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Starring: Billy Mitchell, Steve Wiebe, Walter Day, Steve Sanders
Director: Seth Gordon
Rating: PG-13
Category: Documentary Leave it to an unassuming documentary about classic arcade games to become the most entertaining, suspenseful movie of the summer. “King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters” is both hilarious and depressing in that it has a fantastic underdog story that gives way to political intrigue of Macbeth proportions. I had heard the hype, but even I was surprised at the goods this movie delivers.
The movie begins in 2005 in the garage of Steve Wiebe, a recently unemployed father of two from Redmond, Washington who channels all of his frustrations into…his Donkey Kong machine. Steve, a naturally gifted individual to begin with, turns out to be quite good at Donkey Kong, and in fact, he videotapes himself breaking the world record, set by legendary gamer Billy Mitchell back in 1982 at the tender age of 17. Mitchell, who comes off as a man lacking both humility and a sense of irony, is none too pleased by this development. Nor, it appears, is Twin Galaxies, the official record-keepers for arcade games. In fact, they disqualify Steve’s new record on a technicality, and Steve, determined to prove himself, flies to an annual arcade tournament in New Hampshire to clear his name, and even challenges Billy to a game in a bit of friendly rivalry. Billy declines to attend, and Steve ends up setting a new record on a machine recognized by Twin Galaxies’ main referee Walter Day. Billy, however, always has a backup plan, and he is not about to let this newcomer steal his glory.
That last word tells you everything you need to know about Billy, Steve, and everyone else who participates in the classic arcade tournaments. They take these world records very, very seriously, even if the people around them don’t (Steve’s daughter actually has the movie’s best line in regard to the lengths her father goes to break the record). To these men – there is only one female gamer featured here, and she’s an 80-year-old Qbert fan, of all things – there is great glory in holding the world record high score on these games, and while Billy pretends that his true interests lay elsewhere, like the restaurant chain he bought from his parents, he will stop at nothing to maintain his status as the world’s best Donkey Kong player.
It’s a common dilemma for documentary filmmakers to lose their objectivity during filming and ultimately slant the story in favor of one of their subjects, and while it appears that director Seth Gordon is guilty of portraying Steve as the victim, you cannot deny that Billy, Walter and everyone else in this movie gave Gordon plenty of reasons to tell the story the way he has. Billy, for one, is the physical embodiment of hyperbole, answering the phone on one occasion as “World Record Headquarters” and even going so far as to suggest that his commenting on a controversial issue regarding the gamer world records is like talking about abortion. The rest of the gamers, as well as the supposedly impartial Twin Galaxies, fall at Billy’s feet, as if any of them has anything tangible to lose (other than Billy’s “wrath,” whatever the hell that is) if Steve breaks Billy’s record. They even seemed to be offended when Steve dared to eat at Billy’s restaurant.
Two years after principal photography for “The King of Kong” was completed, the battle still rages. In 2006, Steve officially beat Billy’s world record once again (again, you ask? You’ll have to see the movie to find out the whole story), and just last month, Billy seemed to take it back, though his new record has yet to be acknowledged since he recorded the game using a direct feed, which is not allowed under current gaming guidelines. Are these men determined or obsessed? Champions or laughingstocks? To Gordon’s credit, he made sure that that is for the viewer to decide, and this viewer found them utterly fascinating. And sad. But mostly fascinating.
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Garrett Hedlun, Kelly Preston, John Goodman, Aisha Tyler
Director: James Wan
Rating: R
Category: Suspense / Drama
Embrace the badness. It’s a lesson that a lot of movies would benefit greatly from learning. Look at “Ghost Rider,” for example. That’s a bad, bad movie, right there, but hot damn, is it bad in a really fun way. James Wan, director of “Saw” and this year’s underwhelming “Dead Silence,” must have known that he was setting himself up for trouble when he signed on to make “Death Sentence,” author Brian Garfield’s first sequel to his 1972 novel “Death Wish.” And yet, Wan approaches the subject matter with a wide-eyed innocence that only occasionally taps into its potential for awesome badness. If you’re going to get in bed with a movie like this, you should be prepared to go all the way.
Kevin Bacon is Nick Hume, a risk assessment specialist whose life is torn apart when his oldest son Brendon (Stuart Lafferty) is killed before his very eyes in a gas station holdup by a group of masked thugs. Nick jumps the killer and is able to ID him in a police line, but once he learns that the killer will serve a relatively short sentence, Nick recants his testimony, making the killer a free man and, more conveniently, an open target. Nick exacts his revenge by killing his son’s killer, unaware that he has just started a gang war with noted dirtbag Billy Darley (Garrett Hedlund), who now feels just as wronged as Nick did, setting the wheels of vigilante justice into tragic motion.
I’m willing to wager that Wan was attracted to the source material because it was as far removed from “Saw” as any directorial gig that he has likely been offered to date, and yet as each death scene came and went, I could not shake the thought that the movie would have been better served by a series of deadly traps, each one grislier than the last. They actually seemed to be heading in that direction at one point – in what turned out to be the most entertaining death scene the movie has to offer – but from then on, the goings get serious, man, and even though you want to get excited when Bacon gives the camera the ‘I’m Gonna Git You Sucka’ look, it’s too late for the movie to live up to either Wan’s reputation as a gorehound director or the awesomely bad potential of the source material. I will, however, give points to Bacon for giving the movie his all. Six degrees jokes and all, Bacon knows what a movie needs, even when the director himself doesn’t.
There is a case study to be made with “Death Sentence,” in that someone should wait outside of a theater showing the movie and ask the viewers, “So what is the moral of the story?” My critic friends and I asked ourselves that question as we were walking out, and we could not come up with one. Is vigilante justice wrong, or is vigilante justice only wrong when there is retribution for your act of retribution? The movie itself doesn’t appear to have an answer for this; it just wants to make sure a bunch of people get dead, but even on that front it fails, since the director, like it or not, has a reputation for dispatching with people in far more interesting ways than the poor bastards here. If you’re lucky enough to have a Brew & View near you, that would be the perfect environment in which to see “Death Sentence.” Since the movie itself didn’t embrace its inherent badness, it is now your problem to do so. A few drinks will definitely help in that endeavor.
Starring: Daeg Faerch, Tyler Mane, Scout Taylor-Compton, Malcolm McDowell, Sheri Moon Zombie, William Forsythe, Danny Trejo, Brad Dourif
Director: Rob Zombie
Rating: R
Category: Horror
ALSO: Be sure to check out our interview with director Rob Zombie.
When it was announced that musician-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie would be helming the next “Halloween,” the horror community was abuzz with speculation as to where exactly it would fall within the timeline of the first eight films. Would it be yet another uninspired sequel, or was Zombie eyeing a complete reboot of the franchise á la “Batman Begins” and “Casino Royale”? Of course, we now know that the latest “Halloween” is a remake of the classic John Carpenter film, but the question on everyone’s mind is: is it any good?
Let me begin by saying that while I’m not a particularly big fan of the original, I respect what the film means to the genre. It single-handedly launched a cinematic movement that transformed horror movies into box office blockbusters (almost overnight) and led to the production of other popular series like “Friday the 13th” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” Simply put, the film deserves all the credit it’s received over the years, and though it doesn’t necessarily hold up to today’s standards of what makes a great horror movie, the idea of someone like Zombie meddling with it is enough to send even the most neutral observer into a crazed frenzy. And for good reason, too. Not only is Zombie’s version just as uninspired as every other “Halloween” sequel of the past 20 years, but it’s an absolute abomination of the original story, so much so that I wouldn’t at all be surprised to discover that Zombie used copies of Carpenter’s script to wipe his ass on a daily basis.
Unlike the original film – which opened with a first-person shot of little Michael Myers’ murder of his older sister on Halloween night – the new edition spends more time building to the inevitable. It’s still Halloween and Michael (Daeg Faerch) is still a closet lunatic, but this time around he’s the son of a stripper (Sheri Moon Zombie) living in a rundown house with his two sisters (including Hanna Hall) and his mother’s new white trash husband (William Forsythe). When he’s not being verbally abused by his family, Michael is bullied at school, kills small animals for fun, and parades around town wearing a 99-cent clown mask.
After returning from a lonely night of trick-r-treating, Michael does the unthinkable: he bounds his stepdad with duct tape and slits his throat, stabs his older sister with a kitchen knife 17 times, and bashes in the head of her hippie boyfriend with an aluminum baseball bat. Arrested for murder and taken to an asylum run by the incomparable Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), Michael splits his time between psychiatric evaluation and solitary confinement until one day – 15 years later – he escapes. Completely transformed from a four-foot nothing squirt into a six-foot-eight behemoth, Michael heads back to his hometown to track down his baby sister, Laurie (Scout-Taylor Compton), and finish what he started.
The fact that Zombie doesn’t even remotely try to emulate Carpenter’s film is a bit disturbing in its own right, but when coupled with the idea that he could do it better, well, that’s just plain ridiculous. And yet, with the exception of maybe two shots, Zombie’s version is entirely different from the original. This might be considered a godsend to fans of the film after what Gus Van Sant did with his shot-for-shot remake of “Psycho,” but when you consider the damage he’s inflicting to the legacy of the Myers’ character, it’s still well worth getting upset about. Zombie has either never seen the most recent Hannibal Lecter flick or he thought it was absolutely brilliant, because he includes the same sort of backstory that turned Lecter into a tragic hero. Granted, Michael Myers isn’t quite as complex of a character as the flesh-eating doctor, but does Zombie really think he’s going to earn sympathy for his murderous protagonist by playing Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” while Michael sits alone on Halloween night? The kid’s a killer, straight and simple, and no amount of character development is going to convince the audience otherwise.
Unfortunately, Zombie can’t help but exude his fascination for the horror icon, and that seems to be the biggest problem surrounding “Halloween.” While Laurie (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) was the true protagonist of the original film, it takes nearly an hour before we’re finally introduced Taylor-Scout Compton. By then, the audience doesn’t want to invest the time in bonding with another main character, and as a result, she’s relegated to playing the role of the lead victim. Sure, that means she doesn’t have to strip down to her skivvies like all the other female players, but it’s quite a demotion nonetheless.
It’s a shame, really, since the up-and-coming actress is an absolute joy to watch on screen. In fact, the casting of Compton might just be the one thing that Zombie actually did right on the project, but it hardly matters considering he does so many other things wrong. The suspense is considerably dialed down (if not just because there’s no room for it by the time Michael returns as an adult), the violence drastically increased (did you know only four people died in the original?), and McDowell’s role as Loomis (though substantially more involved than when Donald Pleasence first played him) is an insult to the actor’s talents. The same goes for Carpenter, but it’s an insult on a completely different level. Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” might have its merits when viewed as a simple horror film, but as a movie based on a pre-existing property, it’s nothing short of a travesty.
Starring: Will Arnett, Will Forte, Chi McBride, Kristen Wiig, Malin Akerman
Director: Bob Odenkirk
Rating: R
Category: Comedy
The fact that movies like “The Brothers Solomon” are still being made is kind of depressing, but what’s even more depressing is that there are people out there who are not only willing to pay to see them, but actually enjoy them as well. I’ve always said that writer/director Bob Odenkirk needs to seriously rethink his idea of what’s funny, and if this is his attempt at ignoring my suggestion, well, then, mission accomplished. Not only is his latest directing gig actually worse than “Let’s Go to Prison” (which also co-starred Will Arnett), but it confirms my suspicions that – with the exception of Andy Samberg – the current generation of “Saturday Night Live” players is the least talented group of comedians in the history of the show. Written by “SNL” cast member Will Forte in a blatant attempt at capitalizing on the success of the recent string of sex comedies, “The Brothers Solomon” is neither funny nor heartwarming – it’s just plain stupid.
The two Wills star as Dean and John Solomon, a pair of socially inept brothers who aren’t exactly schooled in the art of picking up women. Whether they’re buying a stranger’s groceries as a way of breaking the ice, kissing their dates’ fathers on the lips, or proposing marriage on the first date, even the worst rejections never seem to break their spirit. It’s all thanks to their father (Lee Majors), who raised the boys with a never-say-die attitude, so when the time comes to repay him by granting his final wish – to see his firstborn grandchild – the brothers set off to make a baby.
Based around the idea that watching two complete idiots who smile all the time is hilarious, “The Brothers Solomon” couldn’t be any further off the mark. It’s not that the movie isn’t funny enough, or that some of the humor is too silly – it’s that there isn’t a single comedic moment in the film, period. Okay, so maybe that was a little harsh. The film does have a few gags that warrant a giggle or two, but by the time they finally arrive, you’ve probably already convinced yourself that no matter what happens, you refuse to give in to such moronic behavior by cracking a smile. Even fellow movie critic Kristin Dreyer Kramer showed signs of breaking midway through the brisk 91-minute runtime, but she held strong and kept that frown upside-down.
Usually a deciding factor in whether or not a comedy works, the performances in the film are absolutely horrendous. Arnett, who’s been making a cash grab as of late after the cancellation of “Arrested Development,” still hasn’t proven that he’s as talented as we were all led to believe, while his co-star is simply worthless. How Forte ever managed to get such a juvenile script greenlit is beyond me, especially with Lorne Michaels’ name absent from the producers’ credits, but he simply doesn’t deserve such a high level of trust when there’s nothing of merit to back it up. Furthermore, fellow “SNL” star Kristen Wiig – who proved her comic bite with a small role in this year’s “Knocked Up” – is criminally underused as the surrogate mother, Malin Ackerman is given little more to do than look pretty and be a bitch, and Chi McBride’s supporting role as Wiig’s ex-boyfriend doesn’t even begin to justify the film’s R-rating.
Sure, when things aren’t looking good, a few choice swear words can usually turn it around, but when it’s the difference between selling more tickets and flat out bombing at the box office, shooting for a PG-13 seems the smarter business decision. Then again, maybe not. The rest of the crowd – made up mostly of male college students – was laughing like a bunch of doped-up hyenas, and while it pains me to say this, “The Brothers Solomon” may actually benefit from the higher rating. Just about every major comedy released under an R-rating in the past few years (including “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Wedding Crashers,” “Knocked Up” and “Superbad”) have gone on to become instant hits, and though “The Brothers Solomon” doesn’t even come close to the quality of any of those films, it’ll have no problem convincing the general public otherwise. It’s too bad. That’s money that would be better spent elsewhere.