Fired Up

Nick & Shawn got into football to impress chicks. When their coach announces that their football camp has been moved from the beach to land locked Texas they panic about spending two weeks without girls, and decide to jump ship and join the cheer squad so they can go to cheer camp and be surrounded by hundreds of men deprived women. Although their cheer squad questions Sawn & Nick’s motives they let the boys join because they are in desperate need of something to keep them from ending cheer camp in last place for another year.

Fired Up is a silly movie, but I laughed from beginning to end. The premise of girl starved high school males may have been done in dozens of movies before, but Fired Up manages to make this concept fun again. The majority of this rests on the characters of Nick & Shawn played by Eric Christian Olsen & Nicholas D’Agosto.

Olsen & D’Agosto have a natural chemistry together that makes for amazing comic timing. Watching Nick & Shawn is made fun because of this. They are two halves of one whole but they complement each other so well that you don’t want them to be torn apart. Nick should not be without Shawn’s watchful eye and Shawn can never be too intellectual because of Shawn’s quick quips and sexist observations. I truly hope Olsen & D’Agosto work together again; you can’t force chemistry and these two are the best pairing I have seen in years.

Perhaps what is most surprising about Fired Up is the intelligence behind it. These are well written characters even though they are stereotypes; the football coach is a beautiful exaggeration, a cheerleader is a closet lesbian, the jocks are brick headed – everything is what you expect but so well crafted that the characters flow naturally in their world and don’t do anything that seems expected in a negative way. Screenwriter Freedom Jones even manages to work in a character arch for both Shawn and Nick and keep the film quippy and funny. Perhaps my favorite sequence in the film has to do with when Nick & Shawn are cooking dinner and realizing that Nick knows the names of and cares for the girls on the cheer squad.

Fired Up may be a movie in the vein of American Pie but I somehow the tone coming out of the film is far more joyful than that franchise left me. This is one DVD that is going to be added to my collection as soon as I can.

Director: Will Gluck
Writer: Freedom Jones
Shawn: Nicholas D’Agosto
Nick: Eric Christian Olsen
Carly: Sarah Roemer
Diora: Molly Sims
Dr. Rick: David Walton
Poppy: Juliette Goglia
Coach Byrnes: Philip Baker Hall
Coach Keith: John Michael Higgins

Nick: Bottomless breadsticks only keep you at the Olive Garden for so long, until at some point you look up and say 'Why the hell am I at the Olive Garden with all these fat people?'

The Box

The Box
Originally uploaded by wbmoviesgirl

Norma, Arthur and their son Walter are a happy family but like most people are strapped for cash and having trouble making ends meet. Just when Arthur discovers NASA has rejected him from the astronaut program Arlington Steward shows up on their doorstep with a box and a proposition. The box contains a button, and if Norma and Arthur push the button they will get one million dollars, but somewhere in the world, someone they don’t know will die. Desprate and unbelieving, Norma presses the button and she and Arthur are sucked into a mystery that neither one of them can understand or find their way out of.

Not surprisingly, The Box is a movie that most people won’t like. This is a morality tale and if anyone wants to be honest that means it’s a movie that can’t have the easily accomplished, cop-out ending. As a true morality tale The Box makes sure it has a lesson to impart and does so in the best way it can: just like Icarus got caught up in the moment and plummeting into tragedy, Arthur & Norma help cause the tragedy that unfolds around them and they have no one to blame but themselves.

Part of what I loved about The Box is that it’s a true Richard Kelly film – it’s a morality tale with a B-movie, science fiction slant. By setting the film around NASA in the seventies Kelly is allowed the room to play with a world that is still wary of technology, space and the mysterious “other”. Arlington Steward is a mystery instead of a search on the internet – genuine gumshoe work is required. This lends an aura of mystery to the film that is hard to accomplish in a film set in a contemporary period. Even though this mystery involves the supernatural it is one that could be easily resolved now adays as it revolves around one central figure, one who could be easily tracked on the internet or in any computerized database. I assume Kelley added this element to the short story himself as he said the concept for Norma & Arthur in the film were based around his parents.

Richard Kelly films thrill me in a way that I have talked too much about to those that know me. He makes movies that can still surprise me, movies that have visuals I want to emulate, and stories that astound me. I am sad that the mass audiences no longer have the film vocabulary to view and enjoy as Richard Kelly film, but I have to hope that the more movies he makes and the longer they pick up followings on DVD that the easier it will be for a mass audience to see and enjoy his films in the theatre.

Director & Writer: Richard Kelly
Norma: Cameron Diaz
Arthur: James Marsden
Arlington Steward: Frank Langella
Dana: Gillian Jacobs
Walter: Sam Oz Stone

Star Trek

I have been waiting anxiously for Star Trek to come out on DVD for months now, it’s no secret that I adore this film.

What struck me about the film this time around is the camera movement Abrams put into his shots. They’re slightly unique for the camera work one would normally see in this kind of film and I honestly think that it’s a technique I might try out some day. Abrams uses a lot of dolly work for his shots and will start or end with a canted angle. In the planet bound scenes it adds a nice visual character to the shot, but when done on the Enterprise and when they are in space it aids to the visual idea that they are in space, a place without a right side up or gravity to pin the ship down.

I will also be interested to see if Abrams does direct the sequel if he keeps the camera flares or drops them from his visual style. While the camera flares grew on me when I first watched the film, I can’t see any story centric reason for them to be there, they seem to merely be there because Abrams thought they were a nice visual touch. I may have come out of Mission: Impossible 3 feeling like the film was good but looked a bit television like, but I did not get that feeling at all from the visuals in Star Trek.

Be prepared for many, many viewings of this film now that I have it on DVD and don’t have to pay $10 a pop to see it.


Kirk: Showing them compassion. It may be the only way to earn peace with Romulus. It's logic, Spock, I thought you'd like that.
Spock: No, not really. Not this time.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Bob Wilton is a small time journalist whose wife has just left him. Distraught he goes to Iraq at the start of the Gulf War hoping to get permission to cover the war; however, what he finds is much better – Lyn Cassady, who claims to be a former member of the Army’s psychic spy unit and on a mission to find his former commanding officer Bill Django. Together Lyn & Bob journey across the Iraq desert and encounter civilians, terrorists and independent contractors as Bob slowly draws from Lyn what the unit he belonged to was like.

What drew me to The Men Who Stare at Goats was the quirky concept and the cast. The cast delivers, the concept stops just short of doing so.

This film is helmed by remarkable actors: George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges & Kevin Spacey. These are leading men that will be looked back at one day as the standout, true movie stars of our generation. They are as talented as they are charismatic and having them all on screen together is an amazing thing. None of these actors can do any wrong on their own, so put them all together and you have acting gold.

The downside to The Men Who Stare at Goats was that it’s a genuinely quirky film, which I am normally fine with but I couldn’t help but feel that director Grant Heslov was trying to emulate the style of something like Burn After Reading and he missed. This genuinely felt like a Coen brother’s film that was lacking the spirit and presence of the Coen brothers. As I watched The Men Who Stare at Goats and I wondered what the film would have been like if they were helming it, something I am sure was aided not just by the quirky concept but the fact that the film is starring one of their leading men – George Clooney.

What genuinely kept me laughing the entire film was all of the references to the psychic spies as Jedi warriors. This is funny on a geek level alone, but it’s made absolutely hysterical by the fact that Ewan McGregor played Obi Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels – I am 100% sure this was brought up many times on set.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is an entertaining movie. It’s only issue is that for those of us out there that have a bit of a broader understanding of the genre we know what the film could be instead of what it is. It’s definitely worth watching, it’s just not necessarily a movie you will want to watch over and over again. If you’re really looking for a quirky spy film I would recommend Burn After Reading, you’ll even get George Clooney in that one and Brad Pitt in perhaps his most memorable role ever.

Director: Grant Heslov
Writer: Peter Straughan
Lyn Cassady: George Clooney
Bob Wilton: Ewan McGregor
Bill Django: Jeff Bridges
Larry Hooper: Kevin Spacey
Brigader General Hopgood: Stephen Lang
Todd Nixon: Robert Patrick
Gus Lacey: Stephen Root

Bob Wilton: So what do you use to remote view?
Lyn Cassady: I drink. And I find classic rock helps.
Bob Wilton: Any music in particular?
Lyn Cassady: Boston. Boston usually works.

Fido

In the brain and not the chest.
Originally uploaded by m a n d a

Timmy Robinson is growing up in a world where zombies are a part of society. A company called ZomCom took control after the zombie wars and found a way to control the zombies and any zombie that wears a ZomCom collar has their appetite for human flesh controlled enough that they can become a part of society as grunt labor. Mrs. Robinson longs for a zombie servant and Timmy longs for a friend, so when she defies her husband and buys a zombie she and Timmy slowly begin to bond with Fido while her husband stays in denial about the zombie infected world around him. Timmy soon begins a friendship with the zombie, whom he names Fido and one day Fido accidently kills a neighbor and Timmy realizes he has to cover up the murder before his mother and the head of ZomCom security can find out and take Fido away.

Fido is one of the most quirky films I’ve seen in a very long time. This is a world where zombies are totally real, corporate America has evolved to incorporate them, cities are protected by fences from the “wild” where they roam, and the average citizen saves all of their life for a funeral which will prevent them from being a zombie after they die because you get a head casket so your head is kept separate from your body. Combine all of these items with a 1950’s aesthetic and you have the world of Fido.

Carrie Anne Moss plays Timmy’s mother in this film and outside of The Matrix and Memento I can’t recall anything else I’ve seen her in. However, Moss is perfect as Timmy’s repressed mother. Like Timmy all she wants is for the neighbors to accept them and Mr. Robinson to pay attention to her and Timmy. The man is so oblivious to his family that he doesn’t even realize Helen is pregnant again, and Moss plays the repressed and overlooked side of Helen beautifully, clearly coming off as the mother who wants more for her son than she has.

This is the only film I’ve ever seen by Andrew Currie, but Fido is so unique that I think I will gladly check out his future projects.

Director: Andrew Currie
Writers: Robert Chomiak, Andrew Currie & Dennis Heaton
Helen Robinson: Carrie-Anne Moss
Fido: Billy Connolly
Bill Robinson: Dylan Baker
Timmy Robinson: K’Sun Ray
Mr. Theopolis: Tim Blake Nelson

Bill Robinson: I'd say I'm a pretty darn good father. My father tried to eat me, I don't remember trying to eat Timmy.
Helen Robinson: Bill, just because your father tried to eat you, does that mean we all have to be unhappy... forever?