I waited for a while on this one.

Down With Love is like a bad date that goes horribly wrong three quarters of the way through.   A good time is had until a terrible faux pas is made, or someone gets food poisoning or your date turns out to be a recently released convict or something that totally derails the good time you’re having.

I desperately wanted to like Down With Love.   Ewan McGregor is a damn joy to watch in almost everything he does, and God bless us everyone that the good Lord saw fit to create McGregor in the first place.   Handsome he is, but save this movie he cannot.   Even Renee Zellweger, who normally relies on an obnoxious squint and something passing for sass to sail her way through movies, really tries here.   She’s very likeable and very sweet in a way I had never realized was possible for her.

It’s a shame that the actual story sinks the movie.

I get the guilty pleasure aspect of this one.  The supporting cast is equally as fun to watch as McGregor and Zellweger, David Hyde Pierce in particular.   The costumes and set design are brilliant and beautifully, tongue-in-cheek retro and it looks like everyone had a good time.

Zellweger’s Barbara Novak is an author who comes to Manhattan to promote her book, Down With Love.  It’s a book that advocates career promotion and happiness with self before falling in love with a man.  She and her editor concoct a scheme to promote her book by setting up an interview with Catcher Block, a playboy writer for a fashionable men’s magazine.   After Block repeatedly blows her off, Novak goes another route and becomes internationally famous, leading Catcher Block to have no dates and surrounded by women more interested in chocolate bars and their careers than him.   He swears vengeance on Novak by pretending to be someone else and romancing her in order to expose that Miss “Down With Love” is really all about love with some unintended consequences.

I’ve only seen bits and pieces of Pillow Talk, the movie that heavily influenced this one, but I’m fairly sure it was done with a little more finesse than this.  Certainly it had to rise above a late twist that’s absurd and unbelievable, breathlessly monologued by Renee Zellweger.    I can’t find much fault with Zellweger and McGregor at all, as they’re both effortlessly charming and the whole ’60’s sex comedy thing is sent up to great hilarious effect at times (although I have never confessed to be a connoisseur of ’60’s sex comedies, you know).    The whole thing feels weak, and it feels like a sham.

It feels like the investment you put into the movie is threefold what you get out of it and no amount of charm can squeeze Down With Love wholly into one’s heart, even if that’s where the movie desperately wants to go.   Instead, the faulty plot and contrivances, even if they’re send ups, send it straight to the discount DVD bin.

A disappointing waste of McGregor, Pierce and Zellweger is what this movie is.

I’ve never gotten Pee Wee Herman.   I understand the guilty pleasure of this movie, a movie wherein the titular character goes all over America searching for his beloved bike.   I understand that filtered through the nostalgia of childhood, Pee Wee’s cute and funny, but even when I was a kid, I didn’t watch Pee Wee’s Playhouse that often.

If you want to get all technical-like – and maybe some of you do – it’s not a bad movie.   Directed by Tim Burton early in his career and starring a multitude of zany characters, the only boring thing is the stretched-too-thin plot.   Pee Wee naively searching for his bike across the country and haphazardly interacting with ghosts, bikers and Hollywood execs gets surprisingly boring after a while.    I understand that it’s a kid’s movie but it does get tiring.   God, how I wanted this man to find his bike.

More than anything, Pee Wee Herman is a mystery, a man who appears to have suffered some sort of brain trauma that causes him to act like a little boy, something that feels disturbing.    He strikes me as the kind of guy that in real life, Mom would’ve warned you away from and Dad would’ve walked you past his house.   Even as a kid, something felt wrong about a grown man who played with toys and acted like someone had removed a big chunk of gray matter from his head.

That’s not to say I can’t understand how others might find it charming and fun; for God’s sakes, I watched a lot of weird-ass stuff growing up myself.   Something about Pee Wee sets my teeth on edge and  makes me a little freaked out.

Plus, he wears a bow tie.   No one trustworthy actually rocks a bow tie anymore.    Did this guy even have a job?   Or a life?   And how did he and Dottie seriously never get together?

Weird, I tell you.   Weird.

Nick Cannon, please don’t take yourself so seriously.

Drumline isn’t actually half bad.   And speaking as a former band nerd, the marching bands are pretty spot on.

Nick Cannon plays Devon, a drummer who goes to an Atlanta college and joins the marching band.   He’s the worst kind of cocky as he’s so arrogant he can barely take criticism.   Devon chafes under the rules of a squad leader and the director of the band, Dr. Lee.    A moral crisis as well as a revelation regarding Devon’s musical knowledge (spoiler:  he can’t read music) lead Devon to grow up and become a better musician.

The thing about Drumline is that the marching bands are as much a character as Devon.   I grew up in football crazy Texas, where marching band is part and parcel of the Texan obsession with all things pigskin related.  (Halftime entertainment is taken very seriously.)   Drumline does convey a lot of the work and sheer grind of being in a marching band, as well as the strange customs and habits a lot of bands have.    Devon’s storyline can be downright exhausting, not to mention irritating.   His attitude problems wear thin after a while.

The bit players are often the most entertaining.    And Drumline features some interesting marching shows even if the plot, especially when it comes to the love story, is worn so thin holes are beginning to show.     It is still surprising that they made a successful movie out of marching band, given that I understand a lot of folks don’t really get the appeal of marching bands, but the director, writer and producers pulled it through.    The bands are fun and the band members aren’t geeks, something too often trotted through any movie since it’s such a simplistic, well-traveled joke.

That’s not to say Drumline doesn’t take itself too seriously at times, which makes it at points really laughable.  The story line between Nick Cannon’s character and his squad leader is alpha male macho bullshit in such a hilarious way, you have to wonder if they played it up for laughs.   It’s clear that Nick Cannon is ultra-serious about his role as Devon to the point of taking it too far at times, which makes his part feel less conflicted, overcompensating young man and more egotistical jerk, like that one person everyone knows who’s so into themselves everyone around them is aware of how silly they really are.

Overall, Drumline’s not a bad movie but not a great one either; I would suspect it’s the kind of movie that’s fun to watch with friends and giggle at when you need something light-hearted and refreshing (after this spate of horror flicks, I certainly needed that).    Good, clean fun, as the grown-ups would say.

For Clarabela of Just Chick Flicks:

Alright, guys, bust out your fans as soon as you’ve pulled yourselves back upright again.   I know.   That just gave you all the vapors right there.

Hugh Jackman – he sings, he dances, he kicks ass!   He’s Wolverine AND does Broadway.   I’m sure he’s nice in real life but is he ever fabulous as the snarly, grouchy Wolverine.    (He does a damn fine job as Wolverine, too.)

He was a a great Oscars host and he tries to be in a variety of acting roles.   I think Hugh Jackman is probably a lot of folks’ Imaginary Celebrity Boyfriend, am I right?

You let that crazy shine on through, Nicholson!

Aspiring writer Jack Torrance has been paying the bills as a teacher, but he longs for more time to write.   After kicking booze due to a nasty incident where he injured his child, Torrance accepts a position as the winter caretaker for The Overlook Hotel.   He packs up wife Wendy and son Danny and heads for rural Colorado, where they soon get snowed in.   It doesn’t take long for the paranormal weirdness to start affecting Torrance, though.

The Shining is one of those horror movies that always pops up on Top 10 Horror lists and is cited by many folks as a movie that scared the hell out of them.   There’s a good reason for that.    If you watch The Shining, it’s a relatively bloodless movie, especially in comparison to some of the other movies I’ve watched recently.   Kubrick conducts a damn master class in suspense.   Most of the movie is actually build-up, rather than anything really happening.    And the scene that always freaks me out the most is the scene where Wendy (Shelley Duvall) discovers that the “book” Jack is working on is actually just page after page of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” typed over and over again.

It’s odd because I’m not a huge Stanley Kubrick fan, but the sense of isolation and growing dread he subtly infuses is just genius.    The Shining is just the story of a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic patriarch filtered through the paranormal lens of The Overlook Hotel.   Even before Nicholson takes up residence in The Overlook, he already has the look of a man teetering on the edge of complete psychosis.   And Shelley Duvall porrays the poor put-upon wife, Wendy, so well as a woman desperately trying to re-weave the last tangled threads holding her family together.

The Shining wouldn’t work half as well if not for the spooky score and brilliantly constructed sets.    It’s a long movie, for sure, but an effective one.   Even with the creepiness of Room 237 and the scary looking twin girls, it was always Jack’s conversations with Mr. Grady, the previous caretaker who went nuts and chopped up his wife and twin girls with an axe, that bothered me the most.    There’s one conversation in particular that stems around “correcting” family behavior that’s eerie.

The concept of being snowbound with an insane family member, one you thought you knew very well a that, is scary enough, but when Kubrick adds in the specters and tricks The Overlook plays on its inhabitants, as well as the trauma sustained by Danny, Wendy and Jack’s psychically sensitive son with fanatically fine-tuned construction and planning, The Shining becomes a movie that shockingly transcends its source material.

That’s a big statement, considering Stephen King is probably the most popular American author living.   I refuse to give Dan Brown any credit, since King can actually write.    And most King adaptations have either been middling or just plain crap, with a few exceptions.   (Even King himself disowned the atrocious Lawnmower Man.)   Even though Kubrick’s version of The Shining deviates in major ways from King’s book, it’s actually all the better for it.   I think Stephen King disagrees with me, but The Shining is one of the few movies that feels very close to being pitch perfect.

Take some lost kids look for a Doctor Satan, a completely insane hillbilly family, sprinkle in some inspirations from other horror movies and bake at 350 degrees for a few hours.

I don’t think Rob Zombie knows how to make a movie by Rob Zombie.   Sure, House of 1000 Corpses is gory and violent, but that’s all that Zombie really relies on to make it scary.    House of 1000 Corpses borrows so heavily from movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in style and substance that it’s hard to view it as its own separate movie.

I haven’t seen Halloween or its much panned sequel, both directed by Zombie, but my problem with Rob has always been that he incorporates too little original content into his own movies with no new spin or take on the subject matter.   It’s not hard to surmise that people are afraid of clowns (It), freaky weirdo rednecks (Deliverance), sadistic, cannibalistic families who torture and chop people up (Texas Chainsaw Massacre).    Zombie also has an unfortunate tendency to keep casting Sheri Moon Zombie, his wife, in his movies.   Moon’s Baby Firefly is never truly scary; she’s simply so annoying you wish you could reach through the screen and smack her.   Bill Moseley as the never-washed and ranty Otis is wonderful, but when you pair him with Moon, it’s obnoxious.

While House of 1000 Corpses is notable for the violence, I don’t think Zombie’s learned the element of leaving an audience in suspense or building tension.   Every scary thing about House of 1000 Corpses is the bloody messes the Firefly family leaves in their trail; the far more abysmal The Devil’s Rejects, which is the sequel to this one, relied too much on Otis and company torturing innocent folks to get the audience scared.   (The Devil’s Rejects, it should be noted, bothered me so much I only got through 20 minutes of the movie.)

I like Zombie a lot; I think he’s a person who genuinely loves horror movies and knows a fantastic amount about them, but I don’t think he’s mastered quite how to make them on his own without borrowing liberally from the men who came before him for inspiration.

Ah, it’s a fish…monster….thing!

Here’s my issue with The Host: what I saw, I really liked and what I heard, I did not.    The Host is pretty much about a gigantic fish-monster … thing spawned by scientists dumping toxic chemicals into a river that makes with the roaring and the rampaging one fine day.   The survivors start coming down with a virus (or do they?) as one family struggles to find a member that they thought was dead – but really isn’t.

Since I was knocking together bookcases, I put The Host on the dubbed version since I was trying to multi-task.   It’s really never a good sign when one of the voice actors does an impression of Officer Barbrady from South Park for a cop voice.    I think that I missed out on a lot by not reading the subtitles and listening to the normal voices, but what I saw I liked.   It’s fun and a little frenzied, if at times sorta forced.

Although…fish monster?   Really?

A bunch of women go spelunking only to discover uncharted horrors!

So, things I have learned from The Descent:

• Don’t ever go spelunking in caves;
• If you do, bring extra knives, maybe a gun;
• If you spot some creepy, blind cave dwellers – run, don’t ask them for directions;
• DO NOT GO SPELUNKING WITH ANYONE NAMED JUNO;
• The Descent 2 shouldn’t even be in existence if we’re going with the “real” ending here;
• Be prepared if you are in a group stranded in an extreme situation that strikes you as the kind of place Bear Grylls would explore on camera for one or more of your friends to go batshit insane.

I think the worst part of The Descent isn’t the creepy crawlers; the film would’ve worked properly and efficiently if they hadn’t been included, with all respect.   The extreme sense of claustrophobia and of being hopelessly lost is frightening enough.   The breakdown between the members of the group and how they react to such a situation is even more frightening.   The crawlers, actually, are just the icing on the cake, so to speak.

It’s that classic tale of boy meets girl, unless you count the girl being a crack science reporter and the boy being a semi-mad genius obsessed with teleportation.

Seth Brundle is a researcher working on how to make teleportation work.   Veronica Quaife scents a story in Seth Brundle; she follows him back to his lab and he shows her these nifty two telepods he’s been working on.  After some arguing, the two agree that Veronica can hang around and cover one of the greatest scientific achievements ever.   It soon becomes more than that, though, and Seth and Veronica’s communication problems soon cause Seth to get drunk and make a very, very bad decision.

I’d say that accidentally teleporting yourself with a common housefly is a very large problem, especially when you combine with the fly at a molecular level with a human to create Brundlefly.   Ick.

David Cronenberg remade the fly from a hokey ’50’s sci-fi flick (come on, the scientist’s head was practically pasted onto a fly’s body) into a much more modern retelling of the horrors that can be achieved through science and arguably what it means to be human.    While it’s gory, sure, Cronenberg never uses violence for violence’s sake (Rob Zombie, we’ll get to you later); instead, he uses it when necessary.   … And let’s face it, Goldblum’s transformation into the fully realized Brundlefly, with his half-fly, half-human body and all the changes he has to make to get there, is going to be gory no matter what

Creepiest moment: Has got to be, hands down, Brundle’s collection of body parts that have fallen off which he stores in his medicine cabinet.   Yuck.  Either that or Goldblum’s semi-deranged rant about taking a dip in the plasma pool.

Scariest moment: I can never, ever, ever hear about someone having a baby without picturing Geena Davis giving birth to a glo-worm.

Imagine that thing, sans the cutesy face and nightcap.   OH, THE HORROR OF IT ALL.

I love The Fly.  It’s got a lot of moments of genuine horror and suspense, as well as one of the weirdest performances Goldblum has done.      It’s definitely not one of the weirdest movies David Cronenberg has done (Oh!  David, let’s be BFF just for The Brood!) but I think, one of the best.   It’s a good fright flick that’s watchable just for the scares or if you want, for the ethical and moral questions it raises.

The ones I didn’t own, I went and bought today:

• The Fly (Remake);
• The Stepford Wives (original);
• House of 1000 Corpses;
• The Descent;
• REC;
• The Shining;
• The Host;
• Drag Me To Hell;
• Return of the Living Dead

We’ll start on the 30th as soon as my installer from the cable company shows up and gets everything all set up.

Uh… it’s like candy coated vampire lore?

Visually speaking, Dracula is a feast.   It’s beautifully lit and bathed in an aura of Victorian sensibilities drenched in crimson and black.    It has some stunning old-school sequences like in the beginning, where a beautiful opening montage explains how Dracula came to be a vampire.   The costumes are gorgeous; the sets are immaculate.

It’s too bad someone didn’t foist the same care upon the story.   What starts out as a feast becomes some sort of sugary confection, like eating a really long-lasting Starburst or something.

For all its pretty trappings, Dracula is threadbare as a movie.   We’re all familiar with the plot so I won’t rehash it here, but Dracula rests on Gary Oldman’s shoulders.   He does a remarkable job of injecting some measure of humanity and sympathy into a devilish beast, so snaps for you, Gary.    Anthony Hopkins shows up as Van Helsing to basically do a crazy old man jig all the way through the movie – watch Dracula and tell me he doesn’t look half-drunk.   No, it’s the appalling mix of Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder that finally does the movie in.   Bless him, Keanu’s out of his depth in this one.   I’m pretty sure everyone knew it too; I don’t get the sense he’s helped any by direction or editing in the slightest.    A cringe-inducing attempt at an English accent sinks his already abysmal performance.   I adore Keanu, as we’ve previously established, but to watch Keanu try and play a naive man addled and terrified by Dracula is to feel embarrassment for him.

Winona Ryder has small moments of clarity, but Mina Harker is so braindead I’m not sure what Ryder could do except stand around and look pretty and/or horrified.   Since Mina is supposed to be the reincarnation of Dracula’s long dead wife, you have to wonder if Dracula loves her in spite of the fact that she’s a dim bulb or because of it.   Either way, my God, she gets tiresome quickly.

Much like in life, pretty can only carry you so far.    While Dracula starts out entertaining and moving, it loses steam in such a rapid fashion it leaves the viewer sucking on sugar for the next interminable hours.

Yea, verily, it’s like the cinematic equivalent of a damn Everlasting Gobstopper:   it feels like it’s never going to end.   And when it does, blessedly, you’re struck with the feeling that such a visually inspiring piece of film should at least have an equally moving story to match.

As they say:  no dice here.   … And it’s a shame.   But I enjoy watching it if only for all the neat visuals and beautiful sets.

A guilty pleasure?   Oh, sure.   Not one of Coppola’s finest cinematic achievements, though.