Screenhead

No, seriously, you won’t.

In fact, rather than say it myself and risk you not believing me, I’m going to just quote the results of a recent interview Woo did with Cinema Blend.  Dig the word:

Yeah, a musical, yeah! I have a script for a musical for 12 years that I paid for with my own money. I still want to make a musical. It’s an original, not from any well-known existing musical. It’s an action musical. (laughs) It’s true! We have a very good script, I wanted to make it, but it’s hard to interest studios to make a musical right now. It’s in English. I love All That Jazz, Singin’ in the Rain, West Side Story. I miss musicals.

A John Woo musical.  Now, while that might be fun, especially if it were something like Hard Boiled-The Musical (especially if he does the double handgun thing that is his hallmark, along with the slow motion dove release), I’m terrified that some day I might well wake up and find Paint Your Wagon, directed by John Woo, on my list of things to watch.

I just got goosebumps.  And they’re not the fun kind, either.

All right, folks, strap in and keep your remotes handy because today I’m going to talk about Heat, one of the longest movies you’ll ever love.

The folks out at Warner Brothers sent me a copy of Heat, and you might be wondering why I’m talking about a movie this old.  Well, it’s not like some of you haven’t heard of it, but it was just released on Blu-ray, so we’ve got a responsibility to cover it.

Heat features Val Kilmer and the gigantic concentrated awesome heap that is Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the same movie.  It’s about a career thief who leads a team of thieves through an incredible robbery that nets the team just over a million and a half bucks in bearer bonds.  The bonds were insured, so the only real victim here is the insurance company, and we’ve all been able to agree that they could have used a kick in the slats since 1995 anyway.  Anyway, the fun really starts when the team tries to sell back the stolen bonds instead of laundering them.

Heat is a long–VERY long!–and incredibly involving tale of deceit, thievery and murder that’s actually very engrossing.  I’d actually seen this one maybe five or six times over the last (nearly) fifteen years, so it was a welcome treat.  But you will have to brace yourself adequately.  Clear your calendar, get your snacks together in advance, because this is a LONG movie.  Nearly THREE HOURS worth of long, in fact.

But the critical takeaway here is that it’s also really, REALLY exciting.

The Screenhead Ten Scale loves my taste in movies and hands this a seven out of ten for being a solid actioner with a lot of twists, even if it’s a bit too long.

Well, despite a whole lot of stops and starts, and the arrest of the original series’ writer, it seems that Silent Hill 2 may not be completely dead.  In fact, it’s so alive that they’re projecting a release date…in 2010.

Dig the word from the series’ designer:

“I was working on storyboards for that around the same time last year…It’s going to be pretty crazy. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there. Roger (Avary) has some awesome ideas and hopefully we’re going to bring that to fruition sometime next year.”

Yeah…too bad Roger (Avary)’s in lockdown, buddy.  But hey, if Roman Polanski can engineer his movie from prison then maybe Roger Avary can drop some notes down or something.  Stranger things have happened, and many of them have happened to us.

I have to admit, I’d kind of like to see where they go with it.  After the miserable ending the last one had, I have no idea what they’re planning to do.  There’s not even much of anything they CAN do.  I mean, two of the three mains are ghosts of some kind and the third is sort of, well, still around.

So what can they do?  I don’t know. And that intrigues me.

So the crew out at The Asylum dropped me a copy of Megafault, part of the Sci-Fi Channel (I will NOT call it SyFy)’s big lineup of generally horrendous disaster movies.

And as it turns out, it’s nowhere near as bad as I was expecting.

In this one, horrible science combines with B-list actors to bring us the Megafault, a geological phenomenon that suggests a never before seen fault so large it runs the breadth of the United States from roughly West Virginia to the Ring of Fire.  And after a round of dynamite in some mountaintop removal work, somehow, the fault activates (they don’t really explain this well at ALL) and starts tearing hell out of the United States.  So now, the government’s got to find a way to fix this before half the country is torn apart.

I say that Megafault isn’t really a bad movie; it’s just kind of confused.  See, it watches like it was scripted by a really, REALLY overstimulated twelve year old who just started screaming plot elements whilst on a Mountain Dew and Pixy Stix rush.

Things seem to happen almost at random with this one, explosions, people falling into fault lines, people bursting into flame, the world’s biggest avalanche…and all of it seemingly in aid of an absolutely ridiculous core concept.  It’s fun, just like watching that overstimulated twelve year old run around would be fun.  But you wouldn’t want to have to take him home with you either.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale admits that it had a good if confused time, ignores the godawful science involved with this (seriously, even Doctor Venture would know this was a dumb idea) and gives it a fair-enough six out of ten.

There are times when you watch a movie that it feels like it was handled by somebody in particular.  Most George Romero or Steven Spielberg or even Michael Bay movies have that certain feel about them, and you can tell, even as you watch them, that this movie was handled by that person.

2012 feels EXACTLY like a Roland Emmerich movie because, let’s face it, we’ve all been here before.  It’s just gotten a LOT bigger since the last time.

This time, as it turns out, the Mayan calendar that’s gotten so much press over the last few months or so was exactly right and the end of the world as we know it starts up on December 21, 2012.  And for a writer and father, who’s been somewhat estranged from his family of late, the whole world will quite literally never be the same again.

If you saw The Day After Tomorrow, ironically, you’ll have about a thirty percent head start into 2012 because it’s almost the EXACT SAME MOVIE.  Both will feature scientists who catch on to things way ahead of the rest of the curve, but no one will believe them for a while until it’s almost too late, then there will be a whole lot of horrendous things happening that are far, far, more outlandish than anybody’s worst case scenarios.  Sprinkle in some bad science, top it off with some schmaltzy family drama, and boom!  You’ve got yet another half baked Roland Emmerich disaster movie that will probably make its shooting budget back if for no other reason that people LOVE to see stuff go boom.

Idiocracy fans, take note–at this rate Ass will be in theaters summer 2015.

Seriously though, this isn’t really a BAD movie.  It’s a bit overlong, sure, and don’t even try to find this movie’s science on a map because it just plain old DON’T EXIST, and don’t even get me started on Roland’s big middle finger to greedheads everywhere who think they can buy their way out of disaster.

But there is plenty going on here.  You’re almost certain to be entertained.  Even I was entertained.  There’s no long term value in a movie like this, but for a pleasant way to kill off two and a half hours with explosions and drama and a number of car jumps so large as to make Bo and Luke themselves have car envy (the first time I saw John Cusack JUMP A LIMO all I could think was “Well sir, right about then the Duke boys knew they was in a heap o’ trouble”.  Try it; it’s fun!), there’s not much better.  And by the way–it’s AWESOME that Woody Harrelson’s in this.  I’ve got a whole new respect for this man.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, shakes its head with a sardonic grin and hands this low-brow disaster epic a six out of ten for its sheer fun factor, even if its plot is a load of steaming garbage that’s about a third of a ripoff and its science so lousy even a fourth grader could knock it into a cocked hat.

Sometimes, folks, movie news is so epic that it can’t immediately be discerned whether it’s epically good or epically bad.  All I know is that this is a big lump of something, though whether it’s a big lump of awesome or a big lump of suck will remain to be seen.

Seems that Will Ferrell (on the producer slot) and Tommy Wirkola (whose name you’ll recognize from zombie Nazi epic Dead Snow) have banded together to get working on a remake of the Hansel and Gretel story, along with writer Dante Harper.

A basic synopsis is now available, and it boggles my mind.  Picture a funny version of The Brothers Grimm, and you’ll have a good idea what’s going on. Basically, fifteen years after the duo in question jammed a cannibal witch into a scorching hot oven to die, they’ve decided it’s time to take up a new line of work–witch bounty hunting.  Apparently there’s a LOT of witches around, and it’s up to Hansel and Gretel to kill them off but good.

See what I mean?  Good? Bad?  It could go either way and do so on an unimaginable scale.  But how will it turn out?  We’ll have a ways to wait before we find that one out.

Now here’s a strange bit of news for all you Marvel “true believers” out there.  Apparently, the second Ghost Rider--yes of COURSE there’ll be a second Ghost Rider--is not going to be a “reboot”, but in fact will function approximately like what Casino Royale did for the Bond series.  Here’s the world from director David Goyer:

“It’s not exactly a reboot…I hate to say it’s more realistic, because he’s got a flaming skull for a head, but it’s a bit more stripped down and darker.  It’s definitely changing tone.  What ‘Casino Royale’ was to the Bond movies, hopefully this will be to ‘Ghost Rider’…this story picks up eight years after the first film…It doesn’t contradict anything that happened in the first film, but we’re pretending that our audience hasn’t seen the first film.  It’s as if you took the same character where things ended in the first film and then picked it up eight years later, he’s just in a much darker, existential place.”

Ghost Rider.  Will be darker and more existential.  Why does this have the ring of the phrase “train wreck” to it?  And if they bring back Nicholas Cage, that should REALLY make things weird.

I think we’re all still smarting from Jurassic Park 3, a lump of molten suck so thick and putrescent that it still hurts to even think about it years later.

So it’s not exactly a dose of good news to hear that the plans for Jurassic Park 4 are moving on as if nothing were wrong.  Joe Johnston, right now, is looking to direct, and apparently the script is already well in hand, because he’s been talking about how “great” the script is.

Apparently, this time around, the fourth one is going to start a new trilogy (!) and will be a completely different direction for the series.  If they want to do completely different, of course, what they’ll have to do it keep people off that stupid island to start with.

Me personally?  I give good odds that Wu’s stupid “lysine contingency” was as big a screw up as his “oh, they can’t breed” line of bullhonkery, which means that, chances are, a few of those original Isla Nublar dinosaurs–or maybe a few site-B Isla Sornas–got loose and are currently terrorizing Brazil.

We’ll have to wait a good long while before we find out what’s what, though.

Remember how, when I wrote about The Haunting of Winchester House, how GREAT I thought it was that The Asylum was finally getting out of the mockbuster trend and no longer Asylumizing movies?

Sadly, that’s all gone as The Asylum releases 2012 Supernova, which is pretty much taking on 2012.  The only problem is that, of course, The Asylum doesn’t have anywhere NEAR the cash required to make those kind of special effects.

The plot, though, is actually pretty interesting–two hundred years ago, a star exploded and launched an enormous wave of radiation.  Sadly, two hundred years ago was apparently during the War of 1812, because it’s about to hit in much-popularized 2012.  So now a group of scientists is out to launch a whole load of nukes into the upper atmosphere so they can augment the Earth’s natural anti-radiation shielding.

I’ll admit, though, that The Asylum clearly does the best it can with what it has to work with.  What baffles me, though, is that they try to take on this monster projects with the most minimalist budgets you can imagine.  It’s like trying to eat a Ho-Ho the size of a Buick, and doing it with a knife and fork.

The result, however, of trying to load a bunch of AA batteries in a space designed for a Diehard is that the whole thing has this vaguely repetitive feel in which a simulated disaster happens, then we react to that disaster, then another one happens, and so on and so forth without much in the way of an overarching plotline to hold it all together.

There will be plenty of thrills here–watching people try to escape from things blowing up and whatnot–but are these thrills going to be enough to hold the overall picture together?  Well, that’s your call, in the end.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile,  isn’t so impressed and thus hands the newest Asylum knockoff a fair enough five out of ten.  it clearly tried, but it just couldn’t tackle what it set out to try.

Watching Astro Boy, the mostly new remake of the original anime / manga, was a lot like using a new version of Windows for the first time.  It’s got a whole lot of fancy bells and whstles, and it’s downright charming in some senses, but it’s also got a whole lot of serious problems that get in the way of realizing its full capability.

The plotline is where most of these problems crop up.  When young Toby Tenma, an unaccountably brilliant lad who’s so hated by his classmates that they’re throwing things at him when he leaves a room, is accidentally killed by a new military robot, his grieving father (who, just incidentally, happens to be the father of modern robotics as well) decides that he’s going to build a replacement son.

Naturally, it’s not long before what he has a “what hath science wrought??” moment and figures it’s for the best to just shut the boy down.  But after the Toby-robot, later called Astro Boy, escapes and makes his way to the wreckage outside the town (actually BENEATH the town if you want to be specific) he briefly grew up in, he discovers that most everything and most everybody serves some purpose in life…even those things that were formerly unwanted.

Let’s get the problems out of the way first.  The plot has so many holes in it it’s a wonder how it manages to stay in one piece.  Enormous segments of events will be left utterly unexplained.

For instance: if the surface dwellers could just fly up to Metro City in any old hovercar, as they’re shown doing in the end, why didn’t they just pack up a few dozen busloads and take back the town themselves?  And while I’m at it, how did Cora manage to leave Metro City in the first place?  Don’t even get me started on why the Peacemaker robot, which is clearly absorbing EVERYTHING IN SIGHT when we first see it, up to and including the barrier in front of it, suddenly becomes SELECTIVE about his absorption capabilities in the final minutes.  He could’ve absorbed the entire city at the rate he was going.  And where did that ALIEN come from in the last thirty seconds?  Seriously?  Can we get a few BIGGER plotholes?  It’s almost blocking daylight at this point!

But.

But…Astro Boy is, let’s face it, a charming little romp with a hyperkinetic boy robot that features lots of high-speed action and sufficient gunfire to keep any anime or action buff occupied.  The only bad things that happen in the end are to the people who deserve them.  The ending could not be much happier.  They will even SAY as much IN THE FILM ITSELF.  You can’t telegraph a punch any more clearly than this one was.

The Screenhead Ten Scale likes a feel-good movie you can’t help but feel good about, but at the same time realizes that this dog will NOT hunt in terms of plot, and thus hands it a thoroughly mixed-bag five out of ten.