THE LOOKOUT (2007) **

Chris Pratt (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, not Chris Pratt) has his sports career is cut short when he gets into a car accident that leaves him brain damaged and suffering from memory loss.  Because of his condition, the only job he can get is an after-hours janitor in a bank.  (Also, because of his condition, he thinks he’s Chris Pratt and not Joseph Gordon-Levitt).  He spends his spare time hanging out with his blind roommate/sponsor (Jeff Daniels) while pining away for a “normal life”.  (And presumably, a role in a Guardians of the Galaxy movie.)  Chris is befriended by an old schoolmate (Matthew Goode) who helps beef up his confidence, but it’s all a ploy to manipulate him into robbing the bank.

I was a big fan of writer/director Scott Frank’s A Walk Among the Tombstones, so I was curious to check this out, as it was his directorial debut.  I also immensely liked Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance in The Walk.  Because of that, I thought The Lookout couldn't miss.  Man, was I wrong.

The early scenes are the best.  Frank does a good job infusing his characters with personality. Daniels in particular excels as the blind roommate.   Once the heist kicks in, the movie oddly enough stops on a dime.  I thought there'd be a big twist or something at the end to justify the lackluster third act, but no.  This has got to be one of the least impressive heists in cinema history. 

Still, Frank does a fine job at establishing a nice atmosphere.  All the ingredients were there for a fine drama.  Frank had the marinade ready; he just forgot to bring the meat.

HAIL, CAESAR! (2016) ** ½

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is a fixer at a Hollywood studio who is overseeing the finishing touches on a big budget Biblical epic.  When his leading man (George Clooney) is kidnapped by Communists, he has to scramble to get him back.  He enlists the help of a cowboy star (Alden Ehrenreich) to find the mastermind behind the scheme, which could be one of the studio’s top stars.

Hail, Caesar! is the Coen brothers’ love letter to the Golden Age of cinema.  There’s probably too many side characters and subplots swirling around that prevent it from gaining any sort of momentum.  The crux of the story is involving, but the Coens seem to be having more fun with their little plot detours, character embellishments, and recreations of old movies.  

I liked how the audience is introduced to each movie star by watching them film a scene from their latest picture.  Channing Tatum has a long Gene Kelly-inspired tapdancing sequence and Scarlett Johansson gets her own Ethel Merman underwater number.  Unfortunately, most of the characters (with the exception of Brolin) are thinly sketched.

There are a few winning moments.  The scene where Ralph Fiennes tries to help Ehrenreich with his dialogue is hysterical.  This sequence alone has more laughs than what’s found in the rest of the film.

Hail, Caesar! is much too unfocused to be wholly successful, but it’s still watchable just for the performances.  Ehrenreich proves he’s a star in the making.  He looks good in a cowboy hat and bolo tie too.  If he doesn’t take off playing Han Solo, he can tide himself over with a Joe Bob Briggs biopic.  Brolin is quite good in the lead and does what he can to hold the film together.  Clooney makes do with his admittedly flimsy role, although he's seen better days.  

It’s the supporting performances that make it fun.  Most people are only on screen for two or three minutes.  No matter how scattershot it gets, it’s hard to completely hate a movie that features Clancy Brown, Christopher Lambert, and Dolph Lundgren in bit parts.  I mean where else are you going to see Channing Tatum salute Dolph Lundgren?

DEMON WIND (1990) * ½

I have fond memories of seeing the lenticular video box cover for Demon Wind on video store shelves back in the day.  I always regretted never renting it.  I mean other movies like Uncle Sam and Jack Frost had lenticular VHS boxes, and they were awesome.  There’s no reason Demon Wind shouldn’t follow suit.

As it turns out, it’s mostly terrible.

Cory (Eric Larson) is plagued by bad dreams, so he takes his girlfriend and his seemingly never-ending posse of friends to the shack where his grandparents mysteriously died years earlier.  It looks just like a burnt-out shell, but when they cross the threshold, they find themselves in the house just as it was all those years ago.  One by one, they become possessed by demons and naturally, the only one who can stop them is Cory.  

Demon Wind is a bad Evil Dead rip-off.  It’s overlong, dull, and often doesn’t make a lick of sense.  The kills quickly get repetitive as does the make-up on all the possessed people.  

There are some weird touches here that prevent it from being a total loss.  In one scene, a woman gets turned into a baby doll.  That’s not even the weird part.  The weird part is the others just sort of accept her fate and move on.  

Cory’s gaggle of friends offer some amusement, just for the sheer number of them.  Even as the movie is headed for the third act, his buddies continue to show up to become demon fodder.  My favorites were the two magician friends who irritate the jock asshole of the group by constantly performing magic tricks. 

Demon Wind was the first film by Charles Philip Moore.  He would get much better as he went on to direct the immortal Angel of Destruction four years later.  You can just tell he was itching to direct Kung Fu movies from the random scene where one of the magicians kickboxes a beer can. 

LARCENY (2017) **

I was a fan of director R. Ellis Frazier’s Rumble, so I decided to take a chance on his latest film, Larceny.  Like Rumble, it is a competently made picture.  Since it doesn’t have the same kind of bonkers twist ending, it’s kind of a forgettable affair. 

Dolph Lundgren stars as an ex-DEA agent who gets himself thrown in jail down in Mexico.  That might sound like a dumb thing for a gringo to do, but Dolph has a plan.  He knows that’s where a big drug dealer keeps all his money and Dolph and his team are planning to take it off his hands.

Larceny is a heist film, so those expecting your typical Lundgren shoot ‘em up may be a little disappointed.  The pacing is also a bit slow and nothing much happens during the middle section.  Frazier fails to get any mileage out of the admittedly novel setting.  It’s a shame too because combining the heist and prison genres seemed like a good idea.

It’s one thing for a movie to be low on action.  It’s another thing to set up a big action sequence and not deliver.  In order to make his escape, Dolph lets the prisoners loose to create a distraction.  Everything looks like it’s leading up to a big shootout, only Frazier cuts to black and flash-forwards to Dolph’s girlfriend being kidnapped after the heist.  It happens so abruptly that it made me think that the production simply ran out of money and couldn't afford to film the sequence.

Dolph is his usual charismatic self.  We also get solid support from Corbin Bernsen as Dolph's boss and Louis Mandylor as a crooked senator.  Jocelyn Osorio also does a fine job as the lone woman on Dolph’s team.  She proves she’s just as capable as the boys and holds her own in her dramatic scenes.  I wouldn’t mind seeing her in her own starring vehicle.

AKA:  Maximum Security.

THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1963) *

William Castle seemed liked the right person to remake James Whale’s classic The Old Dark House.  Castle had a knack for presenting horror with a light tongue-in-cheek touch, which made him perfectly suited to the material.  Unfortunately, his version of The Old Dark House relies way too heavily on comedy, and none of it is very funny.

Tom Poston stars as an American car salesman who comes to a decrepit mansion to deliver a car to his English roommate, played by Peter Bull.  The place is crawling with kooky relatives who inform Poston his roommate died suddenly under shady circumstances.  Poston gets mixed up in the family squabble for the will, and soon becomes the killer’s next target.

Castle’s most famous films featured gimmicks that were often more fun than the movies themselves.  The Old Dark House doesn’t have one, and it’s doubtful the wildest gimmick imaginable could’ve made it work.  It’s probably his all-time worst.  There is one memorable scene involving a death by knitting needle, but that’s about as close as Castle comes to blending horror and humor effectively.

Much of the problem has to do with Poston’s performance.  He was great on Newhart and all, but he is painfully unfunny here.  To be fair, he wasn’t given much to work with as the script mostly requires him to do a lot of double-takes and pratfalls while interacting with the oddball family.  Bull fairs slightly better playing multiple roles, although he doesn’t garner any laughs either.

The best part is the opening credits sequence, designed by Charles Addams.  His most famous creation, The Addams Family, premiered on television the next year.  At times, this almost feels like a test run for that show, but it’s nowhere near as much fun.

KEEP WATCHING (2017) * ½

A killer installs hidden cameras inside unsuspecting families’ homes and watches them.  He then murders them live on camera and broadcasts it on the internet for the world to see.  Bella Thorne is a typical teenage girl who hates her new stepmother.  She also happens to be the killer’s next target.

Keep Watching is basically The Strangers remade as a Found Footage horror movie.  It relies heavily on the hidden camera gimmick, which is a double-edged sword.  Some of the camera placements give us a handful of interesting angles.  I particularly liked the shot from inside the microwave (although you have to wonder how the hell the killer rigged it up).  Other times, the cameras should’ve been easily seen by any and all of the family members.  The camera that’s mounted onto flashlight is the most obvious example.  (Although this leads to an OK sequence involving a Polaroid camera.)

Like most of these things, you have to wait an awful long time for something to happen.  The thing is, you know exactly where it’s going the whole time, which makes the wait feel even longer.  Even the big “twist” is a foregone conclusion, but the movie seems to think it’s pretty damned clever, so it drags it out as long as humanly possible.

I basically only watched this for Bella Thorne.  Unfortunately, she isn’t nearly as well-utilized here as she was in Amityville:  The Awakening or The Babysitter.  The supporting cast, which includes Chandler Riggs, Ioan Gruffudd, and Leigh Whannell are decent, although they aren’t strong enough to carry the movie throughout its slower passages (of which there are many).

DE PALMA (2016) ****

Noah (Frances Ha) Baumbach and Jake (Young Ones) Paltrow aren’t the first two guys you’d expect to make a documentary about Brian De Palma.  Thank God that they did.  It’s essential viewing for De Palma die-hards, or for anyone who loves cinema in general.

Baumbach and Paltrow are slavish to chronology, which makes me love the documentary even more.  They go through De Palma’s filmography with a fine-tooth comb, starting with his early experimental ‘60s movies and moving onwards.  In between clips of his films, we see De Palma talking about the movies and giving on-set anecdotes and dishing out a wealth of fascinating technical and incidental information.  This approach works, mostly because you get to see his work as an artist slowly take shape over the years, but also because every one of his films is covered.  You knew they were going to go in-depth on Scarface, but did you expect them to spend so much time on Mission to Mars?  Heck, even the underrated Wise Guys gets its due!

Folks, this is simply a two-hour film school.  Some may grouse about the rhythm of the movie as it goes from film clip to talking head shot of De Palma to film clip.  Me?  I loved the conciseness of the project.  Few filmmakers deserved a documentary of this nature.  Hell, fewer filmmakers have a filmography worth discussing for two hours.  

You know what, there’s a part of me that wishes it was twice as long.  That’s mostly because De Palma is so damned interesting.  He’s a born storyteller.  Even without a camera, he’s fascinating just sitting there talking movies.  Whether he’s regaling us with war stories from his battles with the ratings board or talking shit on the Carrie remakes, De Palma holds court like few can.  As a filmmaker, there are few finer.  His misfires are more interesting than most directors’ best work. Even his worst films have his distinct fingerprints all over them, which is something that can’t be said for most filmmakers.