Super Summer Movie Reviews: Up, Land of the Lost, Drag Me To Hell

Let me begin by saying that afternoon television during the summer is some dire, dire straits. Terrible. And the prime-time viewing isn't much better. Surprisingly, it's better at the end of the week (with Top Chef Masters, Burn Notice, and Harper's Island on Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday), which means that we can skip the cinema during the weekend and pick up with the much lighter crowds during the week, when I should really be working, but Leah gets bored.

Leah and I did make it out to the AMC Mesa Grand Cinemas on opening weekend to see the new Pixar outing Up. We are running out of superlatives to lay on Pixar movies. It would be hard to surpass a movie that was as excellent as last summer's masterpiece, WallE. So Pixar didn't really bother to try. Instead of a cosmic love story, Pixar brings us an intimate portrait of a man dealing with his grief.

The movie begins with 10 of the most affecting minutes in recent memory. A young man who fancies himself an adventurer runs into a young woman named Ellie, who immediately forge a friendship that, we discover in montage, develops into a romance, then a thirty-plus year marraige. And then the Carl Fredrickson, now old and voiced by Ed Asner, is left a widower. He becomes largely a shut-in in his own home, mourning his life partner and the great adventure they never took: to an unexpored South American wilderness.

The crotchety man eventually finds his home surrounded by the encroaching city, in images that evoke the children's story The Little Red House. When Carl assaults a worker on a neighboring construction site (the sight of blood in a cartoon is striking), he is compelled to abandon his home (to whom he speaks as an avatar for his lost wife) and is moved into an assistated living facility. But before the sentence can be carried out, Fredrickson tethers several thousand balloons to his house and releases them, sending him and a certain stowaway on their adventure, which features a pack of talking dogs, an eight-foot tropical bird, and an eighty-foot dirigible.

Visually, Up reminds me of The Incredibles, which was anoter fantastic Pixar film, but I think that this is a movie that makes fewer compromises than any of the Pixar movies other than WallE. It would have been easy for a lesser studio to allow the house to become the emotional stand-in for Ellie, but the filmmakers here resist that urge. When Carl speaks to the house, it remains simply a house to us, which makes his loneliness that much more effecting for the audience.

Up leads to a fairly predictible final act, but, as with most of the best Pixar movies, the first two acts are well-observed enough to redeem the ultimate sop thrown to the kids, who are (ostensibly) the target audience for the film.

Final Verdict: Better than Iron Man, not quite as good as The Dark Knight.

I have no memory of the (un?)intentionally cheesy television series Land of the Lost. To the best of my knowledge, I've never seen it. But I've heard enough from others to have some idea what a "Sleestak" was before I walked into the theatre. I'd also seen enough Will Farrell comedies to understand that Farrell is very much like pizza: even when he's bad, he's still pretty good.

The plot of the film is largely beside the point. It's kind of a shaggy dog, but here it is: Farrell is Dr. Rick Marshall, who has an outre theory about alternate universes. After he shares his theory on the Today show with Matt Lauer, his career goes down in flames (although he gains YouTube immortality). Marshall ends up performing science demonstrations for children at the museum at the LaBrea Tar Pits, until a comely PhD student (Anna Friel) convinces him that there is evidence supporting his theory. They travel to a roadside attraction, where they accidentially bring the attraction huckster (Danny McBride) to the titular Land of the Lost. Hijinks ensue.

The issue with Will Farrell movies is that it's difficult to ascertain whether the preview represents merely the hilarity that isn't seen (such as in Anchorman or Talledega Nights) or whether there is very little there there after the ten good minutes that you get from assembling the different clips from the preivews together (Stepbrothers, Semi-Pro, Blades of Glory, etc., etc.). Land of the Lost falls firmly into this latter camp. The previews suckered our $14 out of our pockets, but we left feeling rather empty and disappointed. Not a terrible way to spend a Monday mid-day, but probably not the best way, either.

Final Verdict: Not as good as The Incredible Hulk, and maybe slightly better than Stepbrothers.

The Sam Raimi cult has escaped me for nearly 30 years now. I've seen Army of Darkness, and thought it was pretty funny and interestingly chaotic. The Spiderman movies were fun for what they were and kind of went off the rails with the third entry. 2000's The Gift, with Cate Blanchett, is a really quality movie. But I've never really understood the hipster obsession with the guy. Maybe I need to break down an evenually rent the Evil Dead movies. I'll do that... next weekend. Are people so forgiving of the guy who brought America The Quick and the Dead and For the Love of the Game?

Raimi's latest effort returns him to the horror genre. Drag Me To Hell stars Alison Lohman (who has one of those faces that constantly tickles the back of my mind and makes me wonder where I've seen her before. She's appeared as the younger princess [I think] in Beowulf, but I may instead remember her as the young love interest in Big Fish. I have no idea.) as Christine Brown. Christine is an ambitious bank clerk whose boss believes that she might not be quite tough enough to take over as Assistant Manager. To prove her backbone, she denies a mortgage extension to a pathetic Gypsy woman. In revenge, the Gypsy woman places a curse on Brown that will last three days before she is... well, the title will give you the idea.

Raimi seems at his best when he's daring his audience to believe what is actually happening on screen. I am not a horror movie afficionado, but this film seems to occupy a different space than more traditional horror movies like the Halloween series or the torture porn series like Saw. I'm told that Raimi is the master of horror comedy, but this movie doesn't offer a lot of scares, or a lot of laughs. There are moments (like when characters refer to Christine's past as a heavy farm girl) that seem undeveloped and make me wonder whether a director's cut of this movie might be more successful. Lohman is an appealing presence as far as she goes, as is her professor boyfriend Justin Long.

Ultimately, Drag Me To Hell is the kind of likeable, forgettable movie that you probably won't regret seeing, but won't stay with you in any meaningful way. It seems like the kind of movie that was really, really difficult to market. This will make a fine rental for millions of Americans in six months.

Final Verdict: Better than Pineapple Express, but not as good as Hellboy 2: The Golden Army.