Evil Dead:
Bloodsploitation at its most bloody. Is “bloodsploitation” a word
already? I’m gonna just assume it isn’t and that I’m the cleverest
clever guy on planet Clever for coming up with it. Cool? Cool.
There’s some blood in the Evil Dead remake, you guys.
From people slicing off bits of their own faces to people hacking off
their own limbs to people using nail guns as projectile weapons to
people bludgeoning other people with toilet lids to people burying
chainsaws in yet other people’s heads while blood torrents down from the
sky… there’s some blood.
[You Might Also Like:2013 Midterms, Part 3: Ex-Governors, Witchbusters, and (Lots Of) Collateral Damage. ]
Also, there’s a really fun and occasionally scary movie happening during all this bloodplay. Oh. “Bloodplay” actually has
been used before. And, uh… it’s grosser than what happens in this
movie. Google it. But, yeah, as far as remakes go, this will
definitely do. There’s a more grounded feel to it- the demons are all
still mostly human-looking (except those eyes, man…), more like
crazy, possessed Regan MacNeils than big, puffy beasties, and none of
them fly around the cabin, giggling like loons. And did I mention
there’s lots and lots of blood? Like 50 times more than the 1981
classic (and it is a classic, by the way). There’s also some
tweaks to the characters and plot of the original- the Ash character is
now both the first person possessed, the last one standing, and female
(“Mia” played by Jane Levy. She’s a little young for me, but we’ll make
it work), and instead of going on a fun vacation, the reason these five
people are in a cabin deep in the woods is they’re trying to help her
kick her heroin habit. But a lot of the iconic imagery and situations
remain. We still get a dumbass starting the whole mess by not heeding
the warnings and reading the Book Of The Dead aloud, there’s still the
“forest is alive” aspect, and there’s still a loosely-chained cellar
door barely holding the evil at bay, but it’s all updated to fit the new
aesthetic, and it’s all done with such great love and reverence to the
original (originals, actually- it’s like Evil Dead 1 & 2 combined) that I never once said to myself, “remakes suck,” like I do at 90% of them.
Also, it’s really very artistic, visually. Fede Alvarez has a real
eye for framing copious amounts of gore. The aforementioned image of
our heroine burying a chainsaw down the throat of the big bad in the
pouring bloodrain while the cabin burns behind them is, no joke, one of
the most beautiful images of the year so far. Definitely more beautiful
than anything original Evil Dead creator & director Sam Raimi did with that friggin’ Oz movie he made, that’s for damn sure. But we’ll get to that later…
So, uh, see Evil Dead, if you’re not squeamish. It’s the first movie I saw in 2013, and it’s still the most fun I’ve had in the theater this year.
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Oblivion: Planet Of The Matrix Wall-E Space Odyssey Apes! And then some!!
Oblivion is every science fiction movie you’ve ever seen,
wrapped up in one slick package. Sometimes it’s thematic- someone has
been left behind on an unliveable Earth to clean the place up, like in Wall-E. Sometimes it’s visual- recognizeable half-destroyed structures jut out of the landscape, like in Planet Of The Apes.
Sometimes it’s in the design- Tom Cruise flies around in a slick,
curvy, aerodynamic ship with rounded blue-flame engines, like in The Phantom Menace.
And sometimes it’s just plain scene-stealing- our heroes fly an enemy
vessel into the mothership to destry it from within, like in Independence Day.
Add to that cloning, a human resistance, a forbidden zone,
hunter-killer robots, a computer-run ecosystem, a pod-like race through a
canyon, and fast-moving creatures showing up on motion-detectors and
you’ve got a cornucopia of pretty familiar situations.
[You Might Also Like:2013 Midterms, Part 3: Ex-Governors, Witchbusters, and (Lots Of) Collateral Damage. ]
You’d think this would have bugged the shit out of me. It didn’t.
Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, or maybe I was just too tired
to care… but I think, actually, that it was simply a pretty good movie
with some pretty good performances (Cruise, Morgan Freeman, my new
girlfriend Andrea Riseborough, Melissa Leo, Jaime Lannister
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) that elicited some pretty positive reactions in
me. It went with a very specific, uncomfortable tone right from the
get-go and stuck with it. And I’m down with that. Original? Not so
much. A classic? No, but it references several. Good? Yeah. Very
good.
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Iron Man 3: I’m loving this Marvel Movie Renaissance. They’re really starting to take some bold(er) chances, post-Avengers. Iron Man 3 is the first bit of proof. They hire Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang‘s Shane Black to write and direct it, and he tells a very personal tale about a man who should
be on top of the world he just saved, but instead he’s been reduced to a
frightened, obsessed, reclusive ball of uncertainty, that some have
opined is Tony Stark suffering from PTSD, following the cosmic events of
last year’s big team-up. Then Black has the sheer audacity to introduce a classic fan-favorite big bad from the comic (and hinted at in the first Iron Man)
only to unceremoniously blow the whole thing out of the water with a
crazy reveal that completely negates everything the other characters and
we, the audience, expected. And then he goes balls-out and
presents us a Tony Stark that spends 2/3 of the movie, including most of
the big finale, fighting crime while not wearing the superhero suit that gives us the title of the movie.
And it’s all so very, very great. This is how you keep it fresh, kids. I mean, I dug Man Of Steel,
but with its city-in-peril destruction and “enemies from out there,
somewhere” aesthetic, it’s trying so hard to capitalize on The Avengers that it gets one-upped by this smaller tale of one man’s personal growth. I guess Iron is stronger than Steel.
Anyway, the Iron Man returnees (RDJ, Paltrow, Cheadle, et al.)
continue to bring top-notch character interaction and evolution, and
the newcomers (namely Guy Pearce as “Aldrich Killian,” Ben Kingsley as
“The Mandarin,” and Rebecca Hall as “Maya Hansen”) work as perfect,
unexpected foils for them. And, really, it’s the movie’s rich
characters that season it to perfection. The action is just frosting.
If you felt burned by the sheer excess of Iron Man 2 (I didn’t, but I get it if you did) and that kept you from checking out 3,
do yourself a favor and see if it’s still playing near you. If not,
get on it when it’s available at home. Yeah, there’s a veritable army
of Iron on display here, but this time it’s all in service of the more
important half of the equation- the Man.
P.S. Next up for the Marvel people and their bold choices- Thor: The Dark World. Apparently it’s full of Dark Elves and fantasy realms, and possibly very little in the way of Earth. Not to mention next year’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, which features a tree-man and a talking raccoon with guns. Yeah, shit just got surreal, you guys.
[You Might Also Like:2013 Midterms, Part 3: Ex-Governors, Witchbusters, and (Lots Of) Collateral Damage. ]
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