Just the Ticket

If you've been following my reviewing career for any length of time, you may remember my review of The Ledge  (for the nostalgic and the noobian alike, here it is ), a movie which came out on home video--uh-oh, must be careful not to date myself; that term hasn't been used since the days before VHS was replaced by the DVD/Blu-Ray combo pack (and for a bit of commentary on the combo pack, click here )--about the same time that today's critical selection was to be released in theaters. I always laugh at the cheap direct-to-video knockoffs that release concurrently with their big-budget theater counterparts. Before I get into today's review, here's a list of theatrical/knockoff pairs to amuse you: Resident Evil: Apocalypse  had Return Of the Living Dead: Necropolis Snakes On A Plane  had Snakes On A Train Peter Jackson's  King Kong  had King Of the Lost World Jurassic Park  had Carnosaur Transformers  and Revenge Of the Fallen  had Transmorphe...

Welcome to the 40th issue of Just the Ticket! After a week that included such fun things as still not having a steady paying job, finding out from the DOL that I need new glasses (which cost money), and having a leaky water heater (which costs more money to replace), I finally got to watch Albert Nobbs , the tragic tale of a delusional woman (Glenn Close, Damages ) who decides to become a man in order to escape her history of sexual abuse and better her life in 19th century Ireland. I say delusional not because I disagree with her choice, but because she is a creature akin to Michael C. Hall's heroic serial killer on  Dexter . While only one is a murderer, both are people committed to living in a skin they find uncomfortable but necessary, both have fantastically high aspirations for the future even though they are still in the process of discovering who or what they are now, and both give minimal attention to what the consequences will be if they are found out. It makes for...

For those of you who don't know much about Central Washington in general, or about small towns in Central Washington specifically, when it hits summer time around here, people start selling and donating all the old stuff that didn't serve them very well through the past winter. In fact, you can pretty much go yard sale- and thrift store-hopping and track the things you sold or gave to people as the months go by. Sometimes, they even have some decent movies (assuming their children haven't thrown up on them, used them to play DJ Hero on the coffee table, or been unsuccessful at tracking down their favorite Frisbee and decided to have a DVD fight instead). As such, my folks have amassed quite an impressive collection of Clint Eastwood classics, one of which is the 1968 police drama, Coogan's Bluff . It opens with Eastwood as Coogan (first name Mister, middle name Deputy Sherriff for all we know), an Arizona lawman on the hunt for a murderer named Ringerman (Don Stroud...

Once more into the fray. Into the last good fight I'll ever know. Live and die on this day. Live and die on this day. This poem is the last sentiment the man known as Ottway (Liam Neeson) has of his deceased father, and they are words he has lived by, even while coping with the death of his wife and spending his days as a contracted wolf-killer for an Alaska-based oil company. But on the way back to the contiguous 48, the crew's plane crashes and Ottway must lead the other seven survivors (including a well-disguised Dermont Mulroney and an annoying blabbermouth played by Dallas Roberts) on an exodus from the crash site that leads them straight through the hunting ground of a pack of pursuing wolves. The poem, although it seems like something Dylan Thomas would have written, was actually composed by writer/director Joe Carnahan, better known for his nothing-but-action films Smokin' Aces 1 & 2  and The A-Team  (on which he also worked with Neeson). Its ...

No zombies, vampires, or werewolves today, folks! The Parade is going back to ghosts for a review of The Woman In Black , a B-Ho (British Horror, as opposed to J-Ho, Japanese Horror) chiller about a failing lawyer who is forced to save his career by settling the estate of a woman who hung herself following the death of her son, and now haunts the town, hypnotizing and killing local children as revenge for neglecting to search for his body. The lawyer is played by Harry Potter  himself, Daniel Radcliffe, living proof (an ironic choice of words), depending on the camera angle, that Brits--no matter how handsome they may be as teenagers--can grow up to be strikingly more handsome or wind up looking Prince Charles ugly. At times Radcliffe's eyebrows are so bushy and unkempt, and his skin lit so pale, that I expected him to morph into vampire or werewolf any second (just had to work 'em in there, didn't I?), had I not known WIB  was a ghost picture. Like its Japanese cousin...

Yes, that's the best I could come up with for a title. The Soundtrack's Daily Originals Quiz didn't work out that well (only three pageviews for the first post and no comments to answer), but the show, and the Dead Parade, must march on. Today, as if you couldn't deduce by the oh-so-clever title, I will be reviewing one of my favorite zombie-ish movies of the past decade: 2006's Slither . With a meteor on a collision course with Earth, stupid redneck cops, a town called Wheelsy, and a character named Grant Grant (Patient Zero, played by The Walking Dead 's Michael Rooker), you kinda know what to expect out of  Slither , James Gunn's directorial follow-up to the  Dawn Of the Dead  remake of 2004. But then it kind of delivers. Rooker all but steals the show as the above-mentioned Patient Zero, who upon being stung by an alien parasite, begins crying more than usual, eating red meat by the fridge-full (and whatever neighborhood pets and livestock are near ...

Wow! Six days of review posts in a row and 400 page views for Just the Ticket. Thanks, faithful readers! Well, I said back in Dead Parade #8 that the first One A Day series would be only five issues, and even though I'm deciding to make this my sixth day in a row, I'm sticking to the five issue thing and simply making this the 35th issue of Just the Ticket. I don't know why I'm still doing this six days in a row, and I don't know why Sarah Jessica Parker (whose name comes out of my mouth as Sarraca Parker half the time) still thinks Sex And the City  is cool. In I Don't Know How She Does It , Sarraca plays Kate Reddy (For Anything), a supermom/yes-woman who spends most of her free time narrating her life while sitting at a computer, surrounds herself with a redheaded best friend ( Mad Men 's Christina Hendricks) and two bitches (Busy Phillips and Fairly Legal 's Sarah Shahi), and has two men in her life with sexual innuendos for names: Mr. Big, step ...

I've been meaning to write this review for awhile now, and this seemed like the perfect time, seeing as how small-town movie rental services are so encumbered by limitations on their inventory, and I was therefore unable to get all of the movies I wanted to review this week at one time. The Tree Of Life , portrayed in the above trailer as a coming-of-age tale with splashes of introspection and beautiful art direction, was instead a heavily introspective, subjective, over-narrated, bigger-than-itself, too-smart-for-it's-own-good God-bludgeon of a tour of the Universe that had me constantly waiting for an actual movie to start or for writer/director Terrence Malick to come out and tell me I was being Punk'd. At one point, the movie does start and we are introduced to Jack O'Brien (played as an adult by Sean Penn for roughly 21 hit-and-miss minutes that are constantly narrated by Penn and feature no dialogue), who is looking back on his life and the events that cause h...

To be totally honest with you guys, I didn't have a review ready for you today until I saw the IMAX feature, Born To Be Wild . Narrated by Morgan Freeman (AKA God, AKA the guy who narrates the "Olympics are no place for morons...dumbass!" segments on The Tonight Show ), Wild  shares the stories of two families--one a group of orphaned orangutans on the island of Borneo, the other a herd of orphaned elephants in Kenya--and the humans who have dedicated their lives to preparing these young animals for a return to the wild. The humans take a backseat for most of the show, letting the animal antics speak volumes for themselves. Orangutans double-fist their milk bottles, spilling most of the milk on themselves and not really caring. Elephant herds have hazing rituals for the "new guy," covering him with Kenya's beautiful red soil and parading him through a nearby watering hole. So much of what these two species of animals do is so incredibly human that we ca...

Back when the movie was slated to come out in theaters, I began reading Janet Evanovich's One For the Mone y one night in the Ephrata High School Library while waiting for an officials' meeting to start, and I was charmed by the ten or so pages I got through. Unfortunately, book-to-movie adaptations usually suck. I like a good rom-com (not just another boy-with-doubts-meets-girl-who's-about-to-marry-another-guy-she-doesn't-like-and-stalks-her-with-flowers-until-a-wise-black-man-convinces-them-to-grow-a-pair-and-live-happily-ever-after piece of childish crap, but an actually good rom-com that does something new, like Crazy, Stupid, Love or Love & Other Drugs ), but One For the Money was so far from both the rehashed and the respectable breeds of rom-com and went in so many emotional directions that it wasn't really anything. Grey's Anatomy 's controversial Katherine Heigl tries to step out of her usual ditz in distress uniform to take on the ...

The local Safeway here in Ephrata, WA finally had The Vow  in stock and ready for a Just the Ticket One A Day review. It's a true story that has become iconic for our generation; so much so that it has been rehashed in Once Upon A Time , House , A Gifted Man , and even American Dad . But this time it's been done for real, so to speak. In The Vow , Channing Tatum (a phonebook-writer's worst nightmare) and Wedding Crashers  star Rachel McAdams play everyone's idea of a perfect couple. They have little inside jokes and routines all their own and love each other for better or worse (and not just contractually speaking, since they wrote their own vows, which excluded that particular bit of cliched phraseology). But following a car accident on an icy road and an ensuing coma, happy wife Paige wakes up with her last clear memory being around the time when Obama was still a senator, not yet having left her overbearing parents ( American Horror Story 's Emmy-winning...

So begins my first attempt at putting out one movie review a day. No review of  The Vow  just yet, but I was able to download and watch Chronicle  the day before it was supposed to release on DVD, so as promised, here is the first dose of Just the Ticket's One A Day: Thanks to directors like Oren Peli ( Paranormal Activity , the boring first season of The River , and the Coming Distraction, Chernobyl Diaries ) and J.J. Abrams ( Cloverfield ), so-called "found footage" cinema--initially made popular with last century's underwhelming cult classic,  The Blair Witch Project --is on the rise lately. Such films and TV shows, although they for some reason become hits, suffer from annoying hand-held videography, use of amateurish cliches like night vision and infrared, and the limited scope that comes with having only one surveiled location and/or one cameraman. Chronicle  is yet another in the rising tide of faux -cumentaries, but director Josh Trank (Spike TV's T...

Or is it "Blood Food?" I haven't gotten a chance to check out The Vow  yet this week, so I decided to start up the Parade early. In honor of the DVD release of Underworld: Awakening this week, the Dead Parade will take a look at the Underworld franchise thus far. The two-hour-plus freshman film of the series introduces Selene (Kate Beckinsale, Click ), a "Death Dealer"--an elite vampire assassin--defending her people from a prophecied incursion by the subterranean Lycans (short for Lycanthropes, AKA Werewolves). Caught in the middle of the Vampire/Lycan blood feud is Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), a human with the potential to end the war for better or worse. Amid the senseless violence, apathetic collateral damage, and constant blue-tinged cinematography, Beckinsale's Selene and Speedman's Lycan-bitten Michael engage in a nearly emotionless Romeo & Juliet romance. But what Underworld lacks in feeling it makes up for with a story that pai...

The SW@ Ticket tradition made its triumphant return on Just the Ticket this week with a birthday purchase of Mighty proportions: a ticket to the 4pm showing of Avengers at the Lee Theater right next door in Ephrata, WA. At the time I began writing this, I had not yet seen The Avengers , so I've started with what is obviously my weekly rental: the spy actioner, Haywire . Haywire is the big-screen debut for MMA fighter Gina Carano, also starring such big names as Channing Tatum (who is also president of the I Need A First Name Association), Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Douglas (whose father Kirk was the founding member of the I Need A Last Name Association). By the way, why do Latin names sound so dorky when translated into English? I mean, Antonio Banderas...badass name, right? Translate it into English and you get Tony Flags (wasn't he whacked on the first season of The Sopranos ?). Enrique Iglesias may sound like a sexy name, but Henry Churches sounds li...