Carrie (1976)

I Can See Your Dirty Pillows.

The impetus for today’s movie was almost entirely based on Netflix.  I knew I was looking for another classic horror movie and I came across this movie while looking through the horror movies in the instant section.  I knew I needed to review this movie in my Horrorthon.  Then I reached a problem: I was not looking at the right movie.  I was apparently looking at the 2002 made for TV version of the movie I was thinking of.  And the movie I was thinking of was not one that could be streamed.  But I already had my mind set to review it.  It took some doing, but I finally found the movie Carrie, based on a novel by Stephen King, written for the screen by Lawrence D. Cohen, directed by Brian De Palma, and starring Sissy Spacek, Nancy Allen, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, William Katt, John Travolta, Betty Buckley, and PJ Soles.

Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is a shy weirdo that gets abused by her schoolmates for not understanding what’s happening when she gets her first period in the shower.  To top that off, her mother (Piper Laurie) abuses her as well because she thinks Jesus gave her a period as punishments for her sins or some such nonsense.  But Carrie starts to realize that she’s not just an ordinary creepy girl.  She starts to realize that she can do things with her mind, a phenomenon she finds is called “telekinesis.”  But, more important than that (if you’re a high school girl), is that Tommy Ross (William Katt) asked her to the prom!  Sure, he asked her at the behest of his girlfriend, Sue Snell (Amy Irving), because they felt sorry for Carrie.  But Carrie still has a problem: Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen).  Chris is the head of the bully girls that pick on Carrie, and she resents Carrie because picking on her got her punished and banned from the prom.  And that’s just good logic right there.  Chris devises a plan with her boyfriend Billy (John Travolta) to make Carrie pay for the punishment that she brought on herself.

I was pretty surprised to find that I didn’t care for this movie at all.  It’s so well-regarded, but I was not into it at all.  It was mainly the story that turned me off too.  This wasn’t a horror movie; it was whiny high school drama with a ham-fisted telekinesis subplot.  I was equal parts bored and irritated.  The high school type stuff I just found really boring because we’ve all seen that stuff before, and done much better.  And it didn’t seem realistic too, but it’s hard for me to tell.  I haven’t been a girl in high school in many years, but I don’t think girls would just mock a girl for getting her period.  You bitches all do it too!  And that’s why you’re gross.  I’m also sure there are girls in high school so devoid of logic that they would blame Carrie for their troubles like Chris did, even though she clearly brought it all on herself.  And then there’s the trouble at home that comes with her way over the top crazy mom who takes a natural (albeit icky) thing like menstruation and takes it as a sign from God that Carrie is a sinner.  Those people I just like to believe don’t exist.  And how the fuck do her religious beliefs work anyway?  Getting your period is evil, but trying to murder your child later in the movie is alright in God’s book?  And the way they introduced Carrie’s powers was ham-fisted and irritating.  Each time something happened because of them was displayed with a short, sharp noise that felt like I was being stabbed in the ear with the fact that Stephen King just found out what telekinesis was and decided to base a book on that.  And the way she used them was pretty shitty too.  Sure, the prom scene is super memorable and kind of nifty, but I was mainly struck by the fact that she didn’t seem to punish any of the people that deserved it.  People that had tried to help her died and the people that started everything escaped through the front door.  Granted, some of them got what was coming to them later, but it was just shitty.  I also thought a lot of the dialogue was pretty bad.  Someone actually says, “Get ‘er done,” in this movie!  It made me lose all the respect I had for Larry the Cable guy.  The worst dialogue in my opinion is any conversation between Nancy Allen and John Travolta.  That was abysmal.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about this Brian De Palma fella, but I would still have to confess that I was unimpressed with the look of this movie.  I know I’m not a director or anything, but I got to thinking that some of the shots were just rudimentary and distracting.  I first started thinking this when they were in class and Carrie says Tommy’s poem was “beautiful.”  It was a close up on his face with her in the background.  Then there was also a scene where they seemed to try to do a split focus on it – the likes of which were talked about in great length in Citizen Kane for some reason – but this movie did it poorly.  You could see a giant, blurry seam down the center of the frame!  If I had to say one good thing about the direction of this movie it would have to be that the opening credits were chock full of titties.

I suppose I would be comfortable giving credit to some of the performances in this movie.  Sissy Spacek did a formidable job being mostly quiet and reserved, but occasionally manic and at least one occasion scary.  Also, she got her boobs out.  …I think I’d bang it out on Sissy Spacek in this movie.  I’m not gonna lie to you people.  I didn’t really find that many other people in this movie altogether noteworthy.  Some of them did fine jobs, some were underwhelming.  I did get annoyed at the principal in the movie though.  I understand not remembering someone’s name.  I do it all the time.  But if someone corrects me once, I would either remember or not attempt their name again.  This dude seems to go out of his way to get her name wrong, even when it was an awkward placement to even say her name.  I know what they were trying to do, but it was another location where it seemed a little ham-fisted, as if the movie was just trying too hard.

I may be alone in this, but I didn’t like Carrie.  The story took turns being either boring or annoying and it seemed to me to be poorly directed, even though it was Brian De Palma.  I’m too lazy to look it up, but I am under the impression that he’s a good director.  I didn’t see that here.  I’m disappointed in both Stephen King and Brian De Palma for this movie, but I am good with what Sissy Spacek brought to the table.  It may have been amazing when it came out somehow, but I’m not down with it today.  It’s probably a movie you should watch because it’s a classic, but it’s my opinion that you can skip it.  Carrie gets “They’re all gonna laugh at you!” out of “I hate Carrie White.”

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.

From Paris with Love (2010)

Wax On, Wax Off

Today’s movie was a total whim-watch. I saw it on Netflix streaming and I said “…Yeah, I think I’ll do that.” I remember it coming out and thought “Meh”, but that was before I was an Indie Movie Reviewer. With my current “job” title, I felt this was a good enough excuse. And that is the very short, fairly pointless story behind my decision to watch From Paris with Love, written by Luc Besson and Adi Hasak, directed by Pierre Morel, and starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, John Travolta, Kasia Smutniak, Richard Durden and Amber Rose Revah.

James Reese (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a personal aide to a U.S. Ambassador in France, but he has aspirations to get a promotion in his side job; to go from low-ranking CIA operative to high-ranking CIA operative. He’s also engaged to a French girl named Caroline (Kasia Smutniak). He gets the promotion opportunity in the form of a temporary partner by the name of Charlie Wax (John Travolta). James is a bit of a by the books kind of guy, but Charlie likes killing people. They start in on a drug ring in France and that leads them into a plot to unleash a suicide bomber in a meeting that Reese’s boss, Ambassador Bennington (Richard Durden), will be at. And then they must stop it.

It didn’t take very long to get through the story of this movie, mainly because it’s not super plot heavy. It’s pretty much just a big dumb action movie, but it also seems to try to use the fact that they cast John Travolta in it to try to hardcore swagger jack Quentin Tarantino. And they try to do that a pretty good amount, so much so that I wonder how they got away with it. I assume Travolta is why they get away with it, but it could also be because they did a piss poor job of it and it flew under the radar. I had heard Travolta’s character compared to his performance in Pulp Fiction, and there are similarities, but it’s more like Vincent hopped up on Red Bull through the entire movie. They try to emulate Tarantino’s dialogue style, but you can only talk about things that have nothing to do with the movie if it’s well-written and interesting. No one told them this. They did totally throw a couple of “Royal with Cheese” references in the movie, which I would normally think was funny that they referenced another of an actor’s really famous performances, but when I had already been thinking that they were trying to rip off Tarantino, that joke only served to cement it. The rest of the story was no more interesting than the dialogue. It’s pretty simple and the only surprise they go for I thought in about the first 10 minutes of the movie. It happened in a similar way as I predicted the end of The Village when I leaned over to my friend in the very first scene of the movie and said ::DIFFERENT MOVIE SPOILER ALERT:: “I bet it’s going to turn out to be 1998 outside of the village”, and then I was right.::END SPOILER:: I thought that as a joke! Why would you actually make it a plot point?! Well, that’s how I did it here too. I thought it was too obvious to happen, but it did. And, because I like to, let’s talk things that didn’t make sense to me. There was a huge plot point in this movie about Rhys-Meyers trying to charge his phone. After it first died from low battery, he took the battery out, rubbed it against his sleeve, and tried it again. Do you think this shit charges from static electricity?! You’d have to do it a lot longer than that! Also, the last big speech to talk the suicide bomber out of getting in on all those sweet, sweet virgins in heaven did not work for me at all. The dialogue seemed rushed and crappy/sappy, but the actual end of that scene did catch me off guard. It was not as I expected at all.

There were only about 3 notable performances in this movie altogether: Rhys-Meyers, Travolta, and maybe a little Smutniak. All of them pretty mediocre. Rhys-Meyers never really did anything to make me pay attention to him. He had a little love story going on, a little trial and tribulations with love and work, a little bit of rising to the call when you’re needed, a little bit of reaching a breaking point with something, but none of which really worked for me. Travolta’s performance was mediocre, but in a different way. There were parts of this movie where Travolta was a badass, usually around the fighting and shooting scenes. He worked in these scenes. But then the character would just get on my nerves in the rest of the scenes. And when you’re half good, half bad, you come out just mediocre. Speaking of which, Kasia Smutniak. Her character was important to the story, but rarely featured in person. She shows up in the beginning as the girlfriend, pops up briefly in the middle, then is a big part in the end. The rest of the movie she’s just on the phone or being talked about. I found her character arc to be fairly predictable and I wasn’t interested.

The only real reason I can think of to watch this movie is the action scenes. They’re mostly well done. There are a couple of good shootout scenes, a couple good fist fights, and at least one decent car chase. The best of them was probably the fist fight where Travolta single-handedly whoops up 8 dudes with melee weapons. That scene was pretty badass. I could’ve used some more good action, but the scenes that were there were well done.

This is a thoroughly okay, perhaps forgettable, movie. The story of the movie is a bit straight forward, and dialogue either attempts to rip off Quentin Tarantino or just straight out sucks, but it’s got some solid action that might make the movie good enough to look at. I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone, but it is available on Netflix streaming, so if you’ve got nothing better to do and just wanna see some punch face and shoot things, you could do worse. From Paris with Love gets “Shoot the fucker” out of “Did you save the world again, baby”.

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Pulp Fiction (1994)

And You Will Know My Name is the Lord When I Lay My Vengeance Upon Thee.

I sometimes get worried when I start a review after watching a movie that caused me to take almost no notes whatsoever. This usually doesn’t happen when watching a crappy movie because I think of lots of jokes to take down during those; this mainly happens during good movies. What is there to say about a good movie? Well, let’s find out. This movie was suggested by my friend Chris, a young crippled boy who probably submitted his request through the Make A Wish Foundation. Or he posted it on my Facebook page. Either way, this movie is a classic movie, much beloved by many people I’ve spoken to about it. As with most movies with such a pedigree, it took me a while to see it for the first time, but once I had, I loved it and bought it on DVD. When it was requested, I busted out that bad boy and sat down to write what you are presently reading. This movie is Pulp Fiction, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, and starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Ving Rhames, Bruce Willis, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Eric Stoltz, Rosanna Arquette, Maria de Medeiros, Harvey Keitel, Peter Greene, Duane Whitaker, Alexis Arquette, Steve Buscemi, Kathy Griffin, Phil LaMarr, and Christopher Walken.

This here is a difficult movie to summarize, and even more without spoilers. So there will be spoilers, but I’m going to try to do this chronologically. Two hit men, Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), go to an apartment to pick up a briefcase with mysterious, shiny contents. They kill the people in the apartment and leave with their informant, Marvin (Phil Lamarr). On the drive, Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin in the face. They go to Jules’ associate’s, Jimmy’s (Quentin Tarantino), house to clean up the situation, but his wife, Bonnie, is coming home and they need to get it done by the time she arrives. The Wolf, Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel), is called in by their boss, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). He takes care of the situation and Vincent and Jules go to breakfast. Here, they get involved in a hold-up at the restaurant by Ringo (Tim Roth) and Yolanda (Amanda Plummer). Because Jules is reluctant to give up Marsellus’ case, it devolves into a Mexican standoff between the four. Jules defuses the situation and Vincent and Jules take the case back to Marsellus. Here, they see Marsellus paying off boxer, Butch (Bruce Willis), to take a dive in his fight. After turning over the case, Marsellus asks Vincent to take his wife, Mia (Uma Thurman), out for dinner that night to occupy her. He does, they have a nice night of dinner and dancing, and he returns her home. While he’s in the bathroom, Mia finds a baggie of heroin in Vincent’s jacket and snorts it, mistaking it for cocaine. She immediately overdoses and Vincent must rush her over to the house of his drug dealer, Lance (Eric Stoltz), and his girl, Jody (Rosanna Arquette). They are able to revive her by administering an adrenaline shot directly into her heart. Later, Butch does not take the dive in his match. Instead, he kills his opponent in the ring. His intention is to take the money and his girlfriend, Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros), and run away. But Fabienne has forgotten his watch, given to him as a child – along with a disturbing story of a POW camp and anal storage of said watch – by Captain Koons (Christopher Walken), who was in the POW camp with Butch’s father. Butch returns to his apartment for the watch and kills Vincent, who was there looking for Butch. On the way back to Fabienne, Butch sees Marsellus in the street and hits him with his car. Marsellus chases Butch into a pawn shop owned by Maynard (Duane Whitaker), who stops Butch moments from killing Marsellus. Maynard knocks out Butch and Marsellus. They wake up to find themselves tied to chairs with ball gags in their mouth. Maynard called in his buddy, Zed (Peter Greene), and they decide to rape Marsellus. Butch escapes but decides to go back to save Marsellus with a katana. Marsellus tells Butch to never come back to LA, which he happily does with Fabienne.

That is basically the entire movie, condensed to a paragraph. You get a two and a half hour movie out of that by filling it with lots and lots of dialogue. Normally, this would make for an excruciating movie, but this is written by Quentin Tarantino. Much like the oft-mentioned Kevin Smith, Tarantino is an expert at taking scenes where nothing is happening beyond people talking, and that conversation has nothing to do with moving the story along, but make it super compelling so you don’t mind or get bored. The dialogue is definitely the most appealing part to this movie, but that is not to say that the story should not be lauded. Take out all the dialogue and you’d still have a good movie, but not a great one. It’s funny in a lot of parts, dark and violent all over the place, and always intriguing. Though it works in this movie, I’m generally not a fan of the movies being shown out of order. In this movie, it’s fine, but it also makes it a little hard to follow the order of things. But now I’ve written it down in chronological order, so all is well. As with most Tarantino movies, the music is fantastic as well. He loves to throw in those old songs, most of which probably wouldn’t be remembered now were it not for him. Take Miserlou, for example. I like the song, but there is no way I would know that song if it weren’t for this movie.

The acting is pretty much all the way perfect in this movie. John Travolta was a quiet badass who remained calm throughout the greater majority of the movie, even with Bruce Willis pointing a gun at him moments before his death. The only time he lost his shit was when Uma Thurman was dying in front of him, and that was more about getting killed by Marsellus than it was about her death. Samuel L. Jackson was really intimidating at most parts of this movie, more so when he was staring a gun down it’s barrel in the restaurant and when he was quoting the bible at people he was about to kill. “I’m sorry. Did I break your concentration?” Priceless. Uma Thurman was probably as hot as she’s ever been in this movie, and very real as well. I’m not usually one to dig on Uma for whatever reason, but something about that hair do worked for me. Ving Rhames was a great, powerful character in this movie that had that power taken away by a good ass-raping. And he reacts to that much as I assume I would: with a shotgun blast to the rapist’s penis and a threat against anyone who may mention it ever again. I could go through everyone in this movie, but I’ll have the same thing to say about every character from the biggest to the most minor: very real, very good. I think the person that impressed me the most was right in the opening scene of the movie: Amanda Plummer. She comes off first as a sweet lady out to eat with her boyfriend, talking innocently about robbery possibilities. When it’s time to bust out the guns and rob the joint, she is frightening as hell. And later, when Roth has a gun pointed at him, her tough persona cracks drastically as she is terrified she’s about to lose her man to this endeavor.

No surprises here, people. If you’re looking to be shocked by my reviews, keep walking. But I can’t hate on every movie, people. I like stuff too! WHY DON’T YOU GET OFF MY BACK!?! …Sorry. Anyways, great story, fantastic dialogue, and amazing performances land this movie firmly in position for you to own it. Everyone either does or should. So go get it or watch it. Pulp Fiction gets “I want that trophy, so dance good” out of “I don’t need you to tell me how fucking good my coffee is.”

Hey, peeps. Why not rate and comment on this as a favor to good ole Robert, eh? And tell your friends! Let’s make me famous!