Here's To You, Meet The Robinsons

I will admit it, I am a complete sucker for animated movies. Cars, Toy Story, Happily Never After, Shrek, that one where John Cusack was a hunchback, I have seen them all and loved most of them.

Meet The Robinsons flew in under my radar, though, and I missed it -- that is, until it popped up on Netflix.


Meet The Robinsons is a Disney movie about an orphan (at this point it would be harder to find a Disney character with two living parents than it would be to repair Mel Gibson's image) who dreams of two things:

1. Inventing great things
2. Getting adopted

And yes, those things are listed in order. Lewis can't seem to get any of his many inventions to work, but just when he is on the brink of a breakthrough at the school science fair, a mysterious man in a bowler hat sabotages and then absconds with his most recent invention, the Brain Scanner. What follows is a wacky trip through time in a mad race to set things right.

When it comes to animation everyone knows that Pixar is the Holy Beast before which all must bow, but the art work of Meet The Robinsons was good, even great. Walt Disney Feature Animation really stepped up its game and, while still cowering in the shadow of the almighty Pixar, did some real quality work.

Visually, the movie is very bright and fluffy, like a neon bunny fresh from the dryer.


And as colorful as the landscapes may be, the characters are even more so. There is no way I could properly encapsulate in words the sheer hilarious weirdness of the characters Lewis meets in the future, but I will sum it up by saying this: there is a giant squid for a butler and Adam West plays a pizza delivery boy.


The thing I love about these computer animated movies is that, even with all the uplifting kiddie crap, there are still a few places where adult humor can slip in, like when a bunch of frogs in suits (don't ask) throw a flying hat (again, don't ask) into the trunk of their black sedan, and we see it land next to a shovel and a tire iron before the frogs close the lid in a menacing fashion. Kids laugh because it is a flying hat and frogs, adults laugh because they know the flying hat is gonna get whacked.

I give Meet The Robinsons 4 stars

Jennifer's Body: A Lesson in Anatomy

Jennifer's Body was great, it really put the teen aspect into teen horror. The story is that Jennifer is the victim of a Satanic ritual gone wrong, and as result, she becomes a sultry demon who must feed on boy meat and it is up to her timid best friend, Anita "Needy" Lesnicky, to do something about it and/or make out with her.


It was like Juno but with blood and a hot lezzy kissing scene. Not surprisingly this freak film was written by Diablo Cody, the same tattooed writer who penned Juno.

The only real problem I had with this movie is the same problem I had with Juno: the dialog is almost too kitschy and clever for its own good. While watching Juno I'd laugh, but some part of my brain would get upset over the fact that no one, teenaged or otherwise, talks with such heavy doses of lingo. Thankfully, all the slang in this movie is relegated to Megan Fox's bitchy ice queen high school character where it can be considered somewhat believable.

This movie is Megan Fox's perfect role. The entire male population has gone googly-eyed over this salty morsel because of her bangin' bod, though in reality her bod is no different than half the other nearly nude starlets in Hollywood; what makes Fox the stuff of wet dreams is her eyes, her eyes that seem to say, "Yes, I will fuck you, but only until House comes on." She IS the slutty girl in high school who slept with everyone except for you and so she really doesn't have to do any acting, which is perfect for her.

I can now, however, effectively end my ogling of her. Sure, I will look at magazine spreads of her and I won't be able to help what parts of my body blood rushes to, but I can no longer see her as anything else but a soulless husk with a pretty shell. If her acting could get any closer to wooden you could easily mistake her for a IKEA's latest stick of furniture.

Her counterpart in the film, Amanda Seyfried, has got some real chops, or at least she does in comparison to Fox. The scenes that Megan can't carry by looking super duper sexified, Amanda holds with talent. She plays a character who has to be strong and vulnerable, frightened and brave, insane and sane at the same time and does so with colors that fly from here to eternity. I hope she can make a career out of this, I really do.

In fact, the entire cast does a great job of going far above the mahogany floor that is Fox's acting. The teenagers act like teenagers, the teachers are teachers. The only problem with the acting is that there isn't more of it from J.K. Simmons (the dad from Juno) and Amy Sedaris (from Strangers With Candy). You have a couple veterans of film with huge talent and they are on and off screen in less than 10 minutes.

Jennifer's Body is a collection of things that are so bad they are good and so good they are great.

867-5309 stars.

Lesbian Vampire Killers: Fuck Team Edward

These days, vampire movies are filled to the fucking brim with brooding, emo, sparkling, vegan jerkoffs. It was nice to see a vampire flick with some real teeth and biting wit.



What Shaun of The Dead was to zombie movies, Lesbian Vampire Killers is to vampire movies.

I laughed the entire time. Between apathetic British best friends, cursing vicars, and cock swords, my guffaws were thick and plentiful.

I can't really say more, you just need to see it. It's fantastic.

5 Stars and a stake through the heart

Inception

Inception is about a band of thieves that slip into your mind while you dream and steal your secrets. At its core it is a heist movie... sort of. This time around, rather than being hired to steal a secret, they are to implant one.

I sat down in the theater and prepared to have my mind thoroughly fucked, but it never happened. The movie talks about mazes a lot, yet the plot is pretty simple. I was expecting a lot of fancy wonder, which there was some of, but not enough. In a movie about dreams, you expect to see stuff in dreams, like, I don't know, an elephant just chilling in the middle of the crosswalk. Last night, I had a dream about a ghost hopping across my ceiling and leaving cartoon style foot prints all over the place. Weird, I know, but it seemed logical at the time. The dreams in Inception are, for the most part, just like reality.

The directing, acting, and writing were all fine, neither outstanding nor terrible except for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who seems to always be awesome.

3.5 stars and some encouragement to wait until DVD

Bitch Slap: B-Movie

Grindhouse cinema
Exploitation films
B-movies

All of the above is what Bitch Slap is: a throwback to the delightfully lurid and vulgar films of yesteryear when a good rack and a bunch of bullets was all you needed on screen.

Three delicious dames are digging in the desert looking for danger. Hel, Camero and Trixie are three boobtastic babes with a plan to rip off the buried treasure of a mob boss, but the more time they spend digging, the more complicated things get.

Writer and director Rick Jacobson (most notably known for his time on The Legends of Hercules) knew what he wanted from this movie and knew how to get it. He wanted to spend a dime but make it look like a million bucks and did so nearly flawlessly.
HOW TO MAKE A MOVIE ON A BUDGET AS I HAVE LEARNED FROM BITCH SLAP

ACTORS
1. Hire whichever professionals you have befriended during your time in the biz (most of the bit parts are played by people who were on the set of Hercules and Xena)
2. When you have to hire someone other than friends, make sure they are unknown. Any past part bigger than a Teen Camper #3 and they may actually know what their time is worth. (Added bonus: being able to claim you "discovered" so and so.)
3. Make sure you cast a bevy of bombshells.


DIRECTOR
1. Do it yourself

WRITER
1. Do it yourself

SETS
1. Greenscreen is your friend but only to a certain extent so make sure you have ...
2. A set in the desert. Why spend money on fake cacti when the earth grows that shit for free?

PRODUCTION
1. Take all that money you saved by hiring no-names, friends, yourself, and by using the scenery God gave you and dump the rest into production values.

I'm serious, aside from the lack of celebrity, there is no real way to tell it apart from a major studio film like Planet Terror or Crank 2, because they have good lighting and REAL cameras. (I swear, the digital camera has been the death of good indie films -- any schmuck with a Best Buy giftcard can get one.) This is the beauty of the modern day B-movie: if something looks tacky, cheap, or fake, it just adds to the overall aesthetic of the feature. In Bitch Slap, you can tell which scenes have scenery done by computer, but you don't much care because it makes the film more fun.

The script is something between Sin City and an episode of the old '60s Batman TV show. It's got the kind of grit you can feel on your teeth but still manages to be silly. The dialogue can get pretty bad, but again, it is supposed to be bad, so why not run with it?

The acting suffers from the same blessing as the writing and cinematography. It's bad, but you knew going in that it wouldn't be good. Still, it is one thing to be a bad actor and another to be a good actor that has convinced you they are a bad actor. It makes their talent hard to gauge but I am willing to give these girls the benefit of the doubt, especially Erin Cummings, who played the red-headed Hel.

If you like big guns, bigger explosions and the biggest breasts, I recommend you watch Bitch Slap.

4 Stars

Also, there is totally a bunch of lesbian scenes