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The Marc Pease Experience

There is a chance that some clever marketer will take advantage of currents in the culture and, noticing the audience's avid love for Glee, market The Marc Pease Experience as another plucky tale of high-school outcasts united and healed by the magical power of music and performance. This person would, in fact, be clever, but they would also, in fact, be evil with a capital 'E,' because The Marc Pease Experience is -- from horrible title to smug closing moment -- one of the least funny comedies in a long time, and a head-scratching exercise in how you can take three funny, talented people and wind up with them not being especially funny in any way. Fortunately, nobody seems hell-bent on marketing The Marc Pease Experience -- it was dumped unceremoniously into only 10 theaters nationwide, all in second-tier markets last August, and now comes ot a featureless, vanilla DVD in the hopes it might generate some cash on the strength of the names of its stars.

We meet Marc (Jason Schwartzman) just as he's getting ready to make his big entrance in his high school's production of The Wiz, as the Tin Man, egged and coaxed onstage by his drama teacher and the show's director Mr. Gribble (Ben Stiller) -- but Marc's stagefright gets the better of him, and the result is a disaster. Jumping forward 8 years, Marc's a limo-driver loser, dating a high school girl, Meg (Anna Kendricks) from his old school, and Meg also has an uncomfortable attraction to Mr. Gribble, who Marc resents and hates for ruining his life. So from the outset, we have a love triangle where two sides are creepily, disturbingly inappropriate for the other; who exactly are we supposed to root for?

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Paramount's feature-film live-action adaptation of the '80s comic-book and animation and toy franchise, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, is one of the most fascinatingly flawed big-budget movies imaginable. I stumbled out of it overcome with special-effects-induced sensory overload when it played in the theaters, wondering just how narrowly Hollywood is marketing its films these days-- is it, say, down to the year? The month? I'm moved to ask this because G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra feels like the perfect film for a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old-boy -- not one day more, not one day less.

You can't imagine someone much older enjoying G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra because, frankly, it is silly -- cartoony and crude, full of phony high-tech pseudoscience and heroes and villains with goofy codenames like "Snake Eyes" and "Ripcord," plus hidden bases that look like something from a Roger Moore Bond film on steroids. And I can't recommend someone much younger watching G. I Joe: The Rise of Cobra because while it is silly and nonsensical, it is also incredibly violent. And I'm not talking about the red-laser/blue-laser violence of the cartoon that inspired the film, either, where no blood was spilled and bad things happened far away; in the first reel of G.I. Joe, we see someone get a red-hot iron mask latched to their face while they're screaming, then a few people getting stabbed in the eye with knives and crossbow bolts; it is fun for the whole family, but only if your family likes watching people burned alive and stabbed in the brain. And I know plenty of fans of the '80s comics and TV show and toys who liked the nostalgia trip G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra offered, but, much like Transformers, I don't have that spoonful of sweet, toxic nostalgia it takes to make those big, stupid pills go down.

James' Latest Radio Spot

Wanna hear James give his take on last week's DVD releases, including Ice Age 3, Orphan and The Maiden Heist, as well as films currently in theaters, including Michael Jackson's This Is It and Paranormal Activity?  Then click here to listen to his spot on KPAM's Bob Miller Show this past Friday.   

You'll also learn what scary movies James likes to watch on Halloween.  Nope, I'm not going to spoil the surprise -- you have to tune in yourself!

Saturday Night Drive-in: 100 Feet

Sadly, the 100 Feet in the title does not refer to mysterious severed limbs washing up on the shores of British Columbia. No, it’s the distance Famke Janssen’s character Marnie can amble from her home before her ankle alarm goes off. See, a few years ago Marnie put an end to her husband’s abuse by putting an end to him. Unfortunately for her, he was not only Michael Paré, but he was also a cop and so the wheels of justice sorta rolled back over her.

Marnie did some time in prison and now is back in her and her late husband’s home to serve out the rest of her sentence under house imprisonment. But it turns out her late husband's ghost hasn’t moved on either. (You think it's easy to kill Michael Paré? Did you even see Eddie and the Cruisers?) For whatever reasons— undying love of his home’s wood moldings? a lack of donuts in Cop Hell?—his (mean)spirit is hanging around threatening her. So now, unable to leave the house, Marnie’s in the annoyingly redundant position of having to kill him again.

Famke Janssen is one of those utilitarian actresses whose strong physical presence sometimes makes her seem a better actress than she really is. She’s still a tall, striking beauty with an intense stare, and she’s always held up her end of the bargain just fine when she’s in support or an ensemble, as in the X-Men films. But putting her front and center to carry a film in which she’s in every scene is asking a bit too much. You can only look sternly exasperated and resolutely panicked so much before it wears thin. Janssen is decent in 100 Feet, but not good enough to make up for the lack of anything else going on around her in the movie.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

[THE FOLLOWING IS A REPRINT OF REDBLOG'S REVIEW OF ICE AGE: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS DURING ITS THEATRICAL RELEASE LAST SUMMER. ICE AGE: DOTD IS NOW ON DVD AND AVAILABLE FOR RENTAL IN THE REDBOXES.]

I admit I never gave much thought to the Ice Age movies—I dimly recall seeing the first one, skipped the second one, and was trying to come up with any reason at all not to see the latest, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

But since it was in a tight race for first place at the box office and since my two illustrious co-writers here at redblog were off enjoying (or not) the grown-up treats of Public Enemies, and in order to steer my four-year-old nephew off his constant pleadings to see Transformers 2, I ended up seeing Ice Age: Dinos on a 3D screen. And then watching Ice Age 2: The Meltdown the next day.

And you know what? I certainly didn’t hate either of them. I’m not much of a Ray Romano fan (no, everyone certainly does not love Raymond), and Fox’s Ice Age franchise has always just reeked a bit too much of carefully calculated, test-screened and focus-grouped slick product. But as millions of parents have learned, if you’re going to have to watch a non-Pixar animated movie 100 times a year on DVD, these Ice Age flicks aren’t the worst that could happen.

Oh, I’m sure the Ice Age mix of Looney Tunes-style slapstick and treacly, heartwarming message wears thin after about the 50th kid-mandated viewing, but I found Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs a decent time-passer, filled with enough nonstop, kinda nonsensical, wacky humor and good-old-fashioned adventure to stave off adult-onset boredom. No, it’s probably not better than Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, but only by a few shades less, and only in that way that all franchises start to wear threadbare and thin by their third go-round.

I’m not sure the plot matters much, nor did it seem to matter to the filmmakers (co-directors Carlos Saldanha from IA2 and Mike Thurmeier from the Scrat short No Time For Nuts), but here goes: Mammoths Manny (Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah) are expecting a Woolly bundle of baby Snuffleupagus (leading Manny to construct a playground while displaying some pretty impressive tool and art skills for a prehistoric pachyderm).

A feeling-left-out Sid goes off and stumbles onto a trio of dino eggs. Sid plays “mom,” the eggs hatch, the baby Rexes are adorably chaotic, Mama Rex comes back to fetch them (in a scene that, when it comes to conveying the awesome size and heft of a stomping T-Rex, is almost as visually impressive as anything in the Jurassic Park films or King Kong), and ends up hauling hapless Sid back to her Lost World, a Conan-Doyle-esque tropical underground land time forgot. So our friendly herd-family heads down under to rescue Sid.

What? It could happen.

Echelon Conspiracy

Watch enough movies and you start to notice patterns, coincidences, odd synchronicities. Watching Echelon Conspiracy, a thriller that played in less than 400 theaters on its release, comes to DVD with a plot where, if you hold it up to the light just right and squint, there's a strong resemblance to one of 2008's one-hundred-million-dollar blockbusters that was released just six months before -- a spacing too close to suggest that any deliberate plagiarism going on, just that two different writers heard something in the wires and the wind and the world. I can't name the film, of course, for fear of spoiling Echelon Conspiracy, but I will say that, with one exception, I liked how Echelon Conspiracy handled the central plot idea more than I liked how the big-money blockbuster did; whereas the multi-million-making version was bloated and a little silly in its excesses, Echelon Conspiracy stays relatively close to the ground.

Max Peterson (Shane West) is a blue-collar jet-setting high-tech hardware guy -- working with the computing equivalent of big iron, setting up a secure server in Thailand when we meet him. Preparing to check out of his hotel, he gets sent a package -- a new top-of-the-line cell phone. And he starts getting messages from an unknown sender who's always right, in some very interesting ways, which means that when the mystery texts recommend he head for Prague, he heads for Prague ... and follows the phone's hints and tips until he gets on the radar of both a Prague casino security head , John Reed (Ed Burns), and FBI man Dave Grant (Ving Rhames). Back Stateside, the head of the National Security Agency, Raymond Burke (Martin Sheen) is taking a special interest in Max's seemingly magical phone ... which is unusual, considering he's busy with trying to get an expansion of the NSA's powers rammed through congress. ...

Road Trip: Beer Pong

The there are plenty of indications along the way that Road Trip: Beer Pong might, in fact, be much smarter than it has to be, best summed up when Jenna (Julia Levy-Boken), the French-born young woman whose work as the face (and uh, other body parts) of the beer pong championships has inspired her long-lost love (and beer pong genius) Andy (Preston Jones) to drive from Ithaca, N.Y. to Atlanta, Georgia to reconnect with her, explains that she's going to behave when she and Andy are reunited: "I'm a lady ... who sells beer with her breasts."

And, like that contradictory and self-aware moment, Road Trip: Beer Pong sums up its own self: It's a good-hearted, smarter-than-it-has-to-be comedy ... that sells beer and breasts. Branded as a follow-up to 2000's Road Trip, Road Trip: Beer Pong inspires the skeptical question of why you'd follow up Road Trip with a direct-to-video sequel nine years later and the cynical one of why Paramount waited 9 years; if Universal's pumped out 7 American Pie films, clearly, we're in an age when the line between shameless profiteering and giving fans what they want is harder to find than the bottom line of profit.

The Maiden Heist

You would think that a comedy with four Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning actors would have a high enough profile to make it into theaters, and yet The Maiden Heist, starring Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman, William H. Macy and Marcia Gay Harden went straight to DVD. To be sure, there were specific business problems challenging its distributor, the Yari Film Group, but The Maiden Heist also faced the problems of the modern movie business in general, where studios seem averse to releasing any entertaining film that doesn't feature an immediately marketable hook like talking robots, talking animals or talking robot animals. If The Maiden Heist's cast were in a grim, grueling drama, that movie would probably make it into theaters for Oscar time; since they're in a light, bright and breezy caper comedy, and have an average age well above the industry's target demographic, someone somewhere calculated the cost of a release to theaters against the potential profits and made the call to put it on the silver disc of DVD as opposed to the silver screen of the theater.

And I'm not going to say that The Maiden Heist would have made buckets of cash if it played theaters, or rail against the way the movie business seems to be running these days, but I will say that The Maiden Heist works remarkably well on DVD, where it plays slick and slight and funny. Walken plays a security guard at a Boston museum, who loses himself for hours in one of the gallery's classic 19th-century paintings, a portrait of a lady by the sea. One day, though, he's told that to make room for more modern pieces, the painting of the maiden is bound for Copenhagen. This, to Walken is unacceptable; it turns out it's also unacceptable to Morgan Freeman's guard, an amateur artist who's fascinated by a painting full of cats, and William H. Macy, who's grown a little too attached to a bronze nude statue that's bound for Denmark as well. ...

Redbloggers on the Radio

You missed our voices, didn't you?

Fear not... here are the last three radio spots we redbloggers have done for the KPAM Bob Miller Show.

James talks about Year One, Imagine That, Assassination of a High School President, Couples Retreat and A Serious Man.

Locke gives his take on Where the Wild Things Are, Law Abiding Citizen, Land of the Lost and Drag Me to Hell.

And I (Erika) weight in on Astro Boy, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, Amelia, and the film I just luuuurved (I kid), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. 

Blood: The Last Vampire

It is a truth universally acknowledge that any story that has made a good fortune in one medium must be in want of an adaptation. Books become movies, comic books become TV shows, animated series become live-action films ... and now and then these adaptations work and now and then they do not. But in many cases, these adaptations are not as simple as they look; a huge novel often doesn’t squeeze down into the confines of the big screen, or a children's book can't expand to fill the theater. Blood: The Last Vampire is a live-action adaptation of an Japanese animated film, its animated action and stylishness now brought to live with flesh-and-blood actors and click-and-drag effects.

That original 50-minute film's spawned a comics series, a three-novel-long trilogy and a 50-episode animated spin-off, so the idea of a live-action film must have felt as potentially pleasing as it did potentially profitable. The plot follows Saya (Gianna Jun), a young woman who isn't; she's a vampire-human hybrid set loose by human masters to destroy the demons loose in 1970's Tokyo. As usually seems to happen with these things, her overlords -- her grizzled, paternal mentor Michael (Liam Cunningham) excepted -- are, in fact, not on the side of the angels. Saya goes on the run, along with the Alice (Allison Miller), the daughter of the American military man who was one of the first to die as part of the conspiracy's masterstroke. And this is about all the plot you get, with the revelation that the evil god who wiped out Saya's family and cursed her is, of course, behind it all.