Fargo (1996)

The Little Guy Was Kinda Funny-Lookin’

Acting as both a review request and a movie I should’ve seen earlier comes today’s movie. Requested by Sam, today’s movie is a dark comedy, something that generally turns me off. I don’t like my comedies to be demented, with lots of death and sadness to them. On the other hand, this movie is by the Coen Brothers, and they gave me True Grit. On top of that, it’s a classic. How could I not watch it? This is how! This review is over! … Oh, you’re still here. Okay, I’ll review it. Today’s movie is Fargo, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, and starring William H. Macy, Kristin Rudrud, Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare, Harve Presnell, Frances McDormand, John Carroll Lynch, Steve Reevis, Steve Park, and Bruce Campbell.

Car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) has gotten himself into a bit of a financial pickle. The most obvious solution to his (and, let’s face it, ANYONE’s) problem is to hire two guys to kidnap your wife for the ransom. Through a Native American ex-con named Shep Proudfoot (Steve Reevis), Jerry is introduced to the two men who will do the deed, Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare). They kidnap Jerry’s wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrud), but things start to go sour for them as they drive to their safe house. First, they get pulled over for not having tags, then Jean’s bitching from the backseat gets the cop killed. Then, Carl’s lack of upper body strength gets them seen as he tries to drag the cop’s body off the street, making Gaear kill two more people. This gets the local police chief, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), involved. From here, the plan hits a few speed bumps.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise to the greater majority of you, but this is a good ass movie. Hell, it didn’t even come as a surprise to me. I don’t know why it took me so long to watch this thing. I loved True Grit. I loved No Country for Old Men. I’ve already written of my affection for the Big Lebowski. And yet, foolishly, I refrained from this movie. But that problem is now solved. Dark comedies have never really worked for me in the past, but this movie combines a few solid laughs with all their dark subject matter, and ties it all together with an excellent story. I found that the accents wore on me in this movie, though. I was already a little bit prepared for them, having tolerated Sam’s accent for so long, but Jesus they say “Oh yeah” a lot. It kind of gave me the impression that the Coen’s did not care for the people of Minnesota that much, as most of them came off as not that bright. The story of the movie made up for it though. Shit just kept getting worse and worse in this movie. It’s like the Shield or something. You would be saying “Alright, give us a break and let something go right for a change” were the story not so well done. Instead you just sit back and enjoy. I don’t know if I’d call it a negative, but one part I had a bit of an issue with was the part between McDormand and Steve Park in the restaurant. This scene served no purpose whatsoever as far as I could tell, but it was a good scene, so I don’t know if I can say I’d want it gone. The story is put on pause by it, but the performances in the scene were good and it was interesting watching it be funny, then plunge into depressing, and back up again.

The performances in this movie were even better than the story somehow. I started wondering as I started listing the cast about who the hero was in this movie. William H. Macy is the driving force of the movie because he sets everything moving. Buscemi did the majority of the legwork in the movie while Stormare spent his time watching TV’s. Frances McDormand would probably have to be the hero of the movie because she was the only one that was a good person, she solved the thing, but she also didn’t have that much to do with the overall story until the very end. She did make me laugh the most, though. That accent amused me no matter who’s mouth it was coming out of, but it was even funnier when she was saying intelligent things and working out exactly what happened from very little evidence, but all of it was being said with that accent that would make me not take it seriously. Then again, she didn’t seem able to see through William H. Macy’s horrible poker face in their first interview, so who’s to say how bright she is? I did laugh at the joke she told about the personalized license plates, but only because the other cop’s response was “Oh yeah, that’s a good one”. But easily the most awesome thing about this movie is that Bruce Campbell was in it. Sure, he was only in about a minute of the movie, and that minute was on the soap opera Stormare was watching with horrible reception, but I recognized him! That dude rules.

I couldn’t really find a lot to say about this movie. Sometimes, movie’s are just great and I can’t make fun of them. I have let you all down and will now perform ritualistic suicide to punish myself, while simultaneously saving my honor. Probably the only dark comedy that has ever worked for me, the film delivers plenty of dark, plenty of comedy, and a fantastic story, all supported by great acting. No complaints. Go watch this movie and enjoy it, even if you have already. Fargo gets “You’re darned tootin’!” out of “So, I called it in. …End o’ story…”

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Jurassic Park III (2001)

No Force on Earth or Heaven Could Get Me on That Island

Oh no! It’s getting worse! At least so far as Rotten Tomatoes is concerned, the third part to this trilogy is even worse than the second, dropping down to a lowly 50%. After watching the second one, I’m not sure if this movie also suffers from the comparison to the first movie that hurt the second one or if it benefited from comparison to the second one. That sentence just confused me. So, instead of trying to figure that out, let’s jump into my review of Jurassic Park 3, written by Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne, and Jim Taylor, directed by Joe Johnston, and starring Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Tea Leoni, Trevor Morgan, Alessandro Nivola, Michael Jeter, John Diehl, Bruce A. Young, and Laura Dern.

Eric (Trevor Morgan) and his mother’s boyfriend Ben (Mark Harelik) are parasailing off the coast of the infamous Isla Sorna when something goes wrong and the people driving their boat disappear in the mist below them. They look up to see that the boat is about to collide with some rocks, so they detach the cable and sail off towards the shoreline. Meanwhile, Alan Grant (Sam Neill) is visiting Ellie Satler (Laura Dern) and her family. He then goes and does some presentation in order to try to get more funding for his digs, but people only want to ask him about Jurassic Park. He returns to the dig site where his assistant, Billy Brennan (Alessandro Nivola), shows Grant a device they have that makes replica’s of Velociraptor resonating chambers, something they think shows that Velociraptor’s can communicate. Grant is then approached by a wealthy couple, Paul (William H. Macy) and Amanda Kirby (Tea Leoni), who ask Grant to escort them on an aerial tour of Isla Sorna. Grant is not down, but reluctantly agrees once Paul’s checkbook comes out. Much to Grant’s dismay, they land on Isla Sorna instead of just flying over it. It turns out that Paul and Amanda are Eric’s parents and, frustrated with the government’s decision to not look for Eric, hired Grant, Billy, and three mercenaries (Bruce A. Young, Michael Jeter, and John Diehl) to help them find him. And even more to Grant’s dismay, the mercenaries, and their airplane, are quickly dispatched by a giant Spinosaurus and they are now trapped on Isla Sorna.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. I actually thought about saying that in my review of The Lost World too, but I figured it’d be best to hold it until here. Another lackluster installment in the Jurassic Park series, but this one they decided they needed to finish off by putting the rest of the cast of the first, great movie that they had not yet put into a shitty Jurassic Park movie. They knocked out Goldblum, Attenborough, and the kids in the second one, leaving them only with Neill and Dern. Mission accomplished. The story was passable here, but they did a couple of things that I thought were so ill-conceived that it topped the previous movie in bad ideas. The graphics, however, were probably better than they were in the previous two movies. If that was all it took, this would be a great movie. It’s not all it takes for me, though. It uses a much flimsier approach to getting the traumatized person back to the island, and one they already used. Neill was already hesitant to go to the island in the first movie, and Attenborough’s cash got him to go back. I understand Macy and Leoni’s reason for going to the island, but Neill should know better. I know he was heading towards hard times, but money shouldn’t have worked as it did in the first movie, even if he was so sure that he’d just be flying overhead. Has going to these islands ever worked out, Grant? On the plane, they used one of the worst ideas they ever had by making Grant have a dream that Billy was a Velociraptor, that then started speaking his name as the non-dream Billy did. This was SO corny and stupid. If you were so worried that you had gone too long into the movie without showing dinosaurs you could’ve just waited a few more seconds until they saw them. Otherwise there was really no reason to try to do something so dumb. This movie also does something I hate: they bring an expert, but then choose to ignore him. When they’re staring at a Tyrannosaurus, Grant says “Don’t move” and everyone runs. Why bother bringing an expert if you’re going to ignore him at the risk of your lives? It gets worse that they then mention almost exactly what I just said right after I wrote it down. They do a lot in this movie to show how intelligent the Velociraptor’s are, but I think they went way too far. The worst example of this is when they’re looking around the deserted lab, looking at the broken eggs and dead dinosaurs in jars. I can believe that Leoni would look at a Raptor that appeared to be in a jar and think it was just another one, but I won’t believe a Raptor would be three feet away from a person that was looking right at it and be intelligent enough to know it should just hold still and they would think it was a mannequin. As a good thing, I was happy to see that (even though it took them three movies to do it) they finally made Pterodactyl’s a good part of the movie (which I say because I believe they were shown flying in one of the other movies). The look and mood of the Pterodactyl cage area was pretty nice. The thing that bothered me about them is that Leoni forgets to close the cage, allowing the Pterodactyl’s to fly free in the world, and the people leaving the island really don’t seem all that concerned that they let them loose on the world. They could have at least thrown a “Don’t worry, they can’t fly far enough to reach the mainland” to make me feel better about it.

The very worst part of this movie, to me, was the Spinosaurus. Not the Spinosaurus itself, but what they did with him. I understand that you wanted to amp things up for this movie by throwing in a dinosaur that was bigger and scarier than the Tyrannosaurus, but having him lay a massive beatdown on the T-Rex we had grown to love over the last two movies was bad form. You can have the Spinosaurus beat the T-Rex, but you can’t allow him to make the T-Rex his bitch. T-Rex did right by you for two movies already, and this is how you treat him? Especially when you replace him with a dinosaur that can’t possibly make it through a tiny, metal door, but can bust through a giant, barbed, metal fence like it was tissue paper. For another good note, I can’t think of any dinosaurs in the movie that didn’t look good throughout.

The performances were still pretty solid in this movie, probably because they didn’t know how bad it was going to be while filming it. Sam Neill still brings it, and Laura Dern still does nothing for me, but this time it was because she was barely in it. William H. Macy is just a great actor, even in this movie. Tea Leoni was a bit of a miss for me. Her performance was fine, but her hairdo was not. She’s gorgeous with long, brown hair, and even really good with long, blond hair, but short, blond, dike-y hair? Not so much. I kind of liked the Eric character in the movie, but not really because of Trevor Morgan. I mainly liked it because it was a total swagger jack of Newt from Aliens. It was almost the same character! A little kid that has to survive for a prolonged period of time in a place full of dangerous creatures and is also all alone because those dangerous creatures killed everyone else. But, instead of dying as you would expect, they become an expert on them and are able to get around somehow. Same damned character! But I did love Newt, so some of that comes off on this character. I got pissed when the little shit was cocky enough to ask Alan Grant if he knew what a Raptor claw was. Are you shitting me? This guy was studying Raptors when you were still semen in William H. Macy’s balls AND he survived the first movie. You’ve been at this shit for eight weeks. Cocky little fucker. Thankfully, he gets punished for this a few times in this movie. I got to thinking that, after being stranded on the island, having your adult accompaniment killed, and then getting singularly selected by the Pterodactyls as food for their kids, you ever think that God might just want you dead? I will say, in favor of Neill, Macy, and Leoni, there was at least one point in the movie when I totally related to them. Sadly, while watching this movie, it was the scene where they were digging through giant mounds of shit.

The third part to the series further tries to drag down the great things Jurassic Park did. The tools it uses are a decent story bogged down with stupid ideas, the defeat of a much beloved dinosaur in order to replace it with a dinosaur I don’t give a shit about, and hit or miss performances, some of which were stolen right out of Aliens. I feel like this movie did to Jurassic Park what the Spinosaurus did to the T-Rex. The worst thing in the movie was that damned ringtone they used constantly for the satellite phone. Every time I hear that ringtone on someone’s cell phone it reminds me of this movie … and to kill the person whose phone was ringing. You can skip this movie, but I can’t ’cause I’m a reviewer and the thing came in my three pack. Jurassic Park gets “Reverse Darwinism – survival of the most idiotic” out of “This is T-Rex pee.”

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Psycho (1998)

12 Cabins, 12 Vacancies

I feel like I’ve made a mistake that I can’t rectify now. I probably should have watched the original of this movie before watching the remake, but I didn’t and I doubt I’ll be able to by the time this review comes out. Today’s movie is a remake of a classic Alfred Hitchcock movie, and I’ve never seen a Hitchcock movie before. Calm down, everybody! It wasn’t like I refused to watch them, it just never came up. And once I had started today’s movie, I started realizing that I should’ve watched the original first. But, in my defense, this movie could potentially have been hurt by everybody comparing it to the original, and I’m going in unbiased. Yeah, that’s a good excuse. I win. … The movie is Psycho, this version written by Joseph Stefano, directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Viggo Mortensen, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, Philip Baker Hall, Anne Haney, James Remar, Rita Wilson, James LeGros, Flea, and Robert Forster.

Marion Crane (Anne Heche) has a fantastic boyfriend named Sam Loomis (Viggo Mortensen), who is married and in debt. What makes him fantastic? He is Viggo! You are like the buzzing of flies to him! Psst. I WILL make that joke for every Viggo Mortensen performance I review. You’ve been warned. Anyways, Marion works at some job that I never really figured out. Realty, I think? Anyways, she steals $400,000 from a guy who came in to talk with her boss and pay for something in cash. She takes it to get her boyfriend out of debt. She starts driving to California to see him. A cop wakes her up as she sleeps on the side of the road in her car and her skittish demeanor makes him suspicious, so he follows her. She trades her car in for a new one to lose him (even though she knows he’s parked across the street), and even though he comes up, sees her take the new car, and probably talks with the salesperson about her paying in cash, he does not follow. … Whatever, we just need her to get to the Motel, right? She gets caught in a rainstorm and pulls off at the Bates Motel. She meets Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn), who owns the place. He has plenty of rooms because no one ever comes by. He apparently lives there with his mother, who is crazy. He seems nice enough until she suggests putting his mother in an institution, and he gets very upset. She goes to her room, where she decides to return the money the next day, and then goes to take a shower. Do I really haveta tell you how that shower ends?

I didn’t really like this movie, and that proves to me that I also won’t like the original. I HAVE SPOKEN! Even though I’ve never seen the original, I feel like I pretty much know it by heart because of parodies and just seeing scenes from it everywhere. I know the whole mother surprise, I know the shower scene, I know Norman looking through the hole in the wall, I don’t remember him masturbating as he did it, and I’ve actually been to the damned Motel on the Universal lot. That being the case, I feel like this movie stuck so close to the original (or at least what I know about it) that there really wasn’t any reason to make it. The only difference is that it’s in color and stars people I know. And if you aren’t going to add to it (but may potentially subtract from it) there’s no reason to do it. I did not, however, know there was a second half of this movie. I don’t know how I thought this movie worked out, being an entire movie leading up to a murder in a shower and cross-dressing revealed in the last 5 minutes, but I did. So it was interesting to find out what happened in the second half. I wish I had ever figured out what time this movie was supposed to take place in though. I thought they replicated this movie so much that they even set it in the 60s, especially when William H. Macy showed up. Macy acted like a pretty typical 60s cop, and then Julianne Moore walks in wearing a Walkman, for no apparent reason other than to say “PSYCH … O!” There were a bunch of things that didn’t work in this movie, the biggest of which was the music. I know it was a nod to Hitchcock, but I found it kind of tedious and adding to tension that wasn’t there. They would have really tense driving music when Heche was driving in her car. COME ON! She WAS getting herself all worried by having a really annoying interior monologue of people talking about her and figuring out what she’d done, but SHE was worried, not me. I was bored. You don’t need to lay everything flat on the table for the audience, we can figure some things out. But they do that again at the very end of the movie, where the psychologist that talks to Norman lays out exactly what he did and why he did it for about 5 minutes and I was thinking “Yeah, I know. I figured it out when I saw him in the wig.”

The performances were fine in this movie. Not spectacular, but mostly not horrible. Vince Vaughn was kind of like other Vince Vaughn characters, but more creepy, shy, and nervous. Anne Heche looked, and acted, pretty good in this. Her performance in the shower scene seemed a little off, but I think she was trying to do a remake of the performance from the original. Otherwise her reaction to being stabbed was perhaps a bit strange. I had no idea that Viggo Mortensen, Julianne Moore, or William H. Macy were even in this, but I was happy to see they got a pretty descent cast for a movie that didn’t need to happen. I thought Macy’s performance was strange when I started to figure out that this was supposed to be happening in the 80s, but it wasn’t off-putting. The thing that WAS off-putting was how bad his death was. It wasn’t his fault, but I forgot to put it in the last paragraph and I ain’t goin all the way up there to add it. He “falls” down the stairs, but it’s fairly obvious that the “down the stairs” part is green screen and he’s just standing in front of it flailing.

Based on what I know, this seems like a shot for shot remake of a movie regarded as a classic, but I found it to be very boring. Judging by the other reviews for the two movies, my guess is they did a poor job trying to remake the original, which probably didn’t need to be remade. The performances were mostly okay, but the movie didn’t really need to be made. We’ll see if neither movie needed to be made if I ever get around to the original. In the meantime, you don’t really need to watch this one. The remake of Psycho gets “We all go a little mad sometimes” out of “A son is a poor substitute for a lover”.

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