I watched V/H/S 1 and 2 just in time for Halloween, so I’m going to lump them together and talk about them in one post.

V/H/S is a anthology horror series that uses found footage as its hook. There are 5 stories that are linked together by the over arcing story that some lowly crooks are hired by someone to break into a house to steal a VHS tape. They walk into way more than they could have ever imagined. It’s basically a rip off of The Ring set up, but the real meat and potatoes of the movie is watching the VHS tapes that are found. The stuff in the house with the crooks is really paint by the numbers stuff, so it works out well as a whole. There’s only one story I didn’t like and that was the rip off of Friday the 13th. Much like why I don’t like the over arcing story bit, this run of the mill slasher tale does nothing new and has the worst SFX in the whole movie. That’s like the 4th story and thankfully the first one shown is much stronger so it doesn’t disappoint up front. I think my favorite one was the Halloween party that starts out innocent and descends into haunted madness in great ways. The ones I liked have interesting set ups and surprises and are generally well made. V/H/S is an fun movie that uses the old Tales From the Crypt ethos that was always fun to watch. It mixes in the found footage gimmick to make it more contemporary and cohesive as a package (found footage is really hard to do well too, so it’s a huge challenge). The only recent movie I can think of like this is Trick R Treat which came out a good 5 years ago (and is very good too).

V/H/S 2 runs with the baton that the first hands off. Two Private Eye’s hired to find a woman’s son go to his house and go in looking for clues to where he’s gone. The same set up of multiple TV’s with stacks of VHS tapes are found…

The sequel uses the same found footage presentation but the collection of stories are much stronger as a whole. There are 4 and I found the first one “Phase I Clinical Trials” to be the weakest. In it, the main character has an experimental eyeball surgically implanted after losing his natural eye in a car accident. It’s really predictable and rather cliché, but it was done well so it was fun to watch. There’s a cool zombie tale in here, that boasts some great make up work. Then “Safe Haven” which is directed by the great Gareth Evans (The Raid) which is a fantastic short horror piece…until the end. It’s so well done and crazy, but there is a creature that they overstepped in using. It’s introduction is great, you get a glimpse of it in action shortly after mixed in with an harrowing and intense chase scene and then the final time they show it, it looks TERRIBLE. So fake and goofy looking that it takes all the fear away. So much so, that those last 20 seconds almost ruins everything they worked to accomplish. Now the last story “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” might be my favorite short, in any genre, that I’ve ever seen. It takes place at a house on a lake where the kid’s parents go away for the night/weekend and the kids invite their friends over and have a good time. I can’t get over how much amazing stuff they pulled off. Huge props to director Jason Eisener and co-writer John Davies. It’s really well thought out and paced perfectly. The cast is great and believable and the audio and visual work completely sells the madness and horror the kids go through. I was blown away when it ended.

In addition to having better stories, even the P.I. set up I didn’t care about had a great pay off in its last segment. The final gore gag is crazy and looks amazing, a really great pay off. If they can keep the quality going up, I’d be totally down for a part 3. Don’t watch the trailer for this! It gives away way too much.

It’s taken director Alfonso Cuaron and his crew close to 5 years to make Gravity and the time and effort was well worth it. It’s a stunning movie from start to finish. An exhilarating movie with mind bending visuals, raptureous audio and genre leading acting from Sandra Bullock.

While on a space walk to fix the Hubble Telescope, Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) get caught in a chain reaction disaster that leaves them alone in a exhausting fight for their lives. They must depend on each other to survive the most inhospitable environment imaginable.

The visionary work in direction and technical effects make Gravity one of the most visually stunning movies ever made. To the point, it looks like the movie was actually filmed in space. The 3D is done just right, it often achieves the “window effect” where it looks like the movie screen is actually a window you are looking through with the action happening beyond it. There’s depth to what you are looking at. From the shots of tools floating in front of Ryan while Matt buzzes around her with his jet pack as she works to the absolutely unbelievable of Ryan spinning alone through space are just amazing. The latter scene of Ryan alone in particular is really arresting as there is nothing but space around her. With the 3D it looks like she is actually getting further and further away from you sitting in the theatre. Each time she spins around you can see her face lit up by the lights in her helmet, but with each rotation she gets smaller, her face harder to make out with the endless void of deep space and stars stoically shimmering all around her. It looks like she’s just seconds away from being swallowed into oblivion. It’s a frightening scene of complete isolation that is absolutely convincing. The phenomenal sound work completes the illusion of bringing you into space, watching these two trying to survive. The music (and lack of music) is just perfect, the sound effects are immensely engrossing.

While the movie stars Bullock and Clooney, this really rides on Bullock’s shoulders and she does a damn good job. I wouldn’t call myself a fan of hers prior to this, but I think this is the best work of her career. Once the movie started, I only saw her as Ryan Stone. You get to know her as things go from bad to worse which makes you empathize with her. Clooney as Matt holds the senior position (this mission is his last one) and offers a cool, confident and funny relief to the crushing intensity that surrounds the movie. It’s a great balance that works very well with these two actors.

I really loved seeing this, Cuaron is one of my favorite directors and his work is simply stunning here. He devoted a big part of his life to this project and it really shows. The long, single takes are mindboggling. The camera moves beautifully and with clear purpose at every moment, the man is simply one of the best in the world. Gravity is a front runner for movie of the year, let alone action movie of the year. I hesitate to call this sci-fi as it is pretty grounded in today’s tech and science knowledge. It’s easier to call an action-suspense thriller than anything else. I highly recommend going to an IMAX 3D showing if possible as it greatly uses all that wacky tech to its fullest.. At the very least you need to go to a theatre with a fantastic sound system. Strap in and enjoy the ride.

I’m a casual fan of the Iron Man movies. I think they are grossly overhyped despite Robert Downey Jr. being a great Tony Stark. The films would be nothing without him.

Iron Man 3 fixes one of my biggest complaints with this series, the action scenes. They’ve all been teases until this movie. It’s like once something great was happening, the fight ended. Here, the action scenes last more than 35 seconds and are really satisfying. The plane rescue is a real knockout and they came up with some really wild in-suit, part-in/part-out suit action that was really inventive. Special FX remains top of the line ILM work, they make knock out stuff that integrates so well with practical work.

I real surprise for me was how little Iron Man is actually in this. It’s all Tony. He’s full bore IM for a small percentage of the movie. There’s a really great story arc for Stark here where he is suffering from PTSD from the events in Avengers He’s a real mess in the beginning. he goes through even more terrible stuff (which his ego asked for) and at the end he’s much more than a guy in a really expensive suit. He IS Iron Man.

Solid villain work here too (something IM 2 completely botched), with great set up, villainous follow through and a good amount of scenery chewing.

But there is a ton of suspend your disbelief logic and physics here. They acknowledge it at times, but it’s ridiculous. The same people that moan about Batman surviving huge falls and getting back to Gotham in a day better be crossing their arms at the nonsense pulled off here too. At one point the parts of his suit fly to Stark over 800 miles in maybe 2 minutes. That basically requires time travel to work. But I digress, it’s still a good movie and easily the best Iron Man.

Life of Pi’s story is framed in the smartest of ways: a person retelling an experience to another. A beautiful film in it’s visuals, pacing and meaning, Life of Pi is one of my favorites I’ve seen all year. In fact, I regret not seeing it in theatres as the rich visual element (and from what I’ve heard leading 3D cinematography) probably would have made me enjoy it even more.

In his travels, a writer is told by a man that he knows someone that could tell him a true story that would make him believe that God is real. With a pitch like that, who wouldn’t want to hear that story? The writer tracks down Pi Patel and sits down with him to hear a harrowing story of adventure, loss, acceptance, power and discovery. As a teenager Pi and his family were on a large tanker sailing across the Pacific ocean from India to Canada to start a new life with their zoo animals. One night a massive storm sinks the boat and only Pi, a zebra, a orangutan, a hyena and a Bengal tiger survive.

It’s a fanciful story, much like Noah’s Arc where the resiliency and growth of the human spirit is demonstrated. At sea for weeks with only the tiger, animal and man end up depending on each other to survive. There’s a lot of metaphors and hidden meaning in Pi’s tale, one that I think is brilliantly told in just under two hours. The reveals at the end were great and masterful and a lot goes to director Ang Lee on his careful and gentle eye to tell this epic story. Often intense and deeply touching, I think this is a movie for the ages.

Life of Pi reminds me of Tim Burton’s Big Fish which is another beautiful example of how the myths and stories made by man often carry the most weight through generations because they are so colorful and poignant no matter how old you are. Life can be difficult and dark, sometimes dressing things up can make it easier to comprehend. Learning doesn’t come from just step by step manuals where everything is laid out for you.

Years ago I was given Life of Pi to read. I gave it a try but for some reason I didn’t make it far in. Was a too young? Too disinterested? Too distracted? I can’t say for sure, but I think now is the time for me to give it another go.

Now You See Me is a really good, bad movie. It’s in my wheelhouse, I love heist movies. It’s a new twist on heist movies which gives the movie a few more points from me as well. The thieves are master illusionists! So you have the combination of theft and magic, but the problem is you can’t mix magic like this with a Hollywood movie. All the major tricks come down to the explaination of “that’s computer generated”.

The magic of magic is seeing something unbelievable happen in front of you and it looks completely legit. You struggle to figure out the trick. When people are disappearing, floating around or throwing clearly digital objects, that needed suspension of disbelief is gone.

That’s not to say the actors aren’t doing any slight of hand, it’s just that the pay offs of the big “illusions” don’t hold any weight because so much was done in post production. You see three major heists and the main beats of how they were done are explained. Clearly a lot of consultation from magicians was done as the planning and complexity of the illusions are great and plausible (there’s a lot of built sets, forced perspective, misdirection, mirrors and the like shown) but there’s always that “computer generated” out for everything (the giant mirror used for one of the heists is broken and it’s clearly CG).

Even as I could never get passed all of the above, it’s still a fun movie that I enjoyed. The Feds chase after a group of illusionists (dubbed The Four Horseman) who steal money in their live performances and give it away to the audience. It’s a wild concept, taking bank heists and Robin Hood to a new level. The cast is good, although Jesse Eisenberg falls into his Social Network smarmy act and while Dave Franco is pushed to the back for the most of the movie, he gets far and away the best action set piece. Morgan Freeman is also Morgan Freeman, not sure why they wanted him to play himself.

The reveal at the end of the movie is more of a shoulder shrug than a twist. I don’t think it was necessary. You could have had that character be known from the start and change the beginning of the movie to accommodate that and you’d wind up with a better movie in the end. There is a set up for a sequel and there has been industry talk of one…despite all the complaining I’m doing, I’d watch it.

I’ve back logged a few movies, so let’s tee em up and knock em down.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation- Everything a sequel should be. Really well done, fixes the problems of the first and pays a lot of homage to the franchise. Dwayne Johnson keeps cementing his action hero career, he really is one of the best in the buisness today. He carries this movie on his gigantic shoulders. Let’s be real here: G.I. Joe is dumb. It always has been and always will be. It’s a popcorn movie, so if you go into it looking for that, you’ll like it. It’s got guns, marines, tanks, ninjas, choppers, a doomsday device and over the top action scenes and villains. The ninja cliff fight is a real stand out. I don’t think it’s ever been done before and is really well visualized. Complaints are for the terrible soundtrack, Bruce Willis just rolls through his screen time, I have no idea why they cut him a big check to be in this. Easily replaced. And RZA. I’d like to know who invited him. His terrible make up matched his role.

Snow White and The Huntsman- Everything is really dark these days, isn’t it? I think this is the first time I’ve ever scene Kristen Stewart look like she didn’t want to drop dead on the spot. The visuals are really striking, but nothing really stuck with me afterwards. Except Charlize Theron, she’s awesome in everything she does. This flick is pretty paint by the numbers, it follows the fairytale closely, adds it’s own unique visual elements and makes Snow White the leader of an army at the end. Oh and she’s put to sleep for like an hour, much like I was.

Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox- Warner Brothers rules. The animation partnership they have with DC is just the best. Every single movie they put out is awesome, I look forward to every release no matter who is the star. Paradox is all about The Flash and this is such a great story that it made me a fan of The Flash. Before watching this I was pretty luke warm on him as a character. Now, it does help that Batman was a big part of this, but it’s a testament to how cool The Flash can be (Geoff Johns is one of the best comic writers working today). This tale goes into some wild revisionist time traveling that is brilliant in its ideas and execution. WB gives the DC guys the resources to make their best stories come to life and should be commended for it. Check this out!

Four Lions- Wow does this comedy go to some dark places! This is a daring movie in it’s concept and is a tremendous achievement in that it works. Four Lions is a British movie about a young group of Islamic Brits who are going for the full jihad. Yes, this movie focuses on suicide bombers. This is such a taboo subject, but the wit and irony in the writing is really something to behold. The cast really sells it, so kudos to them especially. This flick pulls no punches, it makes you feel uncomfortable and it makes you think and there are some truly hilarious moments from start to finish. This came out in 2010 and I don’t think that many people know about it.

Super straight forward movie review for me on this one: I loved Silver Linings Playbook. The story of two completely messed up, completely lost and lonely people who come together at their recovery phase.

Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are simply brilliant as Pat and Tiffany. The dialog is perfect, honest and so well delivered that they feel and act like believably broken people. Their chemistry together is remarkable and I even liked Robert De Niro as Pat’s father (whenever I see De Niro in a recent movie, I usually can’t shake the ‘there’s De Niro!’ reminder. Same with Al Pacino.) They even got Chris Tucker to come out of hiding for a fun little role!

It’s a touching movie that looks at mental illness and relationships that left me feeling like I watched on of the best movies of the year. I thought there were a few odd camera shot choices (really abrupt and dramatic zooms) that distracted me, but SLP deserved all the attention it got for the 2012 awards season.

Elysium is writer/director Neil Blomkamp’s second movie. That name alone meant I was going to see it. District 9 is arguably the best sci-fi movie released in the last decade, so I had high hopes for Blomkamp’s follow up. What I got was a good, but not great movie.

District 9 was a real breath of fresh air. It was really original, it came out of nowhere, had fantastic no name actors and looked insane for having a small ($30 million) budget. District 9 is just awesome. I can’t fault much of anything on a technical level for Elysium. Many of those high standards carried over from D9. In fact, Sharlto Copley is in this film and he’s done a huge character shift. In D9 he was the nobody turned reluctant hero through horrific circumstances. In Elysium he is a fantastic villain, the rabid merc Kruger, chasing down the hero Max (Matt Damon). Damon is great in this too, he’s proven he can pull off action the Bourne series and he makes for a likable hero.

Story wise, I found Elysium to be too predictable and heavy handed. In 130 years, Elysium is a space station that holds the incredibly wealthy. Earth is more or less dying out. Pollution is choking it out, the human population is way too high to be sustained by what’s left. Elysium is Eden, a floating utopia with amazing healthcare. It’s kinda silly how awesome it is. The people in charge of Elysium do all they can to keep the undesirables out. Back on Earth, Max gets seriously sick from work and has 5 days to get to Elysium for a cure.

Now my problems. You can see every step of where this movie goes before it happens. There’s not much finesse going on here. The message that all humans are equal is made early and made often. It wisely avoids going for a “us vs them” wealth inequality or immigration and focuses on healthcare. People don’t need to die in the streets for any reason when a solution is there. But the movie never let’s that sit and keeps reminding you every 20 minutes. Plus, the healthcare McGuffin Machine is a real Messiah like device. The thing can do anything with just a few sweeps of a laser. Lay down in this thing and it can heal anything as long as you aren’t brain dead or your heart is missing from your body. The movie shows us a world in 130 years that we’ve completely mastered our biology and it feels too sci-fi perfect because the machine is so simple. No matter what it is, blood disorders, genetic diseases, broken bones, body reconstruction, it just takes a wave of a wand to cure.

While I was hoping for more, I still liked Elysium quite a bit. Definitely one of the better movies released this summer, it stands as a really good sci-fi movie. The future tech is really well visualized, it looks and sounds great and the action is really striking. Held down by a capable cast, Elysium is a movie to see.

The Man with the Iron Fists is RZA’s love letter to kung fu movies. It’s a hell of an achievement too! He fell in love with kung fu movies when he was 9, infused the culture into his rap group The Wu Tang Clan and made it all the way to China to direct a major motion picture he co-wrote.

The story goes that a shipment of gold is heading through the Jungle Village. Rival gangs, assassins and the government clash over the gold where the local black smith is caught in the middle. His only goal was to make enough money to escape the area with his girlfriend, but the new leader of the Lion gang puts an end to that. A classic tale of revenge and justice mixed with flying fists and feet.

RZA touches on all the classic step stones of the old kung fu flicks, monks, meditation, cool weapons, wire work, fights a plenty, elaborate and gorgeous costumes, super powerful villains and characters with awesome names (Jack Knife, Poison Dagger, Madam Blossom, Lady Silk).

If you like kung fu movies, check this out lickity split. There’s some solid action, if a bit too quick cut, but there’s a lot of great ideas and love on display here. Congrats to RZA on making his boyhood dream come true.

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Huntersis a spin on the Grimm’s fairytale. Hansel and Gretel are woken up by their mother and father in the middle of the night. Their father takes them out to the woods for a unknown reason where they are separated. They kids stumble upon a house made of candy where they get trapped by a witch with some serious ill intent. But the kids fight back and kill the witch, which starts their career as which bounty hunters!

Jump forward many years and the brother and sister are really good at what they do. They have custom weapons, they’ve become knows as the go to people for village witch problems. The next hour or so of the movie is a romp to stop a devious witch plan to sacrifice 12 children so that they can become immune to fire, making these witches even more dangerous.

It’s a cool monster movie. These are some vicious witches, they each have their own unique design and are dispatched in different ways, The weapons Hansel and Gretel have a really cool, the fights are creative and mostly well done (a lot of fast editing), the effects are very good too (the emphasis on making explosions extra shrapnel-y for the 3D is tiresome and gross though). Edward the Troll is one of my favorite movie creatures now. It’s actually like the witch version of Blade; comic book fantasy.

Good cast and story that’s set up nicely for a sequel. It’s rated R for violence and language, both of which seemed to be in there to try and make it edgy. The gore fits considering what’s going on and there are good moments in there (decapitations, quartering, full body explosions) the cursing always felt out of place to me. Great rental for a rainy day.

The To Do Listis in the high school coming of age genre. Here, it’s 1993 and Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza) is the class valedictorian and feels pressure to become more sexually experienced before college starts. She takes it on like it’s an AP course. She writes a To Do list with different colored markers, looking up terms that she doesn’t know. It seems like everyone she knows is more experienced than her, so she turns to her two friends, her older sister and even her mother to get advise on how to make her love life blossom.

It’s a funny movie that is way more raunchy than I thought it was going to be. Some of the stuff you see Aubrey do stands right next to the most notorious stuff that the American Pie movies did. The cast is great, I really liked the 90’s setting and it felt like an honest view of sexuality from a girl’s perspective. Sure things are ramped up to set up and follow through on jokes, but I really enjoyed it. I can’t really think of anything I didn’t like (actually, the last joke wasn’t necessary). It was really well made. Perfect run time, good editing and direction, lots of references and homages. This movie snuck out, I don’t think many people know about it. I think it’ll catch a big audience when it’s released to home viewership.

The original Evil Dead came out in 1981 and is a sacred cow of the horror genre. It pushed the genre at the time, was made with nothing but sweat, blood and passion and started more than one long lasting career in the industry. Two more sequels came out over a few more years and then nothing. People have been bugging Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell to make another one ever since. Last year, a remake was announced which raised a few eyebrows.

With the release coming up, I re-watched the original to refresh myself and keep a better eye on what new vision the new kids had come up with. Now, I think this 2013 movie is one of the more successful horror reboots (John Carpenter’s The Thing and 2004’s Dawn of the Dead topping that list for sure). This new movie respects the original while going into new directions that make it stand on its own. It’s not an exact retread of the same material, but a new extension of it.

Evil Dead helped make the ‘cabin in the woods’ horror trope and the remake sticks with that. They use the set up that Mia is addicted to heroin and her friends (one is a nurse) and her estranged brother bring her up to an old family vacation cabin to detox. They’re gonna keep her there for a last ditch effort to get her clean as she nearly overdosed on her last bender. It’s a weird set up that I can’t make up my mind if I like it or not. It does work as in I could see someone actually doing this thinking it would work. Plus it has the added bonus of explaining the early paranormal events as, “she’s crazy from the dope with drawl, she’s having fits and we just have to ride it out with it.” So that adds to the audience tension as the movie slowly and steadily slides down a hill into hell on Earth. But on the other hand it just seems like a crummy idea to think that it’d be okay for someone to detox away from professionals, aside from one person who says they know what they’re doing. Someone might end up dead just from that, never mind waking the evil dead that hangs out over there.

Now, for he actual evil, the book of the dead is used again (it has a different cover though). It’s found in the basement under shady circumstances and of course an idiot has to read the incantation that lets demonic evil out to possess the living. This is probably my biggest complaint, as Eric goes through some extra leg work to read the text. In the original, it’s a tape recorder that they find and play back, completely oblivious to what’s on it. The incantation is read aloud and cue horror. Here, there are warnings scrawled all over the book, in English with notes around the horrific pictures. The instructions are even scratched out and Curious Eric rubs them with a paper and pencil to read what was clearly meant to be buried and lost forever. Obviously there would be no movie without this, but the way it goes down makes me nuts. The “Oh, come on!” factor while watching him do it is crazy, but I think that is the point. There’s no way for him to know the devil is actually cracking his knuckles on the other side of the door, only the viewer knows. The 5 actors were all fine, no one really jumped out as me as terrific or bad to me. Although the blonde girl was more of piece of the background until she got possessed, I think she stood around and blinked more than talked in the time she was on screen.

So what follows is madness of the greatest kind. Just like the original, the evil goes after each kid one at a time, possessing one more at each horrific encounter. This movie touches on the infamous moments of the original with the tree and chainsaws, but changes them to make them new and inventive. Plus they came up with some really inventive showpieces which are something to see. The gore effects are really phenomenal with all practical on set work. If they snuck some CG touches, I couldn’t tell. It’s really effective stuff and sits right in line with the spirit of the Evil Dead films as they go wild with the gore and splatter. In fact, I love the way this movie looks and sounds. I’m really impressed with Fede Alvarez’s direction. He’s got a great eye, there’s a lot of awesome camera work and shots that match with the madness. He’s got a few Sam Raimi wood run cams (which is a must) sprinkled throughout, the spooky and tension is often held together with great blocking and camera movement. The end is an absolute scream, they came up with a great finale set piece that makes a new hero for the franchise.

I can see why Raimi and company gave this movie a green light, they trusted these new film makers with their world and it worked. It would be great if this spawned a direct sequel or got Raimi and Campbell the jump they need to bring Ash back one more time for another run through hell. I’m curious to see what someone would think if they saw the remake before seeing the original. Have them see a similar story with the same intentions but with modern movie making techniques compared to the dated visuals of 1981. The suspense of the original is still there, but it looks so crusty and fake, which makes new viewers roll their eyes and dismiss it now.