Directed by Walter Murch
Written by Frank Baum/Walter Murch/Gil Dennis

Its 6 months after the tornado, autumn 1899, the eve of the new century and the farm is still a mess, Uncle Henry is a listless alcoholic and Dorothy keeps talking about witches and magic lands and anthropomorphising the scarecrow. Auntie Em plays the only card she has left to play; electroshock therapy. So off Dorothy goes, back to OZ, now a desolate and terrible place with street gangs that wear ritual masks on their heads and have gurney wheels for hands and feet and roll around everywhere screeching at the top of their lungs. Someone has decapitated all the pretty maidens. There is a rumour going around the henchmen community that SHE has returned and She-Has-Brought-A-CHICKEN!! with her.  Its two hours in a row of this craziness. Disney couldn’t kill the project because they needed it to extend their copyright on the OZ series, but enraged parents and child psychologists shortly did the job for them anyway. Even more disturbingly:  1) It was inspired in large part by a book entitled Wisconsin Death Trip.  2) It is considered to this day to be the most faithful of the OZ adaptations. Starring Fairuza Balk as Dorothy, Admiral Akbar as the electroshock machine, and another guy as a couch.

Directed by Ben Stiller

Written by Ben Stiller, Drake Sather and John Hamburg

Ever see The Manchurian Candidate?  Same movie.

Directed by Alphonso Cuaron
Written by PD James/Mark Fergus/Hawk Osby/David Arata

PD James wrote Barnes & Noble grade mystery novels. How this story ended up emerging from her brain is a bit of a mystery itself. It is absolutely horrifying, and not like Slasher Movie horrifying or You Just Found A Picture Of Your Grandpa Saluting Heydrich At The Nuremburg Rally horrifying. Its more of a Oh God we would totally do this kind of horrifying. Its the near future one no one can make babies anymore, no one tries to do anything anymore, the nations of the world are in flames and England is an island fortress where everyone is just going through their days, waiting for it all to wind down until the last eye closes. A terrorist attack makes Clive Owen almost spill his beer. A reckoning is due. It might have been a coffee, doesn’t matter. None of it matters anymore.

Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Written by Guillermo del Toro/Travis Beacham

The cool thing about watching Godzilla movies back then was that it was putatively difficult for little kids to come away with the wrong message. Superheroes in film are considered to be really damaging to their little minds because they directly equate being a good person with being an extremely violent person. Giant monster-on-monster violence on the other hand; the studies are a bit unclear. It is possible that the only real victims from this era were the family puppies conscripted into playing Mothra in the reenactments. So watching Pacific Rim is kinda liberating in that sense, like unnecessarily using all the towels in your hotel room or realizing that not leaving the house counts as carbon neutral. Its a gigantic freebie of crashing and smashing, an archipelago of vertical train wrecks where the containers are all full of seratonin and monster guts and none of the characters are complex enough to permit more than the most rarified empathy. Watch this and ever so briefly forget that you’ve ever cared about anything at all.

Directed by Mike Judge

Written by Mike Judge and Etan Cohen

I think Idiocracy is actually a Christopher Nolan movie. Hear me out for a sec. Firstly, I would not put it past Mike Judge to front a Christopher Nolan movie as his own. The man just has no rules. Secondly, although it is a passable comedy at best, and I recognize that this fact doesn’t go very far in support of my argument, it also has this time-and-reality bending, Nolanesque ability to rewrite itself as a terrific experience in the viewers memory.  Last time I watched it I wrote “meh” on my arm with Sriracha, apparently in an attempt to communicate with my future self, and now that I am privy to this incredible secret I still don’t love the movie any less. I am filled with pleasure when thinking about it, when discussing it with others, when writing about it right now, and I will happily watch it again even knowing that its going to be a bit of a turd. This is because Idiocracy exists as 2 different movies dependent upon when you’re experiencing it; the bitter, sophomoric, intermittently funny jeremiad of the present or the hilarious vivisection of modern American life that lives happily in our memory. Now tell me again that Christoper Nolan isn’t behind this. I mean, who else could it be? If you haven’t encountered this movie yet, it goes like this: The most expendable guy in the army is paired with a random prostitute in a cryogenics experiment and they wake up in the future to find they are the smartest people on earth and have to fix everything. Sounds great doesn’t it? Yeah but it really isn’t. But later on it will be!! Thanks Chris, you’re the best!

Directed by Wes Anderson

Written by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach

Ever visit a 6 year old relative for the first time? You’re standing there nodding, pretending to understand why its so important that you learn the names and emotional profiles of every single stuffed animal in the giant basket but truth be told you’d kinda prefer to deal with this part later, after you’ve had a couple drinks with your sister. Sometimes you need a minute to ready yourself for the immersive experience. In the Wes Anderson dimension it is the absence of that initial guided tour of his dioramas and bug collections that sets The Life Aquatic a bit apart from the others. This is a movie where the narrative gets up to speed right out of the gate, when Bill Murray threatens to kill one particular asshole shark in the ocean, and moves straight into a wonderful interplay between that trademark Anderson mis-en-scene-papering and the total chaos that regularly envelops his protagonists. It is a charming, fast moving film with an organic fluidity constituent of equal parts romance, exhaustion, bad parenting, insurance fraud and nautical warfare. Also it’s very clear that Jeff Goldblum is ad-libbing most of his lines. Hopefully he knows that some of us noticed.

We have a thing so no movie today.

Directed by Christophe Gans

Written by Christophe Gans and Stephane Cabel

French Historical Werewolf Action Noir.  Not a whole lot to say beyond that. They unfortunately lay it on pretty heavily with the mystical Native American sidekick trope, however in their defense they’re French and the guy does look great in oilskins. Also its been a couple years but I’m pretty sure Monica Bellucci plays a Vatican prostitute/assassin. I could have dreamed that part. Anyhow…

Directed by Jackie Chan

Written by Jackie Chan and Edward Tang

We all have this generally recognized understanding of what are the most absurdly dangerous jobs in the world; smoke jumper, astronaut, underwater welder, Alaskan crab fisherman, mob accountant, aspiring actress, those guys that put out oil fires, going hunting with your uncle, black person. The list does change slightly from era to era, and there was a period in the 1980s in which the most hazardous employment one could have was being an uncredited actor in a Jackie Chan movie. Hong Kong action cinema was then rapidly evolving from the kind of rigid, marionette-like back and forth martial silliness to the sophisticated, fluid, fast moving wire fu upon which all modern action choreography is based. During this brief period a Chinese stuntman’s job was unbelievably dangerous, and the loose assemblage of maniacs known internationally as The Jackie Chan Stunt Team had a replacement rate paramount to the French Foreign Legion. Police Story represents their era of peril at its zenith, as well as Chan at his acrobatic peak, which is another way of saying right before the toll of injuries forced him to start dialing it back a bit. The craziness starts early, the dialogue is kept respectfully brief and it all ends with an extravagant and unconventional repurposing of a perfectly good shopping mall. Arrive prepared to witness a disconcerting amount self-administered civil rights violations, most notably during a car chase for which there are no words in our language to accurately describe.