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Daily Archives: November 30, 2008

Review: Beer For My Horses (DVD)

Country Music Television is the producer behind this Toby Keith film; unless, that is, you count Ford Motor Company, to whom this film is a passionate love letter; especially when it comes to the Ford F-150 truck. A country music and music video star already, Keith makes his movie debut in this film about southern lawmen whose exploits are only remotely connected to the classic Keith-Willie Nelson duet of the same name.

The plot of the film revolves around the arrest of a group of small time anhydrous ammonia thieves that just happens to include the brother of a powerful Mexican drug lord and whose intelligence in said pursuit resembles fig trees. Keith, who also co-wrote and co-produced the film with Blue Collar Comedy Tour comic Rodney Carrington, stars with Carrington as the arresting officers of the drug lord’s brother.

The twist comes when Keith’s girlfriend, played ably by Claire Forlani, is kidnapped by said Mexican drug lord and a swap – brother for girlfriend – is demanded. The film has a decent and deep cast, including Ted Nugent, Tom Skerritt, Willie Nelson and Mac Davis.

There are light comedy moments and action film intensity that call to mind Witless Protection, the product of another Blue Collar Comedy Tour member, Larry the Cable Guy. What grounds the movie, however, is Keith’s rumbley bass voice and commanding screen presence. He comes off convincingly in his role, which holds the rest of the film together.

Rock legend and conservative talk radio standby Ted Nugent is effective in a comic non-speaking role as Skunk Taylor, a lawman who eschews guns and uses instead a bow and arrow to take down his opponents. Of course, that means a genuine hunter’s compound bow, not some Robin Hood lightweight stick-and-twine.

The plot is nothing original, but as a popcorn movie it keeps a person interested from beginning to end, despite some over-the-top antics by Carrington. The biggest strike against the movie is that there are no positive Mexican roles in the film and by casting all Mexican parts as bad guy roles, the film can come off with a negative racial bias, especially with some of the anti-Mexican comments tossed into the movie by Keith and Carrington.

This problem could have been solved easily by tossing a Mexican FBI agent, eager to help take down the drug lord with Keith and Carrington, into the mix, but that choice was not made in this case. The film suffers for this oversight, limiting its potential appeal.

Review: House Season 4 (DVD)

The annuls of television drama have rarely known as odd a duck as Dr. Gregory House and this collection of Season Four episodes is a perfect example of why the show has become a runaway hit for Fox and made an international superstar out of the actor in the title role, Hugh Laurie.

Although Laurie is best-known in the US for his role on House, in Great Britain he would have struggled to get cast in a similar drama due to an early career as an extremely silly comic actor, whose roles ranged from supporting bits on Rowan Atkinson’s Black Adder series, all the way to a sketch comedy show with Stephen Fry, known as “A Bit of Fry and Laurie.”

His transition to drama, however, has been nearly seamless. Using his British wit to make Dr. House seem cruel and dispassionate, Laurie has made the role uniquely his own and garnered quite a bit of acclaim in the process of playing a curmudgeon. He has worked hard behind the scenes against any efforts to soften his character up, preferring to play House in the bitter, asinine mode that the role was originally conceived in.

Season four, like all shows last season, was shortened by the writer’s strike (and perhaps some troubles with light fixtures), cut off at a mere sixteen episodes. Yet despite losing six episodes from their typical twenty-two episode season, it turned into one of the series’ most memorable.

Unlike most shows, who stay with the same core cast members throughout its entire run to the maximum extent possible despite taking place in a supposed “teaching” environment (how old were the sweathogs on Welcome Back, Kotter again?) House last season struck out in a bold direction by graduating its three main residents under Dr. House’s tutelage and forcing House into selecting a new group of understudies.

Of course, House maximizes the cruelty of the selection process, as well as our entertainment value, but putting the prospective interns through a reality-show style series of challenges. As the numbers dwindle over the course of the first ten episodes or so, the stars who possess the best chemistry with Laurie on screen eventually emerge, leading to the casting of Kal Penn, Peter Jacobson and Olivia Wilde as the newest recruits.

Of course, the original cast members were kept on, but their episode appearances have been cut back, beginning with this season and continuing into the current season five airing on Fox right now. This changing of the guard was a risk for a hit show, but was pulled off craftily enough to inject a sense of freshness into the drama, rather than making it feel like the show was gutted.

And the casting call stunt led to story possibilities even for some who didn’t make the final cut, setting up – in a strike-shortened year, mind you –the most affecting season finales of the show’s four-year run. All sixteen episodes, of course, are here in the collection, as over a half-dozen special feature documentaries and a commentary track on the season’s penultimate episode, House’s Head.

In all, any fan of the series will find this collection a must-have and it may be a season that helps hook new fans into the show, since the new cast of residents provide three new touchstones within the show.

Review: Dawn of the Dead (2004) (Blu-Ray)

It takes guts to step into the shoes of a legendary horror director like George A. Romero. Blood and guts, actually. And brains … plenty of … BRAINS! And yet, that’s exactly what Zack Snyder attempted in 2004 with this remake of the George A. Romero classic, Dawn of the Dead, part of Romero’s classic Dead trilogy of zombie movies.

With a $28 million budget and gross receipts over $100 million worldwide, Snyder had a much larger palette to paint with, compared to Romero, who made his version in 1978 with a budget of $650,000 and yet went on to gross $55 million worldwide … at 1978 ticket prices. Despite the much larger budget and a cast featuring stars like Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames, it’s hard to say Snyder did a more effective job than Romero on about 1/50th of the budget.

Dawn of the Dead is set primarily in an American shopping mall, where a group of non-zombified survivors attempt to hold zombie hordes at bay, hoping that by dawn, help will arrive. In the intervening action, many fall and transform to zombies, many brains are eaten (resulting in a memory upgrade for the undead), and much blood and gore is displayed all ‘round.

In the bleak original, the help never came and in that sense, Snyder’s ending places a new twist on the film, seeming to offer a sense of hope, only to snatch it away in the closing seconds of the film. The gutsiness of taking on an intimidating project like this has defined Synder’s directing career, the most recent example of which – with the impending release of The Watchmen, the long-desired film version of the classic Alan Moore comic book – is due to be released in March 2009.

The Blu-Ray offers stark detail to ever scene, and there are plenty of extra features to satisfy the morbidly curious. The best feature is the commentary track, lifted directly from the four-disc DVD Ultimate Edition release, which included Romero talking with Snyder about the film. While the track is, by now, a bit dated, since Romero was still at the time trying to find financing for his fourth Dead film, it is nevertheless the jewel of the assemblage of special features.

Also nice is a home movie on the making of the film, made by a zombie extra; a tour of the Crossroads Mall, and several other mini-documentary features. With a decent, if not quite “better,” remake of the original film, the only major complaints here is the absence of the Romero original movie and several really nice special features that didn’t make it over from the four-disc Ultimate Edition DVD.