Tallulah (2016)

Bad Night (2015)

“Why don't you van go fuck yourself."

            Stories dealing with stolen art are some of my favorites. I have a degree in Art History and museum studies. Besides movies and music, art and museums are my life passions. I always get a kick out of hearing art references in movies or if a story is dealing with art heists and mysteries. Usually stories dealing with art heists are serious dramas or thrillers they are not a lot of comedies (well, to my knowledge at least). There are not a lot of comedies are stolen art especially when it comes to movies geared towards young adults. But there is one movie that deals with stolen and forged art that is geared towards young adults called Bad Night starring two YouTube vlogging stars Jenn McAllister and Lauren Elizabeth.

            Best friends Abby (McAllister) and Kate (Elizabeth) go on a Saturday morning trip with their AP Art History class for extra credit. On their way home the small group stops for lunch. Back on the bus everyone, including the teacher and the driver, get major food poisoning and get majorly sick everywhere. The bus driver refuses to rid back to school in the condition he and everyone else is in. Kate does not want to stay in the hotel room despite the teacher telling the students they cannot go out anywhere they all have to stay in their rooms. Kate is in a mood because her parents told her they cannot afford to send her to college so all she wants to do is go out and have some fun with the credit card her parents gave her for emergencies.

            On the other side of this story is a crooked foreigner and criminal named Ari (Matt Walsh). He has gotten in touch with two famous art thieves who are supposed to be delivering a lost Van Gogh painting. He has a guy who goes by Wheels to pick up the female art thieves to drive them wherever they need to go.

            Kate calls a car to come pick them up and gives the driver the name Monarch and Viceroy instead of their actual names. When they go out to the car they kind of get into the wrong car. They wind up getting into the car that Wheels is driving. Turns out the thieves are known by their code names that are also Monarch and Viceroy and they get into the car that Kate and Abby were supposed to be taking.

            Abby and Kate started off having a good time going to the goodwill store to get different clothes then going out to dinner to a fancy restaurant. The real Monarch and Viceroy, despite not having a real getaway driver, they manage to get a copy of the Van Gogh painting. Eventually, both parties realize they have the wrong drivers and their night gets a little crazy.

            I did not know what was going to happen in the story of Bad Night. I recently read Jenn McAllister’s book Really Professional Internet Person and she talked filming it and what input she and her friend Lauren Elizabeth had with it. After reading the book I was very interested to watch Bad Night and I have to say I was surprised by how good it was. I enjoyed it as a not so serious movie. As I said at the beginning I love when there is a story about stolen art and this was pretty funny. The Van Gogh they were looking for was not an actual Van Gogh painting but it was hilarious. I had no idea Matt Walsh was in the movie so I was pleasantly surprised and very happy to see him. McAllister and Elizabeth were not bad actresses at all. McAllister wrote in her book that she always wanted to act and that this was her first time doing so. I was not expecting her acting and Elizabeth’s acting to be that great so see them actually acting and not sucking was awesome.

            Bad Night is an enjoyable movie. I feel the story did not get out of hand with being silly or ridiculous. The humor was perfect. The direction by Reidel brothers was great too. I have seen one of their other movies which was also a comedy and I like their direction a lot because they do manage to keep the comedy from getting out of hand. Bad Night is a fun movie that I suggest seeing especially if you are into watching YouTuber movies.

 

Silent Sundays: The Shock (1923)

Hiding (2012)

So many movies have been made about people in witness protection and then being found out by the bad guys they are supposed to be protected from. The stories usually turn into some kind of action/thriller where a ton of people are getting killed so some bad ass FBI agent comes in and saves the day or the person who is supposed to be protected does the ass kicking. The 2012 movie Hiding took the story of a person in witness protection but did not make it as predictable as a story like this could be.

            Alicia Torres (Ana Villafañe) is being relocated to a small town in Montana through the Witness Protection Program by an Agent Noah Carter (seriously, he is Agent Carter… well, not my favorite Agent Carter, if you know what I mean). She is to go by the name Josephine Russo and she is not allowed to make contact with anyone from her former life including her grandmother and friends or even be able to paint and draw like she used to or even speak Spanish. Alicia, or Jo as she will now be referred to, is placed into the home of a social worker named Debbie. Debbie has a daughter named Lucy who is the same age as Jo. Jo is not used to people being so nice she is used to the hustle and bustle of New York and people having attitudes. Throughout the movie she has flashbacks to her old life in New York with her parents who were killed and who’s murders she witnessed.

            Jo begins school the following day. She is almost immediately hit on by the football team captain Brett (Jeremy Sumpter). His hitting on Jo causes his ex-girlfriend Zoe to become extremely jealous. Zoe approaches Jo to try to intimidate her but that does not work so well because Jo gives her a big old New York attitude right back and stands up for Lucy who was with her. Jo standing up to her makes Zoe super pissed so she starts looking into Jo to try to get some dirt on her.

            While walking down the hallway, Jo passes by the art room. She goes into the room lured in by her passion. In the art room is a kid named Jesse (Tyler Blackburn) who is working on a painting of the Chicago skyline. They are both drawn towards each other (haha art pun). Jesse is the smart, thoughtful, talented guy compared to Brett who knows he can get whomever and whatever he wants with his stupid charm.

            One-day Jo realizes it is her grandmother’s birthday and asks Debbie to send her grandmother some flowers. That backfires when a man simply known as Mr. Ostrog is sent to find Alicia for the man who killed her parents. Mr. Ostrog tracks down Alicia’s grandmother through the high school she attended when he poses as someone who wants to set up a scholarship in Alicia’s name. At the nursing home where the grandmother is Mr. Ostrog finds the flowers from Jo that were sent through a flower shop in New Jersey. By contacting the flower shop Mr. Ostrog finds out the order was placed by Debbie in Montana.

            Meanwhile, back in Montana, Zoe has a student obtain Jo’s school transcripts and records. She cannot find a trace of Jo online. To try to get Brett back, Zoe tells him she looked into the school Jo was supposed to have transferred from in Seattle and that she is nowhere in their records. This does not bother Brett at all, in fact he tells Zoe to back off.

            Mr. Ostrog comes to Montana. He tracks Alicia down to the high school and even manages to bump into her outside the school. After that encounter he starts stalking her from his car. Of course Jo notices she is being followed, Ostrog is not that good at being inconspicuous. Since she cannot have a cell phone where she can possibly be traced, Jo uses the school phone to get in touch with Agent Carter (hahahaha) to tell her she thinks she is being followed. As she is waiting for Carter to call back she sketches out the guy she bumped into outside the school and faxes it to Carter. In her panic Jo asks Brett for the keys to his truck and his cell phone. Before Jo can even get in the truck Mr. Ostrog comes from behind and chloroforms her.

            Mr. Ostrog takes Jo to a cabin in the middle of the woods (soooooooooooooo clichéd). He has her tied to a chair and of course Jo manages to be a bad ass and run away and then of course she is caught by the bad guy and of course the hero Agent Carter comes in and shoots Mr. Ostrog before he can kill Jo.

            In the end everything is great. Carter tells Alicia that just as long as she can keep quiet and not cause another scene she can stay where she is which makes her very happy.

            The only reason I even heard of Hiding is because of Ana Villafañe. Last week I got to see Villafañe in the Broadway show On Your Feet where she plays Gloria Estefan. The girl is ridiculously talented! I enjoyed her performance so much. She is a stunning singer and excellent actress. In the Playbill under her bio some of her TV and Film work was listed and Hiding was one of them. Naturally, I was curious to see Villafañe in something else since she was so amazing live in front of me on stage. Her acting in Hiding was so good. Jo was supposed to be a tough New Yorker girl and that is exactly what Villafañe played. You believed she was from NYC and had a fabulous tough girl NYC attitude.  I would love to see her in more movies and shows down the road… maybe if On Your Feet gets turned into a movie? I mean, come on the girl is a clone of Gloria Estefan AND she can act on camera so well.  

            The rest of the cast was alright. Jeremy Sumpter was so damn creepy! He looked like a psycho killer and stalker. I do not think I have ever seen him in something else before this and I am perfectly fine with this being the only Sumpter movie I ever see. Tyler Blackburn was good. I liked his character so much better than Sumpter’s and his acting was way better.

            The story was not too bad. The only thing to me that really brought the movie and story down was the storyline with the popular girls and Zoe. That was a good macguffin to think that Zoe had something to do with getting Mr. Ostrog on the path to finding Alicia/Jo. The actresses who played the popular girls were terrible. Some of the story was totally clichéd but since I like Villafañe so much and the fact that the story was not the worst I was able to look past the clichés and enjoy it.

            Hiding was a decent movie. I was just so happy to see Ana Villafañe in a movie and to see that she truly a very talented actress. As much as the story was clichéd in some areas there were differences that makes it a bit of a stand out in Witness Protection-themed movies. The ending was left open ended. It did not just end, not all the bad guys were caught. Well, to me it could have been both open ended and just finished because the focus was on this one guy looking for her and not a whole bunch of other people. I liked open ended/ambiguous endings like that because it lets you kind of create a story of what happened next.  If you can find Hiding I recommend giving it a watch. 

Silent Sundays: Terror Island (1920)

“Lost treasure has ever lured the adventurous- and today countless chases seemingly wild and impossible are under way to salvage the vast wealth sunken by raiders and submarines in the Great War.”

            I think stories of people going looking for sunken treasure is fascinating. It is not something I would ever want to do myself since the ocean freaks me the hell out in every single way but what I find fascinating is how explorers go looking for the treasures and how they act as detectives to locate the sunken vessels with the lost treasures. One story I find interesting is a wreck that happened in the 1800s. There was a ship that went down in a storm mostly because it was carrying so much gold bars that weighed it down. The lost gold caused a financial panic in the 1800s. A man found it after many years of trying to find but it turns out the cold is a bit cursed. Everyone who comes into contact with it has a bit of bad luck. One of the gold bars in currently on display at the museum I am interning at (The Museum of American Finance which is located on Wall Street). The gold bar was used as part of a tour for this company called Museum Hack. Me and the collections manager went on a Museum Hack tour because we have never been on one (it was amazing! It was like a dream to my museum nerd heart). The tour guide told us that the gold was cursed! Me and the collections manager looked at each other because she had put it on display!

            Looking for lost treasures of sunken ships has captured the imagination of people for decades. So many films and books have been written about explorers and adventurers looking for lost gold. One such film is a silent from 1920 entitled Terror Island.

            Harry Harper (Harry Houdini) has created an important submarine for finding treasures called the Hawk. In the local newspaper there is a story about a sunken ship full of diamonds and there is a big fortune for anyone who finds it. Harry had hoped to keep his invention a secret but it somehow got leaked to the newspapers.

            Job Mordaunt, known as the “meanest man in town” is looking for the diamonds just like everyone else. His son Guy (a very young Eugene Pallet) is in on the idea with his father but has some plans of his own to get the diamonds for himself. Guy calls Harry to discuss double crossing his father. Guy claims to have a map from his cousin Beverly and if he can get a hold of it he wants Harry to come with him to get the diamonds and split the profit. Harry tells Guy he does not do business with crooks.

            Beverly has a letter from her father that a pearl he gave her that is shaped like a skull was from an island where he has been taken prisoner. He writes that she must bring the pearl back to the island to rescue him and the native will show him where the sunken ship with the diamonds is located. The natives have given her father until the day of their feast day to bring the pearl back.

            Since Beverly does not trust her relatives she goes to Harry after reading about his new invention. He agrees to help her mostly because he does not want to do business with her uncle or cousin. As soon as Beverly get home she is attacked and chased by her uncle and cousin. Harry fears for her and runs to her house just in time before Mordaunt and Guy could do anything to her.

            Mordaunt finds Harry and attempts to kill him and kidnap Beverly. Mordaunt and Guy take them both onto a ship but Harry manages to escape and takes his submarine to the island where Beverly’s father is. Unfortunately, Harry is somehow recaptured when he goes to save Beverly. But what kind of film would this be if a rescue did not go over well? Harry and Beverly manage to get away again and swim down to the submarine.

            Beverly’s uncle took the pearl from her. Harry and Beverly go to different sides of the island to observe Mordaunt giving back the pearl. By doing this Harry figures they can still get the location of the sunken ship. The native get their pearl back but in exchange for her father and the pearl they want Beverly as their sacrifice.

            Harry makes it down to the native and they quickly hang him by the neck. Can it be called “pulling a Houdini” if Harry Houdini actually escapes, well, like himself? Yeah, I guess so. Harry pulls a Houdini and escapes the native’s hanging device. While Harry was struggling to get free the natives put Beverly into a safe from the downed Hawk and throw her into the ocean. Harry saves her and also manages to get his hands on the jewels from the Hawk. He comes up to the island and the natives are so impressed by him that they let Beverly and her father go free.

            Terror Island was good. I found it more exciting and engaging to watch than Harry Houdini’s other film I recently viewed, Haldane of the Secret Service. There was plenty of action and tension with the underwater and fight scenes. If you like silent films and would be interested in seeing Harry Houdini act in a film Terror Island is definitely worth watching. It is available to view in full on YouTube.