Eye Candy #571 - "The Thing" (2011)

The Thing (2011): “That’s not a dog!”  A prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 film of the same name which I dearly love (which in turn was a remake of the 1951 film “The Thing From Another World”), this film details the 3 days prior to the events featured in the 1982 film, as an alien space ship is discovered beneath the ice in Antarctica.  Its alien passenger, frozen in the ice for 100,000 years, is taken back to base camp by a team of Norwegian scientists (with a healthy smattering of American staff to make American audiences give a crap), where it promptly thaws out and attempts to absorb and assimilate anyone it comes in contact with, all while sprouting fangs, tentacles, and vaguely phallic appendages galore.  Dr. Kate Lloyd (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a paleontologist hired by the head Norwegian researcher to help extract the alien from ice, but she’s also the first to realize what the alien is trying to do.  From then on, it’s all guns, flamethrowers, thermite grenades, and people who aren’t what they appear to be, as Lloyd realizes they have to stop the monster from leaving the Norwegian camp.  Joel Edgerton, channeling Kurt Russell’s Macready from the 1982 film, is an American helicopter pilot caught up in the alien to-do.  The supporting cast also includes Eric Christian Olsen (in a rare serious role) and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Mr. Eko from “Lost), amidst a host of Danish and Norwegian actors.  Violent, gory, and paranoiac, the film seesaws between monster attacks and the mounting distrust between the remaining humans as the alien hides among them.  Director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., in his first full-length English language picture, has an almost slavish devotion to the production design of the 1982 film, making sure to incorporate salient bits to set up the next part of the story, from where bodies are left and what condition they are found in to the size and shape of the block of ice the alien was trapped in.  For fans of the original, these are nice touches without it being a straight homage.  Because let’s face it – we know how this ends before we ever sit down in the theater.  At times it does feel like it’s retracing some of the same steps as the first picture, but there are enough swerves to keep it going along.  Woodchuck sez, “Me likey.”

Eye Candy #570 - "Contagion"

Contagion:  This Steven Soderbergh-helmed ensemble piece plays more like a thriller than a medical drama.  A young woman (played very briefly by Gywneth Paltrow) becomes infected with a virulent plague in Hong Kong and travels back to the United States where the virus runs rampant, killing quickly with a 25% mortality rate.  Her husband (Matt Damon) has to save the remaining member of his family as society in his home city of Minneapolis as well as around the world begins to descend into anarchy and human contact can kill.  Laurence Fishburne is a doctor at the CDC leading a team tasked with finding the source, make-up, and cure for the virus, and whether or not the increasing pandemic is a terrorist attack or more natural in origin, all while tap-dancing around the inherent politics of the situation across various nations. Spanning the globe, the film follows the efforts of survivors, of government personnel looking for a cure, and those seeking to take advantage of situation for personal gain.  As you can tell, it’s busy, busy, busy.  Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, and Jude Law co-star here.  Structurally very similar to Soderbergh’s “Traffic”, he deftly juggles multiple story lines all happening simultaneously, as well as making a 106 minute movie just fly by.  The cast is uniformly good, the film is technically solid, and the points driven home by the movie are extremely timely.  Hand sanitizer sales should go through the roof.  Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”

Eye Candy #569 - "Lone Wolf McQuade"

Lone Wolf McQuade:  The spaghetti western of Chuck Norris movies, with Chuck here as proto-Walker, maverick Texas Ranger J.J. McQuade, fighting for justice in the American southwest against banditos culled directly from Peckinpah westerns, through the medium of his booted feet, sawed-off shotgun, his pet wolf, and his super-charged Ford Bronco that apparently never has its lights off.   He, his ex-wife, and daughter all live in El Paso, though his wife and daughter are planning a move to Las Cruces (which they make sound like the end of the earth, as opposed to say, 25 miles away).  In the course of dealing desert justice, he runs afoul of arms dealer/martial artist Rawley Wilkes (played by Keith Carradine), who is robbing federal arms shipments at the behest of his evil midget partner, Falcon (no, I’m not making that up).  McQuade is saddled with a new partner, Kayo (a very young Robert Beltran) and an obligatory distracting love interest who is more than she appears (played by Barbara Carrere).  This film is trying so hard to be a Sergio Leone homage, it’s hard not to give it some kudos for commitment.  The supporting cast is fun include the always watchable L.Q. Jones and William Sanderson, but the acting is by and large, fairly terrible.  Norris is as wooden as usual.  Throw in some anemic fight scenes, including a much hallooed one between Norris and Carradine (which looks like a joke compared to contemporary fight scenes) and you’ve got the makings of a fairly ho-hum action picture.  Not nearly as much as fun as say, “Invasion USA”, which gets belly laughs just for being awful.  Woodchuck sez, “For serious Norris fans only.”