I’m calling it.  5 years from now there is going to be a Choice Is Yours and it is going to be Chronicle against Chronicle…as this movie has no competition. Chronicle is the first movie I have seen in a long time that when it ended I wanted to go right back in and see it again.

So now I am just trying to figure out if this was just a ME thing or if it was actually amazing.  My compadre in movie watching crime thought it was great, and when I was listening in on other people talking I heard a lot of “WOW, that was a lot better than I thought it was going to be.” So take that how you will. First a refresher. As Whole Milk pointed out the film is written by Max Landis, son of John Landis. Chronicle is both Max’s and director Josh Trank‘s first feature, probably not for long though.

One reason some people seem hesitant to take Chronicle seriously is because of it’s place in the “found footage” subgenre but it works here for two reasons. First, without the firstperson camera I think the movie would have been straight up BAD.  It is the camera that makes the movie so PERSONAL and affecting. Second, they do a really good job of making the camera make sense…jumping from sources/angles, using the powers to get different shots etc etc. Trust me, it all works.

Other great things?  Big shout out to Michael B. Jordan aka Wallace from The Wire aka Vince Howard from Friday Night Lights for holding it down yet again and moving higher and higher on my favorite actors list. Also, although I loved the whole movie, the last 20 minutes are just INSANE.

I don’t really want to talk about the plot too much other than to say it is about “Kids Getting Powers.” A lot of people have been claiming this to be a superhero movie which…it really isn’t.  Yes, the kids have superpowers but they aren’t really starting new lives with them but just incorporating them into their normal lives with varying results. Honestly the only thing I can really think to compare it to is Akira.

I think at the end of the day that is why I loved Chronicle so much. When I was a youngster I would fantasize about having powers and using them on the daily, not running off and fighting evil…WAYYYYYY too much work. Amiright? Anyway, if you liked the trailer even a little bit I think you owe it to yourself to go see Chronicle.

No matter how awful they are, anthology films are always fun. If one story sucks, it won’t be long until you’re onto the next one. They always make good party films when you have some friends over. They have a special place in my heart – I wrote a fairly extensive look at horror anthologies for Topless Robot a couple years ago. The Theater Bizarre, the first film bankrolled and distributed by our friends at Severin Films (Bloody Birthday, The Baby), collects some diverse horror legends and craftsmen to weave together six tales or terror. Six tales with lots and lots of blood. So much blood.

The frame story involves a girl with runny makeup going into a closed-down theater where a slightly horrifying, robotic Udo Kier delivers esoteric intros to all six stories. It’s not really a frame “story” as it is an excuse for Kier to be a creep. I liked some of the tales better than others, one I hated so much you’ll get to read me bitch about it several times within this review.

Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) kicks off the bizarre with a mash-up of Celtic paganism and Lovecraftian mythology called “The Mother of Toads.” A young anthropologist and his annoying girlfriend are traveling through rural France when they stop at a market. The girl finds some classy pewter earrings which her man instantly recognizes as being in the shape of Lovecraft’s Elder Sign. The leathery old woman selling the earrings says her family has a copy of the Necronomicon (if you don’t know what that is, it’s over) and she’d be happy to show it to them.  It’s horribly acted and the story isn’t particularly shocking, but it does feel like a Lovecraft tale: a young student thinks he knows his shit and his thirst for knowledge of the unknown leads to his demise. And it’s super slimy!

Things pick up a bit in the next short, “I Love You”, a tense, blood-stained look at a doomed relationship directed by Buddy Giovinazzo (Combat Shock). A controlling boyfriend foaming at the mouth with jealousy tries to convince his lying whore of a girlfriend that no matter what how much she spreads her legs, he still loves her. The ending is a bit of a head-scratcher, but still enjoyable for Giovinazzo’s raw style and use of people who can actually act. Despite its violent nature (or maybe because of this) “I Love You” felt like the most personal of all the shorts.

Next up is horror make-up god Tom Savini‘s “Wet Dreams.” Thank god for Savini’s short. It’s super fun and the least serious of all the shorts. It features the goriest string of gross-outs of all the shorts, but the least substance, which is fine on this playing field. A douchebag keeps having dreams about a weird toucan-vagina monster thingy, his therapist (played by Savini) talks about raping his mother, and then a girl goes “This is my dream, bitch!”

Douglas Buck (Sisters) delivers the worst of the shorts, “The Accident.” It’s all about life and death through the eyes of a child and bikers hitting deer. It’s artiness just comes off as incompetence. Thankfully, it’s the shortest of the shorts.

Karim Hussain (The Beautiful Beast) brings a pretty interesting story to the table with “Vision Stains.” A girl gets her rocks off by stealing other people’s vitreous fluid with a needle and then injected the fluid in her own eye. Through this she gets to visit their memories. Shit gets weird when she experiments with an unborn baby’s memories. I really like the idea of Hussain’s story a lot, but after watching a needle go in an eye for about the 10th time, I got kinda turned off.

The final short is David Gregory‘s “Sweets” – a hypercolor, ultra gory tale of people who love eating. “I just love masticating!” one girl exclaims. Gregory, who directed 2008′s Plague Town, took the crown with this short. It’s super creative visually and a spot-on mixture of comedy and horror. There’s lot of detail everywhere and it just feels like he took the most time with his segment and didn’t spend all his time making a fake penis, like Savini did.

I feel like there should have been one less short in The Theater Bizarre, and that short is Buck’s “The Accident.” It feels really out of place here and sort of drains all the fun out following Savini’s wacky blood stomp and Stanley’s Frog Whore. It’s like the sober kid at a party where everyone else is wasted. So besides that small buzzkill of a short, the overall film is pretty damn fun. You can tell no cigar-chomping studio suits had anything to do with it – it was made completely outside of the studio system by horror fans for horror fans. It’s like Midnight Madness Heaven!

The Theater Bizarre is in a limited run right now. Don’t miss it if it’s playing near you or Udo Kier will crawl in your room at night and tickle your feet.

Really cool debut release from mysterious project Heath Caring, or perhaps H3VTH CVR1NG. Who knows with the internet these days? Anyone, this guy (guys? gals?) are all about choppin and screwin. As any good screw fan knows, however the caliber of your leaned out abilities the songs being chopped up have to be ill too. Luckily, Heath Caring chose a real winner for their first go’round.

The Drive Soundtrack was some of the most iconic and hooky music of last year. Now, that already plasticine sheen-ed sound has been made even more anesthetized, with all your favorite bits chopped up and screwed into a ride through a waning neon Los Angeles that’s been picked up and dropped right in the middle of the dirty dirty south. Sequel idea anyone? Check it out below.

Ever since Taken, Liam Neeson’s career path has been the bullet train to action stardom. This year he’ll star in at least five action films, including Taken 2 (hooray!), the first being The Grey. Written and directed by Joe Carnahan (The A-Team), The Grey sees Neeson in a perfect action film for his abilities. It’s filled with real emotions and real stakes and if you know the tragedy that’s filled Neeson’s real life in the past few years, it’s all that much more powerful.

Neeson plays Ottway, a sad wolf-sniper working in Alaska at an oil rig. His job is to literally sit there and buck down wolves who threaten the rig and the men working on it. When we meet Ottway, he’s incredibly regretful and heart broken over his wife. Him and a bunch of the grizzly men who work on the rig are taking off for vacation when their plane crashes in the frozen wilderness, very far from civilization. Seven men, including Ottway survive, and decide to walk to rescue, but the blinding snow and tree lines hide a pack of blood-thirsty wolves. In real life, wolves wouldn’t stalk men like this, but if that ruins the movie for you, screw you.

Don’t let the trailer or TV spots goof you- there’s barely any man vs. wolf action. Most of the wolf attacks take place in violent flashes that are only glimpsed at by the audience. Thankfully, Carnahan makes the other survivors of the crew besides Neeson more than just fang fodder. He gives them all some time on screen and we get to know them fairly intimately. Because of this I actually cared every time the wolves snatched up someone and tore them apart. Sometimes it can feel over emotional, but it never teeters over the edge of excess sentimentality. I felt sympathy for every one of them, even the douchebag who’s constantly drinking airplane nips and arguing against everything Neeson suggests.

Neeson is scary perfect at Ottway. His old-man eyes drool sadness and heartache and you feel every bit of it as the journey goes on. I mentioned earlier about the tragedy in Neeson’s real life that is eerily echoed in the film. It’s an incredibly raw performance and it’s easy to believe that he used this film as a sort of therapy.

Yes, he does tape broken nip bottles to his fist and charge a wolf (an alpha male no less), but don’t let the marketing convince you that’s all there is in The Grey. The fantastic action sequences take the back seat to the heavy emotional punches thrown by Neeson. I also want to note that The Grey has one of the boldest, bravest endings I’ve seen in a while. That poem he recites does read like horrible hardcore lyrics, but I love it coming out of the lips of Neeson.

Hey there readers. I hope everyone’s been tapping into their extrasensory abilities while I’ve been on hiatus because this here video is a reel paranormal doozy so to speak. Directed by my college cohort Taylor Cohan, Psychic Cheerleaders: Dawn of the New Age strings one’s (sub)consciousness along a cosmic continuum through the lives of two very gifted girls. This student film is something to behold and it doesn’t hurt that these high school hotties sport their cheerleading uniforms throughout.

Tones shift effortlessly from that of a charmingly campy teen dream to a paranoid REM night terror and back in the blink of your mind’s eye, as Courtney and Sarah learn the true meaning of their powers. The short tips its hat to auteurs like Lynch and Polanski as the mundane, helped along by deadpan dialogue and a droning score, metamorphoses into a psychological free-for-all. It’s an acid-laced after school special that, between you and me, will most likely be getting the feature-length treatment.

But alas I shan’t spoil anything else! Enough jaw-flapping then, I’ll let the images speak for themselves. Check his Vimeo page for past, present, and future work from this promising young filmmaker. Until next time.

I’ve always thought that the “one night movie theater event” is a potentially great idea that as of yet hasn’t been properly implemented. Whether it be a title fight, an opera, or even just a big game, it seems cool to be able to join a sort of hive-party comprised of hundreds of little nodes throughout the country. Though it isn’t a live event, this Wednesday, February 1st, will see the one night only theatrical release of The Chemical Brothers‘ concert film Don’t Think.

I’ve been a big Chemical Brothers fan ever since they were considerably dustier, but I’ve never gotten the pleasure of seeing them live. Shot (fittingly) much like Beastie Boys’ theatrical outing Awesome; I Fucking Shot That!, Don’t Think is taken almost entirely from the perspective of the audience, and apparently is quite transformative in the theater. Cool. Check out the trailer above, and look here to see if it’s screening in your city.

Though I didn’t love it as much as many did, I thought Bobcat Goldthwait’s last movie, the grim Robin Williams starring World’s Greatest Dad, was pretty good, and I thought former standup Goldthwait could potentially have a great one in him (Shakes the Clown does not count). This weekend saw the release of the red band trailer for his new movie, God Bless America, and unfortunately I’m feeling pretty ambivalent/not good about it.

Though it’s trying to be “transgressive” or whatever, I feel like this sort of wish fulfillment narrative is not only sort of an empty exercise, but also that the “edgy” thing Bobcat is saying is pretty played out at this point. Reality TV is dumb? No kidding. People always on their cellphones? Stunner. I’m pretty sure they made this movie already in 1993 with Falling Down. Luckily the lead performance, by the drunk who pissed himself on Mad Men, looks good, though his sidekick is openly aping Ellen Page in Super. What do you guys think? Does this look awesome and I’m just being a debbie downer?

Despite all of the trailers, pre-reviews, and Sundance and whatever, I still found myself surprised this morning as I pressed play on the honest-to-goodness Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie. From the name to the concept to just the general unbelievability of 90 minutes of Awesome Show, there were some years where I thought that the whole idea of a T&E movie was just a big prank. Perhaps it actually began as one, but eventually the two dudes decided to call everyone’s bluff, and here we are. The results, I’m happy to say, are quite good.

Much of what I’ve heard from other reviewers is that if you’re a T&E fan then you’ll be a pig in slop (which is true. very, very disgusting slop) but I’ve also heard a lot of admonishments in the vein of them refusing to adapt their aesthetic to the big screen so as to attract new fans. This (though it very well may not reflect in ticket sales) is most certainly not true. This is not just 90 minutes of Awesome Show, far from it. It’s not as meticulously plotted as, say, Chinatown, but it’s still a narrative motion picture.

After a haltingly wonderful prologue starring Jeff “Chef” Goldblum, the movie starts with Tim and Eric (playing themselves) screening their billion dollar film for its backer, a still intimidating Robert Loggia and his sniveling sidekick played by William Atherton. The short film, Bonjour Diamond Jim, is hysterically terrible, and the boys end up in huge trouble and on the lam.

Which brings them to the (historic) S’wallow Valley Mall, a genuinely scary derelict space pawned off on them by the loose cannon Damien Weebs (Will Ferrell) with the promise of a billion dollar reward for fixing it up. How convenient! From there it settles into a generic “let’s get this business running!” narrative onto which Tim and Eric can hang the incredibly bizarre asides and jokes. The scenes of just the two of them talking are probably my favorite, more than any quirky editing trick or hyperkinetic montage.

The funniest and most impressive thing about Tim & Eric (for me) has always been their brilliance with speech patterns and vocal ticks, and with the luxury of time afforded to them in this format they can really let loose on having long, strange conversations full of stutters, mispronunciations, malapropisms, lip flutters, and Tim Heidecker’s patented jaw double-clutch. It’s times like those when you can really sense the difference between the movie and the show.

Don’t get me wrong, the movie is still manic, but it leaves itself time to breathe more than I expected. It also, as I’m sure you’ve noticed from the trailers, looks much better, which I worried about, but ended up being fine if unremarkable. Then, of course, there’s the, uhh, vulgarity. Awesome Show has always been crass, but B$M is hard, hard R, bordering on NC-17. It’s chock-o-block with violence (including against children and old people), sex, chunky semen, bathtubs full of liquid feces, and John C. Reilly’s belly.

One thing that isn’t different is the supporting cast, which is rounded out by Awesome Show regulars as well as frequent celebrity guests like Reilly, Goldblum, Ferrell, Will Forte, and Zach Galifianakis. Reilly is predictably fantastic, though he doesn’t play Steve Brule, instead a shy, deathly ill, borderline feral man child named Taquito. The real surprise for me was Ferrell. His schtick has been getting real tired recently, but his sinister and tenuous Weebs is a comedic creation par excellence.

If there’s one real complaint I could level it’s that the movie is almost too consistent. I fully expected it to be 60-75% brilliant, and the rest totally misfiring/boring/what have you. Instead, the movie runs at a static “very good” throughout it’s runtime. This is by no means a bad thing. But few moments really stick in the mind as gut-bustingly hysterical. You’ll laugh the whole time, but you might not fall out of your chair. Regardless, by the time the David Liebe Hart scored ending credits started up, I found myself back at my first thought, this time with a big smile instead of trepidation: holy shit, they made a Tim & Eric movie!