Wednesday, October 26, 2016

San Andreas

Last week I was visiting some friends out of town and when I arrived they were watching a documentary on earthquakes off Netflix. It was playing in the background while we visited and during it I just felt like blurting out, “this kind of makes me want to watch San Andreas again” and both my friends agreed too for being in the mood to witness The Rock kick an earthquake’s ass! San Andreas (trailer) hit last year in 2015 and is a perfect example of a popcorn summer blockbuster.

I am a sucker for over-the-top natural disaster flicks such as Deep Impact and Dante’s Peak being some past favorites of mine. San Andreas ups the ridiculous quotient to a new level, but since it features The Rock as an everyday, mega-jacked-up rescue helicopter pilot with a million dollar smile this earthquake has a foe ready to take it head on! Audiences worldwide agreed as San Andreas ended up being a worldwide box office success.

Of course it would not be a disaster movie without a disjointed family with a lot of history deciding to also come to a boil during this disaster that rocked Los Angeles all the way up to San Francisco. Dwayne Johnson is Raymond Gaines, a divorced father who already lost a daughter in a rafting accident and is trying to reconnect with his other daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario). Raymond’s ex-wife Emma, (Carla Gugino) complicates that by pressuring Raymond to hurry up and sign the divorce papers. One other primary character here is Dr. Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) who is a scientist at CalTech with the latest in earthquake prediction technology being on the cusp of forecasting the disaster that is about to transpire.

In order to appreciate this movie you just have to suspend disbelief and accept you are going to see a lot of crazy stunts and special effects that will definitely get you scratching your head. There are countless “yeah, right!” moments in this film, but once you just roll with them and embrace them you will be in for an awesome ride. If it were any other film trying to get away with this, odds are I would probably dismiss the film right away, but the unbelievable charismatic enigma that is The Rock makes it irresistibly difficult to do so that I cannot help but root for Raymond to overcome every obstacle the earthquake puts in his path so he can rescue and reunite his family!

The background family story is pretty forced and ugly to stomach, but while watching this I felt the producers felt this way too. I got the impression the filmmakers rectified this by hamming up all the campy family moments whenever possible that I could not help but share a million dollar smile with the Rock whenever they transpired, that went doubly so with his “second base” line being absolutely priceless in delivery. Trust me, you will know it when you see it, and only Rock can get away with corny moments like those and turn them into theatrical gold. The special effects and action scenes are top notch from beginning to end and you can tell the filmmakers spared no expense when it came to CG.

Actually, when watching the extras it was surprising the amount of effects that were practical and the filmmakers actually admitting to cutting corners on certain aspects of the film because a lot of their budget went to the pricey CG. I will give props to a certain action shot that was one continuous take for nearly five minutes when Emma gets caught in the earthquake while on the top floor of a skyscraper restaurant that had many intense moments. There is only a half hour of behind-the-scenes extras, but they are well worth watching as they break down these crazy scenes and how they looked shot in raw green screen footage and how they materialized on the silver screen. There is also a director’s commentary with Brad Peyton who does a commendable job for a solo commentary full of many production facts like not being allowed to shoot at the actual Hoover Dam, the filming process in Australlia and many shout outs to the cast members in major and minor roles.

San Andreas is the perfect movie to throw in on a rainy night to enjoy with your family and friends and a big bowl of popcorn. It makes full use of its $110 million budget, and with it raking in $474 million worldwide it came as no surprise a sequel was quickly greenlit and is due out in a year or two. I am eagerly anticipating its arrival and will be there day one with a bucket of popcorn by my side!

Other Random Backlog Movie Blogs

3
12 Angry Men (1957)
12 Rounds 3: Lockdown
21 Jump Street
Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie
Atari: Game Over
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Batman: The Killing Joke
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice
Bounty Hunters
Cabin in the Woods
Captain America: The First Avenger
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Clash of the Titans (1981)
Clint Eastwood 11-pack Special
The Condemned 2
Creed
Dirty Work
Faster
Field of Dreams
Fight Club
The Fighter
For Love of the Game
Good Will Hunting
Hercules: Reborn
Hitman
Ink
Man of Steel
Marine 3 & 4
Mortal Kombat
The Replacements
Rocky I-VII
Running Films Part 1
Running Films Part 2
ScoobyDoo Wrestlemania Mystery
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Source Code
Star Trek I-XII
Take Me Home Tonight
TMNT
The Tooth Fairy 1 & 2
Veronica Mars
Wild
The Wrestler (2008)
X-Men: Days of Future Past

Roseanne - Season 1

Roseanne (1988-97, ABC) is right up there with Seinfeld (1989-98, NBC) as one of my all time favorite TV shows. Both series ran nearly concurrently with each other, with Roseanne starting and ending just a year earlier. In case you are unfamiliar with the show, Roseanne (trailer) is centered around the Connor family being a hard working blue-collar family barely making ends meet, while being constantly at odds with each other for better or worse. A couple years ago I ran across the series bundle set for $20 online and could not pass it up. Over the last several weeks I watched an episode here and there until finishing up the first season a few days ago and the show still holds up remarkably well as it did when I was a kiddo.

I loved the show growing up because when it originally aired I related more with the three Connor children on the show because I was in their age bracket and they were constantly driving each other up the wall like I was with my three siblings I grew up with at the time. Watching this show with a fresh set of eyes nearly two decades after it originally aired at the age of 33 I find myself now just a couple years younger (!) than when the parents Dan (John Goodman) and Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) were when the show first aired so obviously I am leaning more towards their story arcs this time around.

My memories of the show featured a decent split of the episodes focusing on the parent’s and children’s story arcs, but the first season is more 80% Dan & Roseanne being the focus while the kids are primarily background noise with a few occasional episodes of one of them being at the forefront. First season Roseanne took me awhile to get use to because it was well before Darlene (Sara Gilbert) and Becky (Alicia Granson) started dating their significant others that wound up as season regulars in later seasons. Becky more-or-less retained her princess character throughout the show, but we are still a couple seasons away from Darlene and DJ (Michael Fishman) from developing into the super emo/out there characters I remember them as. In the first season they are mostly siblings who are constantly driving each other up the wall, and I absolutely loved watching them drive Dan & Roseanne nuts too.

John Goodman is sublime as Dan, and he was a natural for the hard working father role from the first episode. However, it took Barr several episodes to come into her own on the show. She seemed a little too hostile and aggressive with her wit and tone before dialing it back to a more appropriate level about halfway through the season. In one of the extra feature interviews on the first season, Barr herself stated the exact same thing until she was able to find equal ground with the writers and producers on how to round off her character. I think for covering this TV series when it comes to covering the actual individual season content I am just going to list several things that stood out to me in each season, so here are a few more noteworthy items from the debut season.

-I always associated Roseanne and her sister, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) for working at the traditional diner throughout the show’s history, but in the first season they were manual laborers at a plastics factory. On top of that, their boss was a pre-ER George Clooney who toyed with dating Jackie off and on for the first season. An evil new boss in the season finale led to Roseanne and Jackie quitting the plastics factory.

-I had no idea until I watched the pilot on the DVD that there was originally a different DJ in the first episode. Michael Fishman took over on the very next episode, but the pilot DJ featured a slightly older kid but he retained nearly the same look and essence that Fishburn did for DJ in the first season. Also slightly different in the pilot episode was the theme song before it got altered a bit into the opening theme I grew to love from the second episode on.

-I really dug how most of the episodes take place almost entirely inside the Conner’s home. Every few episodes we would get a couple scenes of Roseanne and Jackie at work, but minus a few other moments throughout the season nearly half the episodes this season take place entirely at the Conner’s residence or at the plastics factory. This may seem limiting to the show at first, but somehow the show made it work and proved that a lot of stuff can go down at home and be damn entertaining in the process.

-We are still a bit off from Dan running his own cycle shop, and in the first season he is an independent contractor working dry wall who has ups and downs throughout the season with good paying gigs and occasional lulls between contracts.

-Standout episodes to me in the first season is when the Conners spend an episode coming together to survive a tornado that hit town and it brought back many memories of my family running amok whenever a tornado warning would occur. The episode where the family is kicking back in a friendly rivalry at the bowling alley hit the right notes with me too because of a lot of friendly rivalry games I had with the family.

-There are a few extras worth watching on the first season. There are new interviews (well from 2005 anyways) with Barr and Goodman who discuss their memories of the show and how they knew they had something special from the start. There is also an excellent blooper reel to round off the extras.

-I was surprised to find myself enjoying the first season as much as I did as I presumed it would take the show a couple seasons before it fully found its footing, but here you can tell that the whole cast was gelling together perfectly by the halfway point of the first season. I am looking forward to keep plugging along with the next seasons.

Past TV/Web Series Blogs

2013-14 TV Season Recap
2014-15 TV Season Recap
2015-16 TV Season Recap
Angry Videogame Nerd Vol 8
Angry Videogame Nerd Vol 7
Mortal Kombat: Legacy - Season 1
RedvsBlue - Seasons 1-13
Seinfeld Final Season
Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle
Superheroes: Pioneers of Television

Saturday, October 8, 2016

Wild

I wish I could get out and hike more often than I do. I have always been a fan of getting lost in nature and my thoughts. The last time I went hiking was about two years ago just a couple months prior to the release of today’s film that happens to deal with hiking. That film is 2014’s Wild (trailer). The film is based on the popular book from a couple years prior by one Cheryl Strayed, who spent over 90 days hiking the Pacific Crest Trail to find herself after suffering a string of personal tragedies.

Just showing Cheryl (Reese Witherspoon) hike for 1100 miles nonstop would not exactly be ideal, so the film makes great use of jump cuts throughout her hike to help detail Cheryl’s past lows such as her and her spouse, Paul (Thomas Sadoski) going through a divorce and losing her mom (Laura Dern) to cancer. The cuts are well timed, usually occurring when Reese is suffering through a somewhat relatable hiccup on the trail. Cheryl meets all kinds of interesting characters along the trail, and we really do not get a chance to get too attached to many of them since the film does a good job at keeping the pace moving. My favorite character I had to include a snapshot of here is when she gets interviewed by a inspiring journalist of an independent magazine, The Hobo Times.

There are a lot of quick, touching moments along the trail for Cheryl that I could not help but get invested in. The one that got me to crack up the most was her attempting to put her “monster” of a backpack on in Wild’s opening. Another notable moment is when Cheryl takes a couple days to rest from the trail when it crosses paths with the town of Ashland. The one big repeating source of conflict of Cheryl’s time on the trail is of her fear of getting assaulted. I remember my initial viewing of the film in the theater and thought they overdid it a bit by constantly coming back to Cheryl getting easily intimidated by nearly every person she encounters. However, I later went on to read the book and found out the film did not take any liberties because that was legitimately how Cheryl felt on the trail.

After reading the book and watching the film a second time, I was pretty satisfied with how the film portrayed the book. The film is just the right length at a little under two hours and did a pretty good job squeezing in as much from the book as possible. The film did not have time to go into detail on every one of her pre-hike personal stories, and some of them are only briefly shown in the film as quick flashes a couple times when Cheryl goes through bouts of nausea on the trail. I was fine with this as you did not want the movie overstaying its welcome. If I had to nitpick a couple of things missing from the book, there are a couple of female hiker friends Cheryl meets and teams up with for parts of the trail, but in the film they only show her conversing with one at a rest stop. A big trail moment exclusively in the book is when Cheryl encounters a bear in a very tense moment, and I would have loved to see how that played out on film because Cheryl did a wonderful job describing her life flashing before her eyes before she miraculously scared the bear off. This is conjecture on my part, but perhaps Reese said absolutely no way to doing a scene with a live bear.

There are a solid amount of extra features on the BluRay of Wild. There is a commentary track with director Jean-Marc Vallee and producers Bruna Papandrea and David Greenbaum. It is worth a listen as the crew gives a lot of fun factoids about filming in nature, and goes out of their way to mention what each major and minor actor brought to the film. There are several minutes of deleted scenes with or without director’s commentary. There is nearly a half hour of several mini-features labeled under the “Promotional Features” category. They all have brief interviews with the cast and crew and while a little informative, they serve as mostly extended trailers with a lot of spots from the movie. I would instead watch the four other extras that also total a half hour, but feature less movie footage and more interviews from the cast, crew and Cheryl herself. Real Cheryl Strayed shows Cheryl revisiting a lot of spots from the trail that were used in the film and is well worth checking out. Real Location is the Best Location is another must-see extra that goes more into detail on filming on the Pacific Crest Trail.

I have to admit I am a little biased when it comes to Wild. As a minor fan of hiking this film hits all the right notes on what I like about hiking, and does a stellar job at staying true to the source material. Additionally, one of my favorite musicians has a small role in the film (I will not spoil who), and I had a chance to briefly talk to him about it at a meet and greet after a concert, and that only helped me like this film even more. So yeah, I may be biased so please pardon me when I say if you are looking for a feel good journey of self-discovery flick, then you absolutely have to watch Wild.

Other Random Backlog Movie Blogs

3
12 Angry Men (1957)
12 Rounds 3: Lockdown
21 Jump Street
Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie
Atari: Game Over
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Batman: The Killing Joke
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice
Bounty Hunters
Cabin in the Woods
Captain America: The First Avenger
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Clash of the Titans (1981)
Clint Eastwood 11-pack Special
The Condemned 2
Creed
Dirty Work
Faster
Field of Dreams
Fight Club
The Fighter
For Love of the Game
Good Will Hunting
Hercules: Reborn
Hitman
Ink
Man of Steel
Marine 3 & 4
Mortal Kombat
The Replacements
Rocky I-VII
Running Films Part 1
Running Films Part 2
ScoobyDoo Wrestlemania Mystery
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Source Code
Star Trek I-XII
Take Me Home Tonight
TMNT
The Tooth Fairy 1 & 2
Veronica Mars
The Wrestler (2008)
X-Men: Days of Future Past