Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This film is a seventeen-year-old remake of a 1970s film. It comes from that turn-of-the-century period where Jim Carrey made some midling comedies (Liar, Liar and Yes Man come to mind) amidst his more dramatic and then kid’s movie roles. So it might get lost in that in-between period.

At any rate, Jim Carrey plays Dick Harper, a communications professional working for a large corporation. He gets promoted to Senior Vice President by his bosses, including the CFO and the CEO (played by Alec Baldwin). He’s thrown into the lion’s den by abruptly being shoved into an appearance on a cable news show where he’s confronted with suspicious behavior of the CEO, and as he (Harper) flounders, the stock tanks. The company shuts down amidst great scenes of shredding (a la Enron). As he was promoted, he encouraged his wife, played by Téa Leoni, to quit her job and make big plans for his new large salary.

Out of work, he looks for a job but finds it hard to get a job of equal stature (shades of Executive Blues: Down and Out in Corporate America. So we get some scenes of interviews, followed by slumming by working briefly at a thinly veiled Walmart and working as a day laborer as their furniture, landscaping, and eventually home are repossessed. Carrey ends up with a toy gun, and that inspires him to turn to a life of crime with his wife as his co-conspirator.

It leads to a number of scenes where they commit crimes. When they spot the CFO, they grab him and plot a heist against the CEO, which is the climax of the film. Hey, I can’t know heist comedies, now, can I?

Amusing in spots, but like Executive Blues, it lacks imagination in the change in circumstances. But at least in this case, it’s for comedic effect, even though it stretches credibility.

So were I to give stars, I’d give two and a half out of four or three out of five.

On the Ace of Spades HQ Overnight Thread last night, I saw a link to this listicle: 50 Bad Movies That Are Absurdly Fun to Watch, so I thought, well, how many of them have I seen?

The films I have seen in bold:

• 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
• The 6th Day (2000)
• Airborne (1993)
• Armageddon (1998)
• Bee Movie (2007)
• Book Club (2018)
• The Boy Next Door (2015)
• Collateral Beauty (2016)
• Dune (1984)
• Excalibur (1981)–I might have seen this; I have certainly seen parts of it on HBO the same time I saw Xanadu as our friends had HBO
• Exit Wounds (2001)
• Fear (1996)
• The Fifty Shades of Grey franchise (2015-present)
• Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011)
• Gods of Egypt (2016)
• The Greatest Showman (2017)
• Hackers (1995)
• The Happening (2008)
• The Holiday (2006)
• Home Again (2017)
• Jade (1995)
• Jingle All the Way (1996)
• John Carter (2012)
• Jupiter Ascending (2015)
• Limitless (2011)
• Mac and Me (1988)
• Mamma Mia! (2008)
• Meet Joe Black (1998)
• National Treasure (2004)–Last week!
• The Net (1995)
• Over the Top (1987)
• Party Monster (2003)
• Rambo 3 (1988)
• Road House (1989)
• The Room (2003)
• The Running Man (1987)
• Season of the Witch (2011)
• Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987)
• SPF-18 (2017)
• Spider-Man 3 (2007)
• Sucker Punch (2011)
• St. Elmo’s Fire (1985)
• A Talking Cat!?! (2013)
• Timecop (1994)
• Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012)
• Virtuosity (1995)
• Waterworld (1995)
• What Women Want (2000)
• White House Down (2013)
• xXx: Return of Xander Cage (2017)

Well, 30%, although I would argue that some of the films on this list are not bad at all.

I will leave it to your imagination, gentle reader, to wonder how many of these films I have seen in the theater during their runs. Know you that the number is greater than 1.

Also, I cannot help but note that the oldest film on this list is from 1985, and most of the films listed are from the 21st century, which leads one to believe that the person who wrote it is young and threw in a couple of big budget movies from before the writer’s birth to acknowledge that not everything has taken place in the last fifteen years.

But if you don’t have a bad black-and-white William Shatner movie like Incubus or even a color one like Kingdom of the Spiders on the list, is it really the best bad movies? No Hell Comes to Frog Town? No Revenge of the Wasp Woman?

Child, please.

Oh, I have come to a place where I think of movies that are almost twenty years old as “recent.” I mean, this film came out when this blog was but a year old, when I was only a bit past thirty and probably didn’t even think about having children. So, yeah, this film came out two lifetimes ago, but it seems like not that long ago.

Okay, so this is Nicolas Cage as a modern Indiana Jones. He has been searching for the treasure of the Knights Templar since he was a boy and his grandfather told him the story. Thirty years later, Benjamin Franklin Gates (that is, Nick Cage) is a treasure hunter, and he is leading an expedition to the Arctic to look for a ship that holds a clue to the location of the treasure. They find a pipe whose inscription says that a map is on the Declaration of Independence–which is about as much of the movie as I could have told you before watching it (the Declaration of Independence is a treasure map). So the crime boss funding the expedition, played by Sean Bean, wants to steal it, but Gates balks, leading to a dissolution of their partnership. When Gates and his computer hacker/comic relief sidekick are rebuffed by authorities, they decide to steal it before Sean Bean can. And when they do, they follow the clues and hope to find the treasure, with the crime boss incredibly just a step behind them–and sometimes ahead of them.

So, yeah, well, it’s an actioner, so one should not expect too much from it, but it seems like lighter fare than the action movies when I was young. But, you know what? I’ve been watching some of those older movies, and they don’t have a whole lot of depth to them. If I’m looking for depth, perhaps I should re-weight my evening leisure to reading books, and not just men’s adventure paperbacks. Which this kind of resembles, actually.

But it was one of the few films lately that I watched with my boys, so I have that going for me. Although at least one of them had already seen it. As my beautiful wife has gotten a family NetFlix account so that my oldest could binge-watch Breaking Bad after her mother shared the first episode with the lad (and she a former English teacher, too), I am at risk of falling far behind on movie watching and pop cultural awareness so I must keep watching films. Besides, my to-watch cabinet is full, and I’ve taken to placing my recent video acquisitions atop the entertainment cabinets, which looks kinda junky. So my recent movie watching is actually housekeeping. Which is why I shall end this brief musing here and go watch a movie.

So over the week that my boys were at camp and at the National Youth Gathering for non-perch-handling Lutherans, I took a moment to review the major Conan movies, including:

• Conan the Barbarian (1982)
• Conan the Destroyer (1984)
• Red Sonja (1985)
• Conan the Barbarian (2011)

All right, Red Sonja is not a Conan movie, but it could have been. It is a De Laurentis sword and sorcery flick with Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s name above the titles and above Brigitte Nielsen’s name.

To be honest, I have seen Red Sonja most of the films, as it was on Showtime in that era where I was young, bored, and not supposed to leave the trailer during the day when my mother was at work. So if it was on Showtime in those mid-1980s summers, I saw it a bunch, and Red Sonja qualifies. Secondarily, I have seen the first Conan the Barbarian several times, and Conan the Destroyer. It was the first time I’d seen the Jason Mimosa Conan the Barbarian–I remember when it came out that it was presented as being pretty brutal and not being too interested in seeing it.

So:

In Conan the Barbarian, young Conan sees his father and mother killed before him when a raiding party strikes their undefended village, and he is taken as a slave. He grows up, becomes strong from his labor, and then ends up as a gladiator traveling with Mongol-types, still a slave, until he is released. He flees to a dead area where he finds Mako playing a sorcerer of questionable ability and seeks his revenge on the leader of the band who killed his family and razed his village, Thulsa Doom played by James Earl Jones. Of course, the man is now the leader of a spreading cult of snake-handlers. Oh, and Sandahl Bergman plays Valeria, a fighter-thief that Conan loves.

So it’s a pretty good bit of sword-and-sorcery low fantasy, with magic and whatnot, and it’s the most memorable of the films because, c’mon, man, James Earl Jones turns into a giant snake, and the film has the “What is best in life?” line. It opens and closes with Mako saying it’s but one of Conan’s many adventures.

In Conan the Destroyer, Conan is given a quest to escort the virgin niece, played by Olivia d’Abo, of a queen who is destined to restore the horn of a sleeping god. So Conan and a thief start off with the girl and her bodyguard, played by Wilt Chamberlain. They rescue Mako and a female warrior, played by Grace Jones, from a hostile tribe and they go do some sidequests and then the main quest and discover they’ve been played, and the queen is going to sacrifice the virgin to resurrect the god. So Conan has to slay the tall bodyguard and then the resurrected god.

You know, I might have only seen this twice: Once when I recorded the films onto a DVR and this time. It certainly did not stick with me.

In Red Sonja, a young woman watches her family killed before her for rejecting an evil queen (played by Sandahl Bergman). Left for dead, she prays for vengeance and a magickal figure offers her assistance. And Sonja goes to a monastery to learn to fight with sorta-Buddhists. The same evil queen and her henchmen attack another cult who are about to destroy a talisman called the Talisman that is too powerful for humans. They succeed, leaving only Sonja’s sister to escape and tell Sonja she must plunge it into darkness. So Sonja does some sidequests, dodges and declines Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s offers of help (but he shows up time and again to save the day). Then they storm the castle and save the day.

You know, for having watched the film over and over again thirty-five years ago, I remembered very little about the plot and the action in it. Maybe it will stay with me, but maybe not. Although I own the DVD now and can watch it again before three decades pass.

In Conan the Barbarian, the leader of a raiding band is looking for the parts of a magic mask that grant the wearer great powers. The Cimmerian tribes broke the mask when resisting the last guy to wear it, and they’ve hidden the pieces across Hyboria. Conan’s father is a blacksmith and war leader for their tribe, and this particular film develops the relationship between the father (played by Ron Perlman) and the young Conan. So he lives longer than a parent in the other films or your typical Disney film. But when the bad guy comes to town with his creepy (probably supposed to be Goth hot) daughter, they slaughter his family and take the last piece. But they need a woman of pure blood to sacrifice, which leads them to a monastery. The pureblood woman, played by Rachel Nichols escapes, and Conan captures her/defends her from an ambush and uses her as bait to draw the warlord to him for revenge.

You know, the other three movies are brightly colored and maybe just a touch orange in hue, but the latter film is very darkly colored, with the modern deep blue palette and with a lot of scenes taking place in the darkness or dimly lit areas. It was a little less pleasant to look at.

And as far as the brutishness goes, I guess the Jason Mimosa was supposed to play the character a little more coldly than the Schwarzeneggar version, but to be honest, it’s not that much different. And as for the blood and gore, it’s probably about as shocking as Conan the Barbarian would have been in the early 1980s. The earlier film had decapitations and whatnot, and this film has gouts of blood. I have previously discussed the 80s R and how different R-rated movies from that halcyon era were from R-rated movies today. I think that the brutality and special effects on display in the latter Conan the Barbarian reflect more what our era expects–after all, my kids play video games with gouts of blood erupting now, and that’s something we didn’t have because an Atari 2600 could not capture it.

Oh, yes, and I know, it’s not Jason Mimosa, but I’m going to call him that until he beats me at solo unarmed combat. Of course, I have been practicing saying, “I’m sorry, Mr. Mamoa,” without moving my teeth so I can do it with my jaws wired shut. But then I will probably call him Jason Meowmeow because I never learn.

So, to sum up: It was an interesting review of the material, and it made me wish they made 80s sword and sorcery films today. But they made them then, and I have DVD and videocassette players and spares of each, so I should be able to accumulate and watch the old movies.

It reminded me that it had been eight years(!) since I read the Conan stories (The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, The Bloody Crown of Conan, and The Conquering Sword of Conan). I used to read a lot of this kind of pulp sword-and-sorcery stuff, but I have not in a while. I don’t know if they make much of it any more, or if it’s just not sold widely enough to end up at used book sales–or if it’s that I have not haunted the paperback fiction sections of said used book sales.

But I did get to thinking, how would the Conan saga played out if Robert E. Howard had not killed himself at 30. He could have feasibly lived until the 1970s or 1980s, writing the whole time and maintaining a tight degree of control on his work and characters. Would that have altered the arc of the availability of the characters’ rights for comic books and films? One cannot know.

Oh, and did someone say “Sandahl Bergman?”
Continue reading “On All The Conan Movies” →

This film is labeled “National Lampoon’s,” but it was a British film and not an American film. So any connection to the National Lampoon franchises or brand is negligible, which is kind of unfortunate, as I was going to speculate on whether National Lampoon films were kind of lampooning films of certain genres with their entries in the field, but unfortunately, it would appear that they just rented out the name for the money. And not enough, as a (full disclosure) investor in National Lampoon Media Partners (NLMP) would tell you (because the investment has not panned out, but at least it was not a big of a loss in my portfolio as Salon).

Ah, where were we before I started thinking of my 25 years of investing, which has pretty much broken even?

Oh, yes, this film.

All right, if you wanted to see a Happy Gilmore style movie, but instead dealing with bocce, I’m sorry, bowls (which is apparently the British spelling of bocce) instead of golf, this is the movie for you. Actually, it doesn’t have the Happy Gilmore story arc–this film follows more of the rock star arc where a humble man becomes famous, the fame goes to his head, but he redeems himself after alienating those most important to him.

A guy from the British projects plays bowls, a lawn game where you try to roll a ball close to a target ball, and you can knock the other team’s balls off away and into a gutter. So it’s remarkably like the bar game with the disks or even cornhole in that regard. He wants to play for the English team to take on the international stars, a pair of Australian brothers. So he gets to play in a local tournament/match/Ascot or whatever they call them in Britannia against the local reigning champion (played by James Cromwell, most recently notorious for a silly Starbucks hand-gluing) who has never aimed higher (to play for the national team, for example). He wins, but he writes a British bad word on his opponent’s scorecard, so he gets banned from the sport on a technicality. A splashy American agent (played by Vince Vaughn, not just phoning it in) convinces him to sign with him, and they make a splashy show out of bowls with the new Bad Boy of Bowls. Throw in an obligatory forbidden romance with the daughter of the local champion, a reconciliation of sorts, and a teaming of the two bowlers to face the Australian brothers (and a sudden death final point that looks an awful like Dodgeball), and finis!

Not a whole lot of laughs in it–to be honest, I liked it better when I was watching it and thinking it was an American film lampooning films like this and not the straight comedy it actually was.

But I am thinking about stopping by Academy Sports to pick up a set of bocce balls. Which would be interesting here at Nogglestead, as the ground slopes from north to south and has furrows from where water has run and where old fences stood. So it’s not likely to be the manicured greens of actual bocce courts.