Tag Archives: Summer blockbuster

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

EAKER VS. EAKER AT THE SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS: MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015)

10 Comments

366WeirdMovies.com Proudly, or Not So Proudly, Presents: Eaker vs. Eaker

Aja and Alfred 366Eaker vs. Eaker is the latest “send Alfred to the summer blockbuster movies so that he can curmudgeonly complain” event, but with a twist, cinema fans and friends! For the first time (without even knowing it), you voted to send Alfred and his wife, Aja, to the flicks and have them duke it out, publicly, about each so-called-blockbuster. Everybody here knows all about Alfred’s cinematic savvy, and his cranky-old-dog approach to film critique. Now, you get 2-for-1: Aja is Alfred’s beloved clinical and counseling psychologist partner, who loves to counter just about every cinematic point Alfred makes. And you, kind reader, chose to send us first to Mad Max: Fury Road.

Aja: Ladies first, shall we? Lets.

“What is this thing?” I asked, reluctantly glancing at the poll that sealed our afternoon’s fate.

“Well, dear, they have voted to send us to Mad Max first.”

“Who bestowed this power? Jesus.” I shot Alfred an incredulous smirk. I counted the tallies again. “This is rigged,” I bemoaned.

“Actually, the critics are giving it rave ratings, so who knows?”

This did nothing for my internal motivation to pay money to see this.

On the other hand, it meant spending more time with Alfred, and there was a good chance that we would end up with interlaced fingers for two hours, so okay. “You are going to have to fold the laundry as penance for this,” I plainly announced, “You know, for putting us in this position.”

With his left eyebrow raised in mock indignation, Alfred nodded once and quickly retorted, “I do love and fear my wife,” smiling, “it starts at 4:50pm, and just as consolation, critics are proclaiming it to be highly feminist.” Part of what is so difficult about saying ‘no’ to Alfred is his adorableness. He is frankly beautiful, with long eyelashes and a perfect smile. It gets me every time. Alfred can talk me in or out of just about anything with that look and that flashed, crooked grin. I rolled my eyes like a bratty teen, put on my coat and grabbed the car keys.

“Let’s just get this over with,” I said, calmly and rationally.

“You might actually like it,” he said. Ignoring his verbal petting, I walked out into the rain toward the car.

First, let us set the scene: it was a rainy Friday afternoon and we stood in a long line to get matinee tickets—but since it was an opening day, we had to pay full price. It isn’t that I’m cheap, I’m just fiscally conscious, especially when it comes to the splurge of a movie theater visit. I’m definitely the type to stop at a gas station along the way, pick up Twix and a can of Coca-Cola, and smuggle in my snacks Continue reading EAKER VS. EAKER AT THE SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS: MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015) →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

READER POLL FOR ALFRED EAKER VS. THE SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS: THE CANDIDATES

2 Comments

With summer just around the corner, it is time for the 366 reader base to vote on which four summer blockbusters to send me to review. The candidates below are listed in order of release. Be sure to view the entire post; you will vote at the end.

Poster for Avengers: Age of UltronThe Avengers: Age of Ultron: Director Joss Whedon has a sense of style, produced the cult fave “Firefly,” and is good at managing an ensemble cast. Of course, it’s going to have , who should be playing all the men in-tights characters (but obviously cannot). The best moments in this film’s predecessor were in its first third, before it began wallowing in its excesses, descending into an out-of-control -styled assault on the senses with floating July 4th black snake thingies chasing people in the streets amidst falling glass. I dread the idea of even one man-in-tights saga, let alone a whole cast full of them.

Mad Max: Fury Road: Director sacked the fascistic , which is a promising start. However, Miller’s last Max entry was thirty years ago. Since then, his work has been confined to kiddie fare. Additionally, this film has been described as one long chase scene, as if we needed more of that.

Tomorrowland has a first rate ensemble cast and an equally first rate director in Brad Bird (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and The Iron Giant). This may be the most promising of the summer entries.

Pitch Perfect 2: Features a first time director in Elizabeth Banks, although she did produce the 2012 original, which I have not seen. Although the original garnered some good reviews, the trailer to the sequel looks like a hopelessly adolescent film filled with people all too easy to hate. Unless the film surprises, this may be the nadir of summer releases.

Spy looks almost equally unbearable and obvious. Director Paul Feig was a critical darling with Bridesmaids (2011), but that might prove his one-hit wonder. The Heat (2013) was by the numbers. It starred the female Adam Sandler: Melissa McCarthy. McCarthy, who also was in the insufferable Tammy (2014), returns to collaborate with Fieg.

San Andreas: A disaster film from perennial hack Brad Peyton (Journey 2: Mysterious Island and Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore) starring monosyllabic Dwayne Johnson, who makes  look like a sensitive intellectual actor with range. Has the disaster genre really gone anywhere new since the Towering Inferno (1974)? At least in the Irwin Allen days, one got to see “A” stars burst into flames.

Jurassic World: A third-rate rehash of a film that was not very good to begin with. The plot sounds almost identical to the 1993 Spielberg Continue reading READER POLL FOR ALFRED EAKER VS. THE SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS: THE CANDIDATES →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

ALFRED EAKER VS. THE SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS: DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2014)

4 Comments

In the 1960s, producer Arthur P. Jacobs purchased screen rights to Pierre Boulle’s novel “Monkey Planet” for Twentieth Century Fox. It became Jacobs’ dream project, facing an uphill battle with skeptical executives. Not helping the producer’s cause was Boulle’s public statement calling “Monkey Planet” his worst novel. ((Boulle had previously written the novel “Bridge on the River Kwai” and received credit for the screenplay, but declined to show up for the Academy Award. The reason for the no-show was that Boulle did not write the script, but agreed to receive credit for the film’s back-listed writers.))

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) posterRod Serling and Michael Wilson co-wrote the screen adaptation for the original Planet of The Apes (1968). The script is far more “Twilight Zone” than Boulle. Jacobs wisely cast  in the lead role. Heston, who loved the script, was helpful in influencing studio heads to greenlight the project and to assign director Franklin J. Shaffner, whom the actor had worked with in the underrated The War Lord (1965).

Studio misgivings were laid aside when Planet of the Apes (1968) proved to be a monstrous success. Before Star Wars, Batman, etc, Planet of the Apes was the original blockbuster franchise, spawning four sequels, a short-lived television series, an animated series, and a comic book. The original film retains its classic pop status, despite revisionist opinions, usually by those who have not seen it and dismiss it as a cheesy byproduct of the sixties and seventies. Actually, it is science fiction cinema at its most preferable: the cinematic equivalent of Cracker Jacks with its prize being smart dumb fun amidst caramel popcorn and salty peanuts. Who, in all honesty, would find ‘s academic psychedelia 2001: A Space Odyssey, made the same year, as fun an experience as American icon Heston being put through Sterling’s pulp karma in the form of gorillas on horseback? Heston’s Col. Taylor, disdainful of mankind, is replete with character flaws, yet we root for him as he is catapulted through a physical and emotional nightmare, in which he is forced to do a philosophical about-face, only to learn in the end he was right all along. Heston’s physicality responds perfectly to Sterling’s blunt ironies.

It is the hippest performance of the actor’s career and one can understand his hesitancy regarding the sequel, Beneath The Planet Of The Apes (1970). Heston’s performance there amounts to a cameo, with James Franciscus filling in, albeit in a second-rate Heston imitation. Still, once past the unnecessary rehash of the first film, Beneath, in its innovative second half, proves to be the strangest, most underrated entry of the franchise. It is also the only sequel that retains the original’s flavor.

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes (1971), the best of the sequels, benefits from the quirky performances of Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowell. Writer Paul Dehn crafted an inventive, humor-laden narrative that delighted in seventies pop culture. Dehn, a noted film critic, drew on Rod Sterling’s original script draft for the first film, as well as Boulle’s novel in which Apes and humans coexist in a modern society. Escape‘s Sterling-esque first half gives way to Dehn’s pre-apocalyptic sensibilities and pop social commentary on racism and violence.

Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes (1972) is Bazooka Bubble Gum Armageddon,especially in the unrated version found on home video. The slavery Continue reading ALFRED EAKER VS. THE SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS: DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2014) →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

ALFRED EAKER VS. THE SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS: TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION

2 Comments

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) is one for the shower. It is an endless two hours and forty minutes, made strictly for an illiterate, masochistic audience who seek out movies that will bang them over the head and deafen them. The rest of us may feel so wiped out that we will need to run home, take two Bayer aspirin, and wash off the residue of director Michael Bay’s masturbatory excesses. Bay has made enough money pleasuring himself to toys that he could put a serious dent in the national deficit. That says a lot about contemporary movie executives and perhaps even more about the typical moviegoer.

That aptly named Age of Extinction could very well be a prophetic symbol for movies as a meaningful form of entertainment. To say Transformers is soulless is too much of a given. I cannot imagine anyone even talking about the movie afterwards, except perhaps out of sheer embarrassment for having dragged oneself to see it. I am unsure how many of these movies have been made, and have no desire to find out after having seen this one; but the fact that a series of Transformers movies have been produced already almost guarantees it making a gazillion dollars off numbed contemporary audiences forever looking for sensation devoid of feeling.

Still from Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) Based on the Hasbro robot toy line, Transformers is too pornographic in its violence to be seen by children, and any parent taking their kids to see it should have their head examined. The actors, who include , Kelsey Grammer, and , are in the nadir of their careers. They are lost among scraping metal, explosions, and the countless product placements that at least provides minuscule relief from all the “noise, noise, noise.” Unfortunately, like ‘s Grinch, we are powerless to shut it all up, because the noise is the only thing that prevents us from succumbing to complete boredom. Death from boredom would be far preferable, however, and leave less wear on the posterior. Robots are supposed to be cool, and despite having robots who can turn into cars, Transformers still can’t inspire any emotion besides lethargy. I kept asking myself how Bay could manage to make robots dull, until I remembered that Clint Eastwood worked hard, and successfully, at sucking all the fun and poetry out of the Western and transforming it into a hopelessly vacuous genre.

Not helping the robots is shockingly asinine dialogue delivered by Goodman (in voice over), Wahlberg as a mad scientist type, and Grammer as the stock CIA exec. Incredibly, the girls in the movie are even more witless, reduced to cardboard whores for Bay’s fetishistic lens.

Transformers is not so much a movie as a heavily advertised media event. Doubtlessly, the besotted businessmen funding this clanging, metallic peepshow fancy their product as imaginative enough to rake in plenty of dyed green paper from its zombified audience. To be certain, the producers will be quite busy tallying their profits, but all that green is rendered an illusionless illusion because, although good movies are still being made, American Cinema is broke, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not be able to put it together again.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

ALFRED EAKER VS. THE SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS: X-MEN DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (2014)

2 Comments

For years, Trekkies have perpetrated the “odd-numbered curse” rumor that befell the original crew’s movies. According to this theory somehow, someway the odd numbered movies are mysteriously inferior to the even numbered entries. While there is a certain truth in that, it is not because of some silly curse, nor is it a mystery. Movies do not just magically “make themselves,” and the actors do not make it up as they go along. The common denominator in the even numbered Star Trek entries is Nicholas Meyer, who wrote and directed Star Trek II (1982) and Star Trek VI (1991) and co-wrote the script for Star Trek IV (1986). The strengths of Star Trek IV lie in the writing, particularly that which is clearly from the stylistic hand of Meyer. The film’s weaknesses lie in Leonard Nimoy’s pedestrian directing.

Still from X-men Days of Future Past (2014)When the third X-Men movie, The Last Stand (2006) was released, fans (and some critics) were shocked that it fell far short of the first two entries. Since Bryan Singer directed and co-wrote both X-Men (2000) and X-Men 2 (2003), and was not at all associated with The Last Stand, that third film’s lesser quality should not have been a surprise. Regardless, Singer has returned after an eleven year absence to direct and co-write Days of Future Past. With him, the franchise is vital entertainment again. Although not without flaws, X-Men: Days Of Future Past (2014) is as much imaginative dumb fun as Singer’s previous efforts. Its biggest misstep is that it is not a stand alone movie. It expects the audience to have seen all the previous X-Men movies, and after The Last Stand it should be counted as almost a miracle that any future movies were even made about mutant super-people. (Except, of course, we are talking about the 21st century American market; the same market that actually made a hit of live action Scooby Doo movies, the Transformers franchise, and the Fast and Furious franchise). It is probably helpful to have along a translator who speaks Marvel Comics if you are unfamiliar with all the characters’ histories—and there a lot of characters, too damned many for Singer to balance with the same level of deftness that Joss Whedon is adept at.

Like many Trek stories, this X-Men opus tackles a time travel plot, albeit an overly complicated one. Thankfully, it turns playful. There are plenty of allegories bandied about and historical parallels abound (think the Vietnam War and a Terminator-like apocalypse). An older Professor X (Trek veteran ) and Magneto ( ) meet their  younger selves ( and ), shades of Picard-meets-Kirk or Spock-meets-Spock-Prime. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has to go back to 1973, which means waking up to the music of Roberta Flack and the discovery that Richard Nixon (Mark Comancho) was not only deep in Watergate, but also aiding and abetting Dr. Trask () in a robot plot (it always helps to have robots). References to the Kennedy assassination and the magic bullet are thrown in for good measure (which diverts us back to another unused Trek plot).

Singer occasionally gets waterlogged, probably from trying to appease fanboy expectations. Additionally, his return to pulp is excessively long in its last quarter. However, it is capped off with a winning finale, which feels like a teenage interpretation of “Twilight Of The Gods” (minus Wagner himself, of course).  Singer keeps the film flowing through pop references galore, which helps levitate all that on-sleeve, existential mutant angst. Even the much-missed Jim Croce provides good tonic, via his legendary “Time In A Bottle,” as does John Ottman’s assured score. Once past the confusing opening, X-Men: Days Of Future Past shifts gear into ambitious, melodramatic fun, and has a few surprises up its sleeve, at least to those of us who forgot our Marvel concordance. Now, if the producers are smart, they’ll keep Singer employed in this franchise (providing he can keep out of jail).