Tag Archives: the 90s

Boss Level

Here we go again…

Roy (Frank Grillo) is living the same day over and over. We catch up with him after he’s died about 40 times, only to wake up again to an assassin swinging a machete at his head, and even if he escapes that threat, Roy has discovered he is the target of many, many more killers. Eventually, one of them is going to get Roy, and once they do, he will restart his personal Groundhog Day again and again and again. Who are these killers and why do they want Roy dead? That’s what Roy will have to figure out in order to escape this time loop and save the world, with some help from his scientist ex-wife (Naomi Watts) and with serious opposition from her evil boss (Mel Gibson) and his sidekick (Will Sasso).

Did we need another time loop movie? Definitely not. But Boss Level is not the worst of the bunch. If you can look past some dumb dialogue, such as its insistence that Street Fighter II is an 80s sidescroller (which is so obviously wrong in so many ways), there is a decent action movie here. Again, not a great one, but a serviceable one. It’s no Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, or Palm Springs, as it doesn’t add anything new to the live/die/repeat genre, and doesn’t bother to even try.

Still, it’s a workable popcorn movie and we certainly haven’t had a lot of those lately. If you’re in the market for one of those, this will probably fit the bill, as long as you are willing to put up with a lack of originality, Mel Gibson’s involvement, and the repeated misclassification of a classic 2D fighting game that was released in 1991.

The Craft: Legacy

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If you were a teenager in the 1990s, you probably remember The Craft. It’s a pretty good 90s time capsule, particularly its alt-rock soundtrack that Columbia House was eager to send to you for free*, and also Skeet Ulrich. The Craft did not go out of its way to set up a sequel, which in hindsight is also a characteristic of a bygone era.

These days, everything is open for a sequel, or better yet, a franchise. And Hollywood is retroactively franchising lots of films that seemed like one-offs. Now it’s The Craft’s turn to get sequelized, and possibly franchised(-ized?). That’s a very 2020 approach, especially since due to COVID-19 The Craft: Legacy has gone straight to VOD as a premium rental.

Lourdes (Zoey Luna), Frankie (Gideon Adlon) and Tabby (Lovie Simone) are teen girls who want to be witches. But their attempts are not going well, because as the original film established you always need four witches before things get crazy. Enter Lily (Cailee Spaeny), the new girl in town, who has a really awful first day of school but as a result catches the eye of the witch trio, and once they get together the magic starts to happen.

Speaking of 90s relics, David Duchovny is in this movie as Lily’s mom’s fiance, which is why Lily and her mom (Michelle Monaghan) have moved to this little west coast town, and which I have the feeling is the same town as in the first film. Do those little details matter? They might, in the next instalment!

I expected this movie to be really, really awful, and it’s actually quite fun. A big reason why it’s fun is the way the witches use their powers. They didn’t use their powers to ruin people’s lives or to seek revenge. That bad girl trope is consistent with the longstanding narrative that powerful women are to be feared, but it’s beyond time we got rid of it and let women be superheroes, and that’s exactly what The Craft: Legacy does. After all, there was no doubt that when Peter Parker got magical powers, he was going to use them for good, and this film lets its heroes do the same. The fact that outcome seems unusual or worth mentioning shows the inequality at play, and in that respect as much as anything, The Craft: Legacy shows both how far we have come since the 1996 original, and how far we have to go.

It also happens to be an entertaining film where girls get cool powers and fight bad guys, so it’s win-win.

Space Jam

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It’s fitting that LeBron James is taking the Space Jam reins from Michael Jordan, since last week James passed Jordan in career points scored and the two have always been compared since James was in high school. Jordan would have scored many more points if only he hadn’t taken two years off in his prime to try his hand at baseball. Rumour has always held that Jordan went to play baseball in order to avoid a gambling suspension, mainly because it made no sense at all for the notoriously competitive Jordan to have “retired” at age 30 (Jordan would retire twice more before his basketball career was over).

Jordan’s baseball career features prominently in Space Jam’s loose plot, as if he had been playing basketball at the time, the evil aliens from the Moron Mountain amusement park would have taken Jordan’s skills and he never would have been able to help the Looney Tunes gang. But because Jordan was retired, the aliens had to steal other NBA players’ talent, space-jam-bill-murray including Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Larry Johnson, Muggsy Bogues and Shawn Bradley. Jordan is then recruited by Bugs Bunny to play with a bunch of other cartoon characters, with some help from Bill Murray and no help at all from Wayne Knight, as the cartoons take on the aliens in a basketball game to determine whether the aliens will enslave those loony ‘toons as an amusement park attraction.

This movie was probably never any good but it has been made worse with age. The animation is dated, the green screen work is horrible, and worst of all, the “stars” involved in this movie, other than the great Charles Barkley, have been forgotten by all but the most attentive New York Knicks fans (who would punch me in the face for saying anything bad about Ewing and who will never forget LJ hitting a clutch four-point play against the Pacers in 1999’s Eastern Conference Finals). Space Jam also really highlights how much the Looney Tunes feel like variations of one another (cat/duck and man/pig in particular) and pale imitations of their Disney counterparts.

Even with only a 90 minute run-time, a significant part of the movie feels like filler, including an opening scene with a 1- year old Jordan, about 5 minutes of Jordan highlights during the opening credits, and a subplot of sorts that features some really terrible acting by the three kids playing Jordan’s family (like so bad that you figure they have to be Jordan’s real kids, but they’re totally not – I checked).

lebron-vs-mj If LeBron’s career arc is any indication, the next Space Jam is destined to be technically superior to Jordan’s original but lacking the same emotional core. That doesn’t bode well for the reboot when there was no substance or emotion to the first Space Jam at all. Watching it again only makes one wonder why anyone bothered to make it in the first place, as well as why James would want to invite any more comparisons to Jordan’s six for six NBA Finals record against LeBron’s three wins and six losses in his attempts (which I don’t begrudge but I’m in the minority on that point). On the other hand, since the original Space Jam has nothing to offer, the reboot can’t possibly be worse!

Captain Marvel

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Mar-Vell! Shazam! Mar-Vell! Shazam! There is a long and interesting legal saga surrounding the Captain Marvel name (though if you are not a law geek it’s probably much more long than interesting). Basically, the red and white Captain Marvel (a.k.a. Shazam) came first as a blatant Superman rip-off. DC sued, put the creators out of business, bought Shazam for cheap and quickly forgot they owned him. Meanwhile, Marvel captain-marvel-mar-vell-shazam-differences-header-1108262-1280x0 Comics decided that if any comic publisher should have a Captain Marvel, it should be them, so Marvel threw together a half-baked story about an alien named Mar-Vell to secure a trademark for the Captain Marvel name, won a lawsuit against DC and others, then gave Mar-Vell cancer and made him the only comic character in history to stay dead.

Given that history, I don’t think it is a coincidence that DC’s Shazam will follow within a month of Captain Marvel’s debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If there’s a lesson here, and there may not be, it’s that “legal reasons” give birth to a lot of strange things (and don’t even get me started on the 90s Captain America and Fantastic Four films).

Incidentally, Marvel’s Captain Marvel is not a resurrection of the alien who died from cancer. Marvel revamped the character through a whole other convoluted saga, and she’s primed to be the first female hero to get her own MCU movie.

Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) is a space-faring Kree soldier with memory problems, a self-described noble warrior hero fighting a war against the shape-shifting Skrulls. After captain-marvel-international-poster-top-1200x675 a Skrull ambush, she crash-lands on mid-90s Earth (smashing through the roof of a Blockbuster Video, as probability would dictate) and realizes that she’s been on this planet before. Teaming up with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Marvel chases after the Skrulls who came to Earth along with her (led by Ben Mendelsohn) while also trying to uncover her forgotten past.

In many ways, Captain Marvel is a standard solo origin story, which at this point they can crank out with no effort at all. But this film still feels like a necessary addition to the MCU. Captain Marvel is a worthy star and the galactic stakes are high enough here to make this film stand on its own. A great deal of those positive feelings are due to Larsen, who does a great job of keeping us invested in the character even before we (and she) know who she really is: the cosmic-powered superstar who is going to undo all the bad stuff that Thanos got away with last time (as you probably can guess, I’m still mad that he turned Spidey into dust). And the icing on the cake is the 90s nostalgia reminding us that no matter how bad your internet is during a snowstorm, things used to be much worse.

Aside from Shazam (which is almost certain to be terrible), Captain Marvel is bound to be compared to Wonder Woman, and for the only time ever, DC’s entry is the better one. Captain Marvel does not have the same crossover appeal as Wonder Woman does, but Captain Marvel is a really fun superhero movie on its own merits, as well as a great lead-in for the new Avengers film next month.

Searching

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Searching Pie

1999. It was the summer that I graduated high school, started preparing for CEGEP, and took my first trip across the country without the parental units. If ever there was a summer that felt like I had my whole life ahead of me, that was the one and- even though it was that same summer that I saw The Goddamn Matrix for the first time, the movie that really brings me back to that feeling- the movie that I saw four times- was American Pie.

Looking back on that scene where three teens repeatedly scream “MILF” at a picture of Stiffler’s Mom, I’d call it misogynist. But 19 years ago, that didn’t stop my friends and I from laughing our asses off. And to this day (and I’m sure this would make him so happy) I can’t look at John Cho without thinking of “MILF’ Guy #2. (Wait, who was “MILF” Guy #1 then?).

It’s almost depressing to think about how long ago that was. Times have changed and a lot of those changes are good. Jason Biggs doesn’t have to watch scrambled porn anymore and Cho can find work without having to lick a framed photo of Jennifer Coolidge. And I’m proud that my sense of humour has gotten a little more sophisticated and hopefully a lot less sexist. Still, I don’t know many people who love thinking about how many years have passed since high school while they weren’t looking and in his new movie John Cho is back to remind me of just how old I’ve gotten by playing the father of a 16 year-old girl.

Searching 1

That Cho is now old and mature enough to carry a tense thriller about a father’s desperate search for his missing teenage daughter isn’t even the most obvious way that Searching reminds us of what a strange and different world we’re now living in. First-time director Aneesh Chaganty shot the entire movie from the point of view of a mock computer screen. So as Cho’s David Kim talks to his daughter’s friends and searches for clues on her laptop, the whole story is told through Google searches, text history, Facebook posts, Skype, and YouTube videos.

Searching 2

My first response to Chaganty’s experimental approach during the first few minutes of Searching was “Alright. I’m impressed so far and am on board for now but can easily see how this can get old pretty quickly”. It’s a testament to Chaganty’s storytelling that the novelty never wears off and is rarely distracting. It’s not a perfect film. I’m not sure all of the laughs it got at my Fantasia screening were entirely intentional and as a thriller one or two of the twists may be a little too far-fetched.

Not all of the changes since 1999 are great and Searching is at its best as an exploration of what a double-edged sword the internet can be. It shows how it can make it easier both to reach out and to retreat into our. How easy it is both to reveal and conceal our true selves. And, most importantly, how useful a tool the internet is for concerned parents and stalkers alike.

Despite its flaws, Searching is a much more gripping and emotionally satisfying experience than you’re probably imagining and Cho nails what I can only imagine must have been a challenging role. I highly recommend it.

Alien Invasions of Earth!

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One of the most iconic Hollywood images of the ’90s was, well…

I was 15 at the time and loved every minute of Independence Day. It was, if not the first, the most impressive alien invasion of earth that I’d ever seen. If you’ve seen the movie, you know the aliens lose. There are smarter aliens out there (and smarter writers than Dean Devlin) who know that if you attack us from the sky with lasers, it’s just going to piss us off. Hiding in plain sight and attacking us from within? That’s just crazy enough to work and it’s a theme in all three of my picks this week.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)– Some of the scariest movie aliens I’ve ever seen are plants from space that take control of a human hosts body. The catch is that, once they’ve got a hold of you, you need to fall asleep for the snatching to take effect. When I first saw this when I was in high school, I couldn’t imagine anything more scary or more relatable than having to fight off sleep to stay alive. This has always been one of my favourite sci-fi movies and, rewatching it this week, I couldn’t believe that I had visited one of the filming locations when I was in LA last month without even knowing it!

The Faculty (1998)– The modern-day king of B-movies Robert Rodriguez teams up with Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson in this nearly perfect union between witty and silly. A Breakfast Clubish mix of students from different walks of student life must fight for their lives and their community when they start to realize that their teachers are being controlled by body snatching aliens. Usher is the star quarterback. Jon Stewart is a nerdy science teacher. Salma Hayek is the nurse. This is the perfect movie to treat yourself to after sitting through…

Under the Skin (2014)– The alien doesn’t exactly hide in plain sight here. After all, there’s nothing plain about Scarlett Johansson. She cleverly uses her appeal though to lure men into her clutches though, with graphically aroused men continuing to walk towards her even as they are already starting to sink into her black pool of doom. Under the Skin is creepy as hell (check out Jay’s excellent review of the score) and not much fun. Alien invasion here is more a metaphor for… what exactly? I’m only about halfway there in figuring that out.

Movies: A Personal History

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Ben over at Views From the Sofa recently reviewed the first film in the Mission: Impossible franchise. For those of us in denial, that one came out back in 1996. 1996! This franchise is nearly 20 years old, and that makes me feel ancient. Remember how that recognizable Mission: Impossible music actually played on the radio for a while? That was bizarre. His post reminded me that I’d watched it at the home of one of my friends, who by the second film, in 2000, had become my boyfriend, and by the third film in 2006, was my husband, and by the fourth in 2011 was my ex-husband.

A lot of movies, the good and the bad, are loaded for us with what was going on in our lives at the time. Some movies we remember more fondly, some are guilty by association. Here’s a little look at some of mine, and if you wanted to jump in with some of yours, I’d be tickled pink. Particularly if you had nice memories that could usurp some of my ex-husband ones.

Night at the Roxbury: Matt and I had a laugh recently about this one when our coworker suddenly asked us, seemingly out of the blue, whether we’d heard of this one. Like it was a new movie we might not have seen yet. No indication that it’s a throwback from 1998. She’d come across it on Youtube, because she’d been listening to that head-nodding song from the soundtrack. Now, Matt and I happen to be the exact same age, which means we idolized SNL at the same time, and saw many of the same movies as a result. I remember seeing this one with a big group of my pothead friends at an ancient movie theatre called The Port in my hometown, a one-screener with a red velvet curtain and a balcony that was mostly condemned due to a drooping\flaking ceiling. The ticket taker complimented me on my feather boa (I know, all shots to the head right now would be totally deserved) and remarked that in 42 years of taking tickets, I had to be the first to prance in wearing one. And I probably had been prancing. Anyway, we laughed uproariously, as a bunch of kids who’d recently learned about putting shrooms in McFlurrys will do. Two or three years later, I was respectably employed by our federal government, which was hosting a “ball” to thank its dedicated employees. My friend Caroline and I watched as our respective boyfriends did the head-nodding thing to this song and agreed that this was bliss. We have both since ditched these boyfriends, thank fucking Christ.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRVfysTXhNA

(Also, I believe I owned that exact jacket that Will Ferrell is wearing. I may or may not have worn it with a feather boa.)

Mission to Mars: I cannot say that I saw this is theatres, but I did buy a ticket for it in 2000 and was sitting in a theatre while it played. It is the first and only movie I’ve fallen asleep at. I felt awful. I think I remember some weird stuff happening, but that could have been my fever dreams. I went home and puked up a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich, the first and only time I’ve eaten Wendy’s. It turns out I had Mono. I was very, very sick, and I have held a grudge against this film, and against Wendy’s, ever since.

Shrek the Third: I was on a date and attempting to see this movie when fire broke out in the Scarborough cinema. I believe it was a grease fire at the concession stand Burger King. We were evacuated and made to stand about the parking lot for what felt like eternity before being given vouchers so we could see the movie again, elsewhere. Not only did I not see that movie ever again, I didn’t see the guy again either (he evacuated in an every man for himself kind of way, without so much as a glance over his shoulder to see if I had succumbed to the flames). I did however see Spiderman 3 with another guy that very night in Toronto, and guess what? That one wasn’t any good either. I have never revisited either movie.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: My best friend and I had meant to treat her young daughter to this movie but custody issues arose at the last minute, so Rachel and I saw this one by ourselves, wearing dorky 3D glasses. I think the movie was okay but what I remember most is seeing a preview trailer for Up. We thought it looked amazing and made plans to see it as soon as it hit theatres. Rachel passed away before that could happen, so its release really felt like a lesson in life goes on. Some plans never come to pass. It was difficult to watch and still is, but it’s actually about going on after the death of a loved one, and continuing to embrace life and its many adventures. I have, but I still hold that movie close to my heart, and it serves as a bit of a talisman.

Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion

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You may have heard that one of your favourite Assholes is about to celebrate his 20th high school reunion – I recently lamented the fact that he expected me to accompany him in my Grosse Pointe Blank review\rant.

Romy & Michele is the second high school reunion movie to come out of apparently nostalgia-crazy 1997, and I’m starting to see an alarming trend here. These reunionites are dressed like it’s the second coming of the prom. I’m picturing Sean’s classmates as more the cutoffs kind, maybe denim accessories, vests without shirts.

Also super duper alarming: how EVERYONE goes back to track down their lost loves. Can you really be lusting after your high school crush a decade later?

This movie is so incredibly dumb, but it does prey on my worst fears about high school reunions.

“What’s the point of going if not to impress people?” they ask. Cue a goddamned helicopter. I mean, who, Sean, out of your graduating class, will arrive and\or depart by helicopter?

“All I ever wanted was for people to think we are better than we were in high school” they say. Um, right. Is this whole thing going to be one big circle jerk where they all compliment each other’s middling jobs and average offspring, or are they all just measuring each other’s metaphorical penises to see who wins most successful?

Speaking of which. Romy & Michele manages to get right down to the obvious with an award: Most Changed for the Better Since High School. Everyone is there to compete. Everyone hopes it’s them. But only one can win!

Does this sound super fun or what?

Grosse Pointe Blank

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I dug this old DVD out from our shelves recently because one of the Assholes (coughSeancough) is just old enough to be attending his own high school reunion. It’s impractical to tease him about it 24 hours a day, so I took a 107 minute break to watch this movie.

John Cusack is attending his own high school reunion in this movie – his 10th – and going back to Grosse Point, Michigan means confronting the feisty prom date he stood up a decade ago (Minnie Driver) and his tenacious feelings for her. Oh, and did I mention he’s a hitman? You’d think ‘professional assassin’ would be a card you kept close to your chest, but actually Martin Blank plays it frequently, confessing to anyone who will listen, only no one ever believes him. I mean, would you, Sean, take the kid who repeatedly forgot his geography homework seriously if he told you he killed people for money? Or would it take finding a bloody corpse with a Bic pen sticking out of his neck crumpled by your old locker to think “Gee, this guy might be a psychopath”?

Going back to your old haunt after so many years away is never easy, and to be honest, I believe that high school reunions are for two types of people: 1) the geeks and nerds who have grown up to be either hot or rich or preferably both 2) the popular kids who ruled and peaked in high school and now, having gone down hill, want to relive their glory days. Not my cup of tea.

And for spouses, it’s even more awkward. This is not your school. These people are not and never were your friends. I liken it to being in a grocery store full of strangers, only for some reason you’re required to shake everyone’s hand and stand around making chit-chat with them as if you care. And you don’t care. You don’t want to see pictures of their stupid kids. You’re there for one of two reasons: either 1) you’re a trophy wife to show off or 2) you’re a crutch for when your spouse’s old high school insecurities start to flare. And now you’re obliged to stand around in uncomfortable shoes for hours while people you don’t know reminisce about things you weren’t there for. And it’s pointless to get invested – these people haven’t spoken to each other for 20 years and will go back to ignoring one another until their 40th. No one really cares, they just want to see and be seen. They hope that their social standing will have improved. They hope their successes will compare favourably to their peers’. But they don’t really care. If they really cared, they wouldn’t have lost touch. I mean, hello, it’s the age of Facebook. Aren’t high school reunions kind of obsolete now? What’s stopped you from Facebook-stalking any of these losers? They’re just somebodies that you used to know.

Okay, you can see that I’m hard on this whole high school reunion thing. I don’t get it. Have you been to yours? Would you? Was it terrible? I’m watching movies to prep myself, because that’s what I do. Next up: Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion. That should be educational, right?

Frightfest 2015: Scream

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With its three progressively implausible sequels and the always idiotic Scary movie franchise which it inspired, I find it easy to forget that Ghostface’s journey began with a modest and self-contained horror comedy back in 1996. It was the only movie in the Scream franchise to manage to be genuinely scary while it sumultaneously pays homage to and pokes fun at the conventions of the slasher genre.

Casey (Drew Barrymore) is home alone making some popcorn and getting ready to watch some scary movie when she gets a phone call from a mysterious stranger. The phone call begins as a wrong number but soon becomes a flirtatious discussion of horror movies. Before long, though, the conversation turns to threats (“What do you want?” Casey screams. “To see what your insides look like,” he replies) and Casey may need to rely on her knowledge of horror movies to survive the night.

If you need me to tell you what Scream is about, to tell you any more would spoil the fun. Yes, people die in this movie and when they die they bleed. A lot. But there’s so much fun to be had here. Watch it for the kids of Woodsboro High, who are having way too much fun knowing that there’s a killer on the loose. Or for the bumbling Deputy Dewey (David Arquette) who is always being publicly undermined by his kidsister (Rose McGowan) while he’s on the case.

And, if you find yourself double-checking your locks at night after watching it, just be thankful for all the Rules for Suriviving a Horror Movie That You’ve Just Learnt.