Hello everyone and welcome to the weekend, part 2! I saw the two films I missed this weekend, and here’s what I thought…

FAME. I never saw the original by Alan Parker, though I am a fan of the filmmaker since he made BUGSY MALONE, a personal favorite of mine. I tried to put the original on my netflix Queue but it had a very long wait. Typical. So I’m not sure how this compares to that one. The remake focuses on a handful of kids at New York’s performing arts high school from Freshman year to Graduation. Here’s the cast of characters: Jenny is a shy and meek actress that needs to come out of her shell. Marco is the calm and cool singer that captures Jenny’s heart. Denise is a classic pianist but wants to sing hip hop. Malik is a hard ass that wants to be a rapper and actor (freakin’ pick one a-hole). Victor is a musician that happens to produce hip hop as well. Kevin is a wannabe filmmaker that just has no clue. And there’s a few others that really didn’t make much of an impression. We also see mainly three teachers at the school: Ms Kraft (Bebe Neuwirth) is the tough but honest dance teacher. Charles S. Dutton is the sensitive drama teacher. And Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) is a music teacher that has no heart. The movie constantly shifts from one story to the next, always throwing hurdle after hurdle at the students just to show how difficult it is to “make it”. Honestly, it starts off quite well. The energy is high, and it was interesting how everyone was introduced through their auditions. I almost cared for a couple of the kids during the first half. But then the movie kind of implodes, and that’s due to the large number of major players. There’s just too many characters to fully flesh any of them out. It’s like watching a recap of a full season of a Television show. I also wish there were more musical numbers. The first one with all of the kids singing and dancing in the lunchroom was alot of fun, but then the rest of the songs are just hip hop garbage. Apparently, every kid at this art school listens to and loves hip-hop. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like any art school I’ve ever heard of. The character I cared about the most was Jenny, played very well by Kay Panabaker. But she still wasn’t fleshed out hardly at all. Naturi Naughton was very good as Denise and she does what she can with her thin character. Collins Pennie overdoes the thug thing too much as Malik, making him more unlikable than anything. His poor attitude really bothered me. I was hoping he that he’d be expelled. I think his character was supposed to change, but I never really saw the transition. The worst for me was the character of the filmmaker, and that’s probably because I’m one myself. I also went to film school so I know all kinds of students, and this guy was pathetic. Talking about long shots and quirky Wes Anderson characters. He has no clue what it is to be a director. His idea of filmmaking is using some crappy camcorder to film his friend getting drunk. It’s an awful short film, and then the teacher praises him for it. He would have been laughed out of any film class. Whatever! That pissed me off the most. The end of the film wraps everything up too neatly, and turns out to be like every other modern dance film like STEP UP. It follows every cliche of the genre to the letter, and is just boring. I suppose it’s no worst than any other entry from the genre, so fans of these kinds of movies will probably enjoy it. I was just disappointed, cause it started off with potential, but it falls apart by the end.

PANDORUM is a sci-fi thriller that looked kind of like EVENT HORIZON from the trailer. I wasn’t a big fan of that movie, though it looked really cool. It stars Ben Foster as Bower, who wakes up from a hyper sleep on a spaceship in deep space. He doesn’t remember much of anything. Payton (Dennis Quaid) also wakes up from hyper sleep. At least he remembers that they are on a mission to travel to a newly found planet that has life on it, to start a new colony. The ship also contains 16,000 passengers, all in hyper sleep. The ship has no power, so Bower travels through the ship as Payton navigates him by radio. We soon learn that they aren’t alone. There are cannibalistic mutants that want to eat them. Bower also meets a couple of survivors that know how to battle the creatures, Nadia and some Asian dude. Nadia knows where the reactor is and guides Bower to it as they are being pursued by the mutants. Meanwhile, Payton finds a passenger named Gallo (Cam Gigandet) who might have some kind of sickness called Pandorum, which causes one to go nuts and kill everybody (kind of like Michael Biehn in THE ABYSS). With a budget of 40 million, this looks pretty impressive. The effects were alot better than I thought they would be. Most of the set design was typical of the genre. Lots of grungy and dark looking corridors. But the reactor room was awesome, which was also the lair of the mutants. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The movie starts off a tad shaky. Ben Foster overacts for most of the first act, and Dennis Quaid grunts his way through his lines. But director Christian Alvart really captures the claustrophobic tone nicely. And once the mutants start attacking, the pace really picks up. Seeing that asian dude battle them was pretty cool. The reactor finale was about as exciting as it gets, with Bower crawling over the sleeping mutants. What didn’t work for me was the stuff with Payton and Gallo. Mainly because Cam Gigandet is such a douchebag of an actor.

He sucks. Hated him in both NEVER BACK DOWN and TWILIGHT. Why is this guy allowed to act? He looks like someone that would’ve kicked my ass in junior high. Just one look at him and you think, “Asshole!”. He probably threatened a producer that he would beat up his kids if he didn’t get an acting job. Every single acting choice and facial tick is too much. He does everything they tell you not to do in acting class. Saying that he overdoes it is an understatement. But at least his acting makes Foster’s performance subtle by comparison. The conclusion gets a little silly, with a plot twist that felt unnecessary. But I really liked the resolution of the film. Overall, it was a fairly involving sci-fi monster film that tried to add a little psychological stuff in it that didn’t quite work. Fans of the genre that aren’t very picky will like it enough. It’s definitely better than the other sci-fi film this weekend, SURROGATES. If you have to see one of those, see PANDORUM. The film has solid direction and effects. It’s unfortunate that Cam Gigandet’s awful work deflates this movie, which I may have recommended if it wasn’t for him. There has been many entries from this genre that have been much worse, though

Here’s the recap based on a four-star rating system:

FAME [PG] – **

PANDORUM [R] – **1/2

None of the mainstreams films are worth a trip to the theater this weekend. But I do recommend going to lagoon to see PARIS.

That’s it for now!

Take Care!

Be Geeky!

And watch movies!

This post was written by Austin Kennedy, Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Diversionary Tactics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.