Meet Monica Velour (2010)

With the Super Bowl this week, and with my Patriots playing in the big game, I figured I'd do some Super Bowl XLVI themed posts. At the same time, this film, Meet Monica Velour, has been on my radar for some time, it was one I wanted to watch, but I thought it was more indie flick than DTV flick, so I backed off it-- plus, it wasn't until recently that it became available on Watch Instantly. Anyway, the film takes place in Indiana (though shot in Michigan), and the Super Bowl is playing in Indianapolis, so I figured I'd make it happen as part of my Super Bowl theme.

Meet Monica Velour follows a recent high school grad from Washington named Tobe (Dustin Ingram). After his grandfather and guardian, Brian Dennehy, gives him the family hot dog mobile as a graduation present, he decides to put it up for sale, but only gets an offer from a dude out in Indiana (DTVC favorite Keith David). This just happens to coincide with a performance at an Indiana strip club by 70s/80s porn star Monica Velour (Kim Cattrall), whom Tobe has a major obsession with. He decides on a whim to drive the hot dog truck out to Indiana to sell it and meet her. The only problem is, the real her is very different from her on-screen persona.



This was a really great movie. For me, it's what a Romantic Comedy should be. It also had a very 90s indie feel to it, which was interesting, because there was a lot of vintage memorabilia and nostalgia throughout, so why not have the movie feel like it could've been made in the 90s too. It lost itself a little near the end, but it had built up so much goodwill to that point that it could get away with it. Great cast, and a fun, endearing story-- this is worth checking out.

The Romantic Comedy has been for me a genre that's been drawing dead for sometime, yet despite that fact, still brings in a lot of money at the box office. I think the thing that turns me off is the often fairy tale aspect, that somehow the two lovers that seemed so not meant for each other, or who had been kept apart because one of them was engaged to a heel, somewhere around the last 15 minutes magically see what we've seen all along, and they ride off into the sunset. This movie turns that on its ear somewhat, but finds away to keep that sentimentality in a way that didn't make me run from it. For Tobe, this is his fairy tale-- and would be the same fairy tale for a lot of 17-year-old boys, meeting and interacting with a porn star, with her reciprocating-- and while we root for Tobe, we also realize the ludicrousness of what he wants, and the movie never lets us or Tobe get too caught up in the fairy tale before reality busts in. I think it's that balance that works best here, that it's quirky and fun, and a little outrageous, but also down to Earth when it has to be, and isn't afraid to be down-to-Earth.



Brian Dennehy was fantastic as the grandfather. One of the scariest movies I've ever seen was To Catch a Killer, where Dennehy plays a chilling John Wayne Gacy. That he can go from that to utterly hilarious in this is a testament to the kind of actor he is. Anyone who's a big Brian Dennehy fan will be happy to see him here (won't give away a scene with him near the end). Same can be said of Kim Cattrall. This was not her Sex and the City character, there was nothing glamorous or cougar-ish in her role here, she was a has-been and a drunk living in a trailer park, needing to make some money to get custody of her daughter from her ex-husband. In her scenes with Tobe, she easily could've fallen into her Sex and the City role, which is probably what most people would be expecting, but she didn't, and the movie was better for that.

Another big name we had here for only a small part was the great Keith David. He plays something of a junk collector, a man with tons of vintage memorabilia collected from all over the country. It's interesting, because he's the same age as Cattrall, but it felt like his character was supposed to be Tobe's surrogate grandfather while he was away from home, whereas Cattrall was some kind of oedipal mother figure. He's known for his great voice, but when he gets the chance to act on screen, especially in a role like this, he's always equal to the task. Also wanted to mention Dustin Ingram, who played Tobe. He looked like a geeky version of Eric Balfour, which was interesting, because Balfour usually plays the heel in teen flicks, the guy who beats up someone like Tobe. He also looks kind of Napoleon Dynamite-ish. Don't let that fool you, his character is totally unique, and a lot of fun to follow through the film.



I wanted to finish up with a quick word on Indiana, considering that's why I'm doing this review this week. I've never been there, a friend I graduated from college with went to Indiana University for grad school, and I believe he's still there working, but that's about it for a personal connection to the area. Of course, there are also their sports teams, and my Pats and their Colts have had a big rivalry for years, and it's gotta kinda suck that it's the Pats playing in the Super Bowl there. It's one of those Midwestern states that we on the coasts don't often think about, so it's cool that it's in the spotlight for this week, the biggest in American sports.

This is currently on Watch Instantly, so if you have that it would be worth checking out. Great performances, great story, everything you'd want out of a movie like this. Sometimes these kinds of things work, and sometimes they don't, this time it did.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1291549/

Crossroads (2002)

Last month on our friend Mr. Gable's site, Mr. Gable's Reality, his buddy Alcohol Paul wrote a review on this movie, and the first thought I had was "man, that looks scary." And then I thought "hey, if it's so scary, maybe I should watch it for Halloween and see just how scary it is", and that's how we got here. I decided to make it the first of a two-part Halloween set of posts, in an attempt to do something other than just watch horror movies. Let's see how it worked.

Crossroads stars pop singer Britney Spears as a girl in a small town whose father, Dan Aykroyd, is a big push that wants her to go to school to become a doctor. She kind of wants that too, but she also loves music and has an aptitude for that that she'd like to pursue, despite her father's wishes. After graduating from high school, she meets back up with two friends whom she was best friends with 8 years ago, but whom she'd grown apart from since. One of the friends is going to LA to audition for a singing contract, and the other decides she wants to go too to see her boyfriend, who's attending UCLA. Britney thinks this might be a good chance to hitch a ride and visit her long lost mother, who lives in Tuscon. Will she find all the answers she's looking for in life?



All right, so this starts off with Britney in her underwear, and I'm thinking "hey, maybe this won't be so bad", and then she starts jumping around and singing Madonna's "Open Your Heart", and I'm like "whoa... I don't think I can do this..." But then Dan Aykroyd comes in and saves me, and we find out Britney's character is her class valedictorian. What? I can work with this, this might not be so bad. Then there was the insertion of the guy/love-interest who drives the girls across country. He worked as my outlet, because whenever the film became too teen girl scary for me, it became so for his character too, and he'd freak out. One clear example came when the girls were driving while he was sleeping, and they were belting out the lyrics to Shania Twain's "I Feel Like a Woman". That was my breaking point, but before I could hit he stop button, he wakes up and loses his mind, and in the process saves my life. In that sense, I may have picked the wrong film, because it made it like the kind of horror film where every time someone was about to be killed, something would save the victims at the last minute. I need some killing damn it!

I would've liked this on the so-bad-it's-good level, but this goes wrong in its attempts to deal with some more serious subject matter that it wasn't really equipped to handle, and which really felt out of place. We had Taryn Manning character's pregnancy, which might have worked, except we then get the revelation that she became pregnant after she was raped, then we find out her rapist was fellow traveler Zoe Saldana's UCLA boyfriend, and then, even worse, she falls down the stairs and has a miscarriage. Ouch! Did we need any of that? The other thing was how this jumped around and seldom focused or developed anything. When Britney meets her mom, played by Kim Cattrall, it's like a 2-minute scene, and then Britney's back at the hotel crying, telling us what happened. Why not show us? For an extra 5-7 minutes, we could've had more Kim Cattrall, and the movie could've been better for it. So, while this wasn't scary enough as a teen girl movie, it also was lacking too much to be enjoyable either, and the dour nature of the places where it went wrong make it hard to make fun of as a bad movie.



Yes, that is Dan Aykroyd. I don't know what to make of him in stuff like this. I grew up in the 80s with guys like him and Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, John Candy, and Steve Martin as the kind of funny guys you built a big budget comedy around. Now we see Dan Aykroyd as Britney Spears's dad in Crossroads. I got this off of cable, but I have to hope the DVD had behind the scenes interviews where Britney talks about what an honor it was to act opposite Aykroyd, what a true master of the craft he is, how much she learned from him. Another person I want to point out is Zoe Saldana, whom I'm a big fan of, and whose new film Columbiana I really want to see. This movie does a cool thing with her character, by having her boyfriend be white, though we don't see him until the end and assume he's black before that-- I know I was surprised. Good work out of you movie to mix it up. Bad work out of you movie to make him a rapist and make the other poor girl lose her baby.

I can't do a movie about Britney Spears without mentioning her at least once. It goes without saying that quite a bit has happened to her-- probably happened to us all, but especially to her-- in the nine years between this movie and now. Watching this though, there isn't exactly a sense of a lost innocence or a gentler, simpler time in her life. For instance, Spears has a few scenes in her underwear, and seems plenty at home doing it. I'm not saying she's a bad person for that, I'm saying she's much more comfortable with herself than some innocent teen girl. And the way she acts, I forgot her character is the naive bookworm valedictorian, she seems much more down-to-Earth and wise beyond what her character's years should have been-- in a sense, it was more unbelievable that she was playing a character that was supposed to be so naive, as opposed to a character that was supposed to be going to college for pre-med. It was definitely an aspect I wasn't expecting.



As I was navigating the teen girl discovering herself waters, I found a few familiar landmarks that helped me along. First, how do you not love the Waffle House? I could be watching Manos, The Hands of Fate, and if I see a Waffle House, I'm feeling that much better. The other thing was the inclusion of Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend". I didn't see that coming at all, among the Britney songs and NSYNC and Shania Twain. It was almost like a bone thrown out to a guy, not expecting him to be watching this at my age, but maybe 9 years ago, if I had been dating a girl at the time that wanted to see this and I was dragged along, I hear some Matthew Sweet and I can relax a little, and not think about how I can't believe I let myself be dragged into this. (Or can't believe myself watching this as a 32-year-old trying to think outside the box for his blog's Halloween posts!)

Ultimately, while this has the classic bad teen girl movie hallmarks: the first love, the making it as a singer at the end, the almost perfunctory personal discovery; it's never anything so bad that it's the scariness I so wanted for this Halloween post, and I'm kinda not sure how it got its Razzie. On the other hand, any fun this movie could've had is betrayed by some weird plot choices, especially the rape revelation and the miscarriage. In the end, part one of my Halloween experiment failed.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275022/

Split Second (1992)

This film was brought to my radar through a Tumblr site, Rise. Really cool stuff there, especially some great pics from 80s flicks and TV shows. They posted a covershot from Split Second (not the one I used here), and I thought it was pretty sweet and reblogged it. I also realized that A) I needed to get some more Rutger Hauer up here, and B) I'd never seen this one before. So I put some work in and found out a buddy that's a pretty huge Rutger Hauer fan had it, so here we are.

Split Second takes place 3 years ago, when London is partially flooded due to Global Warming induced rains. Insert Hauer as a police detective who doesn't follow the rules, is reckless and dangerous, and has discovered a serial killer that he thought was gone is back and viciously killing people. But what is this thing? Is it even human? And does he have the firepower to stop it?



This one falls short for me. Liked the premise and loved Hauer. It felt like it would've made a great 90s syndicated TV show, with Hauer as the lead reoccurring character, and this would've been a sweet one episode in said TV show. It just didn't quite have enough material for 90 minutes worth of movie. The first 40 minutes were pretty lackluster, then it picks up with the introduction of Kim Cattrall's character, and more consistent danger from the baddie that gives Hauer more than just mean-mugging and great one-liners to do. Then we get an extended ending which we needed to transition to quicker, something that I might have forgiven more had we not had a stagnant first 40 minutes or so, because it was good once we got there, but I'd already had enough "let's get on with it"s. This definitely had its moments, but overall was a miss.

I will say one thing for it though, this is some fantastic Rutger Hauer. This is certainly no Hauer bait-and-switch, this is the kind of too sweet Hauer that makes me fall for the bait-and-switch, the kind of Hauer that got him in the Hall of Fame in the first place. Everything is awesome, from the leather duster, the shades, the cigar and cigarette smoking, and the sweet one-liners. His character was a bit of a dick though, which was a bit of a drawback, but they made up for it by giving him a huge gun. Too bad even his awesomeness couldn't carry this film through its dead spots.



This is some interesting Kim Cattrall. First off, she's something of a main character, but doesn't appear until around the 40 minute mark. Second, her hair is kind of weird, like a bob, but with the area right next to the ear shaved. What, is that supposed to be futuristic? Also, she has a shower scene, and boobs are shown. I know some people watch these movies for things like that, so yes, Kim Cattrall nude scene in Split Second. (And no, I didn't post any pics of it.)

The late Pete Postletwaite has a small part in this as the jerk fellow officer that's always giving Hauer a hard time. You can see from that image how far that gets him. In 1992, he made appearances in three TV shows, and four movies, including this one, Alien³, and Last of the Mohicans. I've always loved Pete Postletwaite, and he will be missed. Here's to you Pete, you were one of the good ones.



I don't want to give too much of this movie away, but let's just say it [cough cough] emulates [cough cough] a few sci-fi classics that came before it. I don't have a problem with that at all. As long as there's stuff happening, a rip-off can be a lot of fun. With this one, it's almost as if the rip-off is an afterthought though, like they were writing a classic serial killer suspense thriller, and then couldn't figure out how to end it, and came up with all this madness. Problem is, the serial killer suspense thriller stuff was too boring, so by the time we got to the fun rip-off, I was too bored. On the other hand, I can see how many people would go into this, be bored by the beginning, then have so much fun with the end, that they forget the horrible beginning. I know this feeling. When I saw Iggy Pop in concert, he was so good, I literally forgot about the horrible opening act. I mean that too, a buddy I saw the show with brought up the opening act, and I was like "what opening act?"

According to Amazon, there actually is a region 1 DVD of this, and it'll run you about $125 used. I'm not kidding. Obviously, that's not what you want, and on VHS you can get it used for much cheaper, under $5. If you see it for a couple bucks, it's worth it for the great Rutger Hauer, but otherwise, it leaves quite a bit to be desired.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105459/