In defense of... Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.

With yet another would-be remake/reboot/sequel of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre arriving in theaters tonight night at 10pm (this time merely titled Texas Chainsaw 3D), I thought now would be as good a time as any to offer my thoughts on my favorite entry in the very long running series.  No, I'm not talking about the admittedly groundbreaking Tobe Hopper original, nor the surprisingly good 2003 remake, nor even one of the wacky 'official' sequels.  No, truth be told, my favorite variation on the adventures of Leatherface and his cannibalistic family remains the last one.  I'm speaking of course of Jonathan Liebesman's 2006 prequel to Marcus Nispel's 2003 remake (complicated, I know), entitled merely Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.  The film was a moderate box office success ($19 million opening weekend, $51 million worldwide off a $16 million budget) but was roundly panned by most critics and even a large number of would-be hardcore horror fans.  To this day, I'm not sure why.  Yes, it can be argued that we don't need an origin story for Leatherface and his murderous clan. We don't need to see how he was born, how he got the chainsaw, or how a certain villain from the prior entry happened to have lost his legs.  But perhaps too well hidden in the minutiae of its origin stories and mythology building is nothing less than a top-flight horror film.

John Gosling's weekend movie preview, featuring (of course) The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

This will be John Gosling's final Weekend Movie Preview column for at least the immediate future.  I am quite thankful that we was willing to contribute his exhaustive and informative pieces for the last several months, and it is fitting that he finishes this up for an obscenely detailed run-down of the history of the lone new release this weekend (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey), as it was his educational historical essay on The Amazing Spider-Man that brought him to my attention in the first place.  If you have a moment, please take a second to thank him in the comments section below.  He already has my thanks and my gratitude.

The Hobbit was written by J.R.R Tolkien and first published in 1937, to great acclaim. The fantasy novel told the tale of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins and his adventures with a group of dwarves, alongside Gandalf the Grey. Hugely influential, not to mention successful, it led Tolkien to write the Lord of the Rings trilogy, further establishing the world, characters and history of Middle Earth. Essentially written for children, The Hobbit's short story nature seemed ripe for adaptation, and indeed, it has appeared in many various guises over the intervening years including (but not limited to) stage and radio plays, computer games, comic books and an animated feature in 1977.

Rock of Ages gets a poster that advertises its insignificance.

Not much to comment on.  The film looks patently silly and may be quite terrible, but it's among the ones I most want to see this summer.  The cast is top-notch and Adam Shankman's Hairspray is my personal favorite screen musical of the post-Moulin Rouge era.  I don't presume this will be *good* (the trailers seem weirdly off, even in terms of simple lighting), but I'm presuming this will be awfully fun.  This one drops on June 15th, so as always, we'll see.  But even if it's "nothin' but a good time', that should be enough.  Anyway, the second trailer is embedded below after the jump.

Scott Mendelson

The Hobbit gets a trailer. Maybe you CAN go home again after all...

The highest compliment I can pay to this footage is that it looks absolutely a part of the prior Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Unlike the Star Wars prequels, which looked and felt like a world very different from the original trilogy, this two-part adaptation of The Hobbit should fit right in with the first three films.  How wonderful it is to hear that music again, from the mournful beautiful main 'Shire theme' to the almost subtle appearance of 'the Ring theme' when an old friend pops up in the end, these two films feel of a piece with what came before.  The only real 'concern' I have is that I never found The Hobbit that engaging as a novel.  Truth be told, I never got around to actually reading Lord of the Rings because I wasn't all that intrigued by the original story.  But for those who enjoy the first book as much as the next three, I can find no fault with what is on display at the moment.  The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens on December 14th, 2012.  As always, we'll see...

Scott Mendelson    

Weekend Box Office (11/06/11): Puss in Boots tops again with record hold, while Tower Heist and A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas slightly underperform.

 Well it looks like the answer to last weekend's big question was "B".  Dreamworks did indeed trade one boffo opening weekend for two rock-solid weekends after all.  Last weekend, after being moved onto Halloween weekend at the last minute, Puss In Boots (review and trailer) debuted with a mediocre (for Dreamworks Animation) $34 million.  I speculated that perhaps Dreamworks simply was hoping to have an extra weekend before facing off against Happy Feet 2 (November 18th) and were hoping to use positive word of mouth to fuel a strong hold this weekend as well.  Puss In Boots topped the box office again, with another $33 million.  That's a drop of 3% from last weekend.  The Shrek spin-off pulled in the smallest second weekend drop for a Dreamworks animated film of all-time, behind only the 0.2% rise of the first Shrek, which had the Memorial Day weekend holiday behind it.  In fact, give-or-take how the final numbers measure up to the 3.6% drop of the second weekend of The Sixth Sense, and the 2.8% increase for My Dog Skip (coming off just a $5 million debut , Puss In Boots may have snagged the record for the smallest second-weekend drop for a non-Holiday weekend.

Review: A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas 3D (2011) again proves that the first film's brilliance was a fluke.

A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas 3D
2011
90 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is arguably the best comedy of the prior decade.  It's laugh-out-loud funny, but also filled with intelligent characters engaging in outlandish, but almost-plausible adventures in search of a most simple pleasure (a hamburger).  It was crude, but not stupid about its raunch, and it created a wonderful 'this is America' tapestry that helped make it one of the finest films about race/ethnicity relations in modern cinema. Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is every bit as lousy as most of us expected the first film to be.  It's aimless, painfully unfunny, openly stupid, and trading in the sort of stock storytelling conventions ("Oh, that girl I dated for a few months in college is THE ONE who I must win back!") that the original avoided.  More importantly, it's outright immoral in how it claims political topicality but sells the three biggest post-9/11 lies around (there are no innocent men in Gitmo, the post 9/11 abuses are the result of a few bad apples, and George W. Bush is really just 'one of us').  For better or worse, A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas isn't as offensive as the first sequel, but it's still a shockingly lazy, uninspired affair.  It feels cheap and constrained, with only a handful of laughs and a narrative that sees fit to mostly replicate jokes from the first film.  It's not as aggressively bad as the first sequel, but mere mediocrity is not something to aspire to.

Review: Final Destination 5 (3D) - The series is still a cheap burger, but this entree is seasoned just right.

Final Destination 5
2011
95 minutes
Rated R

by Scott Mendelson

Look, the Final Destination series is arguably the Mad-Libs of modern day studio filmmaking.  More-so than any other franchise in recent history, the ongoing 'Death Strikes Soon!' saga is basically a fill-in-the-blank template with few real deviations from the formula.  If you haven't liked any of the sequels, you won't like this one either.  It is too much to hope for that the series will return to the genuine quality that started it back in 2000.  The first Final Destination was a real movie.  It was a moving, somber, and character-driven horror fable that dealt in real terms with grief, loss, predestination, and the often arbitrary nature of death itself.  The sequels that followed have been, to varying degrees, gore cartoons whereby a bunch of pretty people survive an over-to-top tragedy and then get picked off one by one in various Rube-Goldberg-esque fashions.  The last film didn't even bother to try to be a real movie, and it failed to even deliver on the the blood-splattering 'money shots' that would have justified its existence.  This new entry is a marked improvement and it may even be the best sequel in the series (give or take your admiration for Final Destination 2).  It is indeed the same old meal you've been eating for eleven years, with mostly the same ingredients.  But it's prepared better this time around, with just enough new spices and marinade to make it tastier.

Blu Ray Review: Mortal Kombat (1995)

Mortal Kombat
1995
101 minutes
rated PG-13
Available from Warner Home Video on April 19th.

by Scott Mendelson

Mortal Kombat is very much a product of its time and place. It remains a time capsule of the mid-90s era when pre-established properties were slowly becoming the big thing in the wake of the Batman series, but hadn't yet fully taken over as they would after 2001 (there's a LONG essay about that coming soon-ish). It is odd to refer to a violent kung-fu fantasy based on an ultraviolent video game as 'charming', but Mortal Kombat remains, nearly sixteen years later, an amusing and nostalgia-filled trip to our youth. It remains one of the more successful films ever based on a video game, both artistically (for whatever that's worth) and commercially (at $70 million in domestic grosses, it trails only the first animated Pokemon movie, Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time and Tomb Raider in the video game genre). It is not 'good' by most definitions, but by god it felt good to kick back and remember a time when a movie like this was just a B-movie genre entry in late summer, rather than a $200 million tentpole with an entire studio at peril. Like Street Fighter: the Movie, Mortal Kombat is a dumb, fun B-movie back when B-movies weren't being given A+ budgets and expectations.