The Monster Squad Aura is No More

The Monster Squad Aura is No More

I watch The Goonies at least once a month and that isn't because I have kids. (My kids aren't quite old enough for Data, Chunk and the boys.) I watch it because I love it and it was a huge part of my life when I was younger and one of the movies along with Raiders that churned my imagination every which way leading me down the path I am at today. Epic, the huge fantasy script I wrote had many 'Goonie' and other movies of that time elements to it. My friend Chip, was a Monster Squad guy. I loved The Monster Squad too. It was a couple years past "The Goonies," but at that age, movies like that just rocked and I have/had always been a big fan of the Hammer Studio/Universal Studio Monster Pictures and anything remotely similar to those characters I would line up for any day. Well, "The Goonies" throughout the next 20 years never really went away. You could find it on TNT, Superstation, VHS, and finally in a Deluxe Edition DVD. I owned both and had The Goonies whenever I wanted them at least for the last seven to eight years.



The Monster Squad wasn't that way. It had come out in the theater and then disappeared into thin air, maybe surfacing back in the day of Russ Russell's basement on HBO... I can't remember. Well, I had occasionally seen little reminders online, TV, books of that campy film, "The Monster Squad." In fact, I had been excited for quite awhile for a DVD release of it.

Finally, what, two years ago, I got my wish in a Deluxe Edition DVD. With the release of the DVD came lots of articles and press on the film where I found out 20 years later that the film had bombed miserably at the Box Office and Critics/Audiences had torn it apart. I don't remember it being that way. I loved that fraggin' movie. Yeah, I was 14 but so what?

Even looking at The Goonies, yes there are some real fake, cheesy parts, dialogue and the whole premise is rather ridiculous. Do I still watch it? Hell yes! The same went for Monster Squad. The only difference is I had not seen MS in maybe twenty years.

In the past year and a half, everytime I'd walk by it at Wal-Nuts, Best Buy, Circuit City, I'd check the price, pick it up, yearn to have it, but I had promised my wife only 8 films a year, (I could purchase,) and I guess subconsciously I found $17.00 for this film not caliber enough to be put on the 'Big Eight' list especially when I had not bought "There Will Be Blood" yet. I thought, Christmas Time would be right around the corner and I'd get to relive some more memories of my childhood while being inspired like I once was with Goonies and the other Imaginative Movies of that time.

Well, a week and a half ago, I got a break. I had succumbed to an acute kidney infection and was sentenced to bed rest. My DVD player shit the bed a week before and my loving, sympathetic mother gave me some money to go replace it since I had just blown $400 on a Doctor visit and could not do so myself. Well, the DVD Player ended up being on sale so of course I was like, "Well, let's find a movie to watch on it as well." I hate giving Wal Nuts a red cent of my money but today it just so happened I was there at their pharmacy cause it was close to home. They have something called Roll Back Pricing, (whatever that means,) but anyway Monster Squad had been victim of the Roll Back and was only nine dollars. I thought, "Today was my day.... I was buying Monster Squad."

That night after the kids went to sleep I watched the film for the first time since before puberty, (don't quote me on that,) and well.... I'm not sure it was the same movie. I mean maybe, back in the day I was suffering from no Goonie Sequelitis or something and this Monster Squad at the time was enough antibiotic to keep me pushing on. Like I said earlier, I watch Goonies and see the cheese that I never saw back in the day, yet I'm OK with it because I get it.
Well, Monster Squad's cheesiness and ridiculousness was inexcusable and the effects were awful and it just wasn't the same movie I remembered. That's heart breaking considering the patience and anxiety I had toward finely owning and watching that film again.

Yes I know now why it bombed. Nice try but I'll keep wearing out my Goonie, Dirty Dancing, Ferris Bueller DVD's out.

My Big Eight List Thus Far I've Bought:

1. Planet Terror-- *Doesn't really count as list of eight. (Christmas gift card)
2. Heat Deluxe Edition
3. Midnight Cowboy DE
4. There Will Be Blood
5. Monster Squad-- *Gift
6. Juno

*The Eight are actual movies I buy out of my bank account with MY money.

The Original Kick Ass Poster



The Not so Kick Ass DVD

Good but the Worst of the Four

WARNING: Indiana Jones 4 Spoilers in this post. If you plan on seeing it, and haven't, don't read!!!!!


When I'm wrong, I'll say I'm wrong. I may just have been real wrong here. The last time this sort of thing happened it was like 1999, I believe. I went to the theater and watched 'The English Patient.' I walked out of there hating-- scratch that-- loathing that movie. I don't know whether it caught me on a bad day, or I was expecting more than I got, I don't know. The two weeks following, I began to think about the movie. (This one had already won Best Picture and gotten the rave reviews by the time I took my turn so I had high hopes and when it didn't deliver, I couldn't help but think what went wrong.) Well the more I thought about the story, the film, the characters, the more I realized maybe the film was OK and I had just experienced it during two bad hours of one bad day. I couldn't stop thinking about it. Finally, I snuck out of work and went back to the cheap matinee to watch again. I loved every minute of it the second time around. In fact it still rests on my Top 20 of all time and I own the Deluxe Edition DVD that gets watched at least once a year. (I also watched it 5 times in the theatre total. Sorry, I was a film geek and with a Student ID we went to films for $3.00 and $5.00 anytime in LA.)

There has only been three times in my life that this little belch in perspective of a film has occurred. Pulp Fiction, The English Patient and now…. YES, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

To refresh you, Raiders rests at the 1 movie of all time in my book and was the film that started all this ridiculousness for me. So best believe, twenty years in waiting from 'Crusade' to this one…. My hopes were high. I watched the film with my buddy Doug, and I could tell half way through he was miserable. I on the other hand, felt that there were massively cheesy excerpts, but I kept an open mind and didn't let the cheesy one liners and transparent plot twists deter me from enjoying the film. But as the film creeped into its final act some shananigans happened that made it hard for me to keep a positive perspective. First, Shia swinging from the vines with his monkey cousins following him, coincidentally helping wreck the bad guys? C'mon man. And then, freaking Lucas you asshole…. You just had to do it didn't you? Isn't there enough starships and freaking space pods in your other franchise? You had to go ahead do it here and Speilberg, don't think you are in the clear here with your 'Close Encounters Ship' replica showing up to offer a "corridor" at the end of a INDIANA JONES MOVIE!!!!!

OK, so with that crap said, I left the theatre hurt, broken, and betrayed from what I had seen. I was so hurt in fact that I vowed to never speak of Indy 4 again. Well, two weeks has gone by and I haven't been able to take my mind off that film. The more I think about the film the more I feel I gave it a spiteful impulsive review, because honestly, cheesy one liners and stale references of Indy adventures past, I had a good time and that honestly is what Indiana was all about. I had originally predicted that this film would be good, but the worst of the four and that to me was a dead on take of Indy 4. If I completely block out Jones Junior swinging from the vines with the monkeys and the Close Encounters mother ship barreling out of the Amazon Jungle out of my head, I can actually retort my original review and say, "It was Indiana and that's all that matters." It will not get a spot in my Top 20 nor will say it's gonna' be a movie I'll make time to see again in the theater. I will own the Deluxe Edition DVD and I may just go buy the Barnes & Noble Graphic Novel, (I own the previous three films comics as well.) I will just stop reading after the big Jungle Chase and I'll make sure for the DVD that my player's remote is fixed by then so I can hit stop about the time Shia is sprung up in the tree after fighting off Cate Blanchett's Russian Antagonist character on the back of a Jeep.

A Note to George: Dude, a spaceship does not belong in an Indiana Jones movie. Get off your high horse. That stunt nearly crushed a young kids' dream and aura of the Fedora and whip…… NOTICE I SAY, 'NEARLY.'

The Best Film of All Time

16th of All Time (Mostly because it's Indy)

In the low 30s... Until now was the worst of the three.

Fun. Good. But like I said, the worst of the 4 and not planted on SSG's list.

Thanks but no Thanks

I'm only going to answer this question one more time. Here are the reasons I am not seeing Transformers.

1)Michael Bay
2)$200 plus budget rarely makes a good film
3)When Computer EFX take over the importance of sets, story and now acting duties, you've lost the word 'Cinema' altogether completely, (which started the phenonmenon to begin with)
4) Again, Michael Bay

Yes, I'm old school. Yes, I am a prude when it comes to devoting time to watching films. Yes, I owned every Transformer that filled the toy store aisles back in the day. (Prowl was my favorite.)

But...

If I were to spend $15.00 on a "Dreaded Summer Movie," Box Office Ticket... It would be... (WAIT I DID!!!!) Oceans Thirteen. --Wonderful by the way!!!- If I were to get two more choices, they would be:

Bruce, Kevin and this franchise they call Die Hard. They are saying it is the smartest of all the DH's before it. If no "Yippy Kah Yah" then it would have to be "Bugger..." The Pirates World End. You are now saying what is the difference?

Two Things: One, I'm a huge 'Adventure' movie buff, obviously and that movie the last time I checked, the Pirates movies still spent money on real sets. IE: Boats, Oceans, Swords and Two, It's the final of the 3. I own the other two... Why wouldn't I at least give the finale a day in court? With Indiana Jones 4 in production as of June 18th there is no room for no brainer EFX movies. Transformers is just that. The movie shot almost completely from the Autodesk Software Platform, this movie from what I've read and obviously seen has no substance. No story, (or one we consider halfway descent.) I hear everybody say, it's great and yada, yada, but they are not saying it's great as a piece for your collection of 'Cinema Storytelling.' They are saying it is great because the filmmakers... Scratch that the Computer Effect Makers green screen a bus getting hit with a wrecking ball and then superimpose 'Rock Crusher' in the wrecking ball's place. Cool and all but I'll pass. Robot movies have never been all that cool unless you have seen Short Circuit and hell, the cartoon for these ridiculus hunks of steel wasn't all that good to begin with. You know why you haven't seen a GI JOE movie? Because they realized after Dolph Lundgren effed up He Man, that these kinds of cartoons based on old school action figures don't play well. This one will not either. Gimme' Rum, Nakatomi Plaza, a Fedora or even then an R2-D2 Beep. The Transformer schtick should have stayed where it belongs... The discontinued item list at Toys R Us.

Prove me wrong.


**Good Old Fashioned Fantasy, Adventure, Action Driven Movies I am putting on my TO WATCH LIST.
***In Order

1)Indy 4
2)Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton)
3)Live Free/Die Hard
4)Grindhouse
5)Pirates World End
6)Batman - The Dark Knight
7)Beowulf

8)BUY BABEL ON DVD AND WATCH OVER & OVER AGAIN.
 


 


  


  


  


 

Snakes... Why did it have to be Snakes.

Getting away from the normal drama, over exaggerated garble I type here, I received the best news thus far this year.

Are you ready?

Indiana Jones 4 is now in pre-production. It will come to theatres in the summer of 2008!!!! You have no idea how long I've waited to hear that bit of news.

Do you know how many years I've read the rumors and BS "Production News" lies. All of them spread false hope. Do you know how many "bootleg" scripts of INDY 4 I've read in the past eight years? I've read Darabont's, Koepp's, Kasdan's and countless other's specs. The stories ranged from Indy's son going after Noah's Ark to Indy coming out of retirement to find Jimmy Hoffa's body.(Just kidding on the second one.) The others ranged from chasing Nazis, dragons, and all sorts of superstitious hocus pocus. I loved almost everyone I read. So now, it's really happening and they are keeping the script under lock and key. In fact, there was one rumor where the script was actually being printed with invisible ink and only the key Execs had the "serum" to make it readable. Either way, I won't cause a big ruckus over what it is about nor will I blow any money buying a pirated copy off eBay. I want to be surprised. I look forward to anxiously awaiting the open date. I look forward to news updates, teasers, trailers and all that other marketing crap. (I'll be first in line to buy a movie poster for my new office and house.) Raiders was the movie that threw me in this tumultuous career path and I know Indy 4 will never, ever surpass Raiders but c'mon....

It took almost ten years of script writing to get Lucas, Speilberg, Connery and Ford to commit to it. It will be worth every minute, hour, day, month I have to wait. The last movie I did the countdown on was Miami Vice. It was at the casting stages when I heard about it. Indy hasn't even arrived at the concept art yet so the next year will be painstakingly tough and although timing sucked and I never made it to the theater to see 'Vice' on the big screen. ( I was in route on opening night when my babysitter bailed on me,) I will not miss Indy.

In the Summer of 2008, Payton will be two and a half and although she won't be old enough to take, I'll remember as I approach the box office that fateful Friday night when my father looked back at me as he paid for our tickets for Raiders with his eyebrow raising smile and said, "Here we go," wishing I could share that moment with her too. To end yet another rant, I hope it will restore my faith in America Cinema.

*Note to George Lucas

Please man, don't cake it up. You got away with all the CGI in Star Wars, because, well you had to, but Indy is real sets, natural backgrounds. Indy is dirt, blood and real camels, snakes, rats and well, not real, nazis. If I see a thousand CGI'd snakes and not the real thing, you will ruin everything great about the series. I hope I'm not alone on this. George, Steve-- Please build sets. Not Green Screens. Put glass in front of the snakes, (even if we can see it,) not wire and key frames. Really blow up the tank and whatever you do, have the Prop Master round up at least thirty fedoras because again, if I see one CGI'd fedora fly off of Mr. Ford's head and blow down a cliff or something, I'm going to really write you off, Lucas. (You were already gone until Star Wars Episode 3, so be on your best behavior.) Go back to your roots.

(I got a new set of brush markers. I had to try 'em out.)

For more information on Indiana Jones. Check out this cool site I discovered.

Dead Blog

This looks like and well, is right now a dead blog. I have been slammed doing the other projects I have committed to but will get back to this by May. Thanks.

The Hero's Journey

Epic was a fantasy story I had been compiling over the years. I had originally planned on doing this “world” I created as a children’s book, but one day sitting in the Century City Shopping Center patio area, I began writing my story in scenes as if in screenplay form. It just started flowing. Before I knew it I had written about forty notebook pages worth. It was wonderful. I escaped into this surreal island and sea world. I was sketching as I wrote. I had missed the movie I had been there to see twice and was still there when they were turning the lights off.

The Langston Dominion fresh and vivid in my imagination and yes it resembles Star Wars, The Goonies etc… You’ve got a group of kids that fight the most evil army in the sea on their quest to find a treasure that will free their people of their home land’s dictatorship. It is your ‘Hero’s Journey’ story, Joseph Campbell wrote about for years and years. This theory is also used in half the novels, movies and even video games that are out there now. It is basic mythology and Mr. Campbell’s philosophy of how the hero in a man or woman is found through conflict and what they call thresholds.

My story is just completely different in its setting, time and location. My world is a jungle infested Greece BC with a slight turn on Never Never Land.

The boats do not have motors, yet they have discovered a propeller style mechanism that four men put their backs into a gear to get it moving. They have cannons yet utilize the catapult systems quite often. They call days, “moons”; seconds and minutes, “ticks and shades”; coins, “stones”; boats, “floats,” and that is just to name a few differences.

They have creatures, humans and creature humans on these island countries. They what they call “Fathers” who are in a sense the leaders or mayors of their particular village. They have a high class as well as a middle and low class of people. Biased politics run the islands that tend to cause trouble for the lower class as it does in America today.

Now that I’ve given a little description of some idiosyncriasities of my world and we’ve stopped on politics, it’s time to get into the heart of the story and how it’s become to be Epic.

Epic

If you know me, you know the story of my father and I leaving the local cineplex years back. The story where we had just seen ‘Raiders’ for the first time and I looked at him as he unlocked the car doors, and said, that’s what I want to do when I get older. Dad thought I meant, be an archieologist. I meant filmmaker. And since those old days of watching Star Wars, The Goonies, Batman and Indy on the celluloid I had dreamt of writing a fantasy/adventure script. Movies of this category have always fascinated me. They’ve touched the imagination inside of me, spawning many days in the woods with my childhood friends, re-enacting these movies and even adding our own little sequels and stories to them. These movies also spawned my drawing ability. Instead of playing Nintendo like my friends at a little older age, I chose to draw my own adventures with my hero character I called, Elan. He was the heir of the Village Leader in this Jungle/Fantasy world. There were all sorts of evils, goods and monsters in this world and paper just wasn’t enough to tell my story. I had been animating on my Apple IIc since I was ten so I sat down in front of it and started animating a kind of “which way book.” If you don’t know what that was, back in the day they had these books you would read where you would have to turn to page 13 or turn to page 69 depending on which action you chose to do and you either died, went on a different adventure or conquered that particular book. Well I did this in a computer program. Back then, (God I hate saying that,) computers still had green monitors and came equipped with just 2x2 block pixels. I would pixel by pixel create these monsters, bad guys and good guys that Elan, my hero, would meet on the way and would have to make decisions in your adventure just like a role playing game, where you would either prevail or parrish. It was quite tedious, but my friends and family would fancy me by sitting down and doing it.

Flash Forward, nearly 16 years later, to my sophomore year in college where I wrote the screenplay, Epic. The first draft of it was 370 pages long and it was the well polished real vision of my jungle/fantasy world come to life. I cut the script down to a lean 134 pages and started shopping it. The story engulfed my life. I drew story boards, cartoon characters, location sketches, I mean this was all I did for a year.
Nothing came of that script. This was before the Lord of the Rings and after the 13th Warrior bombed, so studios were not looking for this kind of script. The only thing I had going for me was it was right after the Titanic Craze where studios were indeed scooping up spec scripts involving young love stories set on a large scale adventure canvas. After accepting that I would probably have to be in the Hollywood circle first to shop this script so, I put it away, but only after writing two sequels to it, (treatments only.) I guess what I’m getting at with this is that movies like this are the movies that now are coming back into popularity. These are the movies that stimulate your imagination and skew your vision on everything. You see so many irrational and so unbelievable in any way, shape or form action, blow ‘em up movies out there that don’t hold their weight in water. On the other end you have the movies such as Wizard of OZ, The Corpse Bride, Mars Attacks, and heck, Indiana Jones for that matter are movies that are YEAH completely farfetched but work. These are the movies that Hollywood should be making. They say the reason they don’t do these movies more than they do are because the American people have gotten dumb over the years and don’t want to think or use their imagination. They want it spoon fed to them.

I believe the American People have become smarter, but have gotten brainwashed and dulled through “reality shows” and “one dimensional films.” With the movies that have been made in the last four years, the American people haven’t really in a long while had to use their imagination.

OK, so you are saying get on with it. The reason for this is after watching the Wizard of Oz for the first time in two years and then getting the shear pleasure of being able to enjoy a little movie named ‘Corpse Bride,’ I have a newfound love again for the swashbuckler-fantasy-creative driven type adventure. I pulled all my scripts of this genre out and read through them again. I thought now finding my drawing passion on the rise and being in the middle of computer animation classes again, I thought, if I put all that together I may have something cool. Something different than commercials, weddings, football etc. This section of my site is for that. Feel free to share your sketches, stories etc. I will post artwork from my many scripts, notes and drawings I compiled up while writing ‘Crestfallen’s Robot’, ‘Epic,’ ‘The Dirty South,’ and the new story that I well—Can’t share quite yet. Stay tuned-