How Strange is Winter's Tale (2014)?

There are certain movies that when you watch them, you are dumbfounded about what you have just seen.  You try to follow along with the story that is being told only to be thrown by the ridiculous twists and turns that it takes.  By the end of the movie, you are at a loss for words as to how it made you feel.  Instead of liking or disliking it, you remain in a state of awe, not knowing what happened, yet knowing everything.  I’ve experienced that before and I will likely experience it again.

Most recently, I experienced this feeling through watching a movie called Winter’s Tale.   It is a 2014 romantic film about the miracles that are experienced throughout life.  It stars Colin Farrell as a thief named Peter Lake who falls in love with the ill Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay).  Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe) does not like this and attempts to rip the two love-struck people apart in any way that he can.  That plot might not sound all that strange.  Believe me when I say I only scratched the surface with that description.

This post is going to turn out very similar to the post I wrote for Howard the Duck, I think.  I am going to take a look at a lot of the strange and ridiculous parts of the movie by listing them.  The movie was quite odd so it should not be difficult to come up with things to write about.  I should not need to say this but I feel obligated to anyway.  There will be spoilers for Winter’s Tale throughout this post.  That is only the nature of the beast when I write a post like this.  Do not get up in arms if I ruin the story of Winter’s Tale for you.  I warned you.  I was fair.  If you continue reading past this point, getting spoiled is your own fault.

Alright.  The following many points are some of the crazy things that happen throughout Winter’s Tale.  They help to set the movie apart from the many other movies that get released on a weekly basis.  The movie as a whole is an experience that needs to be had.  If you have not seen it, stop reading this right now and then come back to this post after having watched the movie.  Or read this post then watch the movie.  Either way, you need to watch the movie.  And here are some reasons why:

1. The movie begins with a husband, wife, and baby who sound eastern European.  They are turned away from America because the husband has a disease.  As they head back to Europe, the parents put the child on a tiny little toy boat and push him back toward America.  This child somehow survives and grows up to become Colin Farrell.
2. Adult Peter Lake has an Irish accent for some reason.  Most of the people in America in the 1910s, when the movie mostly takes place, have American accents of some sort.  Peter Lake grew up in America around Americans and yet somehow ended up with an Irish accent.  There is no explanation as to why that is the case.  It just is.
3. The movie is about love but it is also about miracles.  It is about how everybody has a miracle within them and that the miracle will eventually manifest in one way or another.  The miracle that Beverly Penn gives is immortality to Peter Lake.  This means that though the majority of the film takes place in the 1910s, Peter Lake can end up in 2014 at the same exact age he was before.  The miracle that Peter Lake can give is resurrection.  He brings a little girl back from death.  Yep.  That’s what I said.  She comes back to life after dying because Peter Lake cries on her and resurrects her.
4. There is a flying horse in this movie.  Pearly Soames calls it a dog during the movie but it is really a horse.  It helps Peter Lake to escape Pearly’s men multiple times throughout the movie.  The men trap Peter Lake and are about to stab him.  Do they?  No.  He finds the horse and rides into the sky above them.  The men are about to attack Beverly.  Do they?  No.  Peter shows up with his flying horse, gets her, and flies away with her.  A girl is dying and Pearly is coming back again.  What happens?  Peter puts the girl on the horse and flies to a remote house to bring her back to life.  Then at the end of the movie, he flies into outer space with the horse.  Yeah.
5. Did I mention that Pearly Soames is a demon?  No?  Well, he’s a demon.  And he really wants to stop Peter Lake from performing a miracle.  He wants to break rules to do it so he must go to his boss, Lucifer (Will Smith) for permission.  I’ve got nothing more on that point, really.
6. Beverly gets poisoned with some poison that will only affect her if she gets excited.  Of course, she doesn’t know that she has been poisoned when she bones Peter Lake.  She dies as she climaxes.  Peter Lake tries to resurrect her, but she is not the person he is supposed to give his miracle to.  It does end with him having immortality though.
7. In the first of two fights between Peter Lake and Pearly Soames, Pearly kicks Peter’s ass and throws him off of a bridge.  He does not check to make sure that Peter is dead.  He assumes it and ends up making an ass out of himself later on.  Peter ends up being alive, with amnesia.  For one hundred years, he cannot remember who he is.  And he does not find it strange that he does not age at all.
8. Beverly Penn has a little sister who is about ten or so years old during the 1910s when the majority of the film takes place.  When Peter figures out who he is in 2014, he ends up running into the sister again.  The sister would be over 100 years old at the time and should be frail.  Yet she is personally running a newspaper and running around doing the work.  She also looks like an 80-something year old woman because she is played by Eva Marie Saint who is only very recently 90 years old.  There is a fifteen or twenty year age difference between actress and character.  The character who shouldn’t even be alive for Peter Lake to find in 2014.
9. In the second fight between Peter Lake and Pearly Soames, Peter Lake ends up winning.  He stabs Pearly with a piece of metal and Pearly turns into a snowman.  You hear that?  He turns into a snowman.  Pearly becomes snow Pearly.  Why?  It is never explained.  Never.  Not once.

That is a lot of crazy stuff that was going on in Winter’s Tale.  There is probably a whole lot more that I haven’t even mentioned here.  But what I did mention is a lot of the wackier stuff that stuck in my mind and helped make watching the movie into one of the most unique experiences that I have had in a while.

You owe it to yourself to check out Winter’s Tale.  Is it sappy and overly romantic?  Sure it is.  But it also has a lot of odd little moments in it that make it into one of the strangest romantic films out there.  It is a movie that needs to be seen if only to know the truth of what I have written throughout this post.  It is a movie that needs to be seen for the experience.  It is a movie that needs to be seen.

And here are a few notes that need to be read:

• I mentioned how this post is similar to one I wrote for Howard the Duck, so I thought I would link to that post.
• An actor named Roman Blat appeared in Winter’s Tale.  He was also in the movie New Year’s Eve, which was covered around this past New Year’s Eve.
• Have you seen Winter’s Tale?  What did you think of it?  Do you know any other big budget movies that are as ridiculous as Winter’s Tale?  Give your thoughts in the comments.
• If you have a movie that you want me to watch as part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, put that suggestion in the comments.  Or you could find me on Twitter and tell me there.

The Similarities and Differences Between Warriors of Virtue (1997) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

This Friday, a movie is going to be released into theaters that plays with my childhood in a major way.  That movie is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, directed by Jonathan Liebesman.  It is a reboot or reimagining or whatever you want to call it of the 1980s comic, television, movie, and action figure mega-franchise.  I grew up watching the movies on repeat.  The action, comedy, and special effects transfixed my mind as a child.  I still have a fond memory of the film series and I own a DVD set of the movies that came in a case designed to be a manhole cover.

                                              

That is why this week’s movie is one that had the same basic idea as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies.  People dressed as animals and used martial arts.  And that brings us to Warriors of Virtue, a movie about a child meeting up with five virtuous kangaroos and helping to defeat the evil Komodo.  Komodo wants to destroy the kangaroos’ home so that he can remain youthful.

Now that you know the basic premise of Warriors of Virtue, it seems only fitting that we go through the similarities and differences between the two franchises.  The differences will be noticeably longer, but I will pair them up with a similarity because that is what I feel like doing.  Let us undertake this adventure thusly.  Be warned, there will be some spoilers.

Similarity: A team of like-species animals fight evil.

Differences: In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, the animals are turtles.  The title deems that so, not that all titles tell the truth.  There are four turtles.  Each one is named after a classical artist.  You can tell them apart by their colour eyeband, weapon, and personality.  In Warriors of Virtue, the team consists of five kangaroos.  They vary in looks.  Each kangaroo is defined by their weapon, element, and their virtue.  They are given Chinese names.

Similarity: The team looks up to a wise, old mentor figure.

Differences: Splinter is the mentor in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  He is an old rat that was mutated along with the turtles.  He ends up in danger during the first movie but makes it out okay.  Master Chung is the mentor in Warriors of Virtue.  He is an old man living in the Land of Tao.  He ends up in danger during the first movie and dies at the hands of Komodo.

Similarity: The team of animals uses martial arts.

Differences: The stunt work in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles relies on the physical prowess of the people in the turtle suits.  They tumble, flip, punch, and kick as a normal person would.  There is little to no outside help for what they are doing.  Warriors of Virtue, on the other hand, heavily relies on wirework for the stunts.  The kangaroos fly across sets when they jump.  They flip and spin in mid-air.  They float around scenery, defying gravity.

Similarity: A human youth helps the animals defeat the villain.

Differences: In Warriors of Virtue, Ryan Jeffers automatically sides with the kangaroos after arriving and hearing the story of what Komodo has been doing.  He is a good kid who does good things.  The youth in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is Danny Pennington, a New York City delinquent.  He does not always work with the turtles.  Instead, he betrays them at some points by leading the Foot Clan to their whereabouts.  He ends up helping the turtles in the end though.

Similarity: A female aids the animals in their quest.

Differences: The female in Warriors of Virtue is a princess from Tao who ends up turning to the side of Komodo and then dies near the end of the film.  In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, we get introduced to April O’Neil, who befriends the turtles and survives the entirety of the movie.  April O’Neil is in both of the sequels, as well as the animated film and the reboot.

Five of these similarity/difference comparisons seems like enough for the time being.  If I keep going, you might get annoyed by the writing format.  Those are also the main similarities between the movies.  They are very vague and general, but they are similarities all the same and needed to be noted.  The two movies are similar in their basic premise though quite different in their execution of the material.

Do the similarities make Warriors of Virtue into a movie that I will take joy in returning to one day?  Nope.  Not at all.  Do the differences help to make the movie stand out and be better?  A little bit; however, it is not enough to salvage what ended up being a boring experience.  Much more attention was paid to the Ryan Jeffers character as well as the kangaroo leader Tsun than any of the other characters.  This meant that I didn’t invest in or care about anyone else in the movie.  Plus, the ending negated everything that had happened in the movie and was extremely abrupt.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will always have a place in my heart.  Being a movie I grew up on, and a movie I still enjoy each time I see it, I will always care about it.  Warriors of Virtue will not end up with that same love and adoration.  It is a movie very similar to TMNT in concept, yet vastly different in the final product.  That’s filmmaking though.  Similar ideas with varied results.  Sometimes they are good and sometimes they are bad.  I thought Warriors of Virtue was bad.  That’s just me though.

There are a bunch of notes this week, so here you go:

• An actor named Michael J. Anderson was in Warriors of Virtue.  He was also in a movie called Tiptoes that got covered a while back.
• Garry Chalk showed up in Warriors of Virtue.  He was also in Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2.
• Do you remember Monster in the Closet?  Jack Tate was in that and Warriors of Virtue.
• There’s also Jay Brazeau in Warriors of Virtue.  He showed up in House of the Dead for a bit.
• Are there any similarities I missed when writing about Warriors of Virtue?  Tell me about them in the comments and maybe I’ll make an amendment.
• I’m about to put together the schedule for weeks 101-125 of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I’m always looking for suggestions of what I should include in the schedule.  If you have any suggestions, put them in the comments or tell me on Twitter.

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter (2001) and Adding Monsters to Established Stories

Since the inception of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, or near enough to the beginning for it to count as the beginning, I have been a large proponent of retelling stories in a new fashion.  Most stories end up being a retelling of something already covered in a movie or book previously.  The effort and originality at this point in time mainly comes from changing the story up in a way that makes it feel new again.  If an unoriginal story can be told in an original way, the person behind making it so deserves recognition and praise.  It takes courage and talent to pull it off in a successful way.

More recently, a trend in updating stories has begun that is not a simple modernization of old material, or a change of setting.  This trend changes large elements of the original story to create something almost wholly new.  Something is added into the story to make it more rambunctious, more kinetic, more frenetic.  Action is infused into a story that does not necessarily involve action, and this action revolves around the concept of monsters.  That’s right, many writers in the movie industry are trying to find ways in which to bring classic stories into the limelight again by tossing some monsters into them.

The first of these films that comes to mind is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter which is based on the book by Seth Grahame-Smith.  It tells a story about Abraham Lincoln’s secret life as a vampire hunter, which was still going on while he was president.  I haven’t read the book or seen the movie so I can’t go into too much detail on what happens in the new version of Lincoln’s life.  I can tell you for a fact that in reality, Abraham Lincoln was not actually killing vampires while campaigning for presidency or while he was president.  That’s because vampires do not exist.  What I can do for you is go into some sort of detail about a movie that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter inspired.

The Asylum is a movie company that always jumps on the chance to make money off of what seems like a big ticket property.  When the movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was nearing its release, The Asylum released a movie on home video titled Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies.  It retold Abraham Lincoln’s secret monster-hunting life, except this time it had zombies instead of vampires.  It ended up being one of the better Asylum movies that I have seen.  But it wasn’t exactly true to the life of Abraham Lincoln.  There were characters in the movie such as a child Theodore Roosevelt who surely never met Abraham Lincoln while hiding from zombies.  The closest that those two ever came to meeting was Teddy Roosevelt watching Lincoln’s funeral procession.  Of course, a movie about a zombie-hunting president is not about the historical accuracy.  It is about the fun, and boy, this movie was fun to watch.  It’s been a while since I saw it, but I had a good time with it.

Another movie I had a good time with that uses this same monster addition to an old tale is this week’s Sunday “Bad” Movie, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.  Released in the year 2001, the movie takes the popular biblical figure and places him in present day Canada.  It does not really tell the same story as the Bible; instead, the movie shows Jesus Christ saving the lesbians of Ottawa from the vampires that are out to kill them.  That’s right.  You read that correctly.  Jesus Christ takes down some lesbian-hating vampires.  He uses his martial arts skills to do it, and gets help from a motorcycle riding Mary Magnum and a wrestler named Santos.  The movie is a mixture of martial arts, music, and farce.  It also takes a very old tale and puts a fun new spin on it.

Finally, we come to a movie that takes a story that originally had monsters and only amped up the action to make a dark children’s tale into an all-out action film.  The movie that I’m talking about in this case is Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.  The original Hansel and Gretel story is about two children who end up lost in the woods and almost eaten by a witch.  In this re-imagining of the childhood classic, the two siblings become hunters who want to take down every witch that they discover.  They have guns and other weapons to help them in their quest.  It is an amped up version of the classic tale made for the short attention span of today’s audiences.  It’s more energetic to keep people interested in what is happening on screen.

There is also another Hansel and Gretel movie released by The Asylum with the subtitle Warriors of Witchcraft.  I haven’t seen the movie and it is not as big a name as some of these other movies so the most I am going to touch on it is to say that it exists.  I cannot go into detail about it because having not seen it leaves me at a loss of what the movie actually is.

Each of these movies has one thing in common.  They tried to freshen up an old tale, whether historical or fictional, by adding action and/or monsters.  Sometimes this melding worked and sometimes it didn’t.  But it always made for an interesting watch.  Seeing a new interpretation of a story that has been told numerous times throughout the history of literature and film is always interesting.  Even if the movie turns out to be bad, the fact that the idea was attempted is interesting in itself.

The concept of adding monsters into classic stories or historical events is one that excites me.  It gives a new way to tell a tale that has been told many times before.  I am a big fan of finding new ways to tell stories and think that a lot of originality in this day and age comes from the ability to do that.  Each of the movies that I wrote about in this post found a way to retell a well-known story in a new way, with monsters.  Some were more successful than others, but that’s how movies work.  And it’s the magic of movies that keeps me going.

There are some notes I have to give here:

• Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter was suggested for the Sunday "Bad" Movies by @filmslikedreams.
• In my post for Rise of the Zombies, I wrote about The Asylum and the “rules” to their movies.  In my post for Snakes on a Train, I wrote about my history with watching movies from The Asylum.
• I wrote about retelling stories in different settings and how that shows originality in my post for Jonah: A Veggietales Movie.
• My post for April Fools was about stories being repeated in different films.
• I watched a Hansel and Gretel movie for the Sunday “Bad” Movies that was titled Hansel and Gretel Get Baked.  It was one of four Hansel and Gretel movies released in 2013.
• Can you think of any other movies that take an old story and add monsters to make it more interesting?  Discuss them in the comments.
• If you have any suggestions for future movies to be included in the Sunday “Bad” Movies, feel free to suggest them below.  Or you can contact me on Twitter to give me movie ideas.