Tag: KaDee Strickland

Exploring the Nic Cage B Grade Cinematic Universe with Nate: Grand Isle

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

This was something else, and aside from a few well placed moments of black comedy and some decent atmospherics, kind of a WTF waste of time. Grand Isle refers to the swampy Louisiana island that kooky alcoholic war veteran Walter (Nic Cage) and his bizarre, manipulative wife Fancy (Kadee Strickland) are confined to during a hurricane sometime circa 1988. They hate each other, he’s a cantankerous, mean spirited drunk and she’s a slinky, untrustworthy wannabe femme fatale and the young man (Luke Benward) that he hired to fix the fence before the storm hit is now stuck in their house with them, a hapless pawn in their half crazed mind games with each other that ultimately end in murder. We know this because there are flash forwards to the future where Buddy, soaked in blood, is being periodically and lazily interrogated by a suspicious detective played by a sneering Kelsey Grammar. This thing tries to be a sultry, southern gothic potboiler and provide a decent mystery but it just can’t keep its story straight or its ducks in a row enough that we care nor comprehend what’s going on. Cage is kind of a hoot here though as the misanthropic asshole drunkard, swilling down an entire case of Pabst Blue Ribbon only to line the bottles up on the fence while Buddy is fixing it and go up to the roof to blast them with a scoped rifle just to shake the poor kid up, lol. Strickland hams it up a lot as the wife and you’ve gotta give her credit for such a crazy performance, whether she’s slowly serving mint juleps or taking a candlelit bath with Billie Holliday’s Strange Fruit warbling off a turntable in the background she’s like a weird southern belle Jessica Rabbit or something. Benward is unfortunately just bland and very not charismatic which is felt throughout, and Grammar does his best with his few scenes and is always some kind of presence but his efforts, although garnished with a hilariously over the top southern dandy accent, are kinda lost in the shuffle. I feel like this setting, idea and cast would have been great with a way better script but as it is there’s just nothing of substance there. Two cages out of five.

-Nate Hill

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense produces the kind of rarely attained fear that we always seek out in this genre, that creeping cold dread that has you clammy and your nerves jagged, where you know you’ll be looking over your shoulder as you walk down the dark hallway to your room later that night. That’s the best kind to me, stemming from well made, atmospheric ghost stories as opposed to all this gore-hound nonsense you see these days (can you believe they’re making another fucking Saw flick? Actually from a dollar sign perspective I can, but still). This one is a veritable haunted house of apparitions and phantasms, all witnessed by a disturbed Haley Joel Osment, who would look even more worried if he could see himself now as a twenty-something walking play-dough potato. He can see dead people, as he intensely whispers to Bruce Willis’s lonely child psychologist in the film’s now showcase moment, and not all of them like to keep their distance. Willis is traumatized from a tragedy years before involving an unstable former patient (Donnie Whalberg), and treads hesitantly with this new kid. A bond is formed, however, and with it comes the desire to help. The frequent paranormal sightings range from grisly, bemusing, shocking, tragic and often downright terrifying, especially one involving a very young, gaunt Mischa Barton invading a couch fort Osment has made to try and get some peace and quiet. The plot is carefully composed and directed by Shyamalan in a magician behind the curtain fashion, the veil gradually drawn with every beat until we’re presented with a staggering twist ending that has become legend since the film’s release back in the days before such a conclusion could be found in every fourth title on the thriller shelf of Blockbuster. Such is the power of storytelling though, and the potency of innovation to inspire others. It’s also great fun to watch the film multiple times and spot the breadcrumb trail of clues leading towards the outcome, clues that you wouldn’t have picked up on before. Along with Barton, who is terrific, there’s nice work from Toni Colette, Trevor Morgan, Kadee Strickland and Olivia Williams as well. You may know the ending even if you haven’t seen the film before, as we do after all live in the age of spoilers, snitches and online hoo-hah, but there’s more to be had than the shock of that, it’s a mesmerizing journey there with a darkly enchanted aura from start to flabbergasting finish. Remains Shyamalan’s best to this day. 

-Nate Hill

Robot Cops, Giant Bugs and Big Snakes in the Jungle: An Interview with Ed Neumeier by Kent Hill

by Kent Hill, posted in Interviews

 

 

I remember vividly the first time a saw RoboCop. Watching it with the cousins in my bedroom and my mother walking past, hearing a flurry of coarse language, then sticking her head through the door to see what we were viewing. My cousin Rick, was good at putting spin on such incidents, so that we might avoid reprisal and be allowed to keep the movie going. Needless to say, that first time, I was pretty much doing what Rick told my mother I was doing – I was waiting for RoboCop to show up and not listening to the foul language at all. Well, maybe just a little.

Then we have Starship Troopers for which I blew off a lecture at university to go see. The prospect of this large-scale, B-movie flavored extravaganza was too good to pass up. I walked out of the picture exhilarated and so glad I skipped an hour long spiel on The Trojan Women to partake in this, the third time a director named Paul Verhoeven had blown my joyous, cinema-obsessive brains out.

 

But there’s another character responsible for this pair of uber-cool films and that is their scribe, Ed Neumeier, who as a young man wanted nothing more than to make movies. He, at that time his his life, had had his own mind blown when he learned that in his home town of Marin County a man named George Lucas was making movies. “It is possible,” he said to himself and thus took off for California. Once there, after finishing college, spending time as reader for the studios and a short time as an executive, he had an idea for a story that would eventually become a cinema classic. He joined forces with another filmmaker by the name of Michael Miner and together they got down to writing RoboCop.

 

ROBOCOP, cinematographer Jost Vacano, director Paul Verhoeven, on set, 1987. (c)Orion Pictures

The film would go on to become a phenomenon, spawning two sequels, a remake, and TV series and even an animated series (and a it-looks-really-cool documentary, RoboDoc). The film gave Ed the start he was looking for and introduced him to the director (Verhoeven) with whom he would mount his next assault at cinematic glory. It would take place beyond the stars on planets menaced by giant insects in their hundreds and thousands. Based on the Robert Heinlein novel of the same name, Ed would bring his love of science fiction and personal blend of humor and action to Troopers, and, for the second time, he and Paul were on a winner which would have sequels, Troopers 3 which he himself would direct, as well as animated films, Traitor of Mars is set to be released, comics and games.

 

(L to R) HARRISON FORD as the iron-fisted Colonel Dolarhyde, DANIEL CRAIG as a stranger with no memory of his past and director/executive producer JON FAVREAU on the set of an event film for summer 2011 that crosses the classic Western with the alien-invasion movie in a blazingly original way: ?Cowboys & Aliens?.

Yes folks, Ed Neumeier is indeed a world builder and he’s working in the movie business and living the dream. He is cooking up a new film, and we that have grown up watching and loving the movies he has thus far penned, (yes, I kinda like Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid) look forward to see where this talented screenwriter is going to take us next. Whether it be alien bugs, cyborg cops or those oversized killer serpents you don’t want to have lunch with, I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say, we’re in good hands.

Here he is folks, the man, the one and only . . . Ed Neumeier.