least. If you haven't tuned into The Vampire Diaries before, maybe you're guessing from the title that it's Twilight with a LiveJournal: every week, some new angsty journal entry about a teenaged girl's epic, swooning romance with her undead lover. You'd be wrong.

The title's not all that far off, though: there are vampires, and there are indeed diaries. One of these diaries is being kept by Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev). Elena's been writing down her thoughts for quite some time now, but in these dark days, her diary is her only outlet for the way she really feels. She's still reeling from the deaths of both of her parents just a few short months ago, and while she tries to present a smiling face to the world at large, she's emotionally ravaged inside. Elena has been keeping almost everyone around her at arm's length, dumping one of her oldest friends who she'd only recently started to date and tearing just about every last page out of her social calendar. She's dead inside.

Stefan Salvatore (Paul Wesley), meanwhile, is dead, period. He too keeps a journal, although having been alive...well, undead...for around 150 years, Stefan has had quite a bit more to write about than Elena. One of the first things Stefan did upon his return to his ancestral home of Mystic Falls, Virginia is re-enroll in high school. As an eternal 17 year old, he doesn't run into any trouble looking the part. It certainly doesn't hurt that as one of the few surviving vampires who doesn't sizzle and smolder under the light of day, there's...[read the entire review]

George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead (Blu-ray)

The

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undead in George Romero's movies retain some trace memory of the lives they once knew, and out of some sort of primal, reflexive force of habit, they shamble their way through the same stale routines in death that they did in life. Legions of the walking dead mindlessly converge on a shopping mall the way they once did every Sunday afternoon. Bub picks up a razor and takes a stab at shaving. Big Daddy still tries to pump gas whenever he hears the bell ring at the Exxon down the road. There's no precision...no skill...not even a flicker of thought or intelligence behind it: just the faint, distant shadow of a routine inexorably seared into what's left of the minds of these sad, decaying creatures. That's pretty much how I felt about Romero himself after trudging through his last couple zombie flicks. I take no pleasure in saying that either. I mean, Dawn of the Dead made me fall in love with horror. Hell, it made me fall in love with movies, period, transforming what had once been a casual pasttime into a full-blown obsession. Romero's return to the zombie film, Land of the Dead, was dragged down by abysmal writing and awkward, heavy-handed social commentary, but it still seemed passably mediocre rather than outright bad. Diary of the Dead, meanwhile, was aggressively awful. Cheap, amateurish, and incompetently written and acted, Diary... was an experiment that went so terribly wrong that I'd rather cue up some shitball spaghetti gutmuncher like Zombie 4 than suffer through that again. It's so bad that it made me completely write off one of my longtime heroes. I'm more loyal than I ought to be and am kind of a masochist, though, so when Survival of the Dead -- Romero's sixth zombie movie overall and his third since 2005 -- washed up in the mail, I sighed and plopped it in my Blu-ray deck...[read the entire review]

Time Bandits (Blu-ray)

"If I were creating a world, I wouldn't mess around with butterflies and daffodils. I would've started with lasers! Eight o'clock, day one."

Okay,

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so the heavens and the earth were all hammered out in the space of a week. Six days is kind of a quick turnaround for crafting the fabric of the universe, and the contractors that the Supreme Being farmed all that out to had to do a helluva rush job to hit that deadline. A few gaping rifts were left in the space/time continuum, and if you stumble onto one, you might be transported to...oh, the Napoleonic wars or Sherwood Forest or last Tuesday night so you can pay your phone bill on time. The man upstairs put together a map of these many different doorways, and there's a work order floating around to spackle over all of these holes. A gaggle of pint-sized employees for the Supreme Being, bored with designing shrubs and stinky trees, have wound up getting their wee little hands on the map. Why fix all those hiccups in the space/time continuum when you can use 'em as gateways to transdimensional high robbery? The idea's that they can snatch history's most legendary treasures and duck into a time portal before anyone can blink twice. So, yeah: time bandits.

Alright! So they wield the means to transport themselves to any time and any place, past, present, or future. Where do they trot off to first? To swipe da Vinci's notebooks? To empty out the Louvre? To grab a sports almanac from the future and swoop on over to Vegas? Nope. First up on the hit parade is a British tyke's bedroom. I guess there's kind of a learning curve to carving a path through space and time, and it doesn't help that the floating, disembodied head of the Supreme Being is in hot pursuit. Kevin (Craig Warnock) lets himself get dragged along as these three-foot bandits tear apart...[read the entire review]

Withnail and I (Blu-ray)

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Beer.
Sherry.
Vodka.
Scotch.
Many gallons of wine.
Why not? Lighter fluid.

Withnail (Richard E. Grant) demands booze. It's only fair. I mean, how else is a hyperkinetic failed actor living in a hovel in Camdentown supposed to keep warm in the many months between gigs? Besides, it's 1969: hedonism's kind of the new thing. Withnail keeps himself in enough of a perpetual drunken stupor that he can tolerate living in a rat-infested hole in the wall for entire minutes at a time. His downbeat, nameless flatmate -- y'know, the "I" in the title (played by Paul McGann) -- meanwhile keeps pestering Withnail to hit his father up for some spending money. Despite being every bit as broke and half-starved, Withnail refuses, but hey...a compromise! He asks his eccentric uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths) for the keys to his cottage in the country instead. This bad streak at the whole acting game will probably pass sooner or later, I guess, and they might as well spend the meantime recollecting themselves on holiday.

Turns out Withnail and "I" are trading one unliveable pit of despair for another. Monty's cottage is a few exits and a long, unpaved road past the middle of nowhere. The weather's insufferable. The two of 'em have to smash apart furniture and torch it to make it through the first night. The cottage itself has crumbled into decay. There's no food to be found. The locals either ignore them or are pestered into a near-murderous rage. These two self-indulgent twentysomethings who grew up in wealth and privilege have to start fending for themselves (kind of), from slaughtering their chicken dinner to "fishing" with a double-barrelled rifle. Just about the time you start to think that Withnail and I is settling into an affable fish-out-of-water comedy, it grabs hold of the gears and shifts into something...[read the entire review]

More reviews...

Stuff I've Watched Recently

9/2: Hatchet (Blu-ray; Commentary)
9/2: Hatchet (Blu-ray; Commentary)
9/2: Hatchet (Blu-ray)
9/1: Cemetery Junction (Blu-ray)
9/1: The Evil Dead (Limited Edition) (Blu-ray)
9/1: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (Blu-ray)
8/30: Marmaduke (DVD)
8/29: MacGruber (Blu-ray; Commentary)
8/29: MacGruber (Blu-ray)
8/25: Machine Gun McCain (Blu-ray)
8/23: George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead (Ultimate Undead Edition) (Blu-ray; Commentary)
8/23: Walking After Midnight (Blu-ray)
8/23: George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead (Ultimate Undead Edition) (Blu-ray)
8/22: Hamlet (Blu-ray Book) (Blu-ray)
8/22: The Secret of the Grain (The Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)