The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998)

Trust No One, Mr. Mulder.

Today’s review was requested by my friend Tiffany, and I was more than happy to oblige.  It had been years since I last saw this movie, and it may even have been when it was still in theaters that I last saw it.  I had been a fan of the show that this movie spun off from since day one.  So much so that one of my fondest memories from my youth was going to a convention for the TV show with my mother.  So when I decided that I would review this movie, I went over to my shelf to grab my DVD until my heart sank.  I don’t own this movie.  I have the second movie, but not the first one.  Whatever could that mean?  When I originally saw this movie, did I hate it?  Did I hate it so much that I could overcome my OCD and only own one movie in the series?  I didn’t remember!  There was only one way to find out.  I immediately put the movie on my Netflix queue and, when it came in, set about watching it.  Let’s see what happened in my review of The X-Files: Fight the Future, written by series creator Chris Carter, directed by Rob Bowman, and starring David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Martin Landau, William B. Davis, John Neville, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Mitch Pileggi, Blythe Danner, Jeffrey DeMunn, Terry O’Quinn, Dean Haglund, Bruce Harwood, Tom Braidwood, Glenne Headly, and Lucas Black.

The film opens on the icy tundra known as North Texas, about 35,000 years ago.  We watch as two cavemen enter a cave and fight with some kind of green monster, the blood of which oozes towards the caveman and infects him with something.  We’ll find out about that later.  About 35,000 years later, when Texas has thawed out nicely.  Here and now, a little kid (Lucas Black) falls through a hole and finds a human skull, and then he finds a black oil that crawls through his skin and turn his eyes black.  When his friends get the firemen to rescue him, the three that go down after him go missing as well.  But to hell with that noise; let’s see what FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are up to!  They’re messing around on the roof of a building in Dallas, investigating a bomb threat.  Finding nothing, they go back downstairs and Mulder goes off to get a soda from the vending machine, only to find that the delicious soda goodness in the machine has been replaced with C4.  Special Agent in Charge Darius Michaud (Terry O’Quinn) orders everyone to evacuate the building as he disarms the bomb.  As Mulder and Scully begrudgingly leave, the building explodes, killing Michaud as well as a young boy and three firemen.  Why does that sound familiar?

In much the same way as Tiffany loves me; I love the X-Files.  And that is with all my heart and equally as sexually because the X-Files has Gillian Anderson in it.  But I still really liked this movie and have no good reason to not have it in my collection yet.  The story of the movie is really tight and keeps your attention all the way through, but I can’t say I really expected anything else.  This movie was set into motion after the X-Files already had five successful seasons.  They knew how to make a great story.  And their shows were an hour a piece, and some were two or three part stories.  So how would they have a difficult time translating that into a story that would last 114 minutes?  They wouldn’t!  They also have a fairly unique ability to have the story of their movie continue on through their TV show.  The story is the same kind of thing that you’d find in the TV show: government cover ups and aliens.  They allow the mystery to unfold nice and slowly, and end it with a great climax that gives the audience most of what they want, but they don’t give you everything you want.  I did wonder about one thing from the story, though.  It’s when the people are talking about how to stop Mulder.  One suggests killing him, but they write that off because it would make him a martyr.  They then decide they should take from him something he loves most, and that turns out to be Scully.  But how would taking Scully away stop Mulder?  I mean, you’ve seen what happens to this guy when he gets an idea in his head about something.  That would just lead to him being a man on a mission the likes of which you’ve never seen before.  Then Mulder proves that for me later in the movie.  I think most of the people watching the TV show always hoped that Mulder and Scully would end up together, but they never really did it.  It usually just got as far as having Mulder make flirty comments to Scully.  In this movie, after an emotional confession by Mulder, the two almost kiss before a bee stings Scully and interrupts it as a nice, calculated “Fuck you” to the audience.  You’ll get your love story eventually, but not just yet.  I also wondered if the scene where Mulder was pissing on a poster of the movie Independence Day was another little “Fuck you”.  I like all of the dialogue in the movie as well, particularly the lines from Mulder.  He always has a nice little joke on deck, like when he said that the two strange, round buildings in the middle of the cornfield were Jiffy Pop poppers.

The performances are also totally great, but the characters also had the luxury of at least five or six years to settle into their characters.  The new people that were added to the equation were also just top notch actors, so they really could do no wrong.  I love David Duchovny.  He’s vaguely serious, but usually more snarky.  He doesn’t try too hard to be funny, usually getting there with more of a dry wit, but I like dry wit.  Gillian Anderson is ever present to be the straight man to Mulder, occasionally breaking her serious façade, but usually being all business.  Also, she’s fuckin’ sexy.  Remember a time when a beautiful woman could be noticed as being gorgeous and sexy while constantly wearing a suit?  How did she ever manage to become a sex symbol without showing up on camera with electrical tape over her nipples and nothing else?  However it is done, she pulls it off.  It leaves it all to the imagination, and I like that.  And my imagination does go wild.  Like when Mulder is rescuing her near the end of the movie and he comes across her clothes lying in the chamber they used to transport her there.  Mulder wraps her in his jacket and they make their way out of the facility through a vent.  My imagination envied Mulder for what he must’ve been seeing; crawling through the vent behind Gillian Anderson dressed only in a jacket over her nakedness.  But then they get out of the facility and she’s suddenly wearing pants!  Where’s the verisimilitude?!  I also got to wondering what Gillian Anderson has been up to recently.  The last time I saw her was the second X-Files movie.  Well, wherever she is and whatever she’s doing, I like to think that she’s doing it naked.

The X-Files was awesome, and the first movie they made from the already awesome series had not lost any of its quality.  The story works very well, capturing everything we loved about the TV show, from the mystery, the government cover ups, the paranormal, and the sometimes flirty relationship between Mulder and Scully, who continue to bring their characters to life amongst a slew of other great performances.  Great movie, and one that I need to purchase as soon as possible.  The X-Files: Fight for Future gets “After all you’ve seen you can just walk away?” out of “Look, if I quit now, they win.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

What’s Your Number? (2011)

Are You Going to Rape and Kill Me Later?

The only inspiration I had for watching today’s movie was my love of the main actress in it.  I know I’ve said that I was in love with probably 20 actresses by now, but I like to keep my options open.  And that’s kind of what today’s movie is about.  I knew the basic premise of today’s movie and knew that it was a comedy, but was mainly drawn to the movie by the star.  I’m sure there was a point when it was available on RedBox, but I found the movie on Netflix and got the disc sent to me.  So let’s check in with What’s Your Number?, written by Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden, directed by Mark Mylod, and starring Anna Faris, Chris Evans, Ari Graynor, Blythe Danner, Ed Begley Jr., Heather Burns, Eliza Coupe, Kate Simses, Tika Sumpter, Dave Annable, Joel McHale, Chris Pratt, Zachary Quinto, Martin Freeman, Andy Samberg, Thomas Lennon, Anthony Mackie, Mike Vogel, and Aziz Ansari.

Ally Darling (Anna Faris) makes the mistake of reading an article that says that the average number of sexual relationships a woman has is 10.5.  Ally has had 19.  Finding that her number is so much higher than all of the people she knows, and the article saying that women that are too sexually available never find a husband, Ally resolves to not have sex again until she’s found her husband.  It goes great for her … for all of a few hours, when she gets really drunk at her sisters bachelorette party and sleeps with her ex-boss Roger (Joel McHale).  Having reached 20, and having no desire to stay with the ball scratcher/finger sniffer Roger, Ally decides that her only solution is to find all of the other 19 guys she’s slept with to determine if they are better prospects since the last time they were in her.  She enlists the help of her neighbor, Colin (Chris Evans), and gets started on some poor decision making.

I was vaguely fond of this movie, but probably not for many reasons you’ll find in this paragraph.  The story didn’t really connect with me.  It seemed like some chick read an article in Marie Claire, got pissed because it made her look like a whore, and then decided to make a movie that vindicated her.  I don’t know if 10 is the actual number or not, but if someone is worried about how guys will feel about their number then they should probably be more discerning with their vagina.  I can’t speak for all guys, but I’d say that I personally wouldn’t care that much about what a girl’s number was as long as she didn’t have a kid or any other venereal diseases.  Most of Ally’s reactions to her predicament annoyed me with how little they made sense.  Her first reaction is to get sloppy drunk at a bar.  Yeah, ‘cause no one’s ever slept with someone under those circumstances.  Well, Ally was able to be the first person to do it, ruining her number and leaving her in the situation where she made her next poor decision to try to find old boyfriends.  As they pointed out in the movie, you probably left those guys for a reason.  Also, if you tell a guy that you had sex with 20 guys, his reaction will probably not be much different than telling him you had 21.  So, instead of locking your vag and looking through your old black book, do what you should have been doing already and hold out on the sex until you like a guy.  But that probably wouldn’t have made much of a movie premise, so we let it slide so long as they make a funny movie.  They never really manage to pull that off either.  I would say that this movie finishes as “cute”, but the actual laughs in the movie are few and far between.  They try often enough, but I’d say the movie only managed about three laughs out of me.  I appreciated that Ally realized, as she was climbing a wall to get to someone, that she probably should’ve just waited for him at his apartment.  It was what I was thinking at that point and it got a laugh out of me that they pointed out that it didn’t make that much sense.  The movie also follows a pretty basic romantic comedy pattern, but it does it so slowly that the lack of some real funniness leaves you wishing they would just get to the conclusion that you know they’re heading towards already.  Another thing that I’m pretty sure I’ve noticed in other romantic comedies is that they always pick the strangest little hobbies for the main character to enjoy and somehow find employment from.  I remember in Bridesmaids that Kristen Wiig’s character loved to make cupcakes.  In this movie, Ally strangely loves to make creepy little dioramas that Mr. Right tells her she should do for a living.  Why can’t they ever do something normal and more typical with their time, like writing reviews in all of their free time?

I think the performances are what charmed me the most in this movie.  I’ve been a big fan of Anna Faris since the first time I saw her.  Not only do I find her gorgeous, but she’s typically very funny in all of the movies she’s in.  She’s never really been given the opportunity to participate in a really good comedy, and I have no idea why.  I think she’s got great comedic timing and tends to bring it to all of her movies.  In this movie, she did what she could with material that was spotty at best.  The real thing she brought for me was intense hotness and being almost naked numerous times in the movie.  And what’s more is that I feel the exact same bunch of stuff can be said for Chris Evans.  He’s really good looking, he was nearly naked a lot in this movie, and he’s a pretty good comedic actor.  He’s had much better luck in his career than Anna Faris has, but mostly with action flicks.  Though he was the comic relief in Losers and the Fantastic Four movies, the only actual comedy I’ve seen him in before this was Not Another Teen Movie, but he was pretty funny in that.  I liked Ari Graynor as well, though the only thing that sticks with me that she did was that I liked her vows at her wedding.  I also found the crew that they got as representatives of the 20 guys Ally had sex with were interesting.  The majority of them were pretty big actors that just popped in for a scene.  People like Joel McHale, Zachary Quinto, Martin Freeman, Andy Samberg, Thomas Lennon, Anthony Mackie, the voice of Aziz Ansari, and Anna Faris’ real life husband Chris Pratt.

What’s Your Number? manages to make up for what it’s missing in quality writing and comedy with its two main actors.  It’s got a couple of solid laughs in the movie, but they’re too far spread out and left me just wanting them to cut to the chase and reach the conclusion that you can see coming from about 20 minutes in.  If you’re in the market for a romantic comedy, you could do much worse than this one and it’s at least worth a watch.  If you’ve no interest in a romantic comedy, then you have no real reason to pay this movie any mind.  What’s Your Number? gets “I know that I’m not perfect, but I wanna be with somebody who appreciates me” out of “How’s your blow job?”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.