Year End Movie Notes

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane — SPOILER ALERT — This was horror flick of sorts, I guess… I don’t really know how to classify it.  A girl comes back from summer break looking better than ever and has all the boys in school lusting after her.  She gets invited to a party to which she brings her best friend Emmet who happens to be an unpopular anti-social type.  Emmet convinces the drunken host to jump from the roof of his house into the pool to impress Mandy but this ends in tragedy.  It also ends in a broken friendship, or so we’re led to believe.    Mandy befriends the popular crowd and ends up going with a group of friends (Red, Bird, Jake, Chloe & Melissa) to Red’s ranch for a weekend of partying under the loose supervision of a ranch-hand named Garth.  Mandy fights off the advances of all the boys but falls madly in lust with Garth the moment she lays eyes on him.  Long story short: Emmet shows up and starts killing the kids one by one, a fact we’re exposed to by victim #3 (Bird).  Chloe and Mandy are the last two standing, and as Emmet chases Chloe back to the house she’s met by Mandy, whom we’re led to believe is helping Chloe but in actuality stabs her in the chest with a knife.  And there’s the twist: Mandy and Emmet never stopped being friends!  In fact they hatched this crazy scheme to kill all the popular kids and then kill themselves in a twisted murder-suicide pact.  Somewhere along the line Mandy changed her mind though and ends up killing Emmet and saving Garth and we’re left with her driving a wounded Garth to safety in an old Jeep with the terrifying smirk of a teenage sociopath on her face.

Watchmen — I desperately wanted to see this movie after initially seeing the trailer for it.  I love superhero flicks and this one looked like it would be up there at the top of them.  The movie itself didn’t deliver what the trailer promised.  First of all, it starts really slow, like really really slow!  Once the momentum does build we’re met with a lackluster plot that’s as confused as it is boring.  Millions have to die to save billions and an innocent ‘man’ gets pegged as the enemy but in the end world peace isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.  The few action scenes that were in the movie were well-done but other than that I was bored.  It’s a 3 hour flick and it doesn’t provide any of the stuff that you hope for when you’ve committed to sitting in one place for 3 hours.  I never read the graphic novel so I don’t know how closely it follows it, but I can imagine that if I had read the comic, I’d have been disappointed with the big screen adaptation of it.  And what was with the alternate USA reality set in 1985 with Nixon as president and constant 1940s film noir type shots?  It didn’t really work well.

Zombieland — Zombieland is a spoof of sorts on the entire genre of zombie flicks which are really spoofs in and of themselves.  But this isn’t the annoyingly obvious spoof like the parody films Not Another Teen Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, or Disaster Movie, nor is it a serious type of zombie film like we’re used to seeing from George A. Romero where under the surface there’s always a subtext of social critique.  No, this is a flick that tells the audience that killing zombies is serious business, extremely dangerous, and fantastically fun all at the same time.  We follow a kid named Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) around and listen to his many rules for surviving in a post-apocalyptic Zombieland, rules which are hilariously funny, yet so sensible that you’d be an idiot to not follow them if you found yourself in a similar situation.  For example, we’re told to “double tap” the zombies, i.e., make sure they’re dead by shooting them in the head after we’ve already gotten them down.  Your life is worth a lot more than the cost of that extra bullet you should be putting in the zombie’s head.  Or how about buckling your seat-belt?  You’d be surprised how useful this can be if you find a zombie in your backseat and you need to crash the car to send it flying out through the windshield.  But I digress.  Columbus meets up with Tallahassee (played by Woody Harrelson, a comedic genius I might add) and they proceed on a zombie killing journey that brings them into contact with con-artist sisters Little Rock and Wichita and eventually lands them at Bill Murray’s mansion for a short stop before they take their final stand at Pacific Playland.  Bill Murray’s cameo was brilliant.  He’s as funny as he’s ever been!  Harrelson and Eisenberg play off one another beautifully and there’s as many laughs in this films as there is action, which is to say that there’s a lot of both!  I couldn’t recommend this movie highly enough.

And that’ll do it for the movies I’ve seen in 2009.  My next post about movies will inevitably come in the new year.  So Happy New Year to one and all!

B”H