Fright Night (2011)

The horror movie genre is probably the most popular type of film to remake or update.  Why is that?  Well, what looks cool and scary in 1982 doesn't usually hold up after a decade or two, and foreign horror movies oftentimes throw in bizarre supernatural stuff that doesn't make sense to American audiences (Japan, I'm looking at you).  Personally, I don't mind remakes; my favorite movie of all time, The Maltese Falcon, was the third adaptation of the story in a ten-year span.  The important thing is for the remakes to take what works from the original and improve the rest.  I haven't seen Fright Night (1985) in about fifteen years, and I think it was heavily edited with commercials on VH1 or something; I remember the basic plot, but my overwhelming memory is of a fairly cheesy vampire movie with the guy from Planet of the Apes.  If there is a moderately famous 80s horror movie that is ripe for a quality remake, this is it.

Fright Night (2011) tells the story of former high school nerd and current cool kid, Charley (Anton Yelchin).  You can tell that he's a cool kid, because he has a hot girlfriend, Amy (Imogen Poots) and the guys he hangs out with are douchebags.  Charley wasn't always this cool, though; not even two years ago, he was making his own sci-fi/fantasy-inspired armor and goofing around with the school's biggest dork, Ed (the perpetually nerdy Christopher Mintz-Plasse).  When Ed comes to Charley with the news that a suspicious amount of their classmates have vanished, Charley blows him off.  After all, he's a cool kid.  When Ed elaborates, presenting an argument that the disappearances center around Charley's neighbor's house, Charley ignores him.  When Ed outright states that Charley's neighbor, Jerry (Colin Farrell), is a vampire, that's when things start to get interesting.  Because Jerry is a vampire, and he is responsible for all the disappearances.  What do you do when your next-door neighbor is a blood-sucking monster?

A sexy blood-sucking monster who...loves fruit?

Well, I suppose you would want to move out and maybe rent out your place to a stranger.  But what kind of a horror movie would that make?

Aside from the fact that the supposedly teenage actors are all in their twenties, I liked the cast.  Anton Yelchin is fine as the not-as-cool-as-he-pretends-to-be lead character; he's not amazing or anything, but his job is to stand in contrast to the bad guy, which he does pretty well.  It helps that Colin Farrell turned in a pretty awesome vampire performance.  I'm usually confused when vampires are portrayed as seductive and sexy --- and this is most vampire movies, not just the new wave of teen flicks --- but Farrell felt dangerous and sleazy every second he was on camera.  He's just that perfect blend of sex and violence; while not my favorite style of vampire (I prefer the monstrous Nosferatu-types), Farrell might be the best update to the classic Dracula vampire I have seen in a long while.

I love when evil personified just seems mildly annoyed

Imogen Poots was decent as Charley's girlfriend and it was nice to see her as more than just a damsel in distress, but some of her choices are a little odd.  I don't blame Poots' performance, it is just that her character didn't always make sense ("my boyfriend is acting bizarre...perhaps I should offer to take his virginity?").  On the plus side, I have been amusing myself by saying her last name out loud.

Whisper softly in his ear: "Poooooots"

Christopher Mintz-Plasse is as dorky as ever, so don't expect much new from him.  He's a fine nerd, and was a good casting choice, but you basically know what you're getting when he pops up in a movie.  Toni Collette was third-billed in the film and played Charley's mother, but she was a surprising non-entity in the story.  She was only okay (I guess) for the few scenes she had early in the movie, and then her character all but vanishes.  I did like David Tennant as the Criss Angel-ish vampire expert.  He wasn't a bad-ass or anything, but this is a story that is better with incompetent experts.  Oh, and you might recognize the eyebrows of one of the popular kids at school --- that's Dave Franco, little brother to James.  And, not surprisingly, Chris Sarandon makes a cameo as a nod to the original film.  Of course he does; what else is he busy doing now?

Is that the werewolf from Underworld?

I think what I liked best about Fright Night was the fact that it didn't waste my time.  A kid thinks his neighbor is a vampire, the audience realizes he's right, and there is no time wasted on him trying to convince his mother, girlfriend or the police. That is brilliant!  Instead of pussyfooting around for a half-hour, asking "Why won't anyone believe my insane theory?", we are instead treated to Jerry the Vampire immediately opting to attack Charley and his family.  No muss, no fuss.  And I loved the general attitude Jerry has; he doesn't care about having his secret revealed, he's a killing machine that solves his problems with murder.

...and he gets turned on by death.  Makes sense.

That means that this movie has a lot of action, something very few vampire movies can boast.  While I know that a lot of what I like came from the screenplay, I really liked the general attitude of the movie, and for that I credit director Craig Gillespie.  There is some pretty great atmosphere in Fright Night, and he balances it well with humor.  It never gets campy or stupid, even when some bits lean a little too much toward ridiculousness.  This isn't the work of an auteur, but it's competent and pretty smart.

There is one glaring flaw in Fright Night, though: the vampires.  While Colin Farrell is pretty great, the CGI used to make him and his vampire minions vamp out was awful.  The filmmakers toy with the notion of the vamps being literal monsters --- as in, only vaguely humanoid --- but they don't commit to it, and it is never important in the story.  Instead, we are given scenes with Colin Farrell's head bulging and cracking as he develops a Predator-style food hole for reasons I can't fathom.  The vampires are at their best when they are being seductive or surprisingly scary, not when they are doing a bad impression of Resident Evil creatures.  Oh, and the twist with David Tennant's character was pretty lame.  I would have preferred it if the world wasn't that small, after all.

Guns don't kill people.  Vampires do.  And guns...kill vampires...?

The lack of cool special effects, coupled with the presence of awful special effects, prevents Fright Night from being a modern classic, but it is still very entertaining.  If you are tired of romantic vampires or if you want to see how to successfully take the camp out of a story, this is a good place to start.  This is also a good place to get your "cool vampire" fix for the next few months.  Good vampire movies are rare, and even rarer when they include this much action.

Star Trek (2009)

As the eleventh Star Trek movie, the plainly titled Star Trek (2009) had a lot to live up to.  The Star Trek universe is a rich tapestry of science fiction, with more races, worlds and continuity from the television shows and previous films than any other major Hollywood franchise.  Even the James Bond series, which has many more movies, is not even close to the depth of Star Trek.  It's too bad so many Star Trek movies suck.  To reboot the franchise, television producer/creator J.J. Abrams was recruited to direct.  Abrams isn't a trekkie, so he was up for anything, as long as it looked cool and had Kirk and Spock in it.  If I was a trekkie, I would have gotten a little nervous after hearing that.

If you're not familiar with the Star Trek series, don't worry.  There's plenty to learn, but very few important people actually care if you know it.  So, here are the basics.  In the future, humans have gone into space and met other intelligent species.  These friendly planets have formed a union, called the Federation.  The Federation's version of the Army is the Starfleet Academy; Starfleet protects Federation planets and explores the universe peacefully, seeking knowledge.  Aside from Humans, the most important Federation species are the Vulcans, a race of pointy-eared (but otherwise human-looking), emotionless, logical killjoys.  The opposite of the Vulcans are the Romulans (not part of the Federation), who look pretty much like Vulcans, but are mean, devious, and emotional.  Technically, you don't even need to know that much, but it helps a little when some good guys and bad guys both have pointy ears.

Fans in Romulan costumes: Can you smell the sex in the air?

The movie begins not with a familiar cast of characters, but a blast from the past.  While investigating some sort of electrical space storm, a Federation ship, the Kelvin (what, was Celcius taken?), is attacked by a Romulan ship, the Narada.  After his first mate (Clifton Collins Jr.) convinces the Starfleet commander (Faran Tahir) to visit the Romulan ship, the Romulan captain, Nero (Eric Bana) kills the Starfleet man.  Or, in other words, mean alien kills gullible human.  Back on the Kelvin, George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth) realizes how serious the situation is, and orders an evacuation of the ship, which includes his pregnant wife (Jennifer Morrison).  George knows that the Narada will pick off the evacuation shuttles without something to distract it, so he opts for a suicide mission and steers his ship into the Narada.  The rest of the crew survives, including little James Tiberius Kirk, who was born amidst all the trouble.  The Narada was never seen again.

Fast forward a couple decades, and James Kirk (Chris Pine) is now a headstrong cadet of the Starfleet Academy.  When he's not busy getting it on with green-skinned women, Kirk seems to fill his time by flirting/frustrating language specialist Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and doing his absolute best to royally irritate Starfleet's resident Vulcan, Spock (Zachary Quinto).  When a mysterious electrical space storm appears nearby the planet Vulcan, several Starfleet ships investigate; recognizing the electrical storm as being eerily similar to the one from his birthday, cadet Kirk convinces his ship's captain, Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), to hold back a bit.  Smart boy.  The Narada appears and destroys all the ships it encounters, and appears intent on turning the planet Vulcan into a black hole.  What is the deal with the mysterious Narada?  Why is it attacking the Federation in such a strange manner?  How long until it changes its focus to a planet that actually matters, like Earth?  Did I say "turn the planet...into a black hole?"  How do you do that?  The answer to all those questions is "You'll see."

I wasn't sure how much I would enjoy Star Trek.  I've seen a couple of movies, mostly when I was younger, but the series has never captured my attention for long, aside from the excellent Wrath of Khan.  I'm not a big fan of J.J. Abrams' previous film work and was never a Lost fan, so the idea of rebooting the series with young, sexy actors seemed kind of like a creative last gasp to me.  In my defense, I'm not wrong.  The path the filmmakers took to do this, though, was interesting, entertaining, and surprisingly fun.

This Star Trek, unlike its predecessors, assumes you know only the basics about Star Trek, like the fact that it takes place in space.  Actually, this is a science fiction movie that assumes that you hate science fiction, and goes around that problem.  Gone are any highbrow parallels to modern society's excesses, or commentary on political ideas (for better or worse).  This isn't a movie where the plot is all that important; this is an action movie set in space, with all the explosions and punching that implies.  There's a few things for the core sci-fi fanatics out there, but this movie was made to entertain, pure and simple.

The key to this was the cast.  Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto were awesome as Kirk and Spock, respectively.  Since this movie is more or less centered around the two of them learning to work together, that is very important.  Pine comes across as brash, headstrong, and intelligent, someone just as likely to beat you in school as he is to get in a fight with you at a bar.  Quinto was surprisingly effective as the typically emotionless Spock, and his performance stands up against that of the original Spock, Leonard Nimoy (who has a small part in the film).  It's hard to play what is, essentially, a straight man to the rollicking man slut that is James Kirk and make it seem cool, but Quinto did it.  The rest of the supporting cast, while noteworthy, were basically bit parts.  Zoe Saldana probably had the meatiest supporting role, but her performance seemed a little forced; I just felt like her character wanted to end each line with "Man, I am a cool lady!" in an attempt to draw in more female viewers.  I have nothing against changing up the sausage fest that is your typical Star Trek movie, but I don't know if I Saldana has the acting chops to back that up.  Karl Urban assumed the mantle of Leonard "Bones" McCoy, doctor and second-guesser of Kirk and Spock; he was fine, but I thought he was imitating his predecessor too much.  Other recognizable actors filling established Star Trek roles include Simon Pegg (as Scottie), John Cho (Sulu), and Anton Yelchin (Chekov).  Pegg and Yelchin were kind of funny and cute, and Cho was inexplicably in a fight sequence where he didn't really do anything cool.  As for the bad guys, I can honestly say that I didn't recognize either Eric Bana or Clifton Collins Jr. in their makeup.  They weren't particularly stunning, but they were suitably evil.  There are more bit parts with name actors, like Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Morrison, Winona Ryder, Rachel Nichols, Deep Roy, Victor Garber, and Tyler Perry, but the important thing amidst all these famous faces is that Kirk and Spock, played by two relatively unknown actors, were pretty great.

"If they're so awesome, how come they didn't inspire this fan art?" - William Shatner

That was the top-ranked Google image for the search terms "kirk and spock."  Fact.

J.J. Abrams direction was decent with the actors, but I was really impressed with how involved I was in the movie; when I saw Mission: Impossible III (also directed by Abrams), I was impressed with how frequently Tom Cruise has to sprint in his movies.  That's a nice step up for Abrams.  He's not a great storyteller, but he's smart enough to know that, if you speed by them, it is easy to ignore plot flaws.

When I was first watching this movie, a little question kept popping up in the back of my head: "How is this going to tie in with the rest of the movies?"  Yes, this movie is supposed to be a reboot, but it has all the same characters as the original series and they all act basically the same.  By making this into a "Star Trek: Year One," wasn't this movie effectively rebooting itself as the beginning of a prequel franchise?  As it turns out, none of that really mattered.  When it became apparent that time travel and alternate realities played a part in this movie, all my questions were answered with Leonard Nimoy smiling and saying, "Don't think about it.  You'll just end up with a nosebleed."  I usually don't have a problem with pseudo-science in sci-fi movies, but when it is actually the crux of the entire plot, I want it to make a little more sense.

That said, I still enjoyed this movie.  It was fun.  It broke the rule of every odd-numbered Star Trek being terrible.  And, most importantly, it brought back big-budget bombast to science fiction movies.  I think the last truly great sci-fi-action hybrid was the original Matrix, and this was a refreshing change from all the high-profile sci-fi flops in recent years.  And you know what?  I think the sequel to this movie should be pretty awesome, too.  I give this Star Trek reboot high praise, or as trekkies might say: to infinity and beyond!

Terminator Salvation

I love the Terminator series.  Until I experienced the rapture that comes with repeated viewings of Road House and Purple Rain, Terminator 2: Judgment Day was my most viewed movie as a teenager.  I can even point out the single bullet that, had it not been dropped, would have ended the movie twenty minutes earlier.  While the first two Terminator movies are obviously classics, I'm even okay with the far inferior Terminator 3: Wanton Destruction of Property.  It's not great, but it could have been much, much worse.  As the fourth movie in the franchise, Terminator Salvation sits in an unenviable spot where it wants to recapture the fans that were turned off by the last film while relaunching the series by setting it in the Terminator future.  That is a tough trick to pull off.

How successful is this film?  Well, on paper it might work.  Christian Bale signed up to play the main role of John Connor and the supporting cast was partially filled out with Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin, and Helena Bonham Carter.  Not bad, right?  I liked the notion of taking the series into the post-apocalyptic future instead of retreading the "to save the future, John Connor must live" plot from the last three films.  Also, Arnold Schwarzenegger's sagging man boobs should have no reason to show up, since he was busy governing California at the time of filming.  I love me some vintage Ahnuld, but the man stopped making good movies in 1994.  Oh, and this movie doesn't feature time travel, which automatically makes it slightly less ridiculous than any of the other films.  All in all, this movie was theoretically promising.

And then it starts to fall apart when you take a closer look.  Counting Bale, the pivotal character of John Connor has been played by four different actors in four movies and one TV show.  That implies that there is no true vision for the character, so despite him being a recurring role his character's presence does not indicate any particular level of quality.  The director ended up being McG, which is the most obnoxious Hollywood name in recent memory.  Oh, and he committed the cinematic sins of directing the Charlie's Angels movies.  The rest of the supporting cast consists of Bryce Dallas Howard (I don't care if she's prettier than her dad, she's not very talented!), Moon Bloodgood (whose acting is nowhere near as awesome as her name), Common (who still hasn't convinced me that he can act), and Michael Ironside (whose name should have belonged to a general or linebacker, not a B-movie actor).  And this movie was rated PG-13, not R, like the rest of the franchise.  Add all that to the fact that the script went through several rewrites, and this thing starts to sound like it will utterly suck.

As with so many things, the truth lies somewhere in-between.  In the year 2018, the future is a great big pile of crap.  The sentient computer program, Skynet, has instigated a nuclear holocaust, leaving mankind on the brink of extinction.  The remaining humans are trying just to eke out survival or they are active in the human resistance.  John Connor (Christian Bale) is a member of the resistance movement; despite having some knowledge of the future from his mother and his time-traveling Terminator friends from previous movies, he is not one of the leaders of the movement.  But, apparently, he is the voice of "Human Resistance Radio," the presumably made-up-by-me title to his occasional radio pep talks to the remainders of humanity.  The resistance has just had two major breakthroughs:

1. They have discovered Skynet's "kill list" of humans most in need of being murdered...John is #2, behind Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin)---John's father, who hasn't yet aged into Michael Biehn, gone back in time or slept with Linda Hamilton in The Terminator.
2. They have discovered a radio frequency that disables Skynet's killer robots.  Oh, and Skynet also is planning to kill the leaders of the resistance in one week.  How nice of Skynet to squeeze the leaders of humanity in on that day...I thought they'd be booked!  

Anyway, the resistance leaders are planning to nuke Skynet's central base after using the new robot-disabling technology to turn off their defenses.  The only problem with that is that Skynet has been capturing humans to experiment on them in that same base.  Casualties of war happen every day, but not on John Connor's watch!  He heads to the base to break out the humans before Skynet gets bombed.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to Marcus (Sam Worthington), a man that is being executed in 2003.  The next thing he (or we) know, he awakes in 2018 with absolutely no idea what is going on.  He meets the young Kyle Reese and his fellow survivor, the nine year-old Star (Jadagrace Berry), and they get kidnapped by Skynet machines and taken to the Skynet central base for unknown reasons.  Marcus feels obligated to break his only friends out of the base, so he finds and teams up with a Human Resistance member, Blair (Moon Bloodgood), and is taken to the Resistance base.  Once there, the Resistance discovers a startling secret about Marcus that explains the fifteen-year gap in his memory.  With that reveal, many questions arise:

• Is Marcus one of a kind, or is he a sign of things to come?
• Can Marcus be trusted?
• Can John Connor find Kyle Reese before the Resistance nukes Skynet's base?
• Will Skynet win by being nuked and killing John's soon-to-be father and wiping John out of existence?
• Will Skynet win by drawing John into their main base and killing him before the tide in the man vs. machine battle has turned in favor of man?
• Will Edward Furlong, Nick Stahl, or Thomas Dekker (the other three actors who have played John Connor) show up and really confuse things for viewers?

Let's start with the good things first.  I will admit that, while watching this movie, I was entertained.  It is nowhere near as intelligent a film as the rest of the series, but it has its own charms.  I liked Anton Yelchin's performance; it was reminiscent of Michael Biehn's work in The Terminator, but not indebted to it.  The movie looked good, too.  It can be difficult to capture the dirtiness of a post-nuclear world, but I thought the sets looked great.  I thought the design work for the various Skynet machines was imaginative and pretty cool.  There were a lot of cool mini-tributes to the first couple movies sprinkled throughout; the best was definitely the inclusion of the Guns 'n' Roses song from Terminator 2.  There was a lot of action, too, enough to keep you from thinking about the movie's plot or logic.

That is where things start to sour for this film.  Despite avoiding some time travel problems by setting this in the future, including a young Kyle Reese has the same effect as sending a Terminator back in time to kill John or Sarah Connor; if the Terminators succeed, then the entire time line is disrupted and, I assume, everyone wakes up in a delicious swimming pool of vanilla pudding.  Or, we blink out of existence; until the time stream is totally disrupted and I can be proved wrong, I'm sticking with my theory.  That headache aside, there are a lot of little things that don't make sense in this movie.  How can so many machines that are specifically designed to kill people have such awful aim?  How is Marcus able to swim, considering his presumed body weight?  Why don't Terminators just crush John Connor's throat or punch through his face?  Whenever they get their robotic mitts on him, they just throw him across the room.  Why would sentient machines have a radio frequency for an Achilles' Heel?  When the final plan is revealed, why is it so ridiculously convoluted?  Seriously, when I heard the plan explained, I thought I was listening to Cobra Commander, or possibly underpants gnomes.  And yet, we are supposed to believe that a brilliant and devious supercomputer came up with this?  I am insulted by the filmmakers (probably fair) assessment of the average American's intelligence.  And what was the deal with Skynet targeting Kyle Reese?  In the first Terminator, the father of John Connor was unknown by Skynet, but here he is their number one acquisition priority.  Did John, the only living person who knows the identity of his father, blab his daddy's name?  I'll just mildly state that I doubt it.  But let's say that, yes, John Connor spilled the beans...when Skynet captures Kyle, why don't they just squish him into meat jelly?  It couldn't hurt their evil plans, right?

Despite all that stupidity, though, this isn't a bad movie.  Yes, McG is a pretty bad director in terms of cinematography, storytelling, and working with actors, but at least the movie never drags.  Most of the actors turn in uninspired performances, but not necessarily bad...although Christian Bale was uncharacteristically one-dimensional.  And Sam Worthington still has the range of a box of Triscuits.  If you look at this as a continuation/reboot of the ultra-successful Terminator franchise, this was definitely a disappointment.  On its own, though, the movie is a fun, dumb little flick.  As much as the logic-loving part of my mind might disagree, I give this movie

***EDITED ON 9/27/10 at 14:20 PM***
An excellent comment from nobulljive has forced me to amend my rating.  Yes, it is incredibly stupid for Skynet to have designed a base that conforms to human proportions.  With so many uniquely shaped pieces of machinery, there is absolutely no reason for a base for robots, by robots, to be designed like any modern-day processing plant.  And it is even stupider for the interface for the central Skynet computer to have screens or speakers for Helena Bonham Carter to speak through.  The central computer in Skynet should just have ports for any machine to link up and communicate through. 

Man, I can't believe I didn't think of that; I am now equally upset with myself and this movie.  These logical flaws in the story, on their own, wouldn't bother me too much.  I can forgive action/sci-fi movies for some stupidity.  On top of all the other issues I had with Salvation's plot, though, I cannot in good conscience recommend this film.