Movie Review: The Nightmare Before Christmas

Having gotten to watch Corpse Bride first, I have to confess to having fallen for its dark but off-beat storytelling, never mind that Tim Burton knew it was going to sell and that it is really a *copycat* of Nightmare Before Christmas. Perhaps if I’d seen the latter before Corpse Bride as God intended, I would have appreciated Jack Skellington just a little bit more. And so word a caution: this review is going to be horribly inconsistent and biased because yours truly got pampered by the better polished Corpse Bride. I know Nightmare Before Christmas swept moviegoers in 1993 when it was first released, so I will totally understand if you’re somewhere cursing this review for not doing any justice to a movie so well-loved.

The 2-Disc Collector’s Edition I’m watching this on has been “digitally restored and remastered with state-of-the-art technology”, which means blacks are deeper, ghostly whites are brighter, and…you get the drift. Like Corpse Bride, it’s been done using stop-motion, which means having to painstakingly arrange scenes frame by frame. This probably explains the short 77 minute runtime, though if you ask me it felt a bit lengthy. Hey, I know stories where holidays getting kidnapped and hijacked are awesome due to their sheer rarity (honestly, I can’t think of another movie with the same plot), but… its soundtrack was a complete bore.

There, I said it. Spare me the pitchforks. I honestly, truly got bored of the singing. Till now, I can’t recall a single memorable tune, because everything sounded like the next track to me. Still, in the ancient days of 1993, I can see how NBC won the hearts of kids and adults, with its unique story and filming technique. Danny Elfman has had time to grow, and it shows in what he composed for Corpse Bride.

Nevertheless, NBC is a visual treat and makes a great Halloween classic. Crazy, freakish characters galore; creatures from vampires to hags look like kiddie puppet versions of those brought to life by Doug Jones (Pan’s Labyrinth/Hellboy fame). It’s also twisted as hell, the way Burton likes to make ‘em. Contrary to what I used to believe, NBC was made based on Tim Burton’s story and characters, and then directed by Henry Selick… which probably  explains the mystery of the film’s lengthiness.

There’s a reason why Henry Selick didn’t make the famous Burton-Elfman-Depp trio, and Corpse Bride is right there to explain why.

Disappointing, if you consider the hype, but hey, I’ll lap up anything Burton’s had a hand in making (and he knows it).

Movie Review: Butterfly Lovers

Nothing can be more insulting than getting a speck of dust in your eye towards the credits, because then everyone will think you’re weeping along with the movie. And Butterfly Lovers is anything but tragic. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Now I don’t want to sound like I know anything about movie-making, but when it comes to a romance tragedy, one expects to be sad, even depressed, the way everyone felt after Leonardo DiCaprio died in That Movie About A Boat. I really can’t decide if it was intended for the audience to laugh through the supposedly tragic parts in Butterfly Lovers, but it had me in stitches. Not only me, because I can tell you, I know a stifled giggle when I hear one. Certain scenes in the movie were so over the top exaggerated, you begin to wonder if the director intended it that way. And so with this in mind, Butterfly Lovers makes a miserable tragedy but triumphs as a complete comedy. And then there’ll be those sitting in the audience insulted by the general insensitivity of everyone else.

A semi-fairytale, semi-reality, the story of the Butterfly Lovers has the same gist as Romeo and Juliet, magical death potions (pills) included. If you’ve watched or read any Shakespeare at all, you’ve more or less seen Butterfly Lovers. But again, there are some movies that are still worth the time even when you know how it’s going to end. And despite Wu Chun deadpanning most of his lines, and Charlene Choi voicing hers through some kilohertz filter, I’d say Butterfly Lovers still is a pretty decent period film to watch. It’s cheesy and predictable, somewhat draggy, has embarrassing fight choreography, but its saving grace ironically is its bittersweet direction. ‘Bittersweet’ by way of “oh sh*t” and “LOL” moments. And of course, who will take a review seriously when you have a cast like Wu Chun and Charlene Choi?

My thoughts exactly. 

But the best part about Butterfly Lovers is how it manages to be both silly but level-headed at the same time. You and I know Charlene Choi screams “FEMALE!!$#@”, men’s clothing or not. I’ll admit – it was very, extremely tempting to have been prejudiced against this film, because countless others have starred overly-feminine actresses as men and countless of times we’ve wanted to scream, “She’s a girl, come ON. It’s obvious!” Butterfly Lovers does not demand you to suspend the belief that people are blinder than they are; Wu Chun’s character Shanbo doesn’t take long to suspect that Zhu is indeed, a female. There’s no eye-rolling to be had, and that makes Butterfly Lovers - surprise, surprise – a more endearing, funner (to hell with vocabulary) film to watch.

The movie gets most of it right, and if it ever was a fluke, it was a good fluke.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: Herbie Fully Loaded

What is with Hollywood’s recent fetish with animatronic vehicles? We’ve had Cars, and then Transformers, and now Herbie. No, the order of release isn’t important. It’s the fact that they’ve all been released at around the same time that matters, because hands up if you think the industry needs another trend to cash in on. Also, why cast Lindsay Lohan in a family movie, when there isn’t a day you don’t see reports of her crashing a car, or checking in and out of rebab? Why, was Hilary Duff too busy dressing up dolls to take up the role? I’m sorry, but Lohan + squeaky clean image will not stay put in my mind without me feeling something fishy’s going on. 

Herbie is a cute little bug, perhaps too cute for anyone above the age of fifteen, and unless you grew up on the classic, Fully Loaded will pass as an overly cutsy movie too unbelievably smooth-sailing to gain any real insight from. No real hardship, no real characterisation, no real danger is Herbie. This magical car wants you to believe that it is capable of emotions by winking and performing feats you will find a hard time trying not to laugh at. He gets beaten and crushed and wrecked so very often in the movie, but why worry when you have a character like Justin Long, who’s always there to fix the bug with spare parts from the VW factory? Do the spare parts pose a danger to Herbie’s personality, once he is fitted like a jigsaw from leftovers in the garage? What really makes him tick? I’m not asking for an indept analysis as to how a ton of metal gained the ability to express itself, but Herbie is too much too puppetted to be a character I give a damn about. 

Drowning in all-too-familiar stereotypes are the overprotective father, the humourous sidekick (who’s really nursing a crush on the lead character), and the overly obnoxious competition, NASCAR hotshot Tip Murphy, whose ego the size of America refuses to accept he got beat in a street race by something as shoddy as a VW Bug. I’d like to know how, too. It’s not like Herbie was fitted with the best engines, or whatever mechanical prop a vehicle needs to win races – yes, Herbie used to be a race car, but I find it hard to believe that having Justin Long tinkering around with the bug’s innards (or Lindsay Lohan behind the wheel) had a part to play in winning the race. I simply can’t suspend my belief in logic for that long. What I can believe, though, is that there’ll be those who’d find this enjoyable. It probably is, once you shut your mind off all logic and intelligence. Which seems to be the case for most family flicks, anyway.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: The Mist

Sucky visibility is a sucky thing. Sucky visibility with gigantic creatures grabbing your ass while you’re trying to look past the few inches of fog in front of your face is quite possibly the most nightmarish way to exit life. And leave it to Stephen King to write it. Unlike other slasher films where the increasing body count is directly proportionate to the film’s shrinking intellect, The Mist keeps it real, or as real as a horror-fantasy can get. Set almost entirely in a town’s minimart, a group of people find themselves battling the weird, the dangerous and themselves in order to survive. I haven’t watched a single episode of the TV series “Lost” but the trailers look like they could work for The Mist. 

The movie muscles along at a good pace like in a digestive tract – with good squirts of terror, dread and tension at appropriate junctions. A lot of people get killed in pretty gruesome ways, so don’t love any of them too much. King also leaves his trademark stand on extremists in religion with his character Mrs. Carmody, played to fierce conviction by Marcia Gay Harden. Going off a little cliche with its ‘physical monsters vs. monsters within ourselves’ threat, King paints a fairly good picture of what could have seemed as the end of the world to those trapped within the minimart. Here’re two reasons why the mist is as scary as it looks: 1. you can’t see beyond it, which gives everyone a very real sense of claustrophobia and hopelessness, and 2. there’s no telling what’s hiding inside the mist. When people are grabbed by unseen tentacles, spincers and whatnot, that’s when the shit really hits the roof. King knows that it isn’t only the killing that’s scary; it’s not knowing what the cause of it all that is. 

You’d want to watch out for the very controversial ending, too. Giving the screenplay an input of his own, director and writer Frank Darabont’s tampering with the conclusion will seem like a wild stab to shock everyone out of their seats, albeit without much resistance from King himself. Like it or hate it, The Mist sure has some balls.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: My Best Friend’s Girl

My Best Friend’s Girl falls under the same misguided category most romantic comedies fail to avoid: it has a problem defining its characters. There is, after all, a wide chasm between someone charming, and someone acting like an absolute bastard. My Best Friend’s Girl has Dane Cook trying too much too hard to exude charm, when everyone else is convinced he is really one of the biggest on-screen jerks around. Other than Patrick Dempsey in Made Of Honour, that is.

Cook is Tank, a match-maker of sorts, whose unorthodox approach at fixing people up lands him in a difficult situation after his best friend Dustin (Jason Biggs) ‘hires’ him for a job. What he does when he’s hired goes along the lines of “I’ll seduce your ex and then be a complete asshat so she’ll notice what a gem her previous boyfriend (you) was”. The problem? He falls for his best-friend’s job, of course. I’m sure nobody predicted that, right?

Hopefully the first and last script written by Jordan Cahan, what he’s produced is anything but funny. In fact, it’s probably one of the most insulting rom-coms ever written. There are rom-coms that were a bore, then there are those that were offensive but funny nevertheless; My Best Friend’s Girlsimply crossed a line and became disrespectful as hell. There is nothing funny about a movie suggesting a lifestyle not much different from dogs being permanently in heat. Scratch that, there was a chance that a movie like that could’ve been funny (say, something like Superbad), MBFG blew that chance big time.

Playing out like a handicapped, less charismatic version of Hitch, I say Dane Cook/Tank deserves every bit of misfortune handed to him.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: The Chaser

Honestly, I’ve never had much exposure to the Korean film industry, and as such I have a narrow view of what they call entertainment. I’ve stonned through a number of gameshows off YouTube, cringed at plenty of Korean dramas, so imagine the expression on my face when The Chaser hardly turned out cheesy or uninspired. I’d go as far as say it was actually good, though entering the screening hall with low expectations might have something to do with that. Running a little over two hours long, I found myself wincing, smirking, rolling my eyes and shaking my head, but all done as the directors must have intended. 

The last Korean crime thriller I remember watching was Voice Of A Murderer, and at roughly two hours it became a pain in the butt. The Chaserhandles gore, suspense and terror with delicate grace, and certain scenes and dialogue have a rare humour about them, easing you into short smirks despite the very serious crisis unfolding in the background. Actor Yun-seok Kim does it especially well as the bewildered ex-detective, now-pimp whose girls seem to be slowly going MIA. He becomes suspicious of a client whom he knows only by the latter’s cell-phone number, and thinks the guy is secretly selling his girls, and so begins a wild chase to track him down. Told from a third-person’s perspective, the audience would already know that the client is really an unconvicted serial-killer, whose weapons of butchering consist of Saw-like tools such as hammers and chisels. The point is, here is a film where you know who’s behind the murders, and yet still feel motivated enough to stick around until the credits. A match between an ex-detective who hasn’t quite lost his touch and has a personal score to settle, and a murderous and sadistic lunatic, The Chaser in a way glorifies underground methods at justice over by-the-book laws. 

Top-notch unbelievable acting, delivery, execution, editing and storytelling, there is a negative chance of getting bored watching this. In fact, I’m trying my very best not to rant and put spoilers in every line. S. Korea needs to stop producing romance dramas and deal out more of this. Without sounding like a promo copy, I beg you, please watch it.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: High School Musical 2

To tell you the truth, I’ve kinda lost track of the number of “extended dance editions” for the High School Musical franchise. So here we have it again: the High School Musical 2: Extended DANCE Edition. Zac “I have no career without HSM” Efron returns with his Wildcats team to extort money from fourteen year old fan-girls, though they mask it pretty decently with a couple of new songs other than the one that goes, “What time is it? Summertime!”. 

Anyway, it’s uh…summertime, and the team are off to look for summer jobs, but now Sharpay has the hots for Troy or something, and plots to steal him from Gabriella. (At this point, I doubt anyone cares.) The songs begin and everyone lip-synchs to lyrics like “are you ready for something new?”, except there’s nothing new at all about HSM, so this whole affair is kind of ironic and embarrassing to watch.

Onward with the plot, or horrifically lack thereof – Sharpay then spends the entire remainder of the film using her demon powers to seduce Troy. You have to hand it to the writer for keeping this PG, because when Sharpay seduces, it isn’t physical – she tempts him with a summer job at her private resort, and a promise to pull strings for his college application, so even when Disney’s being totally evil, they do it in the name of education. What Sharpay doesn’t expect is an invasion of the entire Wildcats team when Troy decides to accept her offer on the condition that everyone else is also hired – including rival Gabriella. I guess rival isn’t the best word to use since Troy and Gabriella (or Efron and Hudgens, if you will) are glued to each other both on and off set, but apparently the adhesive isn’t as strong as it looks because Troy does indeed get seduced by Sharpay’s educational offers, which creates a rift between him and Gabriella, and a whole lot of tension with everyone else on the team. But…it’s a happy ending. It always is with PG Disney movies.

Now, I have a thing for movies set in schools, or classrooms. The first HSM was only bearable because of its setting, and maybe a few catchy songs, but the novelty of all that isn’t in this sequel (and probably won’t be in the next as well). One cheesy movie was bearable, but a whole freaking trilogy of them? When Efron isn’t obviously lip-synching to a song with constipated expressions on his face, Hudgens is. Thankfully both their solos were sparse, or I would have cried for it to stop. Don’t waste your time.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: [Rec]

If the title isn’t big enough of a hint, [Rec], as in ‘record’, is a film cut and pasted together from footages of a handheld camera. So yes, it is both stylish and nauseating to watch. Paul Greengrass can pull it off in the Bourne movies, but taking a portable camera to film a horror thriller? It has to be either a very genius move or a moronic one. For one thing, the footages are most likely going to turn out shaky. For another, when whoever’s holding it is fleeing from danger, you kind of don’t get to see much since he’s swinging the thing around. And nobody likes to pay for an overpriced ticket just to look at the ground.

But the ingenuity of filming (and telling a coherent enough story) though a handheld camera deserves some credit for effort. [Rec] pulls it off more than decently, considering the style has a part to do with the plot, which begins when a TV reporter and her cameraman go to cover what goes on in a fire station for their program, “While You Are Sleeping”. The weirdness begins when the station receives a call about an old lady trapped in her apartment room, and TV reporter Angela, with her cameraman, follows the firemen to location. Like in The Blair Witch Project, the film’s cinematographer becomes an actor, feeding the audience with footage captured from his point of view.

The story then kicks into hyper-drive, with Science and the supernatural as its main ingredients. What initially looks like a virus infection begins to take on a demonic spin – a disturbing, highly contagious, rabies-like infection that turns its host unnaturally aggressive is the film’s grounded excuse for graphic and violent gore. Movies like 28 Days Later and Cloverfield also come to mind. There’s a whole truckload of ambuigity and mystery to the whole business of the infection, and [Rec] is a film that begs to be discussed and argued about after leaving the cinema hall. 

[Rec] is chillingly, disturbingly and eerily haunting, and witnessing it all from the viewfinder of someone’s camera greatly amplifies the sense of terror and hopelessness of its characters as they grapple to survive (there’s even a scene in night-vision mode). It is brilliantly shot (as far as shaky footage go) with an atmosphere to kill; [Rec] joins the ranks of horror thrillers that don’t scare you just for the sake of scaring you – things do happen for a reason, which is more than I can say for horror movies nowadays.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: Tropic Thunder

Tropic Thunder is an orchestrated mess. It is the big-budget king of stonner films, kind of like the way the Harold and Kumar movies were your boy-next-door stonner films. And although Ben Stiller isn’t the face you’d imagine directing/writing/starring in something labelled as a “stonner film”, Jack Black certainly fits the bill, no problem. And what better way to proclaim insanity than embracing a wacky role somewhat a parody of himself, eh, Tom Cruise? Hell, even Robert Downey Jr. wants a part of it, never mind the high praise of his performance as Tony Stark. He’s ready to move on from Iron Man, and that’s good news for us. It doesn’t end there – Matthew McConaughey’s in, too. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Tropic Thunderhas a cast so bizarre it is worth paying for just to see everyone in the same movie.

Where the writer-directors of Disaster Movie (and their previous parodies, if you can call them that) have failed to parody current pop culture trends using random lookalikes, Stiller has what looks like the full support of several major celebrities to play themselves and caricatures of themselves. When the cast of Tropic Thunder (the film they’re shooting within this film) are accidentally dropped off in the territory of an illegal heroin production to help them “get into character”, they are left to defend themselves against the Flaming Dragon Gang with props for weapons, together with the misguided belief that it is anything but real. This makes a potential horror movie plot, but Stiller insists on going with the funny. Tropic Thunderthen plays out like a “spot the celebrity” game show, with difficulty levels depending on the make-up crew, whose disguises aren’t limited to wigs and fake mustaches. I must have subconsciously spent the 107 minutes trying to get my mind around Downey Jr.’s skin tone.

Speaking of 107 minutes, Tropic Thunder also makes the few cheeky flicks that seem to start before the actual running time (The Simpsons Movie, if you recall, had Ralph singing along to the Fox Fanfare). You probably will not get certain jokes later on if you’ve missed the few trailers spliced right before the uh…official start of the film, so take heed and don’t be late. These trailers are cleverly played back to back right after the real trailers, which means you don’t really know when exactly the fake trailers begin, until they get so absurd you start to wonder if it’s some overdue April Fool’s joke. There’s one with Tobey Maguire that’s worth the ticket price alone, so I’m saying this again: DON’T BE LATE, and pay attention to the trailers.

But on to the less desirable: Tropic Thunder is gruesome. Was it uncomfortable to hear a guy right behind guffawing at what looked like could hurt, though shot to look silly? Yes. In a film this chaotic, what’s serious becomes funny, and beneath all the cheek, you start to wonder if we’re so far gone to laugh at a beheaded man like it was all a video game. English subtitles would have helped too – in their state of excitement everyone seems to be rattling on much too fast. I’m looking forward to getting more control over the film when it comes out on DVD. Until then, Tropic Thunder feels like a peek into one of Hollywood’s inside jokes.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: Mirrors

Yay, yet another remake of an Asian horror film! It’s like Hollywood doesn’t understand that to be truly scary, you need a kind of belief in the supernatural and a history of traditional customs to fall back on (like Hungry Ghost Festivals), not just successive quick edits and shrieking noises. Yes, I’m thoroughly convinced that no Hollywood horror flick can knock the crown off Thailand’s hair-raisers. 

Mirrors is the remake of the 2003 South Korean horror film Into The Mirror, and though everything from the film’s IMDB description to the poster art to the colour palatte suggests that the movie has, in fact, something to do with the supernatural, Mirrors is more suspense-thriller than omgah-scary. I haven’t had the opportunity to watch the original version, but lo behold, there actually is a plot in this one! I believe credit goes to the original writers of the film instead of the people who shamelessly ripped it off, but at least this remake didn’t turn out quite as embarrassing as the Shutterremake that came out not too long ago. Also, I can’t bring myself to hate Kiefer Sutherland for his faceless threats in Phone Booth. 

Sutherland plays Ben, the victim of some supernatural ass-whipping, after he takes up the job of night watchman in the ruins of an old department store that caught fire and killed a bunch of people some years ago. Naturally this makes the perfect setting for creepy mannequins and more mirrors than you can find in Paris Hilton’s handbag, with the fire a good excuse for the lack of electricity. An ordinary person would have left the job in less than five seconds, but the character Sutherland plays isn’t any ordinary person. He is the father of two in an estranged marriage, desperate and determined to prove he isn’t a failure. So he stays for a night in the ruin, only to hear noises everyone predicted, and gradually turning into someone with schizophrenia. He becomes convinced that there is something within the department store’s many mirrors, and spends the second quarter of the film trying to convince everyone else he isn’t crazy. 

Here comes the truly annoying part. It’s the part where the irritable wife becomes convinced that her husband has finally stepped off the bridge of sanity, and starts yelling stuff like, “WHAT ABOUT ME? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!”, after which she goes, “I should have believed you” when she finally is convinced something’s not right, and you kind of want something to happen to her just to stop the whining. 

Meanwhile, whatever’s inside those mirrors have somehow gained the power to possess all reflective surfaces, and they begin to haunt Ben and his family, in their own house. It is not in the least horrifying, though you kind of want to stick around to see what’s the deal behind the department store fire and why they’re so crazy about Ben. A creepy murder/tragedy mystery than a true ghost story, it’s highly unlikely anyone will refrain from looking at their own reflections anytime soon.

(First published at InCinemas)