The DVD releases for the week of December 13, 2011.

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Check out this week’s PopFilter Podcast to see what the gang thought about Rise of the Planet of the Apes!

https://popfilter.co/2011/12/popfilter-ep-21-in-which-the-friends-fuck-fuck-fuck-nsfw/

FRIGHT NIGHT

*** (out of ****)

 

The idea of reboots and remakes infuriates almost everyone on the planet. They all have their different reasons, or so they think, ranging from “You’re going to ruin the memories of my favorite movie!” to “Why can’t Hollywood come up with an original idea?” Neither one of these reasons are why I’m tired of them, though. You can’t, no matter how hard you try to make a terrible version of a movie I love, ruin my impressions of the original, and Hollywood hasn’t come up with an original idea since the The Great Train Robbery, so to be upset now seems a little unfair . I’m tired of them because Hollywood thinks remaking something gives them the opportunity to rest on their laurels. They don’t have to try and make a good movie, because just the fact that people have heard of and seen the original will be enough to get them into theaters, or they don’t have to promote correctly, because it’s a remake, and people will come based on name recognition. The makers of Fright Night did try to make a decent movie, and they succeeded, but they didn’t tell anyone about the movie, or what kind of movie it was, and in the end, it made less money than other 2011 luminary horror films Final Destination 5, Scream 4, Paranormal Activity 3, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Dream House, and The Smurfs. So I’ll tell you this, Hollywood: feel free to “update” 80’s horror movies, especially ones whose balance of self-awareness, scares, and humor was fairly ahead of its time. Just don’t think for one second that anyone in your target demographic is going to care, just because it’s Fright Night.

In the cozy little village known as Las Vegas lives Charlie, played by Anton Yelchin, a high school student, who used to be a nerd, but now hangs out with the cool kids, assuming the cool kids are two dudes who walk around the school telling everyone how cool they are. According to my high school memories, that checks out. No one understands how he landed his hot girlfriend, Amy, not just because he used to be a nerd, but because he’s so terribly boring. His old best friend from his nerdy days, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, tries to get him to investigate a few of the high school students, something that Mintz-Plasse, in all his nerdy wisdom, attributes to a new vampire living in the neighborhood. We learn almost immediately that Jerry, a new neighbor played by Colin Farrell is a vampire, and he is in fact kidnapping people in the neighborhood, sucking their blood, and then imprisoning them in a jail he created behind the walls of his house. Mintz-Plasse gets bit almost immediately, leaving it up to Charlie to save the day.

I’m still not sure why Anton Yelchin is a budding minor-star. I have yet to see him in anything where he has blown me away. He’s almost like the Emile Hirsch of our generation. He’s totally capable here, but it would have been nice to imagine this with someone who could have brought a little more personality to the role. There’s just nothing there with this kid, except for trying to decide the appropriate levels of fear or sarcasm for each scene. In the end though, it doesn’t really matter, because this is Colin Farrell’s movie.

I guess you could say Colin Farrell is slumming it, but that would mean that Colin Farrell should be on some sort of pedestal to come down from, and I don’t know how that can be true, seeing how he has never been in a good or successful movie. (Obviously In Bruges doesn’t count). In Fright Night, he’s slumming it exactly how you’re supposed to: pick a B-movie that’s going to be a little better than it should be, and give a performance that wraps the movie around your finger, to the point that you can’t tell if Farrell perfectly understands the movie and the role, or if the movie changed its tone based on Farrell’s performance. There’s a scene towards the middle of the movie where Farrell comes over to Yelchin’s place to borrow some beer. Yelchin isn’t 100 percent convinced that he’s dealing with a vampire, but he has enough concerns to not invite Farrell into his house, one of the rules of vampire lore that the movie follows. This makes Farrell realize that Yelchin knows, and decides to fuck with him. In the doorway of the house, Farrell has a one-sided conversation about girls, including Yelchin’s girlfriend and mother. The way Farrell dances around neighbor, friend, monster, player, and rapist is incredible, making it seem like the fact that this guy wants to suck your blood one of the least scary things about him.

Also turning in a memorable performance is David Tennant, who apparently used to be on a British show called Inspector Spacetime. Tennant plays Peter Vincent, star of a Vegas stage show called Fright Night, in which he is a fake vampire expert who fights fake vampires. He is basically Criss Angel, by way of Russell Brand, who has a penchant for Midori and ancient vampire artifacts. After some convincing, he joins the ragtag team of Yelchin and his girlfriend, as they attempt to rid the city of Vegas of creepy guys.

From there, we’re on a race to the finish, as Farrell tries to kill the heroes, they stop him, he comes back, they stop him, he comes back. It’s not all done in the most clever of fashions, but the pacing is kept up, and the fun and the scares are always kept in perfect balance, something that is a lot harder to do than it sounds, if every other horror movie that comes out is to be believed.

The movie does have to do all of the obligatory conversations that modern, self-aware horror movies have to do nowadays (“this isn’t a movie, this is real”, “here’s a list of all the ways to kill a vampire”, “you really think that well-known way to kill a vampire actually works?”), but they mercifully get them out of the way before the end of the first act, so the kids that are too cool for school can continue to watch the movie knowing that they don’t have to take any of this too seriously, but the rest of us, who are over these devices, don’t have to sit through it for the entire runtime. Aside from that, the movie does retain an 80’s feel, from the pacing to the music placement to the type of surface level humor. All that’s really missing is the gratuitous amount of titties, but, as I said before, the movie isn’t perfect. In a pretty good twist that isn’t served up on a platter, Yelchin can’t focus on banging his hot girlfriend because he is too concerned with the vampire that lives next door. Little does he know that this is what’s keeping him alive, as the minute he became the character that had sex with his girlfriend, he’d be the next to die. One of Farrell’s first victims, in awesome fashion, might I add, is the stripper that lives across the street. I rest my case.

Fright Night is the perfect example of a movie that needs to be updated — but only because the movie has become totally, and unfairly, irrelevant, and updating gives everyone a chance to get to see it again, if they forgot about it, or for the first time, never concerning themselves with the fact that the guy who got into a car accident with Yelchin halfway through the movie played the vampire in the original. This movie did not have enough titty to be perfect, granted, but there was enough elements here that it should have at least been more popular than all of the other horror movies I mentioned above. I know most of the stuff I complained about here seem more to do with the marketing department than the film itself, but come on…I have to sit at this website every day and endlessly complain about everything. Eventually I was going to get to the marketing department of the studio that released Fright Night.

 

KUNG FU PANDA 2

**1/2 (out of ****)

Kung Fu Panda 2 doesn’t suffer as much from sequelitis as a lot of its animated contemporaries do, in that, it’s not just a rehash of all the things that made the first one great – but it’s close. Luckily for Panda, the first one had so much to offer that a little bit more of the same isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Taking a page out of The Godfather manual for sequels, Panda 2 has two storylines, except here, they’re a little more connected. Starting where the last movie ended, Po is now a full fledged member of the Furious Five, which is basically a superhero team that runs around kicking the shit out of who ever needs it. Everything is going well until they run into a new villain, a stork (or something) who, in the other storyline, learned a prophecy about a black and white animal that would be his undoing, so killed all of the pandas in the world, and we find out the origin of how Po came to be the son of a stork (or something). Jack Black is still good in what will probably be, when all is said and done, the role he will be best remembered for, but there’s just not enough freshness here to make it feel like this was the Kung Fu Panda story that must be told, whatever the fuck that means.

BLU-RAY

THE ROCKETEER: 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

The Rocketer is a weird movie, and I don’t even really mean the movie, but its place in culture. It’s considered a flop, but everyone has seen it. Everyone loves it, but no one has seen it in forever, and I think that, for whatever reason, people’s memories of this movie are much shinier than the actual movie. That’s why I think that releasing this Blu-ray is a bad idea. Think about how awesome, and how Disney, it would have been if, instead of releasing this, Disney ordered all VHS and DVD copies of this movie to be self-destructed (there’s not a single though in my brain that they don’t have that kind of power). It would have taken this movie from Saturday afternoon classic, like Flight of the Navigator, to some sort of James Dean/Kurt Cobain level of fame, like Song of the South, without all of the racism. But instead, people who need even more nostalgia in their lives will buy this, pop it on, and remember that it’s kind of boring, and probably set jetpack research back about 30 years. Thanks, Billy Campbell.

MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS

Meet Me in St. Louis is actually a pretty fantastic movie, but I’ll describe it like this and let you be the judge: A family goes through both trials and tribulations as they spend an entire year waiting for the World’s Fair, all the while singing about every emotion they have. Still want to see it? Didn’t think so. I’ll give you one reason, though. This is where the song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” came from, but the lyrics have been changed since then, rewritten so that when you listen to it you don’t want to kill yourself. The original version is one of the most fucked up songs ever, with lyrics like Have yourself a merry little Christmas/I’m glad your baby’s dead. Not cool, Judy Garland. Not cool.

TVD

FAMILY GUY: VOLUME 9

If you can only like a band until they become popular, what do you do when you don’t like a band, and then not liking that band becomes popular? I guess I like Family Guy now.

SPIN CITY: THE COMPLETE 6TH SEASON

Only time will tell on who history will be kinder to, Charlie Sheen or Michael J. Fox, but what can know for sure now is that the evidence that will support the two sides will come down to Spin City. Taking over for Fox when his incessant breakdancing grew out of control, Sheen steered the ship for a couple more seasons, which led to Two and a Half Men, which led to relative obscurity. Spin City, much like Wings and Jag, is one of those shows that inexplicably lasted for years even though literally no one watched it. Here is one of those years.