Weekend Throwdown Pits Will Ferrell Against Old School Friend

From the sublime to the ridiculous in one short week: Last week’s big box-office contest placed Up, Pixar’s latest bit of animated genius, against Drag Me to Hell, Sam Raimi’s return to his horror roots. No real contest when you figure in which one the kids could get into and the fact that the only horror movie people really want from Raimi is the next installment in the Evil Dead series. (More Bruce Campbell, please!) This week pits Will Ferrell in a re-imagining (if you can really call it that) of the old Sid and Marty Krofft kiddie series Land of the Lost against The Hangover, the latest rude, boys’ club comedy from Ferrell’s Old School director Todd Phillips. This time the movie with the more kid-friendly, PG-13 rating looks to be the box-office loser—and deserves it.

Imagine if Hannah Montana: The Movie had recast the pop-singing nymphet with a dual identity as a teen hooker and you’ll have some idea of what is wrong with Land of the Lost. Instead of a father getting lost in a time warp with his children, it’s Ferrell’s paleontologist, Anna Friel’s disgraced doctoral student, and Danny McBride’s roadside-attraction redneck who end up in a place where past, present, and future all mingle. Except it is hard to believe Ferrell is really a paleontologist when he is basically playing Talladega Nights‘ clueless and mysteriously arrogant Ricky Bobby.

A bigger mystery is exactly which audience screenwriters Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas were writing Land of the Lost for? Certainly, not the legion of fans of the old show, who are not likely to be amused at a sexualized Cha-ka (Jorma Taccone) as the apeman attaches his hand to Friel’s breast and won’t let go, and who really don’t need to hear McBride ask Ferrell how much money it would take for Ferrell to French kiss Cha-ka. Thanks for stomping on all those childhood memories, guys. This is one of those odd movies where the potty humor seems aimed squarely at tykes, but the content is way too filthy for the little ones. There are laughs in the movie, but only of the oh-so-dumb variety. Land of the Lost’s art department gets style points for taking inspiration from Planet of the Apes‘ signature sunken Statue of Liberty shot and expanding on the idea to create a desert oasis cobbled out of world landmarks, cheap motels, fast food joints, and pop culture ephemera, easily the highlight of the movie.

In contrast, when The Hangover is funny, it is really funny. The story of three idiots who manage to lose the groom during a Las Vegas bachelor party and spend the whole movie trying to remember where they left him, the movie’s main problem is there are too many dead zones when the laughs just stop. It doesn’t help that stars He’s Just Not That Into You’s Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifinakis, and The Office’s Ed Helms don’t exactly reek of charisma. The movie could have used Vince Vaughn’s everyman charm in the city that helped make him a star in those opening scenes in Swingers. That other pre-wedding movie of the year, I Love You, Man, works so well in large part because of the chemistry between stars Paul Rudd and Jason Segal. That’s lacking in The Hangover and it makes for a bumpier ride, but the stuff that works—such as the tiger scenes featured so prominently in the adds, a rude variation of Three Men and a Baby, and some well-crafted lines of dialogue—works hilariously well.

Normally, I would never recommend a Hangover, but in this instance, it sure beats getting Lost. – Pam G.

Pixar Takes It Up a Notch

Up takes flight at San Francisco's Castro Theatre at a special sneak preview, Tuesday, May 26. (Photo: Danielle Keenan)

A word of advice for those planning to see Up: Bring tissue. Lots of it. You will choke up at 78-year-old widower Carl’s (Ed Asner) back story. If you don’t, you may want to see a cardiologist, because you just might be missing a heart. Is it manipulative? Of course. Pixar isn’t a Disney company for nothing. It is also very, very effective, as the genteel geniuses from Emeryville knock one out of the park again.

The story of Carl who — along with pint-sized stowaway Russell (Jordan Nagai) — rides his helium balloon-powered house all the way to South America, where he picks up a big, goofy bird named Kevin and a loyal canine companion, Dug (co-director/co-screenwriter Bob Peterson), Up is the latest example of Pixar’s dedication to excellence. Pixar’s first foray into 3D is a marvel. Unlike most 3D movies where the whole point is to call attention to the technology (my favorite example of that gambit will probably always be the old-school horror movie Flesh for Frankenstein with what star Udo Kier described as “liver on a stick” floating at you), Up simply immerses you in it. Instead of merely watching Carl and Russell’s adventure, you feel as if you are along for the journey.

Beyond its technological achievement, Up once more demonstrates Pixar’s dedication to story above all other concerns. This one was dreamed up by director Pete Docter, Peterson, and Tom McCarthy. McCarthy’s imprint shows in the character of Carl, who is not so different from The Station Agent’s railroad uber-fan Finbar McBride and The Visitor’s gruff professor Walter Vale (like Carl, another lonely widower), in being a solitary, antisocial character who warms up under the influence of initially unwelcome outside forces. McCarthy’s involvement also signals that Pixar will follow a good story wherever it leads, which increasingly means making family movies with perhaps more appeal for adults than for kids.

(In our unscientific survey of a single kid, a friend’s five-year-old, she loved Up, but Carl’s sometimes life-threatening experience scared her and the movie’s volume hurt her ears.)

So where does Up stand in Pixar’s pantheon? That’s purely subjective, of course, although everyone can probably agree that it is better than Cars because, well, everything is better than Cars. On this particular subjective scale, Up ties with Finding Nemo at third. As one of the best movies ever made about the joy of cooking, ranking right up there with Big Night, Ratatouille comes in second. It is going to take some doing for any Pixar to unseat WALL-E at number one with its perfect, poignant, near-silent first half and its terrifically human trash-compactor hero.

Up does get a little bit of extra love for casting Asner as Carl. Most recently seen in an episode of CSI: New York as a Nazi war criminal masquerading as a Holocaust survivor and in the indie romantic comedy Gigantic as Paul Dano’s father, he is just perfect, imbuing Carl with that gruff charm so familiar to fans of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Lou Grant. Christopher Plummer offers an equally vivid take on aged adventurer Charles Muntz, the villain of the piece, but Asner is the heart and soul of this movie. – Pam G.

A More Amusing Museum Visit

It is hard to hate a movie in which a miniature Steve Coogan, costumed as a Roman centurion, rides on the back of a squirrel as he does in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. But then I am inordinately fond of movies in which quirky small animals play a role. Call it the Rocky factor, in honor of the cartoon flying squirrel who fought the Cold War with his moose friend Bullwinkle so we didn’t have to, but if someone were to hold a film festival featuring Groundhog Day and its titular creature, Caddyshack with its indestructible gopher, Phil the Alien and its wise beaver, Ratatouille and its epicurean rat Remy, and Hank and Mike with its cynical and increasingly soiled Easter bunnies, I would so be there.

That leaves the question, does Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian have anything else to recommend itself other than Steve Coogan astride a furry rodent? The original Night at the Museum was half a good idea interlaced with a cloying melodrama involving single dad/museum guard Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) trying to gain his young son’s respect. The movie had its moments when the exhibits in New York’s Museum of Natural History sprung to anarchic life, but too much of it bogged down in ghastly sentimentality.

Happily, Battle of the Smithsonian suffers no such fate. It is not destined for classic status, by any means, and Stiller is much better as the comic a la Zoolander or Tropic Thunder than he is at playing straight man Larry. But Battle of the Smithsonian still has a lot to recommend it, starting with its Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure vibe and some terrific comedy bits, especially from Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader as an enthusiastic, if incompetent, General Custer and Hank Azaria, whose turn as lisping, maniacal pharaoh Kahmunrah underlines his resemblance to Hollywood’s premier Mummy, Boris Karloff.

The change in museums also marks an improvement. Not that there is anything wrong with the Museum of Natural History, but the Smithsonian and its cluster of museums offer a far bigger palate to work from for screenwriters Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon. They take full advantage and thus the Tuskegee Airmen come to life, but so does a Degas ballerina, Rodin’s Thinker (Azaria again), and Albert Einstein (Eugene Levy), making multiple appearances as gift shop bobblehead dolls. Even one of Jeff Koons’ balloon dogs bounces through the frame from time to time. In the most inspired bit of business, Larry and his new friend Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams) jump through Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous Times Square photograph “The Kiss” and try to get lost in the V-J Day crowds.

Adams is Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian’s true ace in the hole, as the actress carries with her some of that Enchanted fairy dust in her portrayal of Earhart as a can-do, adventurous woman. Her sparkle adds a touch of romance to the proceedings. More than that, she lends the movie the one thing she keeps urging Larry to acquire: a bit of moxie. It’s a quality that serves the film well. Is Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian a great movie? Maybe not, but as purely escapist, popcorn movies go, it’s not bad at all. -Pam G.

Trek to Other Worlds

With the San Francisco International Film Festival winding down and Star Trek opening today, this has been a busy week for movies around here. Five movies in four nights, and while technically only Duncan Jones’ fabulous first feature, Moon, and J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Captain Kirk and company take place off-planet, all of them were like visiting another universe. Harry Hoyt’s 84-year-old silent masterpiece The Lost World—screened Tuesday, May 5 with Dengue Fever performing their new score live at the Castro Theatre—locates its Jurassic creatures in an Amazonian jungle so remote it may as well be Mars, a plateau where time has stopped to unleash animated dinosaurs so lovingly detailed that the more technically advanced dinos in Jurassic Park suffer in comparison. Then in Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 – Part I and Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 – Part II, Vincent Cassel’s charismatic, Cesar-winning performance suggests that the late French gangster Jacques Mesrine lived not on the earth but on Planet Jacques where only his own rules applied.

Star Trek, of course, is the big news this week, a movie I wanted to love and couldn’t. It has some wonderful elements and some inspired casting, including a marvelously daft Simon Pegg as Scotty (a lot more of him in the sequel, please); Anton Yelchin appearing to have the time of his life mangling the English language with a cartoon Russian accent as Chekhov; a dapper Karl Urban as Bones; Leonard Nimoy reprising Spock, the role that made him a legend; and most especially Heroes‘ Zachary Quinto as young Spock, the heart and soul of the movie. It is also as big and mostly as action-packed as anyone would want a summer blockbuster to be.

With all that right about Star Trek, what’s wrong? Well, for one thing, James T. Kirk is irritating, and that is no knock on Chris Pine, the actor who plays him. He does a fine job with what he’s been given; it’s just that that character, the smugly over-confident, loudmouth rebel who learns to be a man over the course of the many challenges he faces, is such a cliché. Not only does that make for a dull character (never a good quality in a hero), but also every action he takes is completely and utterly predictable. Far more irritating than the-man-who-would-be-Shatner is a time-bending premise that at times makes Star Trek appear to be nothing more than an extra-special episode of director J.J. Abrams’ series Lost. There is even a kind of episode recap in the middle of the movie when old Spock explains the entire plot to Kirk. The big mystery is why Abrams even bothered to cast an actor as expensive as Eric Bana to play the villainous, chrome-domed Romulan villain Nero. Why not just hire Lost’s John Locke, Terry O’Quinn?

Mainly the trouble with Star Trek is that it’s merely adequate when it could have been something great. I keep comparing it Moon, which is a wrong mirror on so many levels, not the least of which is that Moon is not an action movie. It is a throwback to more character-driven sci-fi, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running. There are no battles and little action, only a lonely astronaut, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who faces an existential crisis on the moon when he discovers that he is not as alone as he thought. Working with a slim, $5 million budget—which could have been Star Trek’s catering bill—Jones blends old-school models with special effects to create a world so tactile you can practically feel the moon dust floating in space. It is a drama that is suspenseful, melancholy, and terrifically involving, and Rockwell delivers perhaps the finest performance of his career. Sunday’s San Francisco International Film Festival screening of it at the Castro in advance of its June release only confirmed what I thought when I first saw in January at the Sundance Film Festival: For 2009 to date, Moon is the best film of the year. Star Trek is entertaining, but it does not come close. – Pam G.

Cheap Trick Cover Makes Rudo y Cursi Sing

In Rudo y Cursi, Y tu mama tambien co-writer Carlos Cuaron’s directing debut, Gael Garcia Bernal is Tato, also known as “Cursi,” a nickname that means “corny” in English, a country boy who makes it big as a Mexico City soccer star. But what Tato really wants to do is sing, and like Jon Gries’ deluded karaoke singer in the Polish bros.’ Jackpot or Christopher Guest’s hopeful theater director Corky St. Clair in Waiting for Guffman, Tato dares to make his dream come true. One of the delights of Rudo y Cursi is the music video within the film with Cursi covering Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me,” accompanying himself on accordion and singing the lyrics in Spanish – badly.

“Carlos picked the song,” Bernal tells me, hours prior to his scheduled appearance with Cuaron and friend and co-star Diego Luna at the San Francisco International Film Festival where Rudo y Cursi was screening in advance of its May 15 local opening. “I think secretly, between you and I and Diego and all the people that are going to read this, I think it’s a song that Carlos used to sing as a kid, like, in front of the mirror. There’s something about that song being very meaningful to him.”

If that is true, Cuaron, younger brother to Y tu mama tambien director Alfonso Cuaron, isn’t letting on, insisting that the song was chosen only for how well it fit the sentimental Tato.

“It defined the character so well, because someone who says or sings, ‘I want you to want me,’ has attention and affection problems and that’s a problem he has,” Cuaron suggests. “I thought thematically it was perfect for him. It was a song that I loved when I was a kid. Gael didn’t know it, because he was born the same year [it came out].”

“I was toying with the idea that probably I could use Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Lips Like Sugar” or Foreigner’s “Urgent,” he adds. “These three songs, what they share in common are silly lyrics. But one morning I was driving my kids to school and I was playing the CD and the Budokan version [of 'I Want You to Want Me'] started, the live version, and I started to sing along with Robin Zander, but very stupidly I started to sing it in Spanish, because I was looking for a song, so I was like doing dialog with the song. And as I did it, [I thought], ‘This is it! It defines the character! I love it!’ That’s why I chose that one.”

Cuaron says he drove his wife and children crazy for a solid year watching Bandamax, Mexico’s answer to MTV, but it was necessary research for getting the video right. “I didn’t want to copy a specific video,” he says. “What I did was take elements from most of the videos. They share a kitschy style. They always happen in a countryside backdrop, usually with horses running around, I don’t know why. Sometimes, they have green screens. For this choreography, you usually get two or more beautiful girls.”

“The choreographer asked what I wanted and I said, ‘Just illustrate the song. I want it be very illustrative, because I want Gael to have tools to illustrate and he could play with things,’” Cuaron continues. “And that’s what he did. He improvised some things that are hits, big hits, like this thing that he does [pretending to wipe his crying eyes with his fists]. I also told her that I wanted her choreography to be danced in weddings a year later and that is happening. I’m very proud of that. I achieved my goal!”

Bernal says that if got to choose, the song would have been Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” prompting a laugh from Luna, who exclaims, “I was thinking just of that! I know you too well, Gael.”

“It fits really well,” explains Bernal. “In English, the words are very simple. The poetry is super simple. In Spanish, you do it and it’s incredibly corny.”

As to the million-dollar question of whether he can actually sing better than tone-deaf Tato, he only laughs, “Between you and me and the readers and Diego, no one will ever know.” – Pam G.

Further Studies in More Ambition than Sense:

Hamlet 2
The Rocker
Airheads
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Wild West
This is Spinal Tap
Leningrad Cowboys Go America
Bowfinger
Highway 61
Be Kind Rewind

SFIFF Gets Art-y

Among the tidbits gleaned from the Sunday, April 26 San Francisco International Film Festival screening of Doug Pray’s Art & Copy is this: That the inspiration for Nike’s famous tag line “Just Do It” came from killer Gary Gilmore’s — of The Executioner’s Song fame — last word’s before a Utah firing squad completed its business, “Let’s do it!” Now there’s something to consider while lacing up your Air Jordans before your next pick-up game.

Pray’s doc stars the creative minds behind some of the most unforgettable campaigns of our times, including Apple’s “1984″ ad, the “Got Milk?” onslaught, the Budweiser frogs (and specifically the Super Bowl commercial in which the amphibians meet a violent end), and the postwar campaign that sold America on the VW bug. It is a fascinating history of sorts, not just of TV commercials, print ads, and billboards, but also of the evolution of the industry from roughly the Mad Men era when advertising evolved into an art form until now.

The men and women of Art & Copy are, for the most part, an amusing bunch, as one might expect among a group of creative people whose job it is to sell, sell, sell. But it also helps to explain Hollywood’s long fascination with the industry. Long before Mad Men, Preston Sturges’ screwball comedy Christmas in July poked fun at a poor nobody determined to win the $25,000 prize in an ad slogan contest, a vexing campaign interrupted adman Cary Grant’s life in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, and a Madison Avenue job lent Bewitched’s bland Darren a sophisticated veneer.

Of course, plenty of the movies revolving around advertising and marketing from The Hucksters to How to Get Ahead in Advertising have focused on the more unsavory aspects of the profession. It is an industry that inspires ambivalence. How many of us haven’t complained about commercialism or the sheer number of ads peppering TV, radio, and magazines? And yet so many of us only watch the Super Bowl for those very same ads. Certainly, part of the appeal of Art & Copy is those snippets of commercials past. The rest is in the candid, witty assessments from those wizards of ads and the peek they provide behind the curtain. – PamG.

More Ad and Mad Men:

It Should Happen to You
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
Putney Swope
Lover Come Back
Wag the Dog
Quiz Show
In Good Company
Thank You for Smoking
The Thrill of It All
A Shock to the System
Melrose Place

Low-riders on a Mission Kick Off SF International Film Festival

Our hometown San Francisco International Film Festival may not have a boulevard as elegant as Cannes’ Croisette, but it does have Castro Street. On Thursday, April 23, as the 52nd edition of North America’s oldest film festival got underway, it literally stopped traffic along the busy avenue when a convoy of low-riders paraded up and down the street in front of the red-carpeted Castro Theatre in celebration of the opening night selection, Peter Bratt’s La Mission.

Filmed locally in the vibrant neighborhood from which the movie gets its title (partially on my block, in fact), the drama stars Bratt’s baby brother Benjamin—who joked, “We’re not boys, we’re little old men,” after Peter described the siblings as “local boys from just over the hill” in his opening remarks—as a widowed dad whose life is turned upside down when he discovers that his teenage son is gay.

The fact that the Bratts are San Francisco natives and made their movie here might make La Mission’s selection as the opening-night film seem like a no-brainer. In fact, it represents something of a change of direction for the festival. The way Executive Director Graham Leggat described it as he kicked off the night, SFIFF has always been a kind of “high-end florist” dedicated to screening the best of international cinema. That mission has not exactly changed. There are, after all, films from 55 countries in the 2009 festival. It’s just that since taking over some functions of the now-defunct Film Arts Foundation, an organization that was dedicated to serving the needs of the local filmmaking community, SFIFF’s focus has shifted. “We’ve become less of a florist and more of a nursery,” is how Leggat sees it. Twenty-nine local films, both features and shorts, made it into this year’s festival, including four documentaries in competition and five narratives in the Cinema by the Bay section.

All of this has us thinking about movies that star our hometown and the Bay Area. Fewer have been made here in recent years. The region is perceived as an expensive place to shoot, although that did not stop the Bratts, Gus Van Sant when he made Milk, or writer/director Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ), who has been shooting his feature debut All About Evil around town in recent months. In honor of SFIFF and its new mission, as well as a way to celebrate the charms of our spectacular city, here is a list of some of our favorite movies shot around the bay. – Pam G.

Vertigo
What’s Up, Doc?
High Anxiety
The Conversation
The Lady from Shanghai
Dark Passage
Time After Time
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Harold and Maude
Petulia
Bullitt
Experiment in Terror
Flower Drum Song
San Francisco
Dirty Harry
The Maltese Falcon
The Birds
Big Trouble in Little China
Shadow of a Doubt
The Laughing Policeman
Zodiac
Chan Is Missing
Dream with the Fishes

A Pittsburgh State of Mind

How weird is it that Adventureland and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh should open within a week of one another? Both coming-of-age tales are set in Pittsburgh in the 1980s, both of them revolving around diffident young men whose world is rocked during the summer after their college graduation. Each has a difficult father, although Adventureland’s James Brennan’s (Jesse Eisenberg) dad is merely a screw-up who messes up his son’s plans for his summer and his further education. Mysteries’ Art Bechstein’s (Jon Foster) pop is a hard-to-please gangster, putting Art in a sticky position as he takes tentative steps away from the old man’s shadow.

The comedy of the two, Adventureland, is far and away the more successful. In a way, it is like Dazed and Confused for the ’80s generation in the way it captures the rhythms of youth at a time when the future is still wide open, and in the particulars of an era. As James finds love and learns a few life lessons while spending his summer working at a broken-down amusement park, writer/director Greg Mottola fills the frame with the fashions, the music, and even the carnival prizes of the era. (I once owned one of those stuffed bananas with eyes, courtesy of the Sugar City Festival in my hometown.) But he doesn’t take it too far. It feels less like a parody of the decade than certain movies of that time. (Valley Girl and Less Than Zero both pop immediately to mind – not to mention Wang Chung’s soundtrack and William Petersen’s too-short shorts in To Live and Die in L.A.)

Adventureland also boasts Eisenberg as its star. The entire ensemble is fantastic, and among the supporting players, Martin Starr as James’ hangdog co-worker Joel, Bill Hader as cheerfully sleazy head carny Bobby, and Ryan Reynolds as the park lothario who supplements his good looks with ridiculous stories about jamming with Lou Reed to reel in the girls, particularly stand out. Mottola also aids his own cause by delivering a witty script that is long on laughs as well as emotionally resonant. But this is a movie that rests on the shoulders of a painfully awkward, gaffe-prone youth – James could be the baby brother to Paul Rudd’s humiliation-magnet realtor in I Love You, Man – and Eisenberg delivers. As he showed in Roger Dodger and The Squid and the Whale, he excels at playing these quiet, intelligent young men, his laconic surface serving as camouflage for the complicated emotions playing out in his eyes.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is far from a disaster but flirts with it. Less forgiving fans of Michael Chabon’s source novel might well hate it for the liberties writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber takes with it. But even for those who are unfamiliar with the novel, parts of it are simply problematic. For one thing, while Adventureland is so specific in recreating its era, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh takes a more generic approach. That might be the function of a lower budget. Art direction, fashion, song clearances — none of that stuff comes cheap. But the movie pays for it in a lack of atmosphere. With the sole exception of the decaying factory where Art hangs out with new friends Jane (Sienna Miller) and Cleveland (Peter Sarsgaard), the look of the film has about as much personality as the average dentist’s office.

The beige atmosphere is not fatal. The colorless lead very nearly is. Granted, Art is unformed, far more unformed than Adventureland’s James. He is someone whose mob-boss dad (Nick Nolte) has basically cowed into submitting to a future that he does not want and who basically just goes with the flow, his behavior taking on the contours of whoever he is with. But Jon Foster is so bland that it is hard to feel much empathy for him and it is far too easy to let one’s mind wander and wonder what his far more eccentric, big brother Ben – who has so effortlessly commanded the screen in such films as Northfork, X-Men: The Last Stand, 3:10 to Yuma, and 30 Days of Night – would do with the part.

Luckily, Peter Sarsgaard is in the house, and he basically saves The Mysteries of Pittsburgh as the seductive bad boy who becomes one point of a romantic triangle. He is so seductive, in fact, that the heretofore straight Art cannot be sure which of his friends he is more attracted to, Jane, the girl who originally caught his attention, or her troubled boyfriend. In interviews promoting the movie, Sarsgaard has talked about bonding with Miller over karaoke, and the song he loved to sing was The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes.” It’s the perfect song for the troubled Cleveland, and he, more than the nominal lead character Art, bears the emotional weight of the movie. If the movie were all about Cleveland, it would be a better movie. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is well worth seeing, for Sarsgaard, if nothing else, but when it comes to revisiting Pennsylvania in the 1980s, Adventureland is your E-ticket ride. – Pam G.

R.W. Goodwin Pours His Childhood into Alien Trespass and Creates a Movie Matcher’s Dream

How strange is it that two movies featuring gelatinous, one-eyed blobs as monsters should open in successive weeks? If Monsters vs. Aliens‘ diminutive B.O.B. and Alien Trespass‘ Ghota were more equal in size, you’d swear they were spawned by the same JELL-O mold.

Both movies riff off ’50s sci-fi, but as sweetly goofy as Monsters vs. Aliens is, its references all seem to be from a checklist: Attack of the 50-Foot Woman-check, The Creature from the Black Lagoon-check, The Fly-check, and so on. It’s a little impersonal. Alien Trespass, on the other hand, is more like Matinee, Joe Dante’s 1993 nod to horrormeister William Castle: a funny, affectionate homage that is very personal. Which makes sense when you realize that first-time feature director R.W. Goodwin is 64 years old, and the movies that Alien Trespass so gleefully steals from are his childhood favorites.

“I’ve always liked scary movies. I was always kind of drawn to scary movies. I love sci-fi, especially when I was a kid, and I would see these ’50s sci-fi movies. That was kind of an imprint on me,” the former X-Files executive producer explained to me at San Francisco’s WonderCon.

“I had favorites for different reasons,” he added. “I think probably the best of the bunch during that period were War of the Worlds—I never could get it out of my mind—The Day the Earth Stood Still, and It Came from Outer Space. Those were the three movies we kind of used to create this movie. Jim Swift, my partner, actually took those three movies and took story elements and characters out of each of them and put it together into this original story. I loved it, and those were my prototypes in making the movie.”

For Clerkdogs’ purposes, Alien Trespass is a movie matcher’s dream assignment, a supposed “lost” 1957 movie that stars Will & Grace’s Eric McCormack as an astronomer living in a remote desert community whose body is taken over by space alien Urp after he stumbles upon Urp’s crashed spaceship. The extraterrestrial means no harm, but if he doesn’t recapture the Ghota, the thing will multiply and destroy the earth. The references to classic sci-fi come fast and furious, and Matinee is not alone in terms of contemporary matches that range from the little-seen zombie flick Fido to the blockbuster Men in Black.

The match number now stands at 22, and that is only a start. Over time, that number is bound to rise, and how could it not when I’ve barely scratched the surface of those movies Goodwin so hilariously lampoons?

“I went through and looked at every old ’50s movie,” he told me. “I love Invaders from Mars, but if you look at that one, you can see the zippers on the creatures. But I loved it. If you look at this movie, you can see little nuggets I’ve stolen from I Married a Monster from Outer Space, from Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, from This Island Earth. I mean, you name it.”

“Maybe Alien Trespass is not quite an A movie, but it’s a high B movie. It’s a B+ movie,” he laughed.

- Pam G.

Our Slow-Cooked Movie Database

Everybody who spends time on our beta-website asks the same question, “When will it be finished so I can use it?” Users often become frustrated that all the genres aren’t complete. So far, we have rated 6,500 titles and have completed the Action, Horror, Sci-fi, Suspense, and Crime genres. Our database takes longer for the same reason that people like it so much; home cooking is always better than fast food. We don’t take shortcuts like using computer-generated pattern recognition or random user content. Each of our writers (mostly former video-store clerks) spends an average of one hour rating and tagging each movie.

The good news is that we have scaled our team of writers to 26, and our database is now growing at the rate of 500 movies per week. We plan to reach our initial 13,000 title goal in June, when we’ll have all the genres completed. We’ll of course continue to expand the database beyond our first phase. We very much appreciate your patience, and we hope that you find the quality of our advice worth the wait.