31 Days of Halloween

Today seems to be 1990 day at the brand new ComingSoon forums. No affiliation to the real ComingSoon. So it's a good moment to throw this movie into the ring.


FLATLINERS (1990)




Produced by Michael Douglas and directed by Joel Schumacher, who later re-teamed on 1993's Falling Down, Flatliners is an Academy Award nominated movie about a group of medical students who let each other flatline for several minutes so they can experience death and know answers about the after-life. But instead, they awaken sins from their past and have to learn how to deal with them. Flatliners is a thought-provoking film with stunning cinematography by Jan de Bont. It also features good acting from Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Julia Roberts, William Baldwin and Oliver Platt. However, despite all this, the horror elements of the story don't make much sense. There's no set-up for them, so they seem totally random. And since these are medical students whose future involve saving lives, wouldn't that make up for any wrong-doing in their past? Or is God simply upset that they're messing with the after-life? The movie never really gives us a clear answer and ends on an unsatisfying note. Nonetheless, since there is such a strong foundation of great ideas and it does give you a lot to think about and research, I still highly recommend Flatliners. It might not hold up too well in repeated viewings but the first time you watch it will definitely make an impact.

B 

Great review, haha.

Today, June 8, 2014 is the 30th anniversary of Ghostbusters AND Gremlins. You think Hollywood is excessive now with its weekly release of blockbuster movies? Well, 30 years ago today, they released two classic films on the same day. And so... what happened? The answer: there was room for it. There was no Internet back then. Video Games weren't dominating. And while network television and cable were popular, they didn't have the money, technology and serialized programs to compete with the cinema. So, Hollywood was in a comfortable place and audiences too. To better illustrate this, here's the opening weekend box office from 30 years ago:

1. Ghostbusters - $13.5 million
2. Gremlins - $12.5 million
3. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - $12 million ($88.7 million total)
4. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock - $9.6 million ($34.8 million total)
5. Beat Street - $5.2 million





The first thing you'll notice is that all the movies in the Top 5 had, more or less, the same success. The difference between Ghostbusters and Beat Street is literally $8.3 million. Compare to last weekend where Maleficent opened with $69.4 million while Blended, the #5 movie, grossed $8.1 million. That's a difference of $61.3 million. So in 1984, audiences sampled all the movies. Everyone wasn't rushing out to see the same movie while ignoring the rest. The second thing you'll notice is that this list is well-rounded. There's two original movies, two sequels and a film made for urban audiences. Compare that to last weekend where the Top 5 consisted of two remakes, a sequel, a comedy-western inspired by similar films and the latest Adam Sandler bulls--t. So in 1984, Hollywood actually tried to make good movies. And finally, the third thing you'll notice is that these movies weren't exactly "blockbusters" from the get-go. I know we're looking at 1984, but adjusted for inflation, Ghostbuster's opening weekend gross is $32.1 million. That won't make any headlines in 2014. So how did these movies become blockbusters and penetrate pop culture? The answer is that, in 1984, movies had "legs." Ghostbusters and Gremlins were the #1 and #2 movie from June 8th till July 19th. That's 6 weeks. And Ghostbusters remained at #1 for an additional week, was dethroned by Purple Rain the following week, and then it returned to #1 in it's 9th week of release. A movie spending almost the entire summer season at #1 is unheard of these days but it was common back then. In fact, movies sticked around so long back then that Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom was released on Memorial Day Weekend and on Labor Day Weekend (3 months later) it was STILL in the Top 10. These days, a movie is on Blu-Ray 3 months later.

In conclusion, A LOT has changed in 30 years for both us and Hollywood. So, happy 30th anniversary to Ghostbusters, Gremlins AND Beat Street. These movies were definitely part of a better era.







Amusingly, the movie that changed all that was Tim Burton's Batman. Warner Bros. created an aggressive and industry-changing marketing campaign that ensured that the film would have a massive opening weekend and then make most of its money over the summer. The movie grossed $250 million domestically which is like $500 million today.

Then during the holiday season, they created an equally impressive marketing campaign for the VHS release. It wasn't about renting Batman. It was about OWNING it. They wanted every kid in America to beg their parents, or Santa Claus, for a VHS copy of Batman along with all the toys.

And of course, this enraged and alarmed theater owners. When Jaws was released in the summer of 1975, it was so success that in Christmas it was still in theaters. That's what theaters wanted but Batman totally killed that. And now the 25th anniversary of that is around the corner.

So it is interesting how 30 years ago the movie theaters were at the height of their success, but 25 years ago, the decline began. It just reminds you that anything can change in a heartbeat. I mean, remember the music industry before Napster? Remember the rental industry before Netflix? Remember the TV industry before TiVo? It'll be interesting to see what other changes we have in the horizon.



It depended on the theater. Before digital, studios would actually send new prints every month, but considering the costs, studios probably focused on the more important ones. And speaking of costs, digital has saved money for the studios. In the old days, you'd always hear about marketing AND distribution costs. Now, you barely hear about distribution cause its so cheap thanks to digital.



That was in the 1970's and EARLY 80's. By the mid-to-late 80's, it was like $25-30. This is when the home media market truly began to flourish. I think Batman was just in the right place at the right and Warner Bros knew that so they used the opportunity to push theaters out of the window and increase their own revenue.

I still haven't seen Body Double. The Terminator, on the other hand, is one of my all-time favourite films.

Coraline made a pretty big splash in 2009, but I never really heard the word “Laika” when people were discussing it. I certainly heard “Henry Selick” and occasionally I heard “Neil Gaiman,” but I think most people just saw “Laika” as just another logo in front of a movie. They would have to forge their own identity soon though because they weren’t able to renegotiate Henry Selick’s contract and after the release of Coraline he parted ways with the studio. For their next project they turned to a pair of co-directors named Sam Fell and Chris Butler. Butler (who also wrote the screenplay) was a storyboard artist on Coraline and on Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride while Fell was perhaps best known for his work with Aardman Animation where he directed Flushed Away. The movie they (along with Arianne Sutner and Stephen Stone, who have “story by” credits) came up with is another horror-tinged family film called ParaNorman.

Initially ParaNorman comes off as a sort of lighthearted take on The Sixth Sense because it’s about a young boy named Norman who has the power to see ghosts roaming around in the world. Unlike The Sixth Sense’s Cole, Norman more or less doesn’t seem all that disturbed by this power even though it occasionally makes him a bit of an outcast with his family and among his peers. He’s a bit older than Coraline was and is perhaps a bit more aware of the situations he’s facing even though he does occasionally screw up here and there as well. I wasn’t a huge fan of the supporting characters though. I’ve come to find that animation generally tends to lean towards stereotypes more often than live action films, possibly because actors have the power to inject thinly drawn characters with more humanity when they’re on set, and ParaNorman is not an exception to this rule. The supporting characters are: a blonde cheerleader who talks like a valley-girl, an overweight nerdy kid, a schoolyard bully, and a dim jock. Here and there each of these characters is given one (and usually only one) moment or trait that differentiates them from the stereotype they represent, but I don’t think that’s really enough.

I’ve called both Coraline and ParaNorman “horror tinged,” but they go about it in very different ways. Coraline was more of a dark fantasy story than a traditional horror film and the demon at the heart of all the trouble manifested itself in unconventional but still somewhat disturbing ways. By contrast the “horror” in ParaNorman is more like a kid-friendly version of traditional horror movie devices like ghosts and zombies. Fell and Butler clearly know their horror movies as evidenced by the little references that pepper the movie (a dude wearing a hockey mask here, a Halloween ringtone there, etc.) and one could intuit that the fact that Norman seems to spend his days watching old zombie movies on VHS is an autobiographical touch on their part. As family films go this is slightly more gruesome than I might have expected. The zombies really do look like rotting corpses and there’s even a scene where a zombie is run over by a car and has his head come off. I feel like Laika was nervous that they may have gone “too far” with some of it so the film has a lot of comedy in it as well, some of it rather questionable. I don’t know that a scene about taking a book from a dead man’s hands needed to be a slapstick sequence and I also don’t think the sight of villagers with torches and guns needed to be a joke given the themes at hand either.

It is finally revealed that the spooy goings on are the result of an accused witch getting revenge on the town that executed her in the 15th Century. As such, the film sort of falls into the same trap that a lot of movies fall into when they’re inspired by the Salem witch trials which is that it wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants the trials to be an act of irrational injustice, but it also wants there to be a real witch, and that sort of invalidates the former point because these trials seem a lot less unjust if there actually are witches on trial. The film tries to sidestep by suggesting that this magic this girl was on trial for using wasn’t actually witchcraft so much as it was some sort of inherited psychic power they didn’t understand, but that doesn’t explain what the other witches were on trial for. Anyway, the film is very clearly trying to impart a message about intolerance and revenge, and it makes this incredibly clear in its final act when expresses this moral through on-the-nose speechifying on the part of the protagonist. It’s kind of a lazy and overly direct way to get the point across and it also generally feels unearned because we’re given no indication earlier on that Norman has this level of maturity and it doesn’t really feel like something that develops over the course of the film.

On a technical level, ParaNorman is certainly a step forward for Laika. The sets are a lot more elaborate, the characters look pretty smooth (even if the models are probably more exaggerated than they needed to be, and the protruding ears are just weird), and there’s generally just a lot more movie to be found in the production values. But on an artistic level, I think it’s a step backwards. While Coraline felt like an uncompromising and moody piece, ParaNorman just kind of feels like a typical animated family film in a number of ways. Its humor, its moralizing, its stock characters, its basic story structure, it all skews pretty close to the basic 2000s animated film formula that I’ve been noticing as this series goes on. It still executes pretty well and the stop-motion visuals are well done, but it just doesn’t feel special in the way that Coraline did.

In Conclusion

With Pixar in decline, Dreamworks still being Dreamworks whenever they aren’t making movies about Dragons, and even Studio Ghibli looking like it’s going to struggle for a while, Laika is looking like one of the few sources of hope amongst those wanting to see artistic family films. That said I’m kind of worried about them. I thought Coraline was clearly the better of their two movies and audiences seemed to feel the same way given that ParaNorman did not end up making as much money as Coraline did. That may partly be because ParaNorman came out at roughly the same time that another horror-tinged stop-motion family film, Tim Burton’s Frankenweeie, came out which sort of led the two movies to sort of cannibalize each other but I think it has just as much to do with Coraline being more of a must-see than ParaNorman. Laika has another movie out right now as of this writing called The Box-Trolls and it seems to be catching on with the public even less, so I hope we’re not just getting diminishing returns from this studio. Still, I think they’ve earned some benefit of the doubt and I do plan to keep an eye on whatever they do next
*** out of Four

Eh, ParaNorman was okay.

The Terminator is good, in fact it's better than T-2. 

 Is it that surprising?  I've given positive reviews to 23 of the 35 movies family movies I've watched for the Finding Pixar and Journey Continues series.  Including two other movies in the last month for the 31 Days of Halloween.

"Film" Twenty-Seven: Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999)

I was a little too young to really get into survival horror games when they were first coming out back in the late 90s, but I’ve been slowly catching up with the classics of the genre. I managed to snag a copy of the original Resident Evil a few years ago back in the waning days of when you could still buy new copies of PSX games for a reasonable price and then two years ago I realized I could download PSOne classics onto my PS3 pretty cheaply so I bought and played through Resident Evil 2 and then switched to the rival series Silent Hill the next year. This year I resolved to play through the last of the PS1 Resident Evil Games: Resident Evil 3: Nemesis.

Resident Evil 2 was ostensibly supposed to be about what happened in Raccoon City once the zombie plague spread there, but not much of the game was actually set on the city streets. Most of it was set inside of a Police Station which became something of a de-facto haunted mansion and then it transitioned into the sewers and into a sort of military base. Resident Evil 3 is more or less the game Resident Evil 2 promised to be in that you’re going through the city streets for much of the first half of the game, and locales change pretty quickly in the second half. It’s set simultaneously with Resident Evil 2 but is told almost entirely from the perspective of Jill Valentine rather than the two protagonists in 2. The games defining feature is of course that throughout the game Jill is being pursued by a monstrous Zombie called the Nemesis. This guy is essentially a tyrant (like the final boss of 1 or Mr. X from 2) except instead of showing up at the end he’s a presence throughout the game. He’ll jump out and attack you at various stages and you can either fight him or try to run. Both options are treacherous though because he can absorb a lot of punishment and unlike other enemies in the game he is capable of chasing you across multiple screens.

Mechanically, the game is essentially what players had come to expect from the series. There are a couple of new movies like a dodge system that’s kind of hard to uses consistently and a 180 degree spin move, but many would argue that this is just a silk hat on a swine’s head because the game is still using clunky tank controls and fixed camera angles. Also, unlike the other games in the series which involved a lot of backtracking through areas you’d already cleared out, this game generally has a lot more fighting in it. The games makes up for this by providing you with a lot more ammo and health items, but I still generally found it a bit more challenging than its predecessors. For a while Nemesis was sort of considered a black sheep of the series, but I think it holds its own. Jill’s costume here as well as the titular Nemesis are both among the most iconic images from the series, and while it isn’t really a quantum leap forward in the series, it is a pretty decent victory lap for the series’ time on the system that made it famous.
***1/2 out of Four

It's like we watched two different movies but arrived at, more-or-less, the same conclusion. 

I Walked With a Zombie is the superior early zombie film.