Smith's Verdict

By Tanner Smith

As much as I love the balance of raunchy comedy and heartfelt drama in Judd Apatow productions like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” The Big Sick, and even Superbad (hey it’s got a heart too)…I freaking love the outlandish nature of “Pineapple Express,” a movie that is a great chunk of comedic dialogue/improvisation, outrageous action set pieces that show they were using their budget like it was no problem, and a weird anti-drug message even though I highly doubt many of the people involved took it to heart long since this movie’s release!

I guess you could say there’s some heartfelt drama in the scenes in which the main characters’ friendship develops, but…I never took it that seriously!

Thing is, I always saw “Pineapple Express” as a hella FUNNY movie! Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg’s typical mix of sharp wit and blunt outrageousness is elevated to action-comedy levels, all of the actors are having a ton of fun with their roles, and…what is my favorite scene in this? I don’t know!!

Is it the scene in which a panicked (and stoned) Dale (Rogen) tries to explain to his dealer Saul (James Franco) about the murder he just witnessed? Hilarious! Is it the long fight sequence between Dale, Saul, and the hilariously unreliable Red (Danny McBride)? Hilarious! Is it the chase scene where Saul has to kick through the red-slushee-drenched windshield in order to see where he’s going? HILARIOUS!

How about the whole final act in which Dale and Saul have to fight their way out of the villains’ lair, which is already invaded by Asian mobsters? (They never specify which “Asians,” so…racist? I dunno.) Even many of the violent deaths are so random and gratuitous, I just can’t help but laugh!

And in between all these hilarious sequences are some nicely handled down-to-earth moments where characters are just sitting around and talking. The director was David Gordon Green, who’s best known for low-key slices of life (and “Halloween 2018”), so seeing this director’s style brought to a Rogen/Goldberg script produced by Judd Apatow is actually pretty awesome. There’s a scene early into the proceedings as Dale and Saul just hang out and shoot the breeze, and it actually feels like a real conversation as opposed to many mainstream comedies were they’re improvising just because they desperately want to be funny.

I mentioned the actors having a ball with their respective roles, and there are A LOT of them here! Seth Rogen is great at being…well, still Seth Rogen, but still the likable type of Seth Rogen. James Franco is hilarious as an intentional extension of Brad Pitt’s drug dealer in “True Romance.” But there’s also Danny McBride as the hilariously unreliable dealer who constantly goes back and forth between helping our heroes and betraying them; Gary Cole and Rosie Perez as the sinister drug lord and corrupt cop who are out to kill these guys; Kevin Corrigan (from True Romance–coincidence?) and Craig Robinson who deserve their own buddy comedy as the two hitmen sent out to dispose of Dale and Saul; James Remar and Bill Hader as a general and a private in a hilarious (I keep using that word) prologue set in the 1930s; Ed Begley Jr. and Nora Dunn as the parents of…Dale’s high-school girlfriend played by Amber Heard……

OK…even though the film makes it very clear Angie (Heard) is 18, it’s still kind of icky that this 20something-year-old process server is making out with his girlfriend by her locker.

Screw it, I love this crazy movie. I loved it as a teen and I love it as an adult.

By Tanner Smith

Here’s the film that helped create the “summer blockbuster,” made Steven Spielberg famous, and gave us three or four of the scariest movie moments we’ve ever seen!

The production problems of “Jaws” are well-known (half the crew even dubbed the film “Flaws”), particularly with all the troubles that can be imagined when filming out at sea. And Spielberg was a young talent with a couple feature films under his belt, and he had huge ambitions in making “Jaws.” But there were many ways the film could’ve gone wrong. Thankfully though, Spielberg used what he had to his advantage and created a film that impressed just about everyone nationwide.

One of the problems he faced was working the animatronics of the shark, which posed the question, “How can you make a scary shark movie without a well-functioning shark?” Spielberg found a way to fix that problem as well: by not showing the shark most of the time but making the audience feel its presence. You see the shark’s POV underwater, you see blood in the water, you see HUMAN LIMBS in the water, the characters attach barrels to the shark so they know it’s still there, and up until the ending, you only catch glimpses of the monstrosity. But most importantly…John Williams’ chilling score. With just two simple notes and an accompanying theme, we were able to be scared of the shark without actually seeing it.

“Jaws” is the perfect example of the phrase “less is more.”

We do see the shark up close when it destroys the ship and attacks the men onboard, and you can see why it wasn’t used more before: it looks fake. We’d be laughing at the film if we got to see more of this thing and if the film wasn’t so well-made leading up to this point.

I love watching this film with a crowd (I did twice–once at the Cinemark in Conway; the other with my cinema-history class at UCA)–when the head pops out of the boat underwater, there’s always at least three or four people SCREAMING. (That’s a great jump-scare, by the way–most jump-scares are false scares following a loud noise, but that ain’t no false scare!)

The main characters are also great. Brody (Roy Scheider) is a great everyman, trying to save his community by stepping outside his element to help catch a shark; Quint (Robert Shaw) is a wonderful Captain-Ahab-type who just wants to capture this damn beast of the sea; and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) is wonderful comic relief while also knowing everything to know about marine biology. (My favorite Hooper moment is when he sarcastically laughs at some amateur fishermen who are out to hunt the shark and then mutters, “They’re all gonna die.”)

My favorite scene: the infamous moment in which we get our first look at the shark, as Brody finds himself staring it in the face for a brief moment before backing up slowly and informing Quint, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” That’s another thing I love about this movie: Spielberg’s ability to insert much-needed humor to a terrifying situation.

Quick sum-up of my thoughts on the sequels: “Jaws 2” is an okay movie, even though the only reason it exists is for box-office reasons. “Jaws 3-D” is hilariously bad. And “Jaws: The Revenge” is EMBARRASSINGLY hilariously bad (though it makes for one of my favorite Siskel & Ebert reviews, slamming it). I hope Michael Caine got paid well for that last one.

By Tanner Smith

I didn’t want to call Baghead one of “my favorite movies” because it’s just so…simple?

But the whole “mumblecore” thing has definitely been a big influence on me as an indie filmmaker, so if I had to pick one, I guess I’ll have to pick “Baghead,” my favorite of the directorial efforts of Jay & Mark, the Duplass Brothers.

For those who wonder what I’m talking about, here’s a definition of “mumblecore”–a subgenre of independent film characterized by naturalistic acting and dialogue (sometimes improvised), low-budget film production, an emphasis on dialogue over plot, and a focus on the personal relationships of people in their 20s and 30s. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

“Baghead” is a strange, wonderful little film is centered around four actors who are down on their luck–one of whom is played by Steve Zissis, who went on to star in the Duplasses’ HBO series “Togetherness”; another is played by the one and only Greta Gerwig, who back then was labeled the “mumblecore queen.” They decide to take a trip to an isolated cabin in the middle of the woods so they can all work on a script idea for them to star in together. One of them has a nightmare about a stalker with a paper bag over his head, which sparks a new idea for a film: a horror movie about a “baghead” stalker-killer. But WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT–there seems to be an actual baghead lurking outside the cabin!!

I know–what are the odds, right?!

This isn’t really a horror film, necessarily. It’s mostly a romantic comedy about Chad (Zissis) hoping to score with the lovely Michelle (Gerwig), who has a crush on Matt (Ross Partridge), who used to date Catherine (Elise Muller)…and then occasionally, Baghead shows up. It’s only near the end of the movie where the suspense truly elevates, and its payoff would be disappointing only if you’re going into this film thinking it’s a standard slasher flick. And I admire Jay & Mark Duplass for handling things unconventionally.

And how the movie was made was basically this: Jay, Mark, their actors, and a very small crew, went up to a cabin in Austin, Texas, in August 2007, and decided to just make a movie. They got the film completed just in time for Sundance 2008 and they ended up selling it for a whole more than it took to actually make it.

Jay & Mark’s first film was a similarly made-on-the-spot production “The Puffy Chair.” I admire that film more than I “like” it, though to be fair, I think it’s because I saw “Baghead” first. They followed up Baghead with their first studio production: Cyrus, starring popular actors like John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill, but still made with the feel of a “Duplass Brothers production.”

The story of the Duplass Brothers, as chronicled in their wonderful autobiography “Like Brothers,” inspires me even today. They teach me that it doesn’t matter what I have to make art–it’s what I do with what I have that truly matters.

My favorite scene in “Baghead”: there’s actually a fairly creepy scene in which Michelle is waiting for Matt to enter her bedroom; Baghead appears and Michelle thinks it’s Matt playing a joke, so she takes her top off…but IS it Matt? She isn’t so sure anymore, and Baghead keeps watching until he suddenly walks away… Uncomfortable.

How did I first find out about this movie? Well, in June 2008, there was an episode of Ebert & Roeper in which Richard Roeper and guest critic Michael Phillips talked about it. They both admired it for its strangeness–Phillips in particular admitted he probably liked it so much because he saw many other films at Sundance that year that were even more pretentious than this one.

I may be dealing with a copyright issue here, but…here’s a transcript of that initial review, aired in mid-June 2008:

MICHAEL PHILLIPS: “I can’t think of a single reason why BAGHEAD should work at all…but it does. This new microbudget film by the Duplass brothers gives us four LA friends who want to jumpstart their fledgling film careers. So they head to Big Bear, east of LA, with the idea of writing a screenplay in the woods. For a while, the characters spend time scaring each other for fun, drinking too much, and then SOMEONE appears outside the cabin with a bag on his or her head. No one knows who it is, and at this point, a nicely observed deadpan comedy gets more and more interesting.”

(shows clip from trailer–“Somebody saw me naked!”)

PHILLIPS: “I don’t want to inflate Baghead or anything, but for me, the Duplass brothers show us, with Baghead, how the so-called ‘mumblecore’ genre should be done–with a sense of humor to go with a sense of everyday realities. In very limited release this weekend, it opens wider over the July 4th weekend…and I say ‘see it!'”

RICHARD ROEPER: “I’m with you, Michael–I liked this film quite a bit! I think this guy should’ve walked into that movie ‘The Strangers’ where they had the guy with the sackcloth over his head! (chuckles) This one’s a lot more entertaining–it’s very funny, it’s smart, and it can be really scary, and…it really has some nice performances as well, so, you know, people should look for this one.”

PHILLIPS: “I saw it the first time at the Sundance Film Festival, and I didn’t know if I was laughing then because I had just seen 10 movies that were so much lamer and more pretentious than this. But you know, second time through, it works well as its own kind of comedy.”

ROEPER: “Absolutely.”

Side-note: I miss this show. Roeper and Phillips had a good rhythm in reviewing new movies together.

By Tanner Smith

It’s the scary movie that made the late film critic Gene Siskel too nervous to walk home after an initial preview screening!

It’s the little indie horror film that could…and did…and set up a long string of disappointments (except for “Halloween (2018)”–that was a pretty good one).

John Carpenter’s “Halloween.” Man, even today, that opening-credit sequence and its subsequent murder scene gives me chills–THIS is how you begin a scary movie!

When I first saw it (at age 13, on the AMC channel), even when I had already seen countless slasher films at that time, I knew there was something special about it. I think it taught me that there could be far more to a horror film than just cheap scares, because “Halloween” had a great deal of heavy atmosphere and provoked more thought in my head than something like “Nightmare on Elm Street” or “Scream” or the “Friday the 13th” movies or any of the ’90s-horror films I was renting at that time. (“Psycho” taught me the same thing; I saw that around the same time I saw “Halloween” for the first time.)

I didn’t even notice at first that there’s very little graphic violence and almost NO blood (except in the opening murder scene). This movie scared little, dumb 13-year-old Tanner with…great filmmaking! Imagine that!! “Halloween” doesn’t specialize in blood or gore; it just relies on suspense, of which it has a great deal.And I’m not gonna lie–the first time I saw the moment in which the killer pops back up near the end, while first watching the movie late at night at age 13, I shouted “OH SH*T!” out of sheer fear. (I can’t be sure, but I think I woke up my parents with that remark.)

But…the film isn’t perfect. I know it’s not. I can tell it wasn’t filmed in the fall season or in Illinois, for that matter–note the palm trees in the background. (“Halloween 2018” contains a better feel for the Halloween season, thanks to the bigger budget.) Some of the acting isn’t very good, and some of the dialogue is even worse. And no matter how many times I watch the film, I still question why Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) just throws the knife away when she could’ve kept it for safety’s sake.

But when I think about “Halloween,” I don’t think about little things like that. Instead, I remember the fantastic cinematography (by Dean Cundey, who went on to shoot blockbusters like “Back to the Future” and “Jurassic Park”), the iconic music score (by Carpenter himself), the brilliantly disturbing one-shot prologue, the silent looming killer, the likable characters I don’t want to see get killed, the metaphors of fate and evil which are scattered all over the film, Dr. Loomis (played terrifically by Donald Pleasance), and the haunting ending that signifies that evil will never die. This film is also credited for that horror-film trope that states that the “final girl” must be a virgin in order to survive–John Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill argued against that, saying that the horny teens die because they’re so preoccupied with the prospects of getting laid that they don’t realize there’s a killer at large, while Laurie has other things on her mind and is more observant. When she finally realizes the danger she’s in, she has chances of survival. She does survive, though she may be mentally scarred for life…

That leads to “Halloween 2018” (or “Halloween: The Return of Good Filmmaking”), which was a solid sequel 40 years later, tackling how this incident affected Laurie all this time. And I’ll be curious to see what the upcoming “Halloween Kills” and “Halloween Ends” bring us in the future.

My favorite scene: the closet scene. Laurie is hiding from Michael and locking herself in a closet, but Michael knows she’s in there and tries busting his way in. The tense music is great, the filmmaking is spectacular, and you have to wonder what you would do if you were in Laurie’s shoes as she’s trying to use whatever she has around her to fight back.

So, if you feel like you’re in a scary movie, just remember these important rules of survival:

1) You can never have sex.

2) You can never drink or do drugs. (An extension of 1.)

3. Never, ever, under any circumstances, say, “Linda, you a**hole!” (…Or was it something else?)