The Last Kiss
Dir: Tony Goldwyn, 2006, 115′
IMDB Keywords: Remake Of Italian Film, Cheating Wife, Female Rear Nudity, Twenty Something, Stripper
Zach Braff and his group of man-child friends all simultaneously start panicking about the fact that they’re in completely unrealistic relationships with stupefyingly hysterical women and try to run away from their adult lives. Into Braff’s life walks Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Rachel Bilson, who represents his last chance at happiness. This shit is so weak and lazy, they actually have Bilson’s character announce this - “I could be your last chance at happiness.” The Last Kiss is actually a remake of an Italian movie, L’Ultimo Bacio, and the Italian origins are obvious when you examine the movie’s slightly disturbing sexual politics, which just makes you wonder exactly who this movie is supposed to appeal to. It’s too misogynistic for women, and there aren’t enough exploding helicopters for men.
Lost Boys 2: The Tribe
Dir: P. J. Pesce, 2008, 92′
IMDB Keywords: Vampire, Direct To Video, Second Part, Sequel, Number In Title
Apart from Corey Feldman (and the briefest of appearances by Corey Haim), this film has almost nothing in common with the original Lost Boys. To the point that, while watching it, I began to wonder if it wasn’t originally written as a really shitty stand-alone vampire film that would have slipped under everyone’s radar until some hot-shot producer decided to copy and paste lines from Lost Boys and increase their film’s profile that way. The entire film is like some half-hearted attempt at filming some Lost Boys fan-fiction (although the brief glimpse of the fat sax player is a touch of genius). If you’re looking for a good vampire film, watch the original. Or, better still, watch Near Dark instead.
The Signal
Dir: David Buckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry, 2007, 99′
IMDB Plot Keywords: Extreme Violence, Flashback, Poison, Beaten To Death, Loss Of Family
All the best horror movies deal with weird, unexplained shit happening on a large scale. We know this. The directors of the Signal (all three of them) know this, and they want us to know they know, so the film is littered with clever, knowing winks to other films. In the case of the Signal, the weird, unexplained shit is a signal on TV and phones that causes people to go crazy and start murdering other people. Not the most original of set-ups, but to make it interesting the filmmakers ditch the only sane character in the film after 25 minutes and spend the rest of the film concentrating on people who are dealing with actually having gone crazy. A good effort to put a new spin on an old formula, but unfortunately the movie is so wildly uneven, the whole thing ends up looking like an experiment in moviemaking onomatopoeia.
Be Kind Rewind
Dir: Michel Gondry, 2008, 101′
IMDB Plot Keywords: Underpass, Interracial Romance, Camcorder, Steamroller, Power Transformer
A freak accident in a power station has Jack Black accidentally erasing all the videos in Mos Def’s video store, leaving the two to re-create (’swede’) a bunch of movies. Let’s face it, the sweded movies were always going to be the real draw here, but I’d still like to think that it’s possible to present these in a believable way without such a ridiculously contrived setup. Still, despite the best efforts of Gondry’s clunky script, Mos Def’s attempt to mumble his way through an entire movie and Jack Black’s phoned-in performance, the movie manages to come together in the end in an unusually satisfying emotional way. I was expecting a lot worse.
Copyright © 2006-2008 lowbrowculture • Didn't we have some fun, though? Remember when the platform was sliding into the fire pit, and I said 'Goodbye', and you were like, 'No Way', and then I was all, 'We pretended we were going to murder you'. That was great.