DailyView: Day 137, Movie 212

Um.

Okay. WTF.

Yes, I knew that The Wicker Man (2006) is considered one of the worst movies ever made, but it couldn’t be that bad, could it?

Yes, it could. Yes, it is.

I watched this on Apple TV but it was weird. The movie ended and I realized that the infamous scene of Nicolas Cage having a cage around his head with bees poured into it was not in the version I was watching. Did Apple TV edit the version of The Wicker Man? I had to go to YouTube and find the scene in order to see it. It was weird, but the dialogue of the scene was included in the Apple TV version, dubbed over top of the women carrying Cage to the giant wicker man. I thought it was odd when Nicolas Cage said “My legs!” as he was inside the bag being carried, but now it made sense. Too bad the rest of the movie did not make any sense.

There were so many things in this movie that had absolutely zero reason for being in the movie. One of the very first scenes, one that is repeated multiple times, is a scene where police officer Nic Cage pulled over a woman and her daughter alongside the road. I guess the girl had thrown her doll out the window and the cop stopped them to give it back to her. The car was then struck by a semi and exploded into flames. Nic Cage tried to get the girl out, but failed. This is apparently a massive, vital scene for the film…. no. It plays no part in the story. Nic Cage kept remembering it…dreaming about it…but it had no ties to the story.

The film is littered with examples like this. Nic Cage bought a self-help tape at the beginning and the movie went out of its way to show it, so, of course, it will play a role in the story later, right? Nope. There was a burned doll in a grave on this mysterious island so this is a prominent piece of storytelling, right? Forget it.

Nicolas Cage is doing his most Nicolas Cage performance in The Wicker Man, delivering these insane lines with such a ferocity that they are laughable. I loved it when Nic Cage just hauled off and punched the one woman right in the face. It was a laugh out loud moment. He then put on a giant bear costume and joined in with the rest of the crazy women. Nicolas Cage was dressed up as a bear. Not even kidding. There is so much unintentional humor in this movie that I laughed more with The Wicker Man than I did in the last couple of comedies I have seen (certainly more than Observe & Report).

I’ve skipped over the plot summary in this review because it does not matter. Nothing in the film makes any sense and the plot is just meant to give Nic Cage a reason to run around this island and yell out crazy things.

You owe yourself a chance to see this horrendous film, but do not go to Apple TV and their censors. I still can’t believe that the version I saw had the most infamous scene removed. This is a terrible movie, but still strangely entertaining.

DailyView: Day 137, Movie 211

I have always been a huge fan of Jim Henson and the Muppets. The Muppets take me back to my childhood, watching the Muppet Show. It was wonderful and I love all of the Muppet movies. However, the Jim Henson movies that do not include the actual Muppets, such as the Dark Crystal, have never been my favorites. Labyrinth was one of those. I had never seen it. It did not have my favorite characters.

I remember I had almost gone to a special Fandom screening of Labyrinth once, but I chose to head home instead. It just did not appeal to me.

This morning I pulled up Labyrinth on Netflix for the DailyView. It started out with me thinking that I was correct in skipping this for so long. When Sara (Jennifer Connolly) showed up, she was such a brat that I wasn’t sure if I would want to watch her for a whole hour and a half. She was cruel to her step-mother and treated her baby brother Toby as if he was just an imposition. She went as far as to wish that the Goblin King would come and take Toby away.

Of course, you need to be careful what you wish for, because David Bowie showed up and told her that he would have Toby and he would become one of them. Sara regretted her selfishness and wanted the baby back, but Bowie said no. The only way she would be able to retrieve Toby was to come to the Goblin Castle at the center of the Labyrinth by midnight.

BY this point, I was not sure what I had gotten myself into. It was feeling like a chore to watch the film and I was not excited about continuing. However, Labyrinth began to grow on me as it continued and, it got to the point where I was seeing why this had become such a cult classic.

Sara began showing more positive character traits, traits that allowed me to root for her in her quest to reclaim her brother. She seemingly cast aside those annoying traits that made me immediately dislike her in the beginning and she became a much more interesting heroine.

David Bowie, who played Jareth the Goblin King, performed some songs and, though they may not be among his biggest hits, they were all engaging and entertaining, The Magic Dance my personal favorite. I did not know Labyrinth was a musical, but it made sense and fit every time a song was used.

The absolute strength of the movie is in the puppetry created by Jim Henson and his crew of puppeteers. The characters found in the Labyrinth are so magical, so artistically beautiful that it totally envelops you into the world of the Labyrinth and every level displayed the artistry and imagination of Jim Henson. I never once wished for a CGI creature as these masterfully designed and realized puppets filled whatever need I had for fantasy.

Of ocurse, all of the classic Muppet performers were here, including Frank Oz, Steve Whitmire, Brian Henson, Dave Goelz, Kevin Clash among others.

Labyrinth has a tone much like The Wizard of Oz, with Sara leading her crew of outcasts through the magical labyrinth in an attempt to face off with the man behind the curtain, in this case, the Goblin King. There is even a little dog, too.

This movie won me over as the fantasy grew. It is a master class in set design, puppetry and creating a world that feels real and has its own real texture. Jennifer Connolly, whose first few scenes nearly turned me off completely, came back strong and had me rooting for her to succeed. David Bowie is a wonderful antagonist and is still quite mysterious when dealing with the young girl. Labyrinth is a perfect example of creativity meeting imagination. This was sadly the final film before the untimely passing of Jim Henson and it truly deserves its cult classic designation.

DailyView: Day 136, Movie 210

Tim Burton has had plenty of classic films in his illustrious career, but I believe there are few as beautifully rendered as Big Fish, a tale of a father and a son and the stories told between them.

A fantastic cast with a witty and creative tall tale of a man’s life brings magic to the screen. Touching and emotional, Big Fish is a film I did not know I would love as much as I did.

Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) was frustrated by his father Ed Bloom (Albert Finney) because he was always telling tall tales about his life, emphasizing the fantastical elements over the reality. Will never knew what was true about his father and what was simply embellishments and that led to a period of estrangement between them. So when news came to Will that his father was dying from cancer, Will and his pregnant wife Josephine (Marion Cotillard) returned home.

Desperate for some level of truth, Will hoped to have moments alone with his father to learn something real about him. However, despite the illness, Ed was more than happy to recount his tales of his youth, leaving his hometown and making his way to find the love of his life.

Ewan McGregor played Ed as a young man working his way through a lifetime of memories, filled with hyperbole and exaggeration though we never really know what exactly was true or what was not. The main story he told, the story of the day his son was born, was about the catching of the Big Fish that was uncatchable, with the use of his golden wedding ring.

Jessica Lange starred as Ed’s wife and love of his life Sandra. Jessica Lange is one of those actresses that, no matter how big or little the part is, will never give you anything but an exceptional performance. She is a treasure and her unrelenting support for Ed in Big Fish tells you everything you need to know about him.

Big Fish was another collaboration between director Tim Burton and composer Danny Elfman, famously working together on other projects such as Batman (1989), The Nightmare Before Christmas and Sleepy Hollow. Elfman received an Oscar nomination for the score of Big Fish and it is well deserved as the music perfectly encompassed the whimsical aspects of the story, beautifully tagging the important parts with a beauty.

Without spoiling the movie, the conclusion in the third act was one of the most emotional moments of the film and it drove home the importance of the relationship between father and son while showing the impact of a person’s life on those around him.

The film may be a tad long, as some scenes from act 1 may stretch out the run time unnecessarily, but that would be the only criticism that I would have. There are great performances and stellar writing, full of metaphors and themes that provide the true magic of life. Big Fish is Tim Burton’s masterpiece.

DailyView: Day 135, Movie 209

I had seen the 2019 remake of Black Christmas and I was not impressed. I have heard a lot of positive about the original film, a Canadian slasher movie directed by Bob Clark and is considered one of the first examples of the slasher genre. I was curious to see how this may or may not compare with the newest version of Black Christmas.

As holiday break approach, the sorority sisters put on a party before people leave for their plans. A series of obscene phone calls break the feel of the party, and lead to the murder of Clare (Lynne Griffin), by a mysterious intruder who had climbed into the sorority’s attic. Stashing her body away, the other did not know what had happened to Clare and when she did not show up to meet her father (James Edmond), they begin to become worried.

The group of sorority sisters is an interesting collection of characters that work well in the film. Jess (Olivia Hussey) is our lead character and she is having problems with her boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea). She is pregnant but does not want to keep the baby and Peter disagrees. Barb (Margot Kidder) has her share of problems and she is using alcohol to cover them. Phil (Andrea Martin) is a fascinating and one of the most different looking character in the film.

This is nothing like the 2019 version. In the new film, there was a whole plot about a Satanic cult committing the murders. There was so much overacting nixed with poor story telling. The 1974 version was considerably more intense and scary. The whole intruder in the attic character is way more frightening and the calls on the phone were disturbing at any time.

There are some outstanding shots in the movie. The sequence with Barb and the killer was an amazingly beautiful and terrifying scene at the same time. There was some feel with this movie that it was a smaller, artsy work with some of the best shots of any horror movie I have seen.

This was 100% better than the remake in 2019. I loved how this film developed and the mystery of who the killer is and how the ending remained unresolved. This was a fantastic horror movie.

DailyView: Day 134, Movie 208

I have had three consecutive DailyView that have been terrible. So when I needed to find a film that was a sure fire winner. In order to find that, I went back to my childhood to one of my favorite comedic pairs, Abbott and Costello. Looking through their list of movies, I found one that was intriguing and that I had not seen. It was Abbott and Costello Meets the Killer, Boris Karloff.

Freddie Phillips (Bud Costello) is a bumbling bellhop at a secluded hotel where a murder has taking place, and the clues are pointing to Freddie as the culprit. Freddie turns to hotel detective Casey (Bud Abbott) for help as bodies continue to pile up.

The original victim was Amos Strickland (Nicolas Joy), a lawyer who planned on releasing a memoir of all of the secrets that he picked up over the years. This attracted plenty of potential suspects, including the Swami Talpur (Boris Karloff).

Lou Costello was great as Freddie. This film highlighted the classic Abbott and Costello slapstick humor and wordplay that made them such an iconic duo. You can’t help but find the hijinks of the EYG Hall of Famers funny. This film even had a pretty decent mystery with the murders. The title of the movie may or may not be a spoiler.

Some of the situations are silly, but Lou Costello never fails to dive in with both feet. He is clearly willing to do anything for a laugh and Bud Abbott continues to be perhaps the best straight man to ever appear on screen.

This was a lot of fun, filled with laughs and ended the streak of flops for the DailyView!

DailyView: Day 133, Movie 207

Boy, the DailyView is in quite the slump lately.

Today’s film is another of the “leaving HBO Max” is September films and it is the third straight film that is just terrible. This movie stars Katie Holmes in the 1992 psychological thriller, Abandon.

The DailyView is 0-3.

Katie Burke (Katie Holmes), a senior at a prestigious college, was struggling to finish her thesis and find a good job when a detective Wade Handler (Benjamin Bratt) interviewed her on his missing persons case, Katie’s former boyfriend, the eccentric Embrey Larkin (Charlie Hunnam). Things become even more complicated when Embrey returned and started seeing Katie around.

For a psychological thriller, this movie is really quite dull. I was bored by a good chunk of the first hour of the movie as it inanely moved from current day to flashbacks dealing with Katie and Embrey’s relationship. The plot is a mess, needlessly convoluted and, as I said, took too long to get going. The twist of the story was clear as the film progressed, unsuccessfully toward the third act.

To be fair, the best part of the movie was the very final scene with Katie and Handler, but by that point, the film was beyond making a comeback.

No performances stood out in this clunker. Zooey Deschanel was the one actor in the film that did anything with her character, playing Katie’s roommate.

I need to try and find a film for tomorrow that breaks this string of crap that I am on.

DailyView: Day 132, Movie 206

Another film that is leaving HBO Max at the end of the month of September is Eye for an Eye, a movie starring Sally Field, Ed Harris and Kiefer Sutherland where a young girl is raped and murdered and the killer gets off on a technicality.

Sally Field and Ed Harris play the parents of the young girl, and Sutherland is the killer. This is a role that Kiefer Sutherland played quite a bit in his early career, as he played several slimeball roles.

This whole film feels quite slimy. It feels as if they are exploiting the worst thing that could happen in a family’s life for no other reason but to set up this revenge tale. It’s not even a straight revenge tale as the question about right and wrong are tossed around haphazardly and done to justify what they do.

There are some ugly scenes that are here because the plot requires it. None of these characters are more than basic sketches of characters. Kiefer Sutherland has every negative trait to make us hate him. There is nothing that makes him a real person. The police are completely incompetent and are almost written as antagonists. Sally Field has some bitter scenes with Joe Mantegna that make her look really bad.

There was a support group of people who had violent losses that was one of the most vile part of this movie. In particular, the work of Charlayne Woodward as Angel. There was so much in this group that felt downright rotten and left me with a disgusting feeling.

This was not a good movie. Yes, they have a great cast, but this class does not elevate the material at all. This is another clunker in the DailyView.

DailyView: Day 131, Movie 205

I had never heard of this movie before, but it came up on the Movie Trivia Schmoedown as a question and, I think it was Andrew Ghai, said he really liked the movie. So when I saw it on the leaving HBO Max list, I decided to give it a try. This was another mall cop movie, coming out the same year as Paul Blart.

This was way worse than Paul Blart. That should say something.

Ronnie (Seth Rogan) worked at a mall as head of security and there are all kinds of things going on. A pervert is showing women his junk, a robber is hitting the mall at night and Ronnie is having major issues. When Ronnie tried to apply for the Police Academy, things start to go badly for him.

This movie has some major problems. The first one is that the protagonist of the movie is 100% a horrible person. I hated Ronnie. He displayed every possible negative characteristic and I think the film still wanted you to root for him. I hated this character and I had no remorse for him. I think the end of the movie made me hate this character even more. There was zero personal growth and his arc was obscene.

But what was worse about Ronnie was that he was diagnosed as Bi-Polar and the movie seemed to make a joke out of it.

There are several jokes and dialogue in the film that absolutely did not age well. Some of the words used are just not used in movies any more. Ronnie was brazenly and unapologetically racist toward a Muslim character (played by Aziz Ansari).

There are a bunch of other characters in the movie that are just as bad as Ronnie. Ray Liotta played a police detective who started out as a friendly and kind cop but ended up cruel and mean. Anna Faris worked in the perfume section and was a horrible person. Michael Peña was Ronnie’s right hand man and another security guard with a deep (but predictable) secret. Celia Weston played Ronnie’s alcoholic mother. Finally, Patton Oswalt was a manager at a cofee shop in the mall. None of these characters are worth the audience’s support.

And above all else, the film is not funny. It is a sad movie with unlikeable characters and ridiculous situations. There is no way that Ronnie isn’t sitting in a jail cell to this day.

This was a terrible movie. I hated just about everything about it.

DailyView: Day 131, Movie 204

Written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Robert Rodriguez, today’s DailyView is the schizophrenic thriller, From Dusk Till Dawn.

Two escaped convicts, Seth (George Clooney) and Richard (Quentin Tarantino). were on their way to Mexico to make a deal with an associate. In order to get across the border, they needed to find sufficient cover. Seth and Richard kidnapped Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel) and his daughter Kate (Juliette Lewis) and son Scott (Ernest Liu), who were on vacation in Jacob’s RV.

Once across the border, Seth and Richard took the Fuller family to the roadside bar, The Titty Twister, that they would be meeting his contact in the morning. Unfortunately, beyond their knowledge, the bar was a hangout for vampires, which led to a violent encounter and a struggle for their survival.

What an odd movie. The first half of this movie felt very much like a crime drama from Tarantino. It had the criminals and the bloody results of their crime spree. Richard was a real kook and clearly suffered from some mental illness. Seth was a leader, but very manipulative and battled with his own anger issues.

The film picked up intensity after they snatched the Fullers. I have to say that I found the performance of Harvey Keitel, who has done some really great work in his career, to be one of the best I have seen from him. I was completely engaged with his character and the internal battle he was handling.

Then, without any warning whatsoever, the film went completely batshit crazy and became a fighting vampire movie. Since I already knew about the vampire twist, it did not shock me, but I cannot imagine the reaction of someone heading into the film without that knowledge. It went totally insane. That’s in a good way, though.

There were some things that pulled me out of the story though. When the vampires would explode in the sunlight, that was a bit too much for me. Plus, the fact that Cheech Marin played, at the very least, three separate characters was very distracting for me. I did not understand why, suddenly, there was another person who sounded like or looked just like Cheech Marin. After looking at IMDB, I see that John Hawkes (who was Lennon on LOST) also played two distinct roles, but since I did not notice that, it did not pull me out of the movie like the Cheech Marin characters did.

Many of the special effects looked like they were done in the nineties and so they were pretty dated. In fact, there were a couple of moments that were most likely intended to be frightening, but turned out to be cheesy or laughable (I’m looking at you, Fred Williamson).

George Clooney does an admirable job of maintaining his character throughout the movie no matter what bizarre situation he found himself in. Next to Keitel, Clooney was the standout among the cast.

From Dusk Till Dawn was a crazy ride that reverse course rapidly in the middle of the film. It really did feel like two completely different movies crammed together into one. Though far from the best work of either Robert Rodrigues or Quentin Tarantino, this movie is still a entertaining watch.

DailyView: Day 130, Movie 203

In the 1990s, Disney Animation was in a heyday. With the successes of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, the studio was on a roll. Next up, Disney took a swing at some history, bringing a highly fictionalized story of the real Pocahontas and John Smith to the big screen.

While the animation continued to be at a high level of beauty, much of the film Pocahontas was quite a step down.

John Smith (Mel Gibson) arrived in the New World with his ship’s crew, led by the greedy Governor Ratcliffe (David Ogden Stiers), whose main concern was discovery of gold. As they were constructing the settlement of Jamestown, Smith meets the daughter of an Algonquin chief named Pocahontas (Irene Bedard) and falls in love with the beautiful Indian girl.

Pocahontas had the rebellious spirit, disobeying her father Chief Powhatan (Russell Means), and searching out advice from her grandmother Willow (Linda Hunt), who was a spirit in a tree.

As the tensions continued to rise between the Indians and the white men, Pocahontas and John Smith became closer.

There were a lot of problems with this movie. First, the story itself was sparse. It was nothing that we hadn’t seen before. In fact, there were plenty of beats in Pocahontas that were near copies of earlier Disney movies. The relationship between John Smith and Pocahontas sprung up out of nowhere and became very deep before you knew it. I did not buy the relationship on any deeper level than the initial fascination.

The music of the film was downright boring. There were two exceptions. The Color of the Wind was to become the most well known of the songs in Pocahontas, but it lacked the magic of other Disney classics. The other standout song was Savages, which stood out because I swear, it was an exact copy of The Mob Song from Beauty and the Beast. As I was watching the section including Savages, I was struck how identical the scene and the song were.

Pocahontas was one of the first Disney movies to have the sidekick animal characters not be able to speak. The racoon, the dog, the hummingbird, all had the same type of personification, but the lack of voices made them easily dismissible.

The film is very short and, although it does have some moments of true artistry in the visuals, the rest of the film is very troubling. I have not even gotten into the controversial story elements dealing with Indians or how Pocahontas was turned into such a sexualized being. These issues exist but a better movie would have helped to minimize them. Unfortunately, this was at best a middling effort from the House of Mouse.