December Movies

So I meant to have this done last week, but a quick overnight work trip to Billings last Wednesday turned into a 4-day stay when a sudden snow storm rolled through turning the roads icy as all hell. So instead of coming home Thursday, I ended not getting back until Saturday. But I am now back, and I’ve got four new movies to cover from the weeks leading up to Christmas, so let’s get to it. The first of these is the fantasy film Eragon, which , interestingly enough, is based on a book written by a teenage boy from Montana. All in all this wasn’t a bad movie, but it wasn’t exactly a great movie, either (sadly, with such stellar fantasy epics as The Lord of the Rings trilogy out, the bar’s been set pretty high for fantasy films these days). While I haven’t read the book, I have to say that part of my problem is that some of the elements of the story are kind of goofy, and I’m guessing these are actually from the book, so the movie can’t really be blamed for them.

If you enjoy fantasy films, this one is certainly worth seeing, and the performances are all pretty solid. At the same time, I don’t see it as one I’d rush out and buy on DVD, and I’m a really big fan of fantasy films. There’s not really much else to say about this one.

The next movie that I saw in recent weeks is the family comedy Night at the Museum. This is yet another comedy starring Ben Stiller that I can say I enjoyed despite Ben Stiller, and not because of him. He’s simply never really impressed me as an actor. As usual he does a passable job with his character, and it’s the story itself and the actors around him that make the movie worth watching. Of especial note are the small parts played by Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney (who is incredibly funny in his small role). Robin Williams also gives a solid performance as Teddy Roosevelt, and Ricky Gervais is an absolute riot in the couple of scenes that he has (he is just a damned funny guy!).

This is a cute, fun movie. While not a spectacular movie by any means, it was still fun to watch. There were some pretty neat ideas as far as what things came to life in the museum (such as Brad Garrett as the voice of an Easter Island head statue). All in all a good movie for the whole family (despite the scene of the monkey peeing on Ben Stiller). Certainly worth a look.

And so we come to Christmas night, which found me at the theatre for the late showing of Black Christmas. I’ll come right out and say it now – this movie sucked. Now, I’m sure most people reading this are thinking, “Well, duh!” and yes, I admit that I didn’t have high expectations (about the only real reason I went to see it was that I’m a fan of Michelle Trachtenberg). But let’s face it, these sorts of movies can be fun in a campy sort of way. I actually really enjoyed the Friday the 13th series and the Nightmare and Elm Street series, and other such movies, as cheesy and dumb as they are. But they can still be fun in their own way, if nothing else simply because of the excessive violence and gratuitous nudity (not to mention the new and exciting ways that the killers come up with to dispatch their victims).

This movie pretty much fails on every level. Despite the R-rating, there’s pretty much no sex scenes, and the only real nude scene features the killer’s middle-age (and fairly skanky) mom. As much as I enjoy my nude scenes, you know it’s bad if I say that this was one I could really have done without! I’m sorry, but what’s the point of having an R-rated movie filled with hot, sexy college coeds, and then only show us a brief scene of the bare butt of one of the girls! Gratuitous nudity is as much a part of this sort of horror movie as the excessive violence and gore is, for crying out loud! It really makes me shake my head that movies are getting more violent and gruesome all the time, but we're seeing less and less gratuitous nudity to along with it. It’s just not right. ;-)

On the subject of excessive violence, the movie disappoints there as well. Everyone is killed in pretty much the same way, which takes all of the fun out of it. Let’s face it, part of why you watch movies like these is to see the amusing variety of ways that killers like Jason Voorhees dispatch their poor victims. This movie is predictable even for a cheesy horror film, and there’s no build-up of tension or anything even remotely scary or suspenseful about it. I actually heard someone behind me as I was leaving the theatre asking the person with them, “Was that supposed to be scary, or funny?” And I had to ask the same question. If it was supposed to be funny, they did a pretty poor job of that as well.

The movie starts out with a girl being killed almost immediately. Her older sister comes looking for her later in the movie, but since she was the first one killed and she’s in the movie all of two minutes, it’s hard to have any sympathy or feel any connection to the older sister’s loss. Also, you quickly find out the killer’s sister is the one killing the coeds, because the killer is still escaping from the sanitarium, and so there’s no build-up of tension at his escape (or any care that he’s escaping at all, as far as that goes), because there’s already someone killing people, so his presence in the movie at all is pretty pointless.

In watching Black Christmas and comparing it to other movies of the genre, there are some easy changes that could have been made to significantly improve this movie. But it’s pretty obvious that the movie as filmed was a hopeless disaster. One of the key signs of this is that there are a couple of scenes in the trailer that not only aren’t in the movie, but so differ from what’s in the movie that it’s hard to figure out where they’d even go (which tells me that the original edit was so bad they had to make a whole bunch of changes in the hopes of fixing the movie, which of course they failed to do).

The one high point of the movie for me was hearing Michelle Trachtenberg swear (and it's a damn shame when that's one of the only positive things you can say about a movie). Since almost everything she’s done prior to this has been either TV or family-oriented movies, I’d never heard her swear before. So hearing her drop the F-bomb was actually pretty amusing (what can I say, I'm easily amused). Plus the fact that she’s really, really cute and just fun to watch. That was about the only thing bearable about the whole movie. I’ll be curious to see if they offer a director’s cut/extended cut of the movie when it comes out on DVD (not that I can imagine myself wasting the time and money to rent it to see if it’s any better, since it’s unlikely it would be regardless of what changes they make to it).

The final movie I’m going to be covering in this entry is The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro. The movie goes from the beginnings of World War II until the Bay of Pigs, and shows the formation and early days of the CIA. This is a great, intense, exciting film. It’s not necessarily a summer blockbuster sort of movie, but it’s still a solid, interesting, well-done drama. De Niro does a great job as director, and the performances are all solid (which is not at all surprising considering the stellar cast they put together for this movie). If you enjoy good, old-fashioned spy thrillers (as opposed to the action/effects bonanzas that most spy movies have become today – most especially the recent James Bond movies), then this is a movie you’re very likely to enjoy.

That’s it for this entry. I’m headed to the theatre tomorrow, and caught a movie while I was in Billings, so I’ll have a couple more reviews for y’all some time next week.