DVD Voice

Last night was fun. Cabin Fever … campers, in the woods, horror, etc. Tonight. Ummm … not so much! Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, is a follow-up to 2002′s Cabin Fever by Eli Roth. This movie is directed by T.I. West – and apparently even he tried to disown it. It has the same contaminated water from Cabin Fever, the same goofy deputy, and the water carries a virus. The similarities stop there. This one was not clever, wasn’t enjoyable and not worth your time to watch it.

It’s a high school, they are having a prom. The school gets a shipment of Down Home Water, the water company who pumps water from Cabin Fever 1′s lake. The kids get to the prom and someone makes punch using the bottled water. Everyone at the prom is carrying a small cup of punch and sipping it. Some people who have had the bottled water earlier in the day are ok all the way until the prom. Others who drink the punch and contaminated water shows symptoms almost immediately. It causes you to forcibly vomit blood and then die. Or lie around painfully watching all your skin swell up and ooze. Then the Feds show up and think it would be a great idea to just lock the school and go inside and shoot everyone. Even after they have chained the front doors, 15 minutes later some kids finally decide to go out the back door which isn’t locked or being watched yet. Ugh.

Like I said – pathetic.

Rated R. 87 minutes (1 hour 27 minutes). Profanity. Lots, because you know its high school kids. Some nudity, for instance topless strippers who are diseased, a couple of butts, and one guy in particular shows everything down below and – well, come to think of it, that is the horror of the movie – makes you want to wash your eyes out with clorox or something. Mostly gorey stuff blood oozing, blood flying, etc. Mercifully the entire movie is short, but not quite short enough.

With the recent release of Cabin Fever 2, I thought it might be a good one to watch, but first I’d like to see the first one of them, so I had NetFlix send out Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever. I believe this was Eli’s first film as a director. I quite enjoyed this – it made for a good Saturday evening entertainment and has me a little stoked that maybe Cabin Fever 2 might be at least partly as good.

Don’t get me wrong, this move isn’t great. It could have been better than it was, but it isn’t bad. It isn’t a typical horror movie, and you figure out what is really going on pretty early. But it does do thing you don’t expect and is entertaining the whole way through. I honestly expected a different kind of cabin fever going in to this – I didn’t read to much about it before hand.

One neat feature is the “Chick Vision” that lets you watch the movie and gray hands will block parts of the movie as you watch it through your fingers. This is for the scarier parts. I would have imagined though that chicks watching this wouldn’t hold their hands up until the scarier parts have already started, but in this feature they start up a little bit early … not totally a bad thing.

Just keep in mind that these guys are camping way out in the middle of nowhere in a rented cabin. The cell phones don’t work and there are all those “eerie” nature noises the city kids encounter. Add on top of this that Eli throws things at you, such as the deer and the dog scenes, will more than likely catch you off guard. Enjoy!

Rated R. 92 minutes (1 hour 32 minutes). Profanity – your typical wild weekend away college kids. You see topless females, but a movie like this kind of felt like it needed a few more – but still, no complaints. Lots of blood and goriness.

Tonight’s movie went into corporate crime, with The Informant! starring Matt Damon in Steven Soderbergh’s film. I must say that I enjoyed it.

Basically it’s a story about America’s top executive to turn whistleblower. He beings working with the FBI about the price fixing going on at ADM. He works with them for over 2 1/2 years getting video and recordings of meetings, but in the end it begins to also appear that he’s embezzling and he gets prosecuted as well.

What’s not to enjoy about this film — the happy-go-lucky bouncy music set against a backdrop of big corporate deals, white collar crimes, FBI agents, and possible jail time, and the while Mark Whitacre goes merrily along seemingly uncaring about the lies he’s telling or when or if they’ll catch up with him. It’s neat to see him just invent (I think) something new when he realizes he’s being discovered and how most of it then checks out, at least for a while. I say “I think” here because he’s so full of stories that you have a hard time really realizing which one of them, if any, are factual. He suffers from bipolar disorder, even as the forged letter from his would-be psychologist states in very specific terms. He must be a brilliant guy to keep all this straight for as long as he did, and that 2 million, no 5 million, or is it 7.5 million? I think it was 9 million, that he embezzled. Maybe it was 11…

Entertaining film! You don’t really learn anything and the drama isn’t really there, its just downright entertaining. So, have an enjoyable evening.

For me, the most sobering thing (aside from the white collar crime, don’t do that) is that in 1992 people with desk jobs were making $100K. When do I get a raise? I’m way underpaid!

Also interesting is ADM’s statement about the movie you can see by clicking here.

Rated R. 108 minutes (1 hour 48 minutes). Why it’s rated R, I don’t know! There is some profanity. No blood, no nudity, no violence aside from the alleged hit in the head by a briefcase.

This weeks sees the release of Cold Souls, a film by Sophie Barthes starring and about Paul Giamatti. It seems that it is possible to extract your soul and store it. So a burdened Paul Giamaitti, who is playing himself in the film, is told about a service that does just that. And to help him do a stage play easier he decides to have his removed and stored. Only thing is that he discovers being soulless is not such a good idea. The service tries to convince him the soul removal has done what was promised he agrees to renting a Russian poet’s soul to help him play the part in a Chekov. It works, but he decides he wants his own soul back — after repeated comments from his wife that his skin felt “scaly” (when he had no soul) to that he smelled different and seemed different after he got the poet’s soul.

Going back to the clinic he finds that his soul is missing … perhaps they shipped it to the warehouse in New Jersey by mistake. Rather than spoil any more, I’ll let you watch it if you desire. I give it a good rating. Once it started I imagined how good I expected it to be, and it didn’t meet my expectations. It was enjoyable and opens more questions if you’ll let yourself think about them.

There is an article on VenusZine about the movie and the director and her ideas behind it.

Questions like: What is our soul? What does it look like? Do we need it? What happens if you “lose” your soul. Is the soul basically good or evil? Can a soul be dried up? Is it really possible to lose your soul? Do emotions or lack of them make up who you are as a person or is it something else? Would you swap souls with someone else to get away from the pain, emptiness, or worries that you think your soul has?

I think it does slightly reinforce the meaning that you should be happy with yourself. That looking back on your life there are lots of good things and good memories and you should relish those and the people who you share your life with.

The quote by David Strathairn who played Dr. Flintstein in the movie is a great one. “Now, have you ever visited the circus and seen one of these creatures standing quietly while tied to a small wooden stick? You see, when the elephant is young and relatively weak, it is tied to an immovable stick. So later, no matter how large and strong he becomes, he continues to believe that he cannot free himself. Many intelligent people are like circus animals. They never question their self-imposed limitations. And the soul can become just such a stick. They need to break the chains.” It is important to break free of those self-imposed limits, you just don’t do it by removing, disregarding, or destroying your soul.

Rated PG-13. 101 minutes (1 hour 41 minutes). Some profanity. Some total female nudity, you just see butt and boobs on a live model at an art studio.

Tonight I took on Amelia, Mira Nair’s biographically based account of some of Amelia Earhart’s adventures. This film stars Hillary Swank as Amelia, Richard Gere, and Ewan McGregor.

I must say, this is a beautiful movie. It’s not 100% true to real life, as few movies — which are entertainment ever are — but as far as what it does do for you it does well. I’m sure we are all familiar with Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, the first one to fly it solo, and who disappears attempting to circumnavigate the globe.

What this movie does show is a woman who knew something she wanted in life, that is to fly. And how the people around her try to ride along on her coattails or use her to get ahead themselves. It’s about how she empowers herself and inspires other women as well as men and children, to dream big and to reach for those dreams. It’s about how her husband discovered that sometimes you can best love someone by letting them be who they are and as he discovered letting someone go to pursue their dreams doesn’t mean you lose them, love is a powerful thing and can bring people back.

And possibly best said by Amelia in this movie, when you have a dream and something you want to do “Don’t let anyone turn you around.”

In short, a beautiful film showing the wonder and spectacle of flight and a entertaining way to spend an evening.

Rated PG. 120 minutes (2 hours).

This Robert De Niro movie, Everybody’s Fine, might be the first De Niro movie I’ve seen without explosions or guns. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting from this one, especially given the title, but I was pleasantly surprised and thought it a good film. Touching. (Also, FYI, it’s a remake of Stanno tutti bene – an Italian film from 1990 by Giuseppe Tornatore).

This is a film about a retired man who has recently had his wife die and has invited each of his four kids to come and visit. They all cancel. So, next best thing he decides to go visit them. Only his first stop in New York to visit his son David but he’s not there. He then goes to Chicago to see Kate Beckinsale and is shuttled over quickly from her (she can’t let him stay, she has a business trip) to his other son Robert (Sam Rockwell). And after an afternoon he’s sent to Vegas because Robert can’t let him stay and he spends a day with his daughter Drew Barrymore.

It’s thought provoking. How everyone goes about saying they are “fine” when in reality things aren’t going as well as they should be. How we lie to each other and to the people in our lives (family) that mean the most instead of being accepting, sharing, and caring. How the kids, and this could be any of us, aren’t open and honest because we have been pressured to be the best we can be and not being “good enough” will disappoint them. It makes you sad how age catches up to us and there’s things we’ve never gotten to do. How kids treat their parents in this busy world and how parents assume sometimes instead of really listen.

In the end, how hard would it be to have a perfect family like that? Yes, people don’t get along and we have our differences, but family is family and that blood should be strong enough to make up for the differences and disputes and let everyone accept each other for who they really are, not who we thought they should be.

If we are honest and share the disappointments and the failures and support each other, even though maybe there isn’t anything we can “do” to help out everyone will still be pretty much fine.

Rated PG-13. 99 minutes (1 hour 39 minutes). A wee bit of profanity.

Tonight we are back on the movie bandwagon. I was doing some midterm work the past few, sorry guys. Ok, so Stump the Band. It’s a horror/”slasher” movie about an all-girl band who goes touring and ends up stranded in the woods with a group of axe murderers after them to satisfy their foot fetish. One of the group pretends he’s a dog and eats dog biscuits and barks, etc.

Why did I watch the whole thing? I can’t say anything much about it except that this might be a good one for a night when your just hanging out, don’t want to watch anything serious and just want to drink the night away. Maybe?

They are going to the next stop in their tour and stop at gas station for gasoline and directions. The creepy attendants give them both. And after a “I’m driving and turned completely around arguing” episode they run off the road. Way off because the driver’s foot gets stuck and he screams “We’re all gonna die!” repeatedly. Hello? Why not use your other foot on the brakes? Or take it out of gear into neutral? They’ve slid to a stop finally inches away from a huge tree. Everyone gets out, argues, and when they are back in the car the driver turns the key a few times and it doesn’t start. “We must be out of gas.” The next day they frantically search for one of the girls who has somehow gotten out of the car without anyone hearing the loud van doors. That turns into the obligatory in the woods at the pond skinny dipping scene. After more arguments they begin to get picked off by the killers who will drag them back to their cellar, estimate the size of their feet and chop them off. (After putting on eye protection first!).

Ok — enough persuasion that you don’t need to see this!

Not Rated. 88 minutes (1 hour 28 minutes). Profanity. Lots of gore/blood – they do not skimp on the red blood color. Female nudity – topless and skinny dippers which is pretty much the high water mark.

I’ve gone back into the 1900s for a movie for tonight. It’s Born of Fire, a film that can just be described as rather weird and seriously un-fulfilling. Peter Firth and Suzan Crowley star in this tale of a musician who is approached by a woman at one of his concerts. She “knows” he’s hearing the same eerie music she is. He needs to go home to see his mother, she gives him a ride. His mother dies, she attends the funeral. She goes home and while driving hears about a volcano erupting in Turkey and “sees” someone attacking her car, so she crashes. She goes home drinks, a black cat is scared of her, she gets a call from Paul, the flutist who she met a couple of days before and he wants to know if she heard about the volcano eruption. She says she’s cold and is going to take a bath but he should come over, she’ll leave the house unlocked. He arrives, she’s standing in front of the tub just staring — she’s seen an image of a dead woman floating in her tub. He tells her she’s cold and puts her in the bath. She tells him he must go to Turkey and find THE MASTER MUSICIAN. She’s back at her observatory job trying to convince her superiors that the eclipse a few days earlier cause the volcano eruption in Turkey. She leaves to prove it. Meanwhile, Paul is looking through ruins and caves to find the master musician, and rounding the corner there she is, staring at the volcano (no instruments with her so that she can verify her claim). She seduces Paul later and a few days later dies giving birth? While a naked cave dweller who shoots fire out of his eyes lurks around them. In the end Paul must save the world by sitting in a circular pool and outplay the crazy master musician on his musical instrument (dueling banjos anyone?).

Anyway, there you have it. Weird! A waste of an evening. The only reason you may want to watch this is to catch some glimpses of Suzan Crowley naked, its the only redeeming thing in here. Oh yes, and this is a horror movie, just fyi on that.

Rated UR. 84 minutes (1 hour 24 minutes). No profanity – very little dialog actually. Nudity – total female nudity and a naked man in the cave who shows everything, except that his artificially wrinkled skin is probably a skin suit so you may just be seeing fake junk – I don’t know, I didn’t look to make sure. Have at it if you want.

Vince Vaughn did a great job in this one, Couples Retreat. This comedy about a couple who feel their marriage is on the rocks wants 3 other couples to go with them on a retreat. Peter Billingsley, of A Christmas Story fame, directs this ensemble movie with Jon Favreau, Kristin Davis, Jason Bateman, and Malin Akerman.

This is a movie that I would have loved to have been a cast or crew member on (heck, I’d like to be that on any movie), but this one, filmed in all sorts of exotic locales – French Polynesia, Bora Bora, Tahiti, etc imagine having to go to “work” there? But beyond the beautiful scenery, if you’ll listen to this movie and follow along with what is going on in these people’s lives, you’ll see people who truly want (or don’t) want to stay together and discover things about themselves. There are timeless truths here as people show how we never really communicate well that people who love each other overlook each other and forget to make sure to tell those around them that they love them and express those feelings. They overlook, they say hurtful things, etc. So listen to what is said, especially some of the things Vince Vaughn’s character says — it does good to hear them. Yes, that’s right, Vince Vaughn, typical funny  man has lots of wise things to say. He just got married recently too.

Also always good to see Jean Reno – except he didn’t hit anyone or blow anything up.

But the movie isn’t without humor. It is good for laughs as well with Vince’s usual witty remarks. Jon Favreau’s back. An epic Guitar Hero battle (or hustle). A therapist telling his patient that “you shouldn’t pull a theoretical gun on your therapist”. Vince Vaughn getting attacked by sharks and living to tell. You can enjoy the evening with humor and have a gently reinforced message that you should be more attuned to the people you love in life – treat them better, be open and responsive to them because they are the best thing in your life.

I didn’t do anything for Valentine’s really, so this is pretty much the closest thing. And it was nice. Now, just get someone to stay along for the ride!

Rated PG-13. 107 minutes (1 hour 47 minutes). Some language. Bunches of swim swear on very shapely females and one big guy’s butt.

The Time Traveler’s Wife had more promise than most. Eric Bana is a “time traveler” he can travel through time, only not at will. He’s found this girl, Rachel McAdams, and spent time over the years going back and building a relationship with her. She sees him as her destiny and has dreamed about him all while growing up. Thing is, that for her the life she ends up with isn’t so great because he will disappear and reappear at odd times and she can never be sure where he is or if she can count on him. Anyway, so her life kind of sucks or it should and yet she can hold up a good game face.

The trouble is that the movie never really goes anywhere, yes it has the beginning and the ending and the tear-jerky parts, but it doesn’t explain why he can time travel or what the genetic mutation is. It doesn’t get into how his doctor is helping him or a glimmer of that kind of hope. It’s just a mix of scenes where he’s going through life and visiting older times or the future.

And the one thing I’d like for him (or any time traveler who might read this) is to bring me some winning lottery numbers! We know time travel exists – I just need a big boost and a couple of lottery numbers – I’d need them spread out over a few years just for safety sake – will do great! Let me hear from you, ok? Thanks!

Rated PG-1. 107 minutes (1 hour 47 minutes). Some violent things happen, a little profanity, and the time traveler arrives wherever he goes naked – can’t time travel with clothes on, it seems, so you’ll see his butt – and also one scene of the cute Rachel McAdam’s.