The Campaign (2012)

Because Filipino Tilt-a-Whirl Operators are This Nation’s Backbone!

My interest was piqued in today’s movie because of the two actors that starred in it, but I probably wouldn’t have gone to the theater for it.  I feel like I’ve been burned by one of the actors in the movie before, though the other has not really let me down just yet.  I guess I looked at the movie and just felt like I didn’t trust it to be worth my money, so I had set my mind to waiting to see it until it came out on DVD and I could get it from RedBox.  But when Friendboss Josh suggested we go see it, I decided to go.  I was on the fence anyway; I just needed a little nudge.  And that brings us to my review of The Campaign, written by Chris Hency and Shawn Harwell, directed by Jay Roach, and starring Zach Galifianakis, Will Ferrell, Dan Aykroyd, John Lithgow, Dylan McDermott, Jason Sudeikis, Brian Cox, Katherine LaNasa, Sarah Baker, Jack McBrayer, and John Goodman.

Democratic Congressman Cam Brady (Will Ferrell) has found himself in a sticky situation after he accidentally leaves a sexually explicit message meant for his mistress on the answering machine of a very conservative Christian family.  In response, the two corrupt businessmen that formerly backed Cam, brothers Glen (John Lithgow) and Wade Motch (Dan Aykroyd) decide they need a new candidate to run against Cam with their backing so that they can later manipulate him into letting them bring the Chinese tradition of sweat shop labor to America.  They pick Marty Huggins (Zach Galifianakis), eccentric – and possibly gay – son of former politician and Motch brothers associate, Raymond Huggins (Brian Cox), and set Tim Wattley (Dylan McDermott) to be Marty’s campaign manager and hopefully fix the mess that is Marty enough to make him a viable candidate.  And so begins the battle for the Congressional seat of North Carolina’s 14^th District.

When I left this movie, I found myself torn in regards to its quality, but Friendboss Josh helped me set myself straight.  I had gotten it into my head that the movie was underwhelming because there were points within this movie that I was not laughing, but then Josh reminded me that movies tend to feel the need to include story, which sometimes needs to be exposition and not laughs.  I don’t really know what I was thinking.  The only things that can pull off non-stop laughter are videos on YouTube with the word “Fail” in the title.  And Josh was kind enough to remind me that I laughed out loud on more than one occasion during this movie.  …But fuck Josh!  He doesn’t tell me what to do in a non-work setting!  I HATE THIS MOVIE!  Okay, I don’t.  When I got to thinking about it in the proper head space, I realized that I did find this movie funny enough to recommend for a viewing.  The story was pretty solid.  The tactics in the battle ramp up in new and mostly hilarious and preposterous ways.  I also found it very interesting that the guy we had liked from the beginning of the movie and the guy we hated started to trade places at one point in the movie, though it’s probably not that atypical of a thing to see in a movie like this.  And, though it goes mostly in the way you’d expect, the way it gets there is filled with enough solid laughs that it’s okay.  It would be no spoilers if you saw the trailer for the movie, but I probably laughed the hardest when Cam pulled a Raging Bull on that baby.  First because it was in slow-mo, and second because to Hell with that baby.  The only other part I can really remember making me laugh really hard was the part where Cam’s car had a painting of him sitting down on the side of his car, which I found hilarious.  There were plenty of other moments, but I took shitty notes.  I mean … I don’t want to ruin it …?

The performances were pretty much exactly what I expected them to be.  Galifianakis was probably not as funny as I’d want him to be, but I probably just hold him in too high of a regard.  I’ve loved him for a long time and I probably just always want him to blow my mind with his hilariousness.  The character he does in this movie is funny, but it’s also one I’ve seen him do in a few different places before.  I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the character would be able to sustain an entire movie, but it did alright and brought a good deal of funny.  I liked his awkward attempts to trash talk with Cam, but more of the actual funny came from Ferrell in that exchange.  Ferrell was also a pretty typical character for him, being the smug, stupid, douche nozzle type, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t do it well.  And he punched a baby right in its stupid face.  Speaking of stupid faces, how was Galifianakis’ chubby son in the movie able to pull off a perfectly round face?  He was like a Charlie Brown character.

Once my crazy expectations were put in check, I came to realize that I found The Campaign plenty funny enough to earn a recommendation.  The story was not unexpected, but contained plenty enough laughs, and that’s all a comedy really needs, and the same could mostly be said about the performances.  It’s not the most mind-blowing comedy ever, but it’s good, solid laughs and worth checking out.  The Campaign gets “Rainbow Land is a fictitious place!” out of “I’m Cam Brady, and I seductively approve this message.”

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Cliffhanger (1993)

Suits, Socks, 100 Million Dollars – The Usual Stuff

Today’s movie is in a much similar vein as the previously reviewed Speed.  It’s another classic action movie that some may consider a little cheesy, but in the very least should be a lot of fun.  Unlike Speed, I’m pretty positive that I had seen this one all the way through already, but I didn’t remember it that clearly.  All I really remember is who was in the movie, and that the opening scene of this movie was classically parodied in one of my favorite comedies, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.  I knew that I would probably end up liking Ace Ventura better as a movie, but let’s see how the original scene holds up in my review of Cliffhanger, written by John Long, Michael France, and Sylvester Stallone, directed by Renny Harlin, and starring Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, Michael Rooker, Janine Turner, Rex Linn, Caroline Goodall, Ralph Waite, Leon Robinson, Craig Fairbrass, Paul Winfield, and Michelle Joyner.

Starting off with a scene stolen right out of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, rescue ranger Gabe Walker (Sylvester Stallone) climbs a mountain, looking not for a raccoon, but his friend Hal Tucker (Michael Rooker) and Hal’s girlfriend Sarah (Michelle Joyner).  With the help of Gabe’s girlfriend Jessie Deighan (Janine Turner) and pilot Frank (Ralph Waite), they put a safety line going between 2 mountains.  Hal easily gets across the gap, but Sarah is more jittery about it.  Halfway through, her harness breaks.  Gabe does everything he can to save her, but she plummets to her death.  Eight months later, a group of criminals rob a jet of $100 million from the US Department of Treasury, but shit goes wrong, causing the plane to crash on the mountain with the three cases of money lost on various locations of the mountain.  The leader of the group, former Military Intelligence member Eric Qualen (John Lithgow), is less than pleased with the man who betrayed the Treasury, Richard Travers (Rex Linn).  Qualen’s lady friend, Kristel (Caroline Goodall), calls in for a rescue.  Hal gets the call and heads out to rescue them, not knowing what he’s walking in to.  Jessie tries to convince the recently returned Gabe to join him, but Gabe is hesitant due to Hal’s anger with him and his own fear of going back on the mountain, but he begrudgingly agrees.  Once they reach the criminals, Hal and Gabe are apprehended and made to lead the criminals to the money.

I liked Ace Ventura better, but this was still a pretty fun movie.  They called themselves Cliffhanger, and they definitely delivered on that promise.  There’s lots of hanging from cliffs, lots of shootouts and fist fights, lots of cheesy dialogue, a menacing bad guy, and all the things you’d want out of such a movie.  I got a little bothered by the opening scene of the movie, although it was a pretty great scene altogether.  It’s a very memorable scene with a good deal of tension, and sets up the tale of anger and forgiveness between Sly and Rooker.  They didn’t make very much out of this anger though.  There were a couple angry words from Rooker and a little bit of shoving, but he gets over it pretty quick into the movie when Sly is actually in danger.  The thing that bothered me about the opening scene is I don’t know why it needed to happen like that.  It’s obvious why it happened from a movie making point of view, but why did they decide to run the line between two mountains when they probably could have just hovered above them in the helicopter and reeled them in one by one?  This would’ve made the scene pointless, but they didn’t play that heavily on Rooker being mad at Sly, or even on Sly’s decision to not go up the mountain again, but it bothered me that they seemingly decided to do something pointless that got someone killed.  Still, it’s a great scene.  The rest of the movie doesn’t waste much time with story and dialogue, but it remains entertaining throughout.  One of the things I thought of as being interesting was that Sly took part in the writing, but really didn’t make himself too much of a badass.  He got his ass kicked a pretty good amount, most memorably by the guy from Cool Runnings, Leon Robinson.  Sure, Sly eventually won by body pressing him into a stalagtite, but I would generally expect someone who is as big of a jock as Sly would not be keen on letting his butt get kicked.

The performances were pretty solid for a big dumb action movie.  Sly was in great shape for this part, being in not so rare form with muscles that were ripped to shreds, and that was about all his part really called for.  He was also still able to articulate at this point, so you could actually understand what he was saying.  He pulled off his action and his suspense, and didn’t really do a lot of emotional stuff, but pulled off the slightly emotional parts he had to.  John Lithgow was pretty great in this movie as well.  He was more of a mastermind and didn’t get his hands dirty so much, but was still pretty intimidating.  He didn’t really kill anyone himself except for his female associate that he may or may not have been intimately acquainted with, but it showed that this guy wasn’t fuckin’ around.  He added a lot more quality to the dialogue that probably wouldn’t have been there in the hands of another actor.  Rooker was pretty good as well.  I thought he didn’t seem to be taking the loss of his girlfriend nearly as harshly as Sly did, and that was a little weird, but he still did good.  Janine Turner didn’t do much beyond the typical damsel in distress stuff though.  Leon Robinson’s character was a pretty imposing figure, but I didn’t like him very much.  What kind of bad guy actually says that he’s only going to ask a question three times?  I know that a lot of bad guys actually give them three tries to answer the question, but you don’t tell them that.  Then they know how long they can wait before you kill them for not answering it!

This movie definitely holds up as fun times.  Sure, it’s kind of stupid and a few things don’t make sense to me, but the action is great and the movie is entertaining all the way through.  The performances aren’t anything spectacular, but they work for the movie.  And Lithgow was the bomb.  I streamed this here movie off of the Netflix.  It’s a pretty popular movie, so you may have already seen it, but if you haven’t it’s a good time to check it out streaming.  If you’ve seen it, it’s still fun, so check it out again.  It’s also probably cheap enough that it belongs in any respectable collection.  Cliffhanger gets “Your friend just had the most expensive funeral in history” out of “Do you know what real love is?  Sacrifice…”

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The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

Laugh While You Can, Monkey Boy!

I’ve heard about today’s movie many times as a staple in nerd culture. It got to the point where I felt as if I would not qualify as a true nerd if I had never seen this movie. And since I have only two things – my nerdiness and my balls, and I don’t break ’em for nobody – I felt it was necessary to watch The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, written by Earl Mac Rauch, directed by W. D. Richter, and starring Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Christopher Lloyd, Robert Ito, Clancy Brown, Lewis Smith, Jeff Goldblum, Pepe Serna, Ronald Lacey, Matt Clark, Vincent Schiavelli, Rosalind Cash, Dan Hedaya, and Yakov Smirnoff.

Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) is some kind of scientist/action hero guy. The movie opens with him testing out a Jet Car with a oscillation overthruster mounted to it that allows it to drive into a mountain. When he comes out, he finds some kind of alien organism attached to the car. Elsewhere, in the Trenton Home for the Criminally Insane, Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow) hears about Banzai’s accomplishment and has a flashback to when he helped Banzai’s mentor, Dr. Hikita (Robert Ito), in a overthruster experiment that failed and allowed Lizardo to have his mind taken over by Lord John Whorfin, leader of the Red Lectroids. The Red Lectroids are a group of alien reptiles that tried to take over Planet 10 before being stopped by the Black Lectroids and getting banished into the 8th Dimension. The Red Lectroids now spend their time hidden as regular people who all share the same first name of John. Banzai finds a girl named Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin), the long-lost twin sister of Banzai’s deceased wife, but she is kidnapped to ransom her for the overthruster, and the Black Lectoids threaten to destroy Earth if Banzai can’t stop the Red Lectoids. Can Buckaroo Banzai save the day? And if he can, will we understand what the hell is happening in this movie?

Generally speaking, a cult hit is not a very good movie, but has a certain campy charm that makes it appealing to a certain group of people. I guess you could say that this movie has a bit of a campy charm to it, but it just wasn’t very good. You could very easily say this movie is imaginative, but it was also very strange and confusing. I barely have any idea what was happening in this movie. The whole theme of the movie was reminiscent of old serialized action/drama’s that I’ve seen on Mystery Science Theater 3000, but I wouldn’t want to watch those without three hilarious guys mocking it. This movie was not painfully bad, and certainly had a few entertaining moments, but it was so confusing to me that I can’t say I enjoyed watching it. There was a machine that put people into another dimension, this group of scientist/superheroes that were also in a band or some shit, a love interest that was inexplicably depressed when we meet her and was the twin sister of our hero’s dead wife but them dating was cool somehow, a bunch of strange-looking aliens that all were named John for some reason. I have no idea what was going on here. I suppose it’s a similar story to the first Men in Black movie where the heroes have to stop something from happening to save the world, but it was like the first Men in Black if it was written by people on LSD that didn’t read the story they wrote after the drugs wore off.

The coolest thing about this movie is the people in it. It may not have been the start of these actor’s work, but it was certainly one of the earliest roles for people that went on to be in huge movies. Peter Weller may not have had as big of a career as some of the other people I’ll get to, but he was Robocop. His performance in this movie was decent, but nothing that caused me to pay much attention to him. John Lithgow, on the other hand, I did pay attention to. We should all know Mr. Lithgow from his many other fantastic performances and he was probably the most enjoyable part of this movie with his over the top performance as Emilio Lizardo. If not him by himself, some of the funniest parts were interactions between him and his resentful underling, John Bigboote (which most people pronounced Big Booty), played by Christopher Lloyd. This man will be forever loved by me for Back to the Future, and his role as Fester Addams helps too. This movie didn’t do anything to help my love of him, but didn’t do enough to hurt it. I don’t really know what I thought about Ellen Barkin’s performance because I mainly spent all the time she was on screen trying to figure out if I was attracted to her or not. I’m still undecided. There are many other people in this movie who went on to huge movie roles that I’m sure had very little to do with this movie. Jeff Goldblum was in Independance Day and Jurassic Park, Ronald Lacey was most famously Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark (though that was before this movie), Clancy Brown was the fuckin Kurgan in Highlander, Dan Hedaya was in Alien: Resurrection, and Yakov Smirnoff was … Yakov Smirnoff. Lots of big names in this movie, if nothing else.

I can see how people would find this movie charming without actually finding it charming myself. Kudos are deserved for making a movie that certainly qualifies as a candidate for the most imaginative movie I can think of, but the movie also has to make some sense for me to get into it. It was sort of fun, and included varying qualities of performances from numerous recognizable characters, but if you never know what’s going on, what’s the point? I can’t really recommend you watch this movie. I imagine I’ll find it fun to be able to say that I’ve seen this movie in the future, and it is apparently such a staple in nerd culture that you may have to watch it to consider yourself nerdy, but the movie itself is only good to be mocked, as far as I’m concerned. If they tried to be funny by kind of being a parody in itself, I didn’t get it. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension gets “Use more honey. Find out what she knows” out of “I’ve been ionized, but I’m okay now.”

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Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

You could make the argument that there was no summer movie that I wanted to see more than Rise of the Planet of the Apes because no other movie I’ve seen in a summer involved such preparation. Before watching this movie, I coincidentally came across a very good price of $38 for the original 5 Planet of the Apes movies and decided to buy them, then proceeded to bomb through all of them within 2 days. Also throwing in there the Tim Burton remake with the strangely attractive Helena Bonham Carter ape. So I decided today was the day to witness the Rise.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes – or, for brevity’s sake, Rise of Monkey Town – includes James Franco (with both arms), Brian Cox (who can not be held down by Wolverine’s claws or Magneto’s chains), and Tom Felton (You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Potter?). I say includes because, let’s face it, the star is the monkey named Caesar. Franco is a geneticist trying to cure his father (John Lithgow) from his Alzheimer’s disease. He invents something that reanimates the brain and tries it on some monkeys. He first tries it on Bright Eyes who shows considerable improvement, but then she goes ape-shit (pun intended) and has to be put down with extreme prejudice. As the drunk dude from Zak and Miri Make a Porno is being forced to put down all the apes they tested on, they find that Bright Eyes went ape-shit because she was protecting her baby, later to be Caesar. Unable to put down the baby, Franco takes him in, only to find out that the drug has affected the baby and it’s smart. Over the ensuing years, he teaches Caesar sign language and Caesar gets smarter and smarter.

Now, it should come as no surprise that eventually the apes break free of their shackles and head towards their inevitable dominion over man. If that’s a surprise, then you probably know nothing of the series and probably won’t be seeing this anyway. They don’t quite take over, but Caesar gets locked up in a habitat where Draco Malfoy tortures the other apes ’cause he’s a jerk-face. Caesar don’t like that. He retaliates by making all the other monkey’s smart, breaking free, laying a whooping on man, and taking to the forest. Also, he makes people render unto him the things that are his, and probably gets stabbed 30-something times shortly after the movie. Et tu, Green Goblin?

So one of the things I heard about this movie beforehand is that it breaks with continuity, which I say it does and it doesn’t. Granted, it does not follow the story of the 4th movie in the series which is kind of where this part of the story would be happening. To give a brief recap: 1) Heston lands, captured by talking monkeys, turns out it’s earth year 3800, OH NO! 2) Other guy lands, finds Heston, mutated people pray to a bomb, set that bitch off, OH NO! 3) Turns out 3 friendly chimps got off the planet, go back in time to human times, turns out girl’s preggers, humans think this will lead to humanity’s end, kill parents, baby lives on, OH NO! 4) Baby now grown up, called Caesar, already talks, gets mad, takes over, OH NO! 5) Last of humans gets all pissy with fairly peaceful apes, start fight, lose, OH NO! 1 – Remake) Screw up all of that stuff. There, now we’re up to speed. So, obviously the monkey doesn’t already talk, doesn’t come from future apes that can talk, etc. But in the 3rd movie, when the dad is telling about how apes rose up, they talked about how the first ape was super smart, kept getting beaten by man and ordered around by man, but then finally said the first words ape spoke, which was “NO”. That story is basically how it happens in this movie. So it follows 3rd movie continuity, but parts from 4th movie continuity. And I’m okay with it.

Another good thing about this is the fan service in the movie, the things you’d notice if you had just recently watched all 6 other movies. Bright Eyes is what one of the apes calls Heston, there’s background story about a rocket getting launched and going missing, of course “Get your hands off me you” yada yada yada is in it. I like these things. Makes you feel special for catching on. Problem of course being if I were to look it up now, I’ve probably missed about 107 more things.

There really wasn’t that much bad in the movie. I liked all of the acting well enough, even the acting of the apes, but the apes were pretty obviously CGI, though better than the young Jeff Bridges abortion in Tron Evolution. Other than that, I don’t have a lot of bad to this movie. At least nothing that stuck in my over tired brain long enough to make it home and write this. I apologize in advance if it’s not as funny as when I tear apart a bad movie; I can’t help that this movie was good. But worry not, I RedBoxed Priest. Coming soon!

Pay the money, see this shit … out of 20 …