Hey everybody! I have to tell ya, I’m startled, shocked, stunned, flummoxed and flabbergasted. I just watched The Duff and loved it. It’s not great writing, it’s just not. It’s not a great plot or story, they’re pretty much standard. It’s not even great characters or acting, they too are pretty average. What makes The Duff so much fun to watch is some kind of weird synergy: the whole of the movie is greater than the sum of it’s parts.

The main characters, Bianca (Mae Whitman) and Wesley (Robbie Amell) have been friends since childhood and find themselves working together. That is, until all the old fun stuff comes back. She has a great “monster voice” and he is genuinely likeable and caring. Friends again! It doesn’t seem likely they’ll get together, too much history, but it’s fun to see if they will.

The film is filled with cliche’s…like the scruffy girl that can’t get a date, and the jock that can’t pass science, but once again it doesn’t matter. I can list dozens of teen movies with the nearly the same plot. My personal favorites are: Better Off Dead, Can’t Buy Me Love and Just One of the Guys and each of these are better movies and have some “firsts,” but are still filled with teen cliches.

The Duff seems like just another one in the pack but it’s somehow more. I trust that, like me, you’ll start off the film wondering what the heck; this is just the same old story and not as good. But, once again, like me, you may wake up and realize there’s something special here.

I’m not going to rate the film, check out Rotten Tomatoes for that, but I heartily recommend you watch The Duff. You may be pleasantly surprised. As always, whether you want to throw stones (or money) go to: #260-573-0015, for voice mail (we’ll play it on the show), or you can email them to us at: moviemadnesspodcast@gmail.com. You can also post them to Twitter, Facebook or the Ultimate Movie Geeks community on Google+

Hey everyone, it’s me the Movie Maniac. Me and Mr. Jeremy got together with the fearless Dougie and came up with definitive options for the new crimson arachnid. Check out one of our most fun episodes as we bandy about the choices. I guarantee some surprises, a couple of shocks and at least one great pick, but you need to join us to find out who came up with that one.

Some of us loved Tobey Maguire, some really liked Andrew Garfield (no surprise, one of us didn’t) and some of us really want a new, and younger Spidey, to take over the reins. I was startled myself how this episode turned out and I kinda think you will be too. Having said that, this could be the podcast that gets you off your comfy web and sending an angry message to us at: #260-573-0015, for voice mail (we’ll play it on the show), or you can email them to us at: moviemadnesspodcast@gmail.com. You can also post them to Twitter, Facebook or the Ultimate Movie Geeks community on Google+

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A new princess movie from Disney, how shocking! I’ve heard some discord concerning another Disney Cinderella, but look…nobody does it better. Give this movie a shot, the trailer looks good and what could it hurt? Releasing: Mar. 13, 2015.

Wow, if you weren’t excited before you’ve seen this trailer you darn sure oughta be now. The Avengers are back and facing one of their most brutal challenges. I’ll tell you, this is one of my favorite trailers in the last few years and I cannot wait. Check out the trailer and be in line on: May 1st, Friday! I’ll see you there.

Verdict: ☆ 1/2 _ _ _ _

Dracula rebooted! Why not? Everything else has been. Fear and horror surround history’s creepiest badass for centuries, spawning legends, stories and nightmares throughout all lands. But forget about all that! This is the Vlad you never knew, the Wallacian ruler we get to know from his wife and only son’s point of view. Who better than Luke Evans (Clash of the Titans, The Hobbit) to play that really good guy we know nothing about? Evans has that handsome face you can approach, the dashing next door neighbor with the Volvo and the Harley in the same garage. Here he looks like he just walked off the set of The Hobbit and was given the script for Dracula five minutes before the director yelled “…aaaand action!”

Wait. No makeup? What about hair? He looks like he just walked out of Lake Town and into Wallachia. That’s okay, no worries. One thing that sets Dracula apart from The Hobbit is the fact that there are no battle scenes. Oh, there are armies! The Turks attack Castle Dracula relentlessly. It’s just that Vlad has no army at all except for a few tough guys around him who stare solemnly at everything and hardly lift a sword.

Which is why Vlad decides to visit the creepy creature in a mountain nearby. Legend has it no one comes out of the creature’s cave alive. And that includes Turks, who have been seen entering the cave and not coming out. That’s good enough for Vlad! If it kills Turks, maybe he can figure out a way to use the creature. Unfortunately his plans go awry when the creature decides to use him! Bitten and becoming the Drac we all know and love to hate, Vlad then decimates the entire Turk army himself. It’s not even a contest.

Remember the scene in The Matrix Reloaded when Neo battled an army of Smiths? Yeah. Except it’s Vlad and an army of Turks. That scene alone almost made the price of a rental worth it. All in all though, the movie was pretty hum drum. This is the problem with having such cheap and readily available CGI. Instead of telling a story using CGI as a tool, CGI uses the story to advertise CGI. This movie is so chalk full of CGI from green screens to zillions of bats, it’s completely unrealistic. And no amount of CGI will help make a story deeper than it already is. The story in this CGI pool is desperately shallow, not much more than a wading pool. Sure, it’ll cool you off on a hot day, but you don’t get much exercise out of it.

Here’s a question: Why do the young sons of epic historical movie badasses all have that same, soft, compassionate, doe-eyed look as if they’d never seen a sword in their life and spend their off hours away from lessons caring for baby rabbits? Here’s side by side of the sons of Vlad from Dracula and the son of Maximus from Gladiator:

Verdict: * * * 1/2 – –

Yesterday I watched Gone Girl where everyday suburban people were dancing  because they did something very bad to someone they loved. Then I happened to see a Wayfarer.com commercial where everyday suburban people were dancing because they bought a really nice sofa for a great price and free shipping.

One of these scenarios I could wrap my head around and the other I just squirmed and grimaced the entire time. It’s not that GG was a bad story (I never read the book but everyone tells me it was so much better). It’s that the characters in GG were complete jerks to each other and practically everyone else… and I’m supposed to be drawn in?

I had heard the premise of the story before renting the movie, so I was already kind of prepared. I went into it as if I were watching a reality show. If you go into movies from a certain point of view, in this case, Nick (Affleck) and Amy (Pike) Dunn are two affluent writers who live in NYC and move to Missouri because Nick’s mom gets sick and needs care. Amy hates Missouri. Oh, and she also hates Nick after a while because he’s such a guy. There are other reasons, and I’ll admit, but the time I saw them unfold, I friggin’ hated Nick too.

But I also hated Amy because she’s essentially a pretentious hoity toity who speaks in a very mysterious, smoky, heady voice and uses big words and walks around hating herself and her life and everything she’s attracted into it. Suddenly <BAM!> Amy goes missing, and because she’s loved worldwide for her children’s books, her disappearance becomes nationwide CNN/Fox fodder and we begin to see what happened.

The entire story is three fold: We see things from 1) his POV, 2) her POV and 3) her diary’s POV. All blended seamlessly and it moves the story along well. Now, I won’t go further because there’s a lot to reveal and even one clue would be a spoiler so I’ll shut up about what happens. I will say that if you go into this movie as if it were a horror/thriller, you’ll be horrified/thrilled. I went into it as if it were a reality show because I identified with the characters about as much as I identify with Honey Boo Boo. This made it a popcorn flick for me and, while everyone else around me gasped, I laughed every time a new twist was revealed. This movie takes itself waaaay too seriously, in my humble. Like any marriage, the marriage in this movie could have used some laughs, but that’s just me!

No one was voted off the island, but the entire movie had me shaking my head thinking “God, these two deserve each other.” and “Thank God I’m not this eff’ed up. My life is lookin’ pretty good right about now!”

Kevin Costner‘s excellent performance, a great story and some absolutely wonderful characters make McFarland, USA one of the best movies so far this year. What’s more, it’s based on a true story that seems really likely. Too many of these films depend so much on created drama that it’s hard to see the real people. That’s not a problem in McFarland, the personalities shine through and make this film a joy to watch.

McFarland, California is a mostly Hispanic and very poor agricultural community. Many of the community’s workers are “pickers,” which simply means they spend hours every day harvesting produce by hand. It’s extremely hard work and the rewards are slim. When Coach Jim White (Costner) is forced to find a job, any job, he’s stuck with McFarland, one of the poorest towns in America.

White was consigned there because of his temper and an incident in Idaho. As football coach, according to the film, he threw a cleated shoe and accidentally hit his team captain. He was forced out and almost no school in the country wanted to touch him. Enter McFarland, where the choices were equally slim. Few coaches wanted to end up there.

Upon arriving White notices something startling; many of the local teens are forced to get up before dawn to pick produce until school and then do the same after. What’s even more startling is the speed they must run to be on time. An idea forms: what if he could take these kids and their blistering speed and create a cross country team? That is McFarland, USA. The story of an inspired coach and some very talented boys.

What makes the film so special is that it dives into the intense relationship the White family developed with this so different community. Director Niki Caro managed to skillfully break down the barriers between this very “white” family, even using the name White as a running pun, and a very Hispanic village. What was unexpected was that he was also doing that with the audience. I soon found myself relating more to the Hispanic youngsters and their  parents than the Whites (yes, pun intended). By the end of the film I too wanted to live in McFarland.

The easiest way to talk about McFarland, USA is a comparison to Hoosiers. Caro, in McFarland, managed to get nearly that same involvement in the lives of the players as David Anspaugh did in Hoosiers. I really wanted to know more about the players. I couldn’t wait till the end to find out where everyone ended up. Having said that…Hoosiers gets a 5 out of 5 stars (it’s just flawless), but alas, McFarland, USA gets a measly 4.5.

Both movies though are very, very re-watchable.
 

Hi, this is me, your Movie Maniac, one of the professors at the Movie Madness Podcast University. I’m here with something quite disturbing; I woke in the middle of the night with visions of Mel Brooks tap dancing in my head (sugar plums are far more comforting); I also had an epiphany. I finally know what happened between High Anxiety and Spaceballs. Well, History of the World: Part 1 happened too, but that doesn’t count.

In my dream, Brooks was doing the Putting On The Ritz number from Young Frankenstein, complete with the scantily clad Mel Brooks dancers, when like a lightning bolt I knew why I loved High Anxiety and hated Space Balls. Now, be patient I’ll get there…

Earlier in the day, the wonderful documentary, Mel Brooks: Make a Noise, was on Netflix and I couldn’t help but watch it. While enjoying the film an old concern struck me: what de hell happened, as Mel might have said.  That’s when the disturbing dream came in to play. I realized as Brooks was dancing, “harrumph,” that, in the earlier films, Brooks was paying homage. The original movies were always in the background as subtext. In the new films he was making fun, or mocking: Robin Hood: Men in Tights, really?

In Make a Noise, Brooks explains that he sat with Alfred Hitchcock to watch High Anxiety and nervously awaited his opinion. When Hitch liked the film, even commenting on the draining ink from the newspaper seeming eerily like the blood circling the drain in Psycho, Mel was thrilled. With Spaceballs he just kind of asked George Lucas for permission. According to Brooks, in the documentary, all Lucas made him promise was “no action figures.”

Before all you fellow movie geeks get up in arms, I actually grew to like Spaceballs, despite it mocking one of my favorite films: Star Wars. Even worse, is the aforementioned Robin Hood: Men in Tights. I was horrified when I first watched it…horrified I say! Swashbucklers are my favorite genre and to mock them is tantamount to celluloid blasphemy. To this day I can’t even look at a clip of Tights without cursing. I want to find Mr. Brooks and violently shake my finger at him. (H’m, do you think maybe I’m wound too tight?)

I grew up on Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power and Douglas Fairbanks, et al.. I expected to see an hilarious homage to the original The Adventures of Robin Hood, not just lots of vaudeville style mocking. Certainly Mel Brooks is incredibly funny but the artful crafting of his earlier films seemed to have been replaced by scatological humor and the equivalent of fart jokes, Blazing Saddles notwithstanding.

Lest you think I’m being too sensitive I’d like to bring up some examples. The Court Jester is a wonderful spoof of Robin Hood (and the genre in general). Airplane is about as silly as a film can be but still maintains a loving relationship to the disaster films from whence it sprang. Scream is another great film, that just happens to make it easier for me to watch slasher films, and yet, as “spoofy” as it may be, maintains the integrity of the original.

The last example is Dr. Strangelove. One of the great comedies of all time and also one of the best spoofs. Stanley Kubrick was at his absolute best when directing it and Peter Sellers at the top of his career. Each of these films was wildly funny and yet serious film making. Not to be too harsh, but it seems Mel Brooks should have stuck to the date that brought him.

Having expostulated enough I shall step down from my soapbox and say that Mel Brooks, I love you. Your performance as the 2000-year-old-man is classic comedy at it’s best and your earlier movies are some of the best comedies ever made. I just have one wish. I would love to see you remake Young Frankenstein for the 21st century. That would make up for Men in Tights. Few people have remade their own movies and done it as well as undoubtedly you could. Though you may have to update the humor and enlist a few writers from the hip-hop generation, but I think it would be great!

Verdict: ☆☆☆☆☆

Five friggin’ stars?? What are you crazy Jas??

Nope! You read it right, my friends. Don’t wipe your glasses and shake your head, don’t adjust your monitor settings. This movie was absolutely perfect in just about every single way! I was already a fan of Vaughn and Wilson, but wow! These two totally shot their humor into the stratosphere with this one.

The Internship… basically a 119 minute Google Advertisement that these two completely flipped on its back, yanked its pants off and shotgunned tequila shots next to from opening to closing credits without apologizing. It was one of the funniest movies I’ve seen since The Wedding Crashers!

Billy McMahon and Nick Campbell (Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson) play two mid-life, out of work salesmen who need something… anything… a bite in today’s recession when everything’s gone computer and just aren’t finding it. Brilliant as verbal mouth to mouth salesmen, they’re trying to look for just another step in a world where sales has gone digital.

That is until Billy stops Googling job searches and comes up with the brilliant idea to just Google Google itself and drops them both in the intern program.

What’s so amazing about the genuinely reactive chemistry this entire story pours forthwith upon our keyboards is the fact that just about everyone can identify with some part of this movie. Two oldsters who really aren’t that old (my God, the 80’s were just last week, right?) are thrust head first into the world of today’s internet where even the lingo is like another language… and expected to make it work. The kids don’t understand them and they don’t understand the kids. Sounds like parenthood, amIright? Another reason I identify with this movie! It was a total blast, every single second of it.

The Internship has nothing to prove. It is just a big jar of awesomesauce. If you get what I just said, you’ll love this flick. If you don’t get what I just said, you’ll love this flick even more!

Quick notes I jotted down while laughing my ass off the entire way through the movie:

~If you liked Wedding Planners, you’ll like this one
~Mr. Chetti, the Internship supervisor, played brilliantly by Aasif Mandviwala who’s comedy in this one reminds me very closely of John Turturro’s genius… hilarious!
~Keep it playing through the credits

I’m buying this one on blue ray. I don’t care if Google gets some royalty out of it. Heck, maybe they should for the brilliant marketing alone! Okay, I’m done before I ask this movie out on a date. Promise.

Verdict: ☆☆ – – –

This was an interesting political movie. Written and directed by District 9’s Neil Blomkamp, it was fairly simple in it’s plot because we’ve all seen this before… not in a movie, per se, but on the news! But what it lacks in plot, it makes up for in CGI.

The 1% The rich and powerful people on Earth decided they’d had enough of the world (they helped create) that has gone to Hell and, because they’re rich and powerful, built a space station (named Elysium) to live on with all their riches and power and just left all the poor people behind on Earth to suffer without any technology or privileges. Apparently by 2051, the rich and poor have grown so far apart, they’re completely alien to one another.

The healthcare on Earth is archaic for the 99% everyone who can’t afford to even eat properly and were forced to buy Obamacare have to live with very few hospitals and dismal medical coverage. Everyone on Earth is sick and everyone on the space station has their own healing chambers that fix everything from a cold to Leukemia and even old age in a matter of seconds. Occasionally human traffickers transport those who can afford a ticket up to Elysium but only a tiny fraction of those get up there because the “alien” ships are usually blown out of the sky by Elysium defenses. You know, because the rich don’t want to just build a few thousand more of these medical pods that will cure everyone on Earth. That would be an expense they are not willing to shell out.

Enter a dude named Max (Matt Damon) who gets sick from an industrial accident at his crappy job. Luckily he knows a computer whiz/human trafficker known as Spider, who can get him to the space station for healing, but only if he is allowed to turn Max into a human cyborg that can download data from the person who “built” the space station and therefore can hack into the system, change some code, reboot it (because Elysium is one big operating system run by Unix) and make everyone on Earth a citizen of the space station, thereby helping give medical attention to everyone for free. Think Obamacare becoming real Universal Healthcare with the click of a mouse and a reboot of a Windows machine.

A subplot in this story about the political turmoil on the space station reminds me of American politics at its finest from the perspective of an American joe schmoe. Everyone in office has no soul and is trying to unseat the politician above and there are agents in the field who also have no souls doing the dirty work. And no one is listening to the 99% majority of the people.

I don’t want to give too much more away, because I’d spoil the whole flick for everyone, but if you’ve been watching the news anytime in the past 20 years, you’ve seen this movie. It’s like Blomkamp watched the 6:00 news and said, “Hey, that sounds like a good plot!” In a recent interview, he did admit to this in a way by saying, “”This isn’t science fiction. This is today.” I found it interesting that Elysium police are called “Homeland Security” and that the Secretary of Defense on Elysium (Played oddly by Jodie Foster) has her own private assassins running around doing lethal, top secret covert ops and basically tells the President at least twice to take a hike in no certain terms.

All in all, it was a decent flick. There were emotional moments that tried a little too hard to pull the heartstrings and came off as corny, but otherwise, it was entertaining, if not disturbing when I think about the world we live in.