The Movies That Could Have Been

It's a well-known fact that in Hollywood that for every movie that gets made, 1000 other projects are waiting for that big break to transition from paper to the silver screen (or LCD depending upon what audience it gets made for).  We've uncovered a treasure trove of "lost projects" and have selected a number of the best ones that never made it to production...

Getting whipped by Julia takes on new meaning in this thriller

1 - "A Recipe for Disaster" - Julia Child as an action hero in this Cold-War drama about a chef who infiltrates the Kremlin to serve the Soviets their just desserts.

2 - "They Eat Horses, Don't They" - The inside story of a Pet Food Tycoon and his back-biting, mangy family.

3 - "Damn the Speedos" - The secret story of how Mark Spitz trained Seal Team 6. 

4 - "The People who didn't know Anything" - The story of how a lot of really stupid people took over American politics and invented the Negative Ad.

5 - "Bad to the Bones" - Former rockers with osteoporosis delicately battle crime, making sure not to get fractured along the way.

6 - "Anatomy 101" - Who needs CSI when this new series brings non-stop dissections, drilling and witty humor - at the cadavers' expense!

7 - "Zumba - the Forbidden Exercise" - need we say more.

The Rhythm is going to get you - in trouble...

8 - "299" - These were the guys from Crete who got lost and never made it to that big battle against the Persians...

9 - "Binder Babes" - What happens when you collect binders full of women, nothing good we suspect.

 10 - "Hoodini" - Wearing hoodies can make some people disappear.

11 - "Pump it Up - The Lance Armstrong Story" - Illegal drugs, roadside blood transfusions and lot's of spirit and gritty determination made him the champion he is - er - used to be.

12 - "The Welsh Evasion" - The little known story of the handful of inept Welsh rockers who completely missed out on the birth on modern rock and roll.

13 - "They Call me Candy" - How the tough-talking lady kicked butt and took numbers at the 2012 presidential debate.

14 - "Some like Hotter" - The inside story as to why many people have inexplicably denied the reality of global warming.

Gosh, we miss this guy...

15 - "The Laying Dead" - This is the follow-up series to Anatomy 101.

16 - "Off Base" - How the Red's managed to screw up the 2012 post-season.

17 - "Googlemania" - The story about how the Googles became rock legends in Britain during the 1960's - with such hits as - Googlution, Hey Google and All you need is Google. 

18 - "Saturday the 14th" - A documentary - day in the life - as a psycho serial killer unwinds after a hard day on the job.

19 - "The Bobbit" - What happens when an angry female hobbit goes crazy and hacks off her husband's wee member. (* 1990's insider joke alert).

And the list goes on - we will bring more of these lost gems from time to time as our celebration of the entertainment industry continues here on Raving Reviews.

Read More

Looper Dooper?

It had all of the elements of possible science fiction classic; Bruce Willis, time travel, Philip K. Dick and yet somehow this movie failed to achieve its desired paradox. But before we delve into the movie itself we must describe the strange dimension we were transported to when our local theater decided to sell beer and wine at the concession stand. Never before (at least not since the days when people used to sneak in their own refreshments to drive-ins) were we exposed to interactive cinema like this. 

Let's all go to the Lobby - and get plowed

So, during the film, there were these two guys behind us - we knew they had been drinking because at several points during the movie they discussed whether or not to go back out and buy more wine. They decided to engage in an interactive dialog between themselves and the movie. The first comments ranged from - "I can't follow this, what's happening here" and quickly degenerated into - "Oh my god this is the worst movie ever - what the hell is going on - how could anyone understand this - it's impossible." This went for nearly the entire film.

Now we could spend a lot of time dissecting the movie, but why bother, we'll never remember it as well we will as the theater dialog about it. Let's do a quick overview on Looper anyway:

• The near-future looks really depressing
• The distant-future looks worse
• Bruce Willis and Robin really don't look much alike
• Bruce Willis with long stringy dark hair is just not something you want to see (5 seconds onscreen was 4 seconds too long)
• That little kid really needed a time-out (no time travel puns intended)
• There was lots of gratuitous violence towards the end - but where were the laser guns ???!!!!

 I'm not working for Batman one minute longer!

Anyway, enough of that, what we really need to address is time travel and paradoxes. This is what seemed to be troubling our intoxicated fellow movie-goers. The basic premise is this; if you change something in the present it effects not just the future but any future travelers who happen to be visiting your own temporal neighborhood. Now just to be clear for all you doubters out there - time travel is in fact possible - we all do it every day - only it's one way - forward. This movie assumes that there is a device which looks like a cross between an iron lung and a vacuum cleaner that can somehow send people back in time (the other way). To help better understand how this might be possible we've brought together the world's two foremost experts on time travel and physics, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking...

 Time Travel is simple, don't believe us, just ask Einstein and Hawking

So, now it's all perfectly clear now right? Still don't get it. We'll this isn't a science blog, but we will provide a checklist to determine whether or not you should attempt to watch complex, alternate reality and time travel movies.

The Sci-Fi IQ Test:

• Jean Luc Picard is the guy who directed The Fifth Element. (T or F)
• If you go back in time and kill your grandfather the only thing you miss out on is Christmas presents. (T or F)
• In the show Sliders, there was an alternate Universe where the Bengals actually made it to the Superbowl and won! (T or F)
• In the original planet of the Apes, the three guys and 1 girl were supposed to repopulate the human race (T o F)  and BTW who came up with the math on that?
• In the Matrix, it was the Machines who scorched the sky or was that the Terminator series? 
• How many levels of dream reality (Inception) can you sink into without getting lost?

Does all of this seem too complicated, perhaps you should just head to the concession stand and get liquored up.

Read More

Colombiana es muy Estupido

Hey there, we're back, after nearly a year-long break. We'll provide no explanation for that and dive right into some new raving reviews. Last night, while watching Netflix we came across Jean-Luc's (Besson's) Colombiana - a movie with nearly no redeeming attributes - perhaps explaining its so-so performance at the box office (losing about $4,000,000).

 

What I want to be when I grow up - a female assassin, by Zoe Saldana 

The story goes something like this - cute, innocent nine-year old Cataleya's parents are killed for no reason other than that they are doubling dealing hit people who betrayed their drug lord boss. Inexplicably, the Drug Lord fails to appreciate that folks need to make a living and that killing people and selling out drug lords can be really profitable. The seemingly helpless waif stabs the head goon from the hit-squad and proceeds to outrun the rest of the crew on a chase through Bogota (which looks a lot like Mexico) doing roof jumping scenes that would make James Bond proud and sewer diving al la Harrison Ford in Fugitive.

She escapes to the American embassy where she proceeds to barf up what looks like an SD card (full of Drug Lord secrets) which somehow gets inserted into a floppy disk. This was supposed to be 1992, SD cards weren't invented yet but who cares right? She couldn't have swallowed a floppy disk. So, naturally after inventing the future and bringing down Colombia's biggest cartel she is whisked away to the US where she somehow magically manages to escape from the airport bathroom and find her way to Chicago. She ends up in Chicago because that's where her uncle lives  (a real nice guy who works in the family trade) and yet no one ever thinks to look for her there.

Fast forward to 2011 or so where we witness the all-grown up and painfully skinny Cataleya infiltrate a jailhouse to kill some really creepy looking guy for apparently no reason. Of course, as an assassin, she's supposed to be smart and deadly - that's why she can do all these amazing things. Her uncle made a big point out of telling her (al la Mel Gibson in Braveheart) that warriors or killers think with their head - he does this while shooting up a stranger's car in broad daylight in front of the school where she's just enrolled with dozens of witnesses nearby.

Note the mysterious flower and the fact that Juan Valdez looks like every Drug Lord ever portrayed in the movies

So anyway, Cataleya, named after an exotic flower - they reminder of this about 57 times - sports her slinky body leotard for hits because as we know wearing a lot of clothes makes it harder to fit into air ducts, sewers and other tight spaces. Cataleya is a very artistic girl as she likes to paint a picture of the flower she is named after on all of her dozens of victims. This is supposedly to ensure that the drug lords who killed her parents come and find her so she can ensnare them in her elaborate trap. Of course it turns out she really doesn't have a trap and gets the rest of her family of killers killed. Did we say that this movie was muy estupidia - si...

Anyway, on the periphery this cinematic misfire there are lousy performances and oddities in all directions. We've got Callum Blue playing a CIA operative who can't seem to master his American accent, we've got that guy from Jericho playing an FBI agent with the same problem. We've got a Chicago police Sargent who can barely seem to speak English at all. We've got locations in Chicago that look oddly like Mexico. We've got a location in New Orleans that looks just like Miami. We've got Cataleya confessing to the FBI that she wanted to be one of the good guys despite the fact she spent her life with killers training in the family business. We've a got big fat guy wearing funny underwear getting eaten by sharks. We've got a movie that associates everything in Colombia with drugs and killers yet seems not to know anything about the place they're maligning.

The only positive thing we might say about this movie is that it isn't as stupid as Taken or Taken 2 - a film made by folks involved with producing Colombiana.

Read More