The Penguin Pool Murder - Movie Review

The Penguin Pool Murder & Murder on the Blakcboard

Directed by: George Archainbaud

Written by: Willis Goldbeck

Based on the novel by: Stuart Palmer

The Penguin Pool Murder explores the case of a murdered stockbroker whose body is discovered at the local zoo. Inspector Oscar Piper (James Gleason; Arsenic and Old Lace) is called in to solve the case but he doesn’t count on a wise-cracking school teacher, Hildegard Withers (Edna May Oliver; Drums along the Mohawk), becoming involved in the solving of the case.


Penguins are some of my favorite animals despite their grotesque lifestyles, but that joy took a backseat to the pairing up of Inspector Piper and Ms. Withers almost immediately after the two were paired together and started trading banter. Hildegard Withers was always one sarcastic step ahead of the oafish Inspector Piper, and it was wonderful to witness the evolution of women’s rights and steps to equality in American cinema.

These two would be paired again in Murder on the Blackboard when a local music teacher is found dead. I enjoyed this particular film just as much as it’s predecessor because the audience got a chance to see these characters evolve which is something I was personally not used to witnessing during Hollywood’s Golden Age. The dialogue was just as sharp as it was in The Penguin Pool Murder and it made me yearn for a modern interpretation of the Inspector Piper and Ms. Withers.

I don’t mean remakes, but the way Gleason paraded like the chauvinistic male did during the 1930’s only to be mentally and morally sideswiped by the independent and rambunctious Edna May Oliver was some of the most entertaining Hollywood products I have witnessed in quite some time, and their chemistry left me wanting more movies involving this madcap crime-solving duo.

Hallway Memories

Slithering strands of light protruded through the window. If they didn’t show him the path to exit his room then they would have served no purpose at all.

He leaned over and grabbed the last photograph they had ever taken together. It was a simple picture frame, but the memories inside of it were far more complex and much happier than anything else that had crossed his mind these last few weeks. The morbid scenarios that looped through his mind lately had nothing to do with that photo and had everything to do with finding new ways to stop breathing.

He had no intentions of killing himself. Death was just something he thought about every day, at least once every hour ever since he was a six years old when he saw his mother jump. There were times when the method was something amazing, like being flung wildly through a hurricane as he crash landed to earth strapped to a parachute, but what he focused on was the feeling. He knew that when he died his death would not be painless; it just wasn’t his type of luck and certainly not his style.

Her eyes were the most glamorous things he had ever seen. He missed being able to look into them every day. They were mysterious, gorgeous; they represented everything that he loved about her, and every time she blinked his heart skipped a beat, and now that she was gone his heart stopped beating all together.

He drew back the curtain, turning the illuminating slithers into blinding, enlightening piercings. There was a trail of unwashed dishes leading from his bed where he sat to the hallway where they first made love inside what was then their new house. They had barely handed the check over to the realtor and practically forced her out the door. They would have invited her to join but it had been a long day and neither of them had that kind of energy. It had been a long day, he remembered. Now, everyday was pathetically drawn out between the sunshine and the moon-rise, but he refused to die because he knew that if he died he wouldn’t be able to remember her anymore.

Rambling Nomads

The stench of the piled corpses had seeped into the flavors of every meal we cooked. The dead-body-walls weren't so disturbing or distracting anymore. They were kind of useful to tell you the truth. If any of them shifted or even seemed out of place, the suspected incongruence served as a pleasant warning that the Rambling Nomads were returning.

The downside wasn’t that these drug-fueled mad bastards killed you, it was that they were so strung out on the expired psychiatric medication and bush league speed that they cooked in their camps they couldn’t shut up long enough to kill you. They’d beat you senseless, maybe dismember an appendage or two while blabbing nonsense about tax reforms, the first time they licked a snake's dick, or how many snowflakes it took to drown someone before the drug-crash started kicking in and they needed a new fix. Once they got it, they’d run a few dozen miles before they realized they were clueless about their new location, so they’d just set up a new camp. If some of them wound up alone, they’d just hook other travelers to their paltry narcotics.

Even the delirious had enough awareness to understand that no one could survive this era completely alone.

Double Doors

...the continuation of Chasing Oddities

The double doors guarded secrecy like dust settled on old things. There they were, like I had always seen them only with a slightly important difference, now one of them was slightly ajar. The darkness behind it may as well have been a waving finger, inviting me into the unknown. I knew the big guy was still after me but once the silent siren of the new darkness gestured me towards the forbidden room, I forgot about the chainsaw-wielding psychopath that could not have been more than one-hundred yards behind me when I first entered the house.

I pushed the door open, away from the beckoning emptiness and waited for the creaking to spoil my elusiveness, but the silence reflected the seriousness of this part of my trial, and being the greatest warrior meant honing the patience that came before that ever elusive moment of spiritual discovery, and I was always taught to stand up to fears – all kinds of fears – and horrors.

The room was carpeted gray; the whole identity of these quarters was completely opposite in tone to the ransacked, floor peeled kitchen area before it. There were chairs and plastic fern trees decorating two corners of the area. It was a polite waiting room made eerie only by the gloomy shade and the wicked chamber that partially illuminated my side of the window but was brightly lit on the other side.

There were no stairs, no doors, and no other windows that I could see, only a grungy tiled wall. In fact the whole enclosure resembled an Olympic sized, ill-kept swimming pool without any routes for escape. However, I had to press myself against the glass to see exactly where the water was, and it was well below the floor level of the house, embedded tightly into the earth, and at the bottom of this devious pool were humanoids – what exactly I could not tell. At first glance they looked like normal, full-grown humans curled up into fetal positions except instead of being spread out into single vials they were all gathered and grown in this one monstrous pool.

And then one of them moved their head.

Easy A - Movie Review

Directed by: Will Gluck

Written by: Bert V. Royal

Olive is a social ghost at her California high school. She is never invited to parties and chooses to make up fake boyfriends to spend the weekend with and be dormant at home rather than spend time with her best friend Rhiannon, who badmouths her all the time and whose parents happen to be nudist hippies.

Suddenly, while Olive (Emma Stone) is being interrogated by Rhiannon (Aly Michalka) she utters the biggest lie of her young adulthood – she finally lost her virginity to her fake boyfriend. Through the split-second magic of texting and social websites, Olive has become one of the most popular women at her high school’s dating market. Olive does herself no favors when she begins accepting requests and gift cards from socially inept teenage boys who ask her to admit to having some type of sexual escapade with her. As she does this, her friendship with Rhiannon is fractured and Olive becomes the target of the overly zealous Christian school group led by her one-sided nemesis Marianne (Amanda Bynes) who wants her run out of town. So, Olive figures that if everyone thinks that she is such a whore, she’ll act like the greatest whore known throughout a state known for some of the best whores, both figuratively and literally. But then Olive learns that being thought of in such a light and being the most popular girl in school makes her lonelier and much more miserable than she ever could have been when she only had one friend.

Her only roads of hope are her charismatically liberal parents Rosemary (Patricia Clarkson) and Dill (Stanley Tucci), her eighth grade crush known to the school as Woodchuck Todd, her English teacher Mr. Griffith (Thomas Haden Church), and her own wits, which she is losing more and more of by the day.

I fell in love with Emma Stone’s character. She is the kind of female (especially teenage female) that Hollywood needs more of; she is intelligent, humorous, and does not need acceptance from any social clique other than her family and the friends she cares about, but she’s still a teenager and human, even though science still has yet to prove that teenagers are indeed human at all.

Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson portray the kinds of parents that any teenager could hope to have. They steal the scenes that they’re in. Thomas Haden Church continues his coolness as the untypical English teacher Mr. Griffith, and it was a sweet surprise to find out that Lisa Kudrow portrays his wife in the film and they’re characters become relevant to the story during the middle of the film.It was a treat seeing Amanda Bynes returning to an abnormal character, which is how she got her break into entertainment in the first place.

However, as witty and charming as Easy A begins, shortly past the halfway point the film becomes a bit disjointed and I found myself looking for laughs instead of being pummeled with them. There is a nice tribute to the late great John Hughes that Olive enacts but after that it seems like the movie is relying on pop culture references to deliver the jokes rather than the smart characters that had been created and established before. And every teenager in California appears to be thirty years old or older. I’m not sure if that is serious miscasting or too much time spent in the tanning bed.

Easy A is definitely a “chick flick,” in nearly every sense of the word, and that is definitely a good thing; especially when considering all of the social horrors teenagers, the girls especially, are forced to endure. Olive is a wonderful onscreen role model and even though the movie loses steam after the midway point it is a movie I would recommend to anyone, regardless of age and gender.

The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukallan) - Movie Review

Directed by: Ingmar Bergman

Written by: Ula Isaakson

     

Set during Sweden’s medieval era, The Virgin Spring tells the tale of Tore, a prosperous farmer who has always done right by God and has raised his family to do the same, however the family is unaware that the adopted and pregnant daughter Ingeri secretly worships Odin the Norse God.

One morning, Tore asks his youngest daughter Karin to deliver prayer candles to the church. Mareta, Tore’s wife, asks Ingeri to accompany her foster sister. After the two set out on their journey, they come across a mill by a stream where they become separated after Ingeri chooses to converse with a one-eyed hermit. Karin chooses to continue down the road while Ingeri remains behind only to sense danger while inside the mill and runs in terror.

Karin meets three sheep herders, brothers, and accepts their company when she sits down for lunch. The two oldest turn on her; they rape and murder her, then steal her belongings. Unbeknownst to anyone else, Ingeri witnesses the entire ordeal.

Before Ingeri can return home, the three brothers coincidentally arrive at Tore’s farm seeking shelter for the evening. Tore welcomes them, but when one of them offers to sell Mareta one of Karin’s dresses, the man who chose to follow God’s will now seeks a father’s vengeance.

The cast is superb with Max Von Sydow as the emotional Tore and Birgitta Valberg as the stern but motherly Mareta. Gunnel Lindblom plays Ingeri, spending most of the film splattered with mud across her face, which matches her character’s disposition and is only multiplied by Lindblom’s constant scowling. Birgitta Pettersson does a smashing job as the ill-fated Karin as she is spry and lively as Karin is young and naïve.

For a film with such a disturbing plot it is beautifully rendered on film. Ingmar Bergman was at the top of his game while making this movie. The cinematography is as poetic as the themes behind the story – themes of religion, nihilism, and innocence. The script was written by Ula Isaakson, adapted from a 13th century Swedish ballad Tores dotter I Wange, while much of the imagery and subtext of the film was also inspired by an ancient Latin tale, The Three Living and the Three Dead. The Virgin Spring would later on inspire horror veteran Wes Craven to create his movie The Last House on the Left (1972).

The Virgin Spring is a work of art with a cast that honors the director’s intentions, and together they made a gorgeous film about the evils that corrupt and maim what is good in this world as they explore one of the most difficult subjects – what makes us human – and what happens to make a person good, to make a person evil, and what happens when that unpleasant moral shade of gray

Transamerica - Movie Review

Director: Duncan Tucker

Writer: Duncan Tucker

Bree Osbourne (Felicity Huffman) is going through changes, significant changes. Bree Osbourne was once Stanley Chupak, but Bree never believed that she was meant to be a man. Now, Bree has been approved for gender reassignment surgery but before her therapist allows her to proceed with the operation Bree must resolve one last issue from Stanley’s past.

Bree receives a phone call from a New York jail from Toby Wilkins. Toby (Kevin Zegers; Wrong Turn) is looking for Stanley, his biological father. Toby needs someone to bail him out of jail and Stanley is his lone resource. His mother committed suicide and his stepfather wants nothing to do with him. Toby has kept himself alive by committing petty crimes and prostituting himself.

Bree travels to New York posing as a Christian social worker and bails out Toby and tells Toby that they will travel back to California so he can be reunited with his real father; meanwhile Toby has his own agenda as he is hoping to break into the adult film business. It is a road trip that neither of them will ever forget.

Transamerica was quite funny. I’m not sure if that was the intention, although there are plenty of intentionally funny moments but there is a lot of humor to be found in the developing relationship between Bree and Toby, especially since the two are meeting for the first time and discovering what kind of person the other one is tornado-like fashion. It made for a nice character piece.

The world needs a twisted movie about the underground world of professional air hockey, w/a climax that has someone's guts getting sucked down the goal-vaccum.

Machete - Movie Review

Directed by: Robert Rodriguez & Ethan Maniquis

Written by: Robert Rodriguez & Alvaro Rodriguez

When I first watched the fake Grindhouse trailers that Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez presented to us back in 2007 during their Grindhouse resurgence films, the only one that I thought really warranted its own film was Machete, and really it was for a single reason – to finally give Danny Trejo his due.

Here we are.

Machete is an ex-Federale. His family was murdered by one of Mexico’s top kingpins, Torrez (Steven Seagal), because Machete refused to be morally compromised. After being left for dead himself, Machete wound up in South Texas living as an illegal immigrant.

Through coincidence and bad luck Machete is picked up by a man named Booth (Jeff Fahey; Lawnmower Man, Body Parts). Booth tells Machete that he needs to kill Texas Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro). McLaughlin heavily favors strict regulations on immigration, which is what the public knows. What they are unaware of is that McLaughlin also funds a vigilante Minute Man operation that uses extreme force when they feel someone has crossed over illegally.

While Machete does not like the idea of killing anyone, the senator‘s stance on immigration and the amount of money offered to him alleviates most of the weight bearing down on his conscience.

It turns out to be a setup, and Machete is now on the run. His only help comes from ICE agent Sartana (Jessica Alba) and a taco truck vendor named Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), who might or might not be the leader of an underground immigrant revolutionary force known as The Network. They are all out to clear Machete’s name and expose Senator MacLaughlin.

Machete is another all-out tribute to Grindhouse cinema. The music is raw, the vibe is trashy; the film is even manipulated to look scratched and gritty. Danny Trejo plays it cool and dangerous. Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodriguez are perfect polar opposites in character, style, and approach. Cheech Marin’s few moments of screen-time are some of his best in quite a while. Lindsay Lohan looks like shit, but she seemed sober enough while filming a role that seemed tailor made for her. It was excellent to see Jeff Fahey back on screen. Don Johnson does too good of a job as a sociopathic, redneck vigilante, and Robert De Niro looked to be having the most fun out of anyone else. He finally acts as a character and not just Robert De Niro with or without an accent. And it’s funny listening to Steven Seagal cuss in Spanish.

The action scenes were well intended but not all of them came off looking good, which might have been intentional because the fight scenes in classic Grindhouse flicks weren’t award worthy pieces of action art either. Also, it doesn’t help that while Danny Trejo is in excellent physical shape he is sixty-six years old; and not Chuck Norris’ or Sylvester Stallone’s type of sixty-six years old. Danny Trejo is a man familiar with alcohol, cigars, and other heavy drug uses from past harder times in his personal life.

The movie also seemed too long for its own good. By the time the climax was finally in sight instead of saying, “cool,” I looked down and whispered a covert “thank you.” I wasn’t too keen on the political agenda in regards to illegal immigration but one also might understand that many of the original Grindhouse films like Combat Shock and Humanoids from the Deep were heavily layered with their own political views against Vietnam and the environment, respectively.

Then, there was the tidal wave of CGI blood. It served its purpose but took something away from my own personal experience. I’m just addicted to my carnal cinema servings of corn syrup, flour, and food coloring. I prefer CGI blood in video games or a very disturbing Pixar film.

Machete is a movie with serious views behind it but is not a movie that takes itself too seriously, which might help or hurt it for different people in the audience. The cast gels easily into Machete’s world, and there is no one else that could pull this role off other than Danny Trejo. Danny Trejo IS Machete.

Please Give - Movie Review

Please Give is writer/director Nicole Holofcener’s third film. It focuses on a group of acquaintances in New York City intertwined by an elderly woman. Kate (Catherine Keener; Full Frontal, Death to Smoochy) is a bleeding heart; she is overly sympathetic to everyone else’s plights in life and it drives her family crazy. She is trying to save the world one homeless person at a time. It’s an ironic trait for to have considering she and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt; Frost/Nixon, Simon Birch) own and run a furniture shop which they keep stocked by buying deceased peoples’ furniture and selling them at a significantly higher price, and when they’re not occupied with store business, they are raising their fifteen-year old daughter Abby (Sarah Steele; Spanglish), whose biggest problems in life so far are bad acne and being disallowed to buy a two-hundred dollar pair of blue jeans.


The couple has been waiting for their next-door neighbor Andra, a loutish, soon to be ninety-one year old woman, to die so they can purchase her apartment to expand on their own. Andra is looked after by her granddaughter Rebecca (Rebecca Hall; The Prestige, Frost/Nixon) while the other granddaughter Mary (Amanda Peet; Saving Silverman, Identity) can’t seem to wait for the old hag to croak.

Alex and Kate invite Andra and her two granddaughters to their apartment to celebrate Andra’s birthday and suddenly their lives start becoming more and more intertwined with one another. Some of the experiences are good, others are bad, but all of them are challenging because each person is looking for someone or something new to lean on for emotional support.

Please Give is a somber tale about what happens when people and relationships grow old, and when something new and interesting enters your life, it is all about how you interpret the experience and how you react. The acting was fine. No one stood out over anyone else which was a good thing but there are spots in the movie where you might start checking for the time, but the movie is worth sitting through. There are some funny moments but no real laugh out loud scenarios. The humor paralleled the bleak but hopeful story.

Get Low - Movie Review

Get Low is the cinematic telling of a folk tale from Tennessee, a folk tale that has several parts of truth entwined within it. During the 1930’s, deep in Tennessee woods there lived a hermit. There were many stories about this hermit and none of them painted him in a pleasant light. Some people believed him to be a murderer, others a rapist, but for whatever reason besides a disdain for humanity this man exiled himself to nature with no interest for human contact.


One night, the hermit (Robert Duvall; Lonesome Dove, Assassination Tango) has a profound dream. He awakens from the dream convinced that he is about to die, but when he wakes up the next morning he believes the dream to be a revelation. He wants everyone with a story to tell about him to attend his funeral - - - - while he’s still alive.

The hermit’s name is Felix Bush. He goes to a nearly bankrupt funeral home run by Frank Quinn (Bill Murray; Ghostbusters, Broken Flowers) and his assistant Buddy (Lucas Black; American Gothic, All The Pretty Horses) so that they can assist him in making the necessary arrangements to throw this “funeral party,” and once Frank gets an eye on the amount of money Felix is carrying around with him, Frank is more than excited to oblige Felix.

However, complications arise when Felix’s old girlfriend returns to town. Mattie Darrow (Sissy Spacek; Carrie, Four Christmases) may have been Felix’s girlfriend but she was never his first love, and behind that secret lays a great tragedy and the secret to the mystery of the hermit in the woods.

Get Low was a pleasure to watch. All of the actors were in top form, even though Lucas Black hasn’t really changed his character approach his whole career, but he is looking manlier these days. Bill Murray once again plays a quirky, flawed individual but this one is not as big a schmuck as most of his other parts. Frank has his own story to tell and when he does, you can’t help but cheer for him.

Robert Duvall once again turns in an outstanding performance. His age is very apparent in this film and it made me sad to think that his time could very well be near, and to me that added to the impact that this movie is capable of, but when he was hiding under that hermit garb of bushy hair and beard, and even though I knew it was Robert Duvall in the role I still had to ask myself – is that Robert Duvall?

These movies about past eras and small nature towns fit right into the director’s forte. Aaron Schneider (Simon Birch, Kiss the Girls) has a knack for making nature as much of a character as the people are, and he seems capable of tapping into the mindset of the folks that lived in the past.

Get Low was a treat. There was no one to dislike in the film, it was all about telling stories and learning the truth about Felix and everyone else questioning their own will or their own conscience. It was an excellent character piece of which I would not mind a repeat viewing.