Another Damn Movie Blog

GUEST REVIEW OF ALICE IN WONDERLAND

2010-03-04T11:34:00.000-08:00

Hi there.

Brett Weiner is a very funny man, an old friend and someone who I frequently engage in hyperactive gchat sessions bitching about major motion pictures.

He also has seen a special early screening of Tim Burton's ALICE IN WONDERLAND, which I feared will be a overdone CGI disaster. His review confirms my fears, with fantastic nerd rage. This is his review.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND: REVIEW
by Brett Weiner

There is a moment near the beginning of Tim Burton's new Alice in Wonderland that serves as a metaphor for the execution of this film: Alice's mother chastises her for not wearing the proper attire. Alice responds by saying her deceased father wouldn't care. It should be a savage attack, twisting a knife in her mother's heart. Instead, Alice delivers it as if she is asking about the weather.

The dresses and the design are where Tim Burton's interest lies in his adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic. Sadly, the theater where I saw the movie had problems with the 3-D projection, blurring background details and creating flicker in the shadows. I had to focus on the other elements of the movie: plot, character, and emotional depth, or the gaping black abyss where they should have been.

Alice (a torpid Mia Wasikowska) returns to Wonderland (called “Underland” for some reason) at the age of 19. She spends most of the movie wandering around a wasteland of naked trees, because the Red Queen (a shrill Helena Bohnam Carter) took over, apparently by wreaking havoc at a picnic of the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) with her dragon-like jabberwocky. Alice meets familiar faces, such as the Cheshire Cat (voiced by Steven Fry) and the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), who offer no commentary or innovations upon their appearance in the iconic 1951 animated version. The plot hits all the requisite Hollywood moments but without any motivation. The film is like a child mimicking the motions of an adult - it almost looks right, but there is nothing underneath the surface.

At one point the Hatter utters film's most clever line, telling Alice that “You're not the same as you were before. You were much more... muchier. You've lost your muchness." The same could be said for Burton. When a tertiary character with single digits of screen time has the most emotionally compelling moment by being reunited with his never-before-seen family, something has gone completely wrong. The Cheshire cat, a creature of mystery and riddles, becomes a teleporting comrade-in-arms. Depp's Hatter, who varies between lisping wimp and Scottish warrior, is a bold choice. Sometimes these types of choices create icons, like Jack Sparrow. This time, it creates a jumble of eccentricities. There is no logic to it.

Logic in Wonderland? Yes. Lewis Carroll's book is an examination of logic, math, language and how to twist them into paradoxical abstract concepts. Burton's movie is completely lawless, and throws any higher thoughts out the window. But Alice's dresses sure are lovely.

To be fair, there are a few elements that work. Burton has a deft hand at creating humorous moments and Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas) are delightfully moronic. And the production design is, well, Burtonesque.

As the movie meanders on, Alice somehow learns to become independent by following other peoples' wishes and the climax comes in the form of a war between the armies of the Red and White Queens. Staging a battle in Wonderland is like building a water slide in an art gallery; it may be fun, but you are missing the point.

John August, the writer of Burton's Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, had his own Alice in Wonderland project, based off a critically acclaimed videogame released by American McGee. August stopped working on it due to the writer's strike and Burton's version going into preproduction. I wish I lived in a universe where the reverse was true.

RATING: * Star (out of five stars.)

OMG TWITTER

2010-02-21T19:06:00.000-08:00

That's right, the answer to laziness isn't persistence, it's switching to new technology. We're tweeting, people, at http://twitter.com/ADMovieBlog

Still going to write full reviews, when I have the time/energy/focus, but until then, check out the 160 character reviews.

AVATAR: * * *

PERCY JACKSON: *

UNCLE BUCK: * * *

MOON: * * * *

I WATCHED THIS MOVIE SO YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO: THE MUMMY 3

2010-01-07T10:47:00.000-08:00

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR REVIEW

For all of it's many, many flaws, INDIANA JONES AND THE CRYSTAL SKULL got one thing right: how to reunite characters after many movies and make it mean something.

You remember: Karen Allen walks out of the tent, and she and Ford share an honest to goodness moment of memory and fondness, and you think, hey, they nuked the fridge but maybe this movie will turn out right after all! Well, that didn't happen, for well-documented reasons involving monkeys, fire ants and aliens, but at least you cared about Indy and Marian, if even if their son was a bit of a LaBouf.

Strange, then, to watch THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR, a movie that gets the ancient archeology curse thing right, but can't even manage a bronze in the give-a-shit-olympics when it comes to the family dynamic between Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser), Evie O'Connell (Maria Bello) and their son Alex (Luke Ford.) Of course, let's be fair: Fraser, who I usually like, has never been worse; Bello, who I usually love, is saddled with an impossible accent; and Luke Ford, who I have never seen before, can out douche LaBouf any day of the week. I cared more about the characters in TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN.

Which is stranger because, damn it all, I still really like the first MUMMY movie. I like dumb adventure movies. I know this movie got bad reviews, but I'm it's prime audience. I'm willing to set my brain on hold to be entertained.

See, Stephen Sommers, writer/director of THE MUMMY, can't make a good movie but he can make fantastic trash. Energetically if not expertly acted trash, full of hokeum, usually dumb, but delightfully silly and fun nonetheless. Maybe it's because he didn't know he was making a comedy. THE MUMMY RETURNS, his follow up, did stink something terrible. Maybe because he was trying to make a comedy, or something, who knows. (Thankfully, he returned to form with G.I. JOE, where he thought he was making a real action movie, and made yet another small miracle of campy explosion-fest).

Ah, but the reins of the MUMMY "series" were handed over to Rob Cohen, who, after making DRAGONHEART, THE SKULLS, XXX, DAYLIGHT and STEALTH, still gets work as a director. (Truth in criticsm: FAST AND THE FURIOUS 1 was alright). I fully understand handing over a series to a new director for a reboot, but what exactly in those previous films convinced Universal that he was the man for this job?

Because sure, the acting's terrible, and I wasn't willing to be much on the writing... but isn't it strange how bad this movie looks? Oh, the location work is fine, there are some nice shots of the himalays and the tomb-raiding stuff is neat. The practical action scenes are competent enough, guns going bang-bang and such.

But the digital effects are horrifically bad. WOLVERINE bad. LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN BAD. And it this movie wasn't cheap, either, it cost some 150 million dollars. The best thing a digital effect can do is be hidden (FORREST GUMP); the next best thing is to pass for real (LORD OF THE RINGS); or look fake but in a stylized way (SPEED RACER); if all else fails, it can look fake, but at least look fake with some wit (THE MUMMY.) THE MUMMY 3 fails all of these tests. Not one digital moment looks real, we are constantly aware of actors on set looking at ping pong balls that represent Yetis, Mummys, Skeletons, Etc.

Oh, for a return to the days of practical effects. For 165 million you could pay an army of guys in mummy suits to slouch around all day. Alas, here every time the movie flexes its financial muscle, we get awful CG dragons, ice effects, friendly yetis who wouldn't pass muster in a Sci-Fi creature feature and the single worst computer generated decapitation I have ever seen.

So when the effects fail and the writing's already pretty bad, all we're left with is the characters and the actors who play them. Hear! Brendan Fraser scream every line he's been given, even when the situation doesn't call for it! See! Maria Bello remind everyone why she does dramas, and not action movies! Cringe! As Luke Ford makes dick jokes about his machine guns! Stare blankly! As Jet Li manages to get top billing for a role where he's a digital clay soldier for 80% of his screen time! Shake your head! As Michelle Yeoh is hired, but no one remembered to write her a real character!

All that's left to report, sadly, is the still funny John Hannah, as the simpering comic relief who gets saddled with a Yak for a sidekick. When his plane crashes, Yak inside, someone says "What is that awful smell!" Hannah moans "The Yak Yakked!" It's a bad line, but give the man credit, at least he's trying. No one else bothered too.

I got this movie for 2 dollars on Black Friday. That's $1.50 too much.

RATING: * Star (Out of Five)

P.S. I will say this. At least the Jet Li didn't end up being an alien from the "space between space". And no one hides in a fridge to outlive a nuclear blast. That's something.

CRAZY HEART: REVIEW

2009-12-22T22:14:00.000-08:00

CRAZY HEART is a quiet, beautiful film. It has Jeff Bridges in his finest hour, playing Bad Blake, a musician who use to be somebody and now is a nobody who plays bowling alleys and bars. He's still given free hotel rooms and food by the people who run the bowling alleys, but no free booze. You see, it's a specific clause in his contract: No Tabs at the bar.

That doesn't stop Bad Blake from getting free booze. Not in the ways you think. And yeah, he's a drunk, but not in the way you think. He doesn't make big scenes. He stumbles off stage during a gig, vomits, sits, then goes back and finishes the set. It ain't pretty, but as he mumbles, "Bad Blake's never missed a gig." Bad Blake also pretty much survives by writing music for Tommy (Colin Farrell singing country, yes, Colin Farrell), who used to be his pupil and is now selling out country arenas. Ah, well.

CRAZY HEART is pretty much WALK THE LINE, only it feels more real than WALK THE LINE, which is interesting when because WALK THE LINE is based on a true story and CRAZY HEART is fiction. But CRAZY HEART feels more like how it would really happen with the story of the washed up alcoholic genius singer/songwriter who might get it right this time. Because alcoholics either get worse or they get better. The problem is, of course, not exactly when they get worse, because if they get worse, they get worse. The problem is, even when they get better, it doesn't mean that life waits around to greet them with a smile when they get out of rehab.

I'm making the film sound like an epic downer. It isn't. CRAZY HEART has a lot of sorrow, but also a lot of humor and truth. And what sorrow there is wistful sorrow, the better kind of sorrow. Better because wistful is more interesting, at least to me. The idea of "Ah, well..." has a lot more gas in the tank than "Oh, no" or the ever popular "Why me, Lord?"

There's a lot of nice touches and little twists on this well-worn story. Yes, Blake meets a girl (Maggie Gyllenhaal) with a son, but there's more to her than you would think. Yes, Tommy has bypassed Blake in popularity, but he's actually a nice guy; who often gives credit to Blake and offers to cut an album with him. Yes, Blake has an old friend who looks after him (Robert Duvall), but he's not an enabler or a lecturer, he's a bartender who knows well the risks and rewards of booze. Yes, Blake's alcoholism leads to disaster, but not in obvious, scene-causing ways. Blake's biggest mistake, when it finally comes, could really happen to anyone. The problem is, it happens to him right after he's ordered a double whiskey at lunchtime.

There's a scene between Blake and his bartender in a fishing boat where they discuss mistakes. Listen to the dialogue. Blake has a son that he's never seen in years, who he finally called, and the call didn't go well. Blake thinks that his own gesture is too little, too late. Bartender disagrees: "For 25 years, you stepped wrong, and you were wrong, and he was right. But now you've stepped right, and he's in the wrong, and you're in the right." Blake isn't sure. Bartender is. The point is which of them is right, the point is it's an actual discussion.

Nothing much happens in CRAZY HEART. Nothing much has to, when you have actors this good, writing this good and amazing original music, produced by T Bone Burnett. It never steps wrong, never sounds a false note, and actually takes the time to let you listen to the music. Let me be clear: nothing really happens in this movie. Sure, interesting characters live, breathe, change and think; but there's no epic romance or plot twists or plot, really. If it sounds boring, well, I can't help you, but I can warn you. Me, I found myself caring deeply about what happened to this washed up old man.

There was a movie released in 2006 called ONCE, about an irish singer songwriter and the girl that makes him want to be a better man. But no real plot to speak of. CRAZY HEART is the country version of ONCE. That's not just high praise, it's the truth. And I don't even like country music.

RATING: * * * * * (out of 5 Stars)

P.S. The soundtrack is mostly original songs sung by Jeff Bridges and Colin Farrell. It's really, really good. Really.

HOLIDAY MOVIE MADNESS: HOLIDAY HARDER

2009-12-13T18:47:00.000-08:00

Today's all about Scrooge, comma, Ebenezer.

"A Christmas Carol", the story, is really about Scrooge. The myth of Scrooge only works if we (a) truly believe his misanthropy and (b) believe he may not be redeemable and (c) still want to pull for him. It helps if the ghosts are neat and Tiny Tim is more than a tearjerking puppet, but basically, if you have Scrooge, you have a show.

Of course, what if you have two movies where the Scrooge is quite good, but the takes are quite different?

Therefore, here are two different takes on the story, one with a modern day -circa 1988- Bill Murray, the other with Muppets. Have at thee!

SCROOGED

SCROOGED works on so many levels that it comes as a shock that it almost completely falls apart. Strike that. Reverse it. SCROOGED has such a bad critical reputation as a flop and a turkey that it's a shock to see how good it is, right up until the end. And even then, it's pretty good.

What SCROOGED does right is to re-invent A CHRISTMAS CAROL for today, or at least, today circa 1988. It is hard to age well when your movie is set "now", but SCROOGED manages to become a pretty good capsule for everything wrong about the end of the Reagan era. Bill Murray plays Frank Cross, aka Scrooge 88', television executive and a real sonofabitch. Scrooge 88/Frank doesn't hate Christmas, in fact, he loves it. "It's cold and people stay home and watch TV. These idiots are going to be at home watching TV for me tonight!"

Frank's entire career is riding on a (somewhat implausible) live broadcast of "Christmas Carol", starring Buddy Hackett, Mary Lou-Reton, and for no good reason, John Houseman as himself, as the narrator. When Frank's boss asks what how the show will appeal to the dog and cat demographic (really), Frank comes up with doormice. When they can't get the little antlers onto the doormice, Frank suggests using a stapler. In short, Frank's a real bastard, and Murray's performance is the key to what success the movie has.

A critical shot at the beginning of the film gets the message through. Murray's about to unload on his staff at a meeting, for he has found their television promos wanting. Right before he opens his mouth, he pulls open a drawer at his conference table that contains nothing but a mirror. He looks at himself.

He then smiles and winks at himself.

Then he shoots his staff a look, which we see reflected in the mirror.

This whole shot takes about 3 seconds. But in that 3 seconds, you get a miserable man, forcing himself to be amused at what he does, followed by a look of such reptilian disgust that you either want to leave the room or slap him, and then leave the room.

So we have a fantastic Scrooge. Do we have a movie? Yes, to a point.

Director Richard Donner's career has been made of muscular, competent action pictures (LETHAL WEAPON, et al). So he may have seemed like an odd choice for a dark Christmas comedy. But recall that most of his movies have a wicked sense of humor (SUPERMAN and MAVERICK). And he knows how to handle effects; the scene with the Jacob Marley character is particularly impressive.

So most of SCROOGE is handled nice and dark, and yet somehow Christmas-y at the same time. The whole picture is bathed in an eery chill, you can feel the cold temperature and terror as Frank's life spins completely out of control. The score is early Danny Elfman, which means it's creepy while having some wit. And the way the story is restructured is mostly succcessful, with some nice curveballs. (One nice twist is that there's no time frame on when the ghosts will appear, so we don't get the usual "at the strike of one!" predictablility.)

So with all the praise going around, what's the problem? Other than unnecessarily splitting the Bob Crachit character between two people (Bobcat Golthwait and Alfre Woodward, both good but without much to do), the whole thing starts to fall apart in the third act. The first two ghosts are funny, creepy and present events that seem more or less real. The future scenes are heavily styilized, in terms of acting and production design. We go from sets designed to look like real places to sets that look like rejected Tim Burton houses. The characters in Frank's life, represented in the future by the same actors with poor age make-up, suddenly play their roles in very heavy-handed ways. Even the unstoppable Karen Allen, who was the best thing about INDY 4 and a lot of other movies, and who is mostly great here, comes off wrong. Had the rest of the hauntings been over the top, it might have worked, but they weren't and so it doesn't.

But nothing in the third ghost scenes prepares us for the finale. After having the bejesus scared out of him, the movie ends with Frank basically having a mental breakdown on National Television. It's not funny, it's not sad, it's not heartwarming. It's just kind of awkward, and it fills the ending with an ambiguity that I'm not sure was intentional.

And then, instead of dealing with the fallout from his live national speech, the movie basically turns into a sing-a-long, with Murray talking into the camera and all the ghosts (including the cadaver of Marley) appearing on a piece of scenery to cheer him on. It's all so very strange, not strange wonderful, just strange strange.

Yet, for all the implosion of the ending, SCROOGE retains great power, and has great laughs. Even as it stumbles across the finish line, it still is one of the few re-tellings of CHRISTMAS CAROL that actually finds new threads in a very well-tread story. I cringe at the ending, but I still rewatch the movie almost every year.

Anyway, how bad can a movie be when it starts with a fake trailer for THE NIGHT THE REINDEER DIED, with Lee Majors as the only man who can save Santa's Workshop from Terrorists? Also, Robert Goulet shows up for a "Cajun Christmas" special, which involves him singing while trying to get away from a hungry alligator. Nice.

RATING: * * * * (out of 5 Stars)

A MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL

It is odd that a movie retelling of a classic tale with Muppets can be so faithful to the source material that it basically plays like the same story, only with Muppets. Don't look at me like that. THE MUPPET SHOW managed to have lots of re-telling of classic stories, only to stand it on its head at odd angles. Even MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND had a musical number that involved hula skirts, and Tim Curry making strange un-pirate like demands.

But the only real change that MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL makes to the source material is to add a unnecessary yet indispensable narrator. Unnecessary because the story is simple enough it doesn't need one, but indispensable because the narrator is Gonzo, who despite all appearances claims to be Charles Dickens. Accompanied by Rizzo the Rat, Gonzo pretty much sticks to the script, but the fact that the script is being performed by a fuzzy blue weirdo is what gives the movie a lot of its mirth.

Michael Caine is Scrooge, and while he doesn't do anything majorly different with the role, he stands out by being... well, Michael Caine. When the man wants to be good, he can be. And here, he is terrific, treating Kermit and the other Muppets more or less as if they were real actors. The better Muppet movies are distinguished by actors who don't act as if they're in a Muppet movie, and Caine is up to the task.

Missing, however, is the Jim Henson sense of the absurd that drives this material over the top. MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL is warm, cute and, unfortunately, a little heavy on the sap. Kermit, in particular, is pretty much wasted as Bob Crachit. He's nice without that subtle wit and occasional temper that makes Kermit a special soul. Here, he's pretty much a gentle pushover. Don't get me started on how they use Ms. Piggy.

The biggest mistake the movie makes, however, are the musical numbers. They're bad. They're pointless. Most of them don't advance the plot one whit. The one exception is "Marley and Marley", which is not only propels the action, but is fun and creepy.

Fortunately, the Ghost of Christmas Present segment is done well, with a giant friendly Fraggle-Rock style giant Muppet. And credit where it is due: the movie actually handles the hardest chapter of "A Christmas Carol", the Ghost of Christmas Future, better than most versions. It doesn't get cute or over the top, but merely shows a cold and desolate future ahead. Even Dickens/Gonzo is put off, telling the audience that "We'll see you for the finale."

The finale, unfortuantely, is yet another trecale-y song. But that's what the fast forward button is for. A MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL remains a pretty-good version of the classic tale, featuring Michael Caine and Muppets. If that sounds like fun to you, then it is! If it doesn't, well, I can't blame you.

RATING: * * * (out of 5 Stars).

P.S. The Fullscreen version of MUPPET on DVD is the "extended version", which features an additional song that is notable because (a) it involves no Muppets whatsoever and (b) it is the most unnecessary of all the songs in the movie. Stick with the Widescreen cut, where you not only have the whole image, but you don't have to sit through three minutes of some woman singing to young Scrooge about she's no longer in love with him.

Holiday Movie MADNESS! Part Two

2009-11-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

The madness continues, with more reviews for this holiday season. Notice I didn't say which holiday. You'll see.

I hope to get to SCROOGED, ELF and others as we mosey along, but for today we have the original MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET and MONSTER HOUSE.

Also, the wonderful Jenn Jarecki has a blog called Millie at the Pictures and she has published a write-up on 2012. It's more critical than mine, however, I find little in it that I can disagree with, and I share her desire for a disaster movie script with a bit more respect for the audience. Of course, we're the ones at a disaster movie, so maybe the first step is having the self-respect to not go to a disaster movie. It's a cycle, really.

MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET: REVIEW (1947)

The miracle isn't that Santa Claus is real, and working at Macy's. The miracle is that this movie works at all, and so well.

Even in 1947, the premise was as cloying as a hallmark card. The new Santa at Macys claims he's the real deal, and his ideas are so radical--"If Macy's doesn't have it, I'll send you to someone who does!"-- that they instantly capture the imagination and the wallet of all New Yorkers. And more importantly, they capture the imagination of little Susan Walker (Natalie Wood), who has been raised to believe in practical things, like taxes, realistic dolls and zero imagination. But after one visit on the lap of Santa, real name Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn), and she starts to wonder... what if...

Just writing that paragraph, it sounds all awfully syrupy and too cute. Somehow, it's not. It becomes wonderful and life-affirming, even though it the point of highest action occurs during a state competency hearing.

Maybe it's the economy of storytelling. Like CASABLANCA, made 5 years earlier, the movie moves fast and takes little time to get on with it. It takes a mere 10 minutes to get Kringle off the street and into Macys, and another 10 to set off the central conflict of the film, which is to basically make a believer out of an agnostic child. Also, a snippy faux-psychologist decides that Kringle should be locked up, because he hates him. And joy. And puppies. The point is, there are few scenes establishing things we already know, almost every scene propels the movie forward.

Maybe it's because, for all the talk of faith and belief, the movie stays grounded in realism. If you were to hire someone as Santa and later realize the address he gave is the North Pole, you call a doctor. That's what the people at Macy's do. On the same note, if you were a judge running for re-election, and face with the concept of declaring that, as a matter of law, there is no Santa Claus, you might balk at the prospect. That's what this Judge does here, when a small matter of whether an old man should be committed becomes a referendum on Christmas Spirit.

Maybe it's because for all of its Capra-esque sentiment, there's a healthy verneer of cyncism coating the whole thing. When Santa starts sending customers to other stores, the head of Macy's sneakily--and wisely-- embraces the tide of good will, correctly guessing that the people who think well of Macy's, even if they're not buying something today, will buy something tomorrow. And the Judge's political advisor, Charlie (William Frawley, who played 'Fred' on I LOVE LUCY), has a speech that sounds like the GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, CHRISTMAS EDITION: :

"All right, you go back and tell them that the New York State Supreme Court rules there's no Santa Claus. It's all over the papers. The kids read it and they don't hang up their stockings. Now what happens to all the toys that are supposed to be in those stockings? Nobody buys them. The toy manufacturers are going to like that; so they have to lay off a lot of their employees, union employees. Now you got the CIO and the AF of L against you and they're going to adore you for it and they're going to say it with votes. Oh, and the department stores are going to love you too and the Christmas card makers and the candy companies. Ho ho. Henry, you're going to be an awful popular fella.... "

But mostly I think the movie works because of the performances. Maureen O'Hara and John Paine are pretty bloodless as a couple, but they play their archetypes well- the pragmatic realist versus the idealistic dreamer, although in this case it's the Parade Producer who is the realist and the Property Attorney who is the dreamer. Young Natalie Wood is very effective as the little girl, who is bright and thoughtful and sensible, as supposed to Tim Allen's hateful son in THE SANTA CLAUSE. The Judge and his advisor Charlie are pitch-perfect. But the best performance is Kringle himself, who somehow manages to embody the very soul of the season without any Santa Pyrotechnics. No cookies, no milk, no reindeer, no elves, and while he does wear the suit, he wears it in black or white. Just thoughtful good cheer in the shell of a carefully santizied version of a mentally ill man.

Spoiler Alert: It is very likely that Kris Kringle is not Santa Claus, but an old man living a delusion. However, as his doctor points out, he's not hurting anyone, and in fact makes the lives of everyone around him happier for doing so. The only time he lashes out is against the truly hateful psychologist, and even then, it's a mild smack with a cane. Only a jury of Scrooges would actually vote to convict this old man.

MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET wasn't revolutionary, mind blowing, or epic. It was a simple story, well told, worthy of being retold. That's enough to qualify as a Christmas gem. Just stay away from the remake.

RATING: * * * * (out of 5 stars).

P.S. Also, the 1947 trailer is hilarious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IZr_SvCcXc

MONSTER HOUSE: REVIEW (2006)

MONSTER HOUSE is a perfect little creepy movie for Halloween. A pity it was released in Mid Summer 2006, and that it is currently December, thus making it a holiday movie out of joint. But, alas, Black Friday is when it was on sale at Walmart, so here we are.

An 80's throwback made with modern animation techniques, MONSTER HOUSE concerns a... well, a house that our hero DJ is convinced is alive. And evil. And is hungry. And tonight is Halloween.

It wasn't always this way. First, he was first afraid of his neighbor, Old Man Nebbercracker (Steve Bushemi), who was a cranky coot who literally scream, "You kids stay off my lawn!" One day DJ ventured a little too far, and Nebbercracker pitches such a fit that he keels over on his precious lawn, heart attack.

In a different movie that you've seen before, this little scare would become a heartwarming story about judging strangers, and that the only thing to fear is your own fears. DJ would feel bad, bring Nebbercracker some cookies, and learn some life lessons. But this is a movie called MONSTER HOUSE. In this movie, the only thing to fear is a giant freaking house eating you.

I'm usually a sucker for great animated movies and a terror towards mediocre animated movies, but here my love for drawings that move is neutral. The animation is fine here, but there is nothing about the story that couldn't have been done live action, except for the house, which would have been digital anyway. That isn't a complaint, just a comment. The kids' reactions play well, but I'm sure the live kids would too. The action never really leaves the neighborhood, and the inside of the house could have been a set. It's done well, but the animation neither adds nor detracts for me. Except for the house itself.

Fact: a movie called MONSTER HOUSE would be a bit of a rip-off to come all this way and not have there be an actual house that is a monster. Well, the house IS a monster, and it is one hell of a terror. A giant man-eating house may sound silly, but it plays like the better books of Stephen King, and more importantly, it just looks scary.

Show me a person who is not afraid of being eaten by a giant moving house, and I will show you a fool. DJ, after making the requiste rounds of trying to get adults to believe him, decides to take on the house with his best friend Chowder (Sam Lerner) and token girl Jenny (Spencer Locke), who they befriend after rescuing her from the house. Less lucky are some of the other adults, most of whom get chomped up in scenes that are easily as scary as anything in most horror movies. I'm not quite sure how Sony thought this movie would do well with kids of all ages, as it probably sent most of them running for the aisles in terror. But I'm glad they agreed to produce it anyway, since it has a wicked sense of humor, genuine scares and some sequences of real imagination.

The movie peaks at about 3/4ths through when the kids get swallowed but go down the wrong pipe and are still alive. With an actual trip inside the belly of the beast, the movie provides some insight into how the house came to be, and pulls off a neat trick by showing that you can a) plausibly explain why a house came to be haunted with malevolent evil and b) find pathos in such a situation. Neat.

Alas, that leaves the last act, a shrieking action climax where our hero must literally throw a lit stick of dynamite into the mouth of the house. The humor and spookiness drains away, and all that's left is basically a suburban variation on the ol' slay-the-dragon routine. It's not a fatal blow, but for a movie this clever, you'd expect more of a neat twist.

Still, for about 70 of it's 90 minutes, MONSTER HOUSE is good, scary fun. If there is a shelf for fun, overblown movies about suburban kids going on impossible adventures, it belongs right between MONSTER SQUAD and THE GOONIES.

For some of you, what I just said amounts to heresy. And yes, maybe MONSTER HOUSE is not as over-the-top and loony as those movies. But the effects are better, and there's less racism and homophobia. So, you know. That's a fair trade.

RATING: * * * (out of 5 stars)

Christmas Movie Madness: Part One

2009-11-27T15:06:00.000-08:00

Merry Damn Christmas, Everyone.

It's November 28th, and, through restraint, I've managed to watch only four Christmas movies before December. Already, with this much Ho Ho Hoing , I feel duty bound to inform you that not all Christmas movies are created equal, and more importantly, NOT ALL CHRISTMAS MOVIES AGE WELL. This may sound obvious, but how often do the words "Holiday Classic" get thrown around? They were even thrown at the Jim Carrey HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS, which, as well all know, was a real piece of shit.

Anyway. Four Christmas movies before December. More to come after that. Here is my report on movies 1 and 2:

DISNEY'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL (2009)

At this point, it is harder to do a relevant CHRISTMAS CAROL than it is do a relevant HAMLET. This because, unlike HAMLET, everyone actually remembers what happens in CHRISTMAS CAROL. Scrooge hates everyone. Scrooge gets the bejesus scared out of him by his dead partner. Scrooge is visited by three ghosts. Scrooge feels nostalgic, self-pity, joy, sorrow, terror and guilt; respectively. Scrooge decides to buy a giant turkey, help a handicapped child and generally stop being a rotter. High fives are exchanged all around in the afterlife.

It's a story that's been told by Albery Finney, Patrick Stewart, Bill Murray and Michael Caine. Of these arguably Patrick Stewart was the most successful, although Michael Caine was accompanied by a a gaggle of muppets, which counts for something.

And what does Robert Zemeckis, who created WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, THE POLAR EXPRESS and to a much lesser extent BEOWULF bring to his helming of the story? A digital Jim Carrey, digital Gary Oldman, digital Bob Hoskins, some 3D snow, a truly creepy vision of London ghosts and not much else.

I understand the appeal of putting Jim Carrey into a classic retelling of a tale (profit must be had), but it was a mistake to put him as scrooge. For Pixar's wonderful UP, they dug up Ed Asner, who is not only a good actor but has a voice informed with the scars and wisdom of age. Here, we have Jim Carrey doing a very credible old man impression, which sounds uncannily like Jim Carrey doing a very credible old man impression. They also cast him as all the ghosts, perhaps it would have been wiser to follow through and have Carrey play Bob Crachit, Marley, etc.; and then gotten a great older actor to play Scrooge. For my money, I'd love to see a digital Morgan Freeman, Jack Nicholson or even Anthony Hopkins tackle scrooge. You could still use Carrey to get in the kids, but the performance would be something other than a nice trick. Hell, they could have even gone with digital Bob Hoskins, who is easily the most believable 'digital' version in the film, in his small roll as Fizzwick. (Previously, this role has been tackled by Fozzie Bear.)

If Carrey gets the 'a for effort but c for achievement' award, Gary Oldman gets the 'WTF mate?' award for least convincing digital performance. His face is immoblizied, his movements lifeless, and ultimately makes for a poor Bob Crachit. This is hard to believe and harder to write, because I used to believe Gary Oldman could do anything, and in the past, he usually has. He even makes for, here a particularly terrifying Jacob Marley, in a scene sure to terrify children of all ages. Strange that of all the roles, Bob Crachit is the one to take him down.

Unlike HAMLET, all versions of A CHRISTMAS CAROL can be judged by two standards- do you believe in Scrooge's redemption, and do they get you in the Christmas Spirit or not? Sure, SCROOGED had its problems and MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL is as light as a feather, but both movies achieve these humble goals. Most versions of CHRISTMAS CAROL do. Zemeckis's version, for all its tricks, is ultimately a hollow re-run of an often told story. I went to be propelled into the Christmas Spirit in IMAX 3D. I got my 3D, but no Christmas spirit.

Finally, is there a more worthless role in any CHRISTMAS CAROL than Tiny Tim? Every line out of the little cherub's mouth is a pithy notable quotable, and then he gets to upstage himself by dying and leaving behind naught but a little crutch to propel Scrooge's pity. It's the biggest flaw of the story, and it is particularly glaring here.

I have and will continue to defend Zemeckis's POLAR EXPRESS to the ends of the earth, as it was exciting, funny, sad, triumphant and haunting. None of those words apply here. It's not as bad as BEOWULF, but lord, it ain't very good.

RATING: * * (out of 5 stars)

THE SANTA CLAUSE (1994)

I loved Tim Allen as a kid. So did most of America. I recall believing HOME IMPROVEMENT being the funniest live action sitcom on television.

Have you seen that show recently? With the exception of Tim Allen's assistant Al Borland (Richard Karn), that show was a laugh-free zone. Every single episode boiled down to Tim Allen being an idiot, and his neighbor pointing out that he's an idiot, and Tim Allen trying to make up for being an idiot. I formally apologize to my parents for making them watch it.

I also formally apologize for making them take me to see THE SANTA CLAUSE twice. This was a made for TV movie that somehow got released in theaters, and kids, who loved Tim Allen and continue to love Santa, flocked to it and helped it make 140 million dollars, domestically, in 1996 dollars.

Did I really fall for this tripe? Did I think the phrase "We're your worst nightmare- elves with attitude!" was clever? Did I not pause for a moment to consider how deeply creepy the premise is? Not so much that Tim Allen can become Santa Claus, but that the way he replaces Santa is by KILLING HIM. Okay, okay, so he just calls out "Hey Buddy!" and Santa falls off a roof and dies.

To back up a moment, if you were lucky enough to avoid this movie in the theater: Tim Allen accidentally kills Santa, puts on the dead man's pants, and because he fails to read the fine print on a business card, forms a contract to become the new Santa Claus (he didn't read the Santa CLAUSE, see? See?) He then walks up a magical ladder, suffers an animatronic reindeer's farts, falls for his brat son's guilt trip and becomes Santa Claus for the evening. This entails insulting some small children and generally being an ass. Later he ends up at the North Pole. Santa's Workshop, which resembles a cheap set, is a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.

The Elves claim to be 200 years old, but look uncannily like smarmy children. Allen has the following exchange with a tiny child actor who, in real life, couldn't be older than 13:

Scott Calvin: You know, you look pretty good for your age.
Little Elf Judy: Thanks, but I'm seeing someone in wrapping.

Part of the problem is Allen's smarmy, not funny. jokey persona and is occasionally racist and at the very least insipid. But give the man a little slack, he's also up against a screenplay worthy of Chevy Chase. (It was written by the same brain trust that came up with SPACE JAM) The story sets up Allen as a toy-maker who is divorced, but still wants his son to have a happy home and believe in Santa and the spirit of Christmas. If they had gone all the way and made him a real louse, or a scrooge, or at least some kind of hurdle, they might have gotten something out of this. Instead, we basically have a nice guy who gets the best job in the world, whose biggest trouble is convincing his insufferable son Charlie (Eric Lloyd) to shut up about the fact that he's Santa.

It's hard to identify exactly what it is about little Charlie that made me consider infanticide. Maybe it's his petulant whiny bleating, his little doe-like eyes that well up at the smallest obstacle, or the fact that he often proclaims "you never let me do what I want!" In any case, he's an annoying brat who doesn't listen to anyone, and pretty much spits on all the people trying to take care of him. To be clear, Charlie needs to fall off a roof.

The film's lone moments of wit come from the ever-dependable Judge Reinhold, who plays Charlie's stepdad Dr. Neil. Not only is Dr. Neil actually a nice guy who seems relatively sane, but he gets the best line in the movie, which concerns an Oscar Meyer Weenie Whistle. The movie also gets a little mileage out of a Christmas Eve visit to Dennys, which is inexplicably filled with Japanese Businessman on one side and, more plausibly, divorced fathers and their children on the other. Had they stuck with the concept of a divorced Dad trying to make a merry Christmas with his son, this movie could have worked. Well, they would have also had to eliminate the whole "Kill Santa" element.

There was a movie released in 1985 called SANTA CLAUS: THE MOVIE. It's a train wreck of good intentions and bad screenwriting, which then rolls over a bus of over-acting by John Lithgow and Dudley Moore. However, for all of its faults, it at least got the basic concept of Santa Claus right. THE SANTA CLAUSE thinks its clever because there's an elf that resembles Q of the Bond series, Comet farts a lot and Tim Allen keeps making cracks about the fact that Santa was murdered because he fell off his roof. Because really, what is Santa Claus, if not some jerk who picked up a dead man's pants and didn't read the fine print?

Sometimes, a film becomes more than the sum of its parts. This time it works in reverse. Even though it's probably just a collection of mediocre claptrap, I firmly believe that when you put it all in perspective. THE SANTA CLAUSE is of the worst Christmas Movies out there, and yes, I have seen GRINCH and SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS.

RATING: * Star (out of 5)

Coming soon... looking back at MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET (Original) and ELF. Much better movies.

FANTASTIC MR. FOX: REVIEW

2009-11-21T08:48:00.000-08:00

Joy. That is the feeling one gets watching THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX.

Joy at the wonderful strangeness of the characters, who are flawed and stiffly animated and selfish and yet so human. They are also wild animals.

Joy that you are watching a movie unlike any other, but with the added bonus that you don't want to slit your wrists at the end. (See the brilliant but horrifically sad ARE, WHERE THE WILD THINGS)

Joy that now there are two stop-motion animation masterpieces produced in the same year. (CORALINE is the other.)

Joy that Wes Anderson has broken out of his tunnel-vision, working in a new medium and actually having a plot, while still keeping all of his essential Wes Anderson-ness.

Joy that you're watching the second-best Roald Dahl adapation of all time. This is no small achievement, considering how many have tried and failed to capture the right tone of his work. (No prizes for guessing the best adaptation.)

And finally, joy that this is the first children's movie where they found to way to have the little woodland creatures swear with impunity, and yet offend no one. I'd tell you how they do it, but it's too good of a secret to spill. Let's just say it's more sophisticated than bleeping, and more fun, too.

FANTASTIC MR. FOX is a toy box of a movie, overflowing with invention, random adventure, real fun and good cheer. The plot is a lark, basically a 90 minute roadrunner and coyote story, only replace the road-runner with George Clooney as a fox named Mr. Fox, and the coyote with Michael Gambon as the most hateful hunter in the county, named Bean.

At one point, threatening letters are exchanged between the two nemisi:

Bean: Why did he send us a letter written with letters cut out of a magazine?

Underling: Well, you did the same thing when you sent your letter to him.

Bean: I don't trust this guy.

It all got started because Fox decided to steal some chickens, geese and hard cider from the farmes Boggis, Bunce and Bean, respectively. The Farmers decide to shoot Fox for his trouble, but only get his tail. Fox decides to tunnel all of their chickens, geese and hard cider. The Farmers come back with bulldozers. Eventually, all out war is waged between the animals and the farmers.

The plot is a lark, but it's more plot than Wes Anderson has usually gotten involved with, and it is enough to hang scene after scene of comic invention. A few thoughts sneak in, surprisingly deep ones, but don't worry: the life lessons are kept to a minimum.

The voice work is top drawer, not only in terms of talent (how often do you get Meryl Streep to play your straight man?), but that talent is actually used to create fantasitc characters, as supposed to creating a fish who looks like Will Smith and sounds just like Will Smith. (See TALE, SHARK) Consider Bill Murray as the badger lawyer named Badger. Badger is not just memorable because he's a badger in a suit that sounds just like Bill Murray, but because he actually tries to give good lawyerly advice. And when the advice doesn't work, he snarls and tries to claw his clients. He's also a demolition expert, which provokes this exchange:

Fox: Demolition Expert? What? Since when?

Badger: Since forever!

There's a nice current that runs through the story about wild animals trying to be civilized, reverting to wild-ness and then apologizing later. At least they apologize when they rever, I'll take these animals over the farmers anyday: Boggis eats 12 whole chickens a day, Bunce only eats donuts stuffed with foie de gras, and Bean employs a Rat with a switchblade to protect his hard cider. That last one doesn't sound so bad, until you realize the Rat has the voice of Willem Dafoe. When you send a Rat with a switchblade and the voice of Willem Dafoe after someone's children, as Bean does here, you are basically FedExing nightmares to children everyone. The farmers are so hateful, the children have a little song that they sing about how bad they are. Badger knows, he has it on file at his law office.

Tying the whole thing together is Clooney as Mr. Fox, who is one of the more appealing protganists of animated film history. He the talent and brilliant-but-doomed visions of Jack Skellington, the family dynamics and mid-life crisis drama of Mr. Incredible, with the same swagger as the Disney Fox Robin Hood. In other words, he's smart, ambitious, cocky, makes mistakes, doesn't listen, but is capable of invention and genius and can get you out of a tight spot. He's probably somehow related to the Disney family, as when we first meet him he's listening to the Davy Crockett theme song.

The actual animation style is blocky, awkward and rough. And it's gorgeous. Sure, it looks like it was done by kids over a year in their basement, and that's the charm. As rough and tumble as it is, it gives the world of animated movies new life in this age of pixels. Pixar can only make one movie a year, and while waiting for it we have to wade through the MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, SHARK TALE, PLANET 51, CHICKEN LITTLE, SHREK 3, OPEN SEASON, ICE AGE 1 and 2 AND 3, and on and on.

THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX has everything that a Roald Dahl story has: humour, meaning, beauty, a dash of darkness, a touch of cruelty, just desserts for the nasty people and hope for the good ones. But more than that, it makes you feel good, and not in obvious ways. It has characters you want to get to know better. It features lots of woodland creatures dancing, not because they can dance well or in time, but because it's good to be alive and dancing is fun. It has a man on a banjo for little to no reason. And it ends on an oddly quiet but perfect beat, with a tiny speech that is more inspiring than it has to be or wants to be. In short, it is the best movie I've seen all year.

RATING: * * * * * (out of 5 Stars)

P.S. The woodland creatures also have a game called Whackbat. Owen Wilson is on hand, as Coach Otter, to explain the game:

"Basically, there's three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at Whackbat. Center tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then the twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out and the umpire calls 'hotbox!'. Finally, you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine."

There are helpful diagrams with lines and X's and O's that go along with the speech. If this doesn't make you smile, I don't know what to tell you.

THIS IS IT: REVIEW

2009-11-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

This is a movie for two types of people. Michael Jackson fans, and those who work on producing live events (theater/music/dance.)

Those expecting a freak show or a car wreck will be out 12 bucks and be bored. Jackson's voice wasn't so great, but it's functional, and more importantly, he could still move. He also had the world's best back up singers, dancers and band behind him, and when you've got that, you could be Dan Akyroyd and sound fantastic.

So it's not a fly on the wall at a disaster. But it's not exactly a celebration either. You can tell Michael Jackson was holding back, at least in terms of singing, because these were the dress rehearsals. At one point, when he really nails one his hits, he shakes his head and says "I shouldn't have done that." The crew eggs him on and he retorts, "No, no. I need to save my voice."

Which makes sense, and lends authenticity, but makes it something less than the most intense music concert movie ever, as promised by the ads. However, that's also what makes it interesting on a separate level, on the production level.

If you have ever worked on a live music, theater or dance show, you must see this film. You will see the best artists and technicians in the world doing some of their best work. Whether it's lighting, choreography, vocals or even the pyro guy; Jackson hired the best for his comeback, and you get to see them make their craft. Sometimes, it's more interesting to watch an artist noodling around with an idea than to actually see the finished product.

We do get to see the finished video that was to follow some of the songs, which is fantastic. Jackson inserts himself into an old Bogart movie, and they get into a shoot out during SMOOTH CRIMINAL. THRILLER gets some 3D effects and new zombies. Although my favorite may be the relatively unknown song THEY DON'T REALLY CARE ABOUT US, where ten dancers get multiplied into an infinite field of jack-booted thugs from the future doing drill routines to the beat. It's about as cool as this stuff gets.

The title of the movie is actually pretty sad. All Jackson wanted to do before he retired was give the world one last show, a show that could be called THE show. And based on this movie, it would have worked. Jackson's voice wasn't the best, but he still knew how to kick some ass in the realm of the pop spectacle. Ticketholders would have gotten their money's worth. He would have tasted that glory again. Instead, this is it. This is all he and we get. A fitting farewell, sure. But proof that he had more to do.

RATING: * * * (out of 5 stars)

P.S. Add a fourth star if you are a theater/music/dance professional.

P.P.S. There is one video and song that really bombs, his HEAL THE WORLD number. It's an awkward environmental message that doesn't really work. If you rent the movie, fast forward past this part.

2012: REVIEW

2009-11-14T08:22:00.000-08:00

The Criterion Collection released an edition of ARMAGEDDON, with the defense that it was a perfect example of the big, overblown mid-90's disaster movie, which was the popular style of the time. They had the right idea, but they picked the wrong movie.

I enjoyed ARMAGEDDON, it was fun for what it was, but if you ask someone "you know, that big 90's disaster movie", they'll say, "Oh, you mean INDEPENDENCE DAY?"

As dumb as it was, INDEPENDENCE DAY, like GROUNDHOG DAY, has entered our collective imagination as a reference point. Why? Because it was fun, because it was huge, because it made a star out of Will Smith, and to put it simply, 9/11. When dust clouds were rolling down the REAL streets of New York, all I remember thinking is I've seen this before... and I had, only there were aliens, and Harvey Fierstein, and the Tin Man, and, and...

It's not director/creator/crazy german Ronald Emmerich's fault that his movie accurately portrayed real terrorist devastation. He just thinks big, big and dumb: STARGATE, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, GODZILLA, etc. Well, it's eight years later, and time has made INDEPENDENCE DAY slowly slide back into being fun and not at all and invitation to post traumatic stress inducer. There's something somehow comforting in, with the economy in the crapper and people wanting to blow us up, watching The End Of The World As We Know It because ALIENS HAVE LANDED. Or GLOBAL WARMING WILL KILL US ALL. Or THERE IS A GIANT MONSTER AND OH MY GOD I HAVEN'T TOLD MY DAUGHTER I LOVED HER AIIEEEEE

So, in short, not his fault that terrorist attacks made me think of his movie. It IS his fault that he keeps making the same movie over and over again. 2012 is the same movie he has made before, only bigger. But you knew that. I knew that. Your dog knows that. The only question is, does 2012 deliver? The answer is yes. Oh my, yes.

30 minutes of exposition and ominous portents, followed by 2 hours of demolition derby. Everything explodes in this movie. Everything. If there's something that's a famous landmark, it blows up. And it is silly. Delightfully silly. A man says to his girlfriend, "I feel like something's come between us," and then a giant fissure opens between them. A giant plane is revealed, and some kid says, "it's huge!", and a nearby Russian mobster growls, "It's Russian." A noble scientist says, "If we don't open these doors, we lose our humanity!" And someone replies, "Oh, just do it then." Actually, that was the gay couple sitting next to me, but you get the general idea.

And yet, there is a certain baseline competency (see Howard, Ron) that Emmerich brings to his movies that makes them satisfying, if nothing else. He likes the ominous forboding. He lingers on his effects, inviting us to see how big, crazy and intricate they are. There is no quick cutting and shaky cam. It may not be new, but after a summer of big budget disasters, it is comforting.

The screenplay is nothing new or original, but the same story we've seen before about lots of individuals coming together to face an imminent threat. This is also somewhat comforting. Stock characters work if the performers are good enough, and with John Cusack, Danny Glover and Woody Harrelson (as the requisite crazy guy) on board, they work here. And Emmerich keeps topping himself with the destruction.

Look, you pays your money, you takes your chances. 2012 is as advertised. You want wholesale world desctruction? You got it. You want memorable characters, witty dialogue and smart plot twists? STAR TREK comes out on tuesday on DVD, and UP is available.

RATING: * * * (out of 5 stars)

P.S. There is one (1) intriguing idea in the movie. The noble scientist remarks that, just because he happens to be reading some guy's book that no one bought, and he just happens to be one of the few that will survive the cataclycsm, that book will endure for generations while other books don't, by chance. Should Emmerich be right and 2012 actually happen and there's only room on board for one disaster movie to make it through the ages, I hope it's THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE. You heard me. There has never been a better disaster movie than THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE.

P.P.S. THE PATRIOT is Emmerich's worst movie. Even worse than GODZILLA. You heard me.

SNATCH: REVIEW

2009-11-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

Rewatching SNATCH after six, seven years on the DVD shelf plays about the same as seeing your ‘cool’ Uncle a few years after college. He’s still a good guy, but what was once ‘cool’ now seems disorganized and immature. Just substitute that demo album with a search for a diamond and that motorcycle for Brad Pitt in an unintelligible accent. The first time around, I admired the fact that it dared to not make sense or add up to anything. This time, I found myself getting frustrated and at times bored with the ever-looping stories, characters, missed connections and tough guy talk.

Unspooled, there are basically two plots, that play on parallel tracks that sometimes interect. One involves a perfectly cut diamond stolen by the excellently named Frankie Four Fingers (Bencio Del Toro), and the series of men who kill each other to try to get it. The other involves a boxing promoter named Turkish (a young Jason Staham), who gets mixed up with a gypsy boxer named Mickey (a young-ish Brad Pitt) who is an expert at the rope-a-dope.

The boxer plotline begins slow and silly, the diamond plotline starts with a quick-cutting hold up and violence. But it’s the boxer plotline that eventually pays off, proving the closest thing to an emotional connection with any of the characters. The diamond plotline, on the other hand, bites off more than writer/director Guy Ritchie can chew: consider that in the pursuit of the diamond are Frankie Four Fingers (who doesn’t last long), Cousin Avi (Dennis Farina), Bullet Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones), Boris the Blade (Rade Serbedzija) and Brick Top (Alan Ford). While they’re all gifted character actors with great character names, it’s only Brick Top who makes any real impression beyond surface notes, partly because Alan Ford gnashes teeth expertly, but mostly because he’s a guy named Brick Top who feeds his enemies to pigs. There’s also Sol, Vinne and Tyrone, who pull off the world’s worst robbery. And Gorgeous George, the Boxer. And Doug the Head, the jeweler. And, and…

Are you overwhelmed? I loved this rogue’s gallery in college. I couldn’t get enough of it. Now, I watched with the sneaking suspicion that Guy Ritchie probably wrote the whole thing in a drunken weekend, and no one had the heart to tell him that one character with a great name is a good idea, two is a clever idea and seven is just playing with yourself on Final Draft.

Parts of the movie remain fantastic. The opening credits sequence is a masterstroke, introducing a seemingly endless cast all at once. Pretty much any scene with Brad Pitt hits exactly the right note. The use of music remains is on par with Scorcese, songs that not only underscore the action but add to it. Individually lines of dialogue sneak through and dig into your memory, and there are two monologues by especially nasty men that are perfect. And the boxing fight at the end of the movie is about as good as these scenes get.

But other parts show their age. The movie is over-narrated by Jason Staham, often telling us things we don’t need to know or already can guess. It doesn’t help that back in 2000, Jason Staham had a promising career ahead of him. Now in 2009, he’s made one decent movie in the past 9 years, and even in that movie he gives the same damn performance. In other words, it’s not that Turkish is cool and detached, it’s that Jason Staham has only one note to play and plays it all the time. Many of the plot twists are glaringly arbitrary, artificially adding length to a movie that already feels long at 102 minutes. And in the end, a movie about a search for a treasure means nothing when the men searching for the treasure are ultimately nothing more than cleverly named stick figures who swear a lot.

I mentioned individual lines of dialogue as being great, because overall Ritchie writes his characters in asked and answered style, like this:

Avi: Why do they call him the Bullet-Dodger?

Bullet Tooth Tony: 'Cause he dodges bullets, Avi.

Cute. Now imagine it again:

Tommy: Are you sayin' I can't shoot?

Turkish: No Tommy, I'm not saying you can't shoot. I know you can't shoot.

And again…

Doug the Head: Slow down, Franky, my son. When in Rome...

Franky Four Fingers: I am not in Rome, Doug. I am in a rush.

And again:

Vinny: This is a shotgun, Sol.

Sol: It's a fucking anti-aircraft gun, Vincent.

Vinny: Well I wanna raise some pulses, don't I?

Sol: You'll raise Hell. Never mind pulses.

You have now obtained a masters in Guy Ritchie dialogue. One exchange is funny, two is clever, nineteen is….

So what is this movie about, really? That the underworld of London has shady characters? Stop the presses. Don’t trust a gypsy boxer? A man who knows nothing about diamonds finds one when he adopts a dog to fool the police? What?

Not that it would matter if was endlessly entertaining. You can have zero point if you’re endlessly entertaining. Which SNATCH was, back in 2000. Now, it’s 2009. Of course, Ocean’s 11 came out in 99, and it’s aged just fine. And that one had 11 characters, not counting Andy Garcia. SNATCH remains fun, but what it really needed was a rewrite and an editor.

And get a hair cut, hippie.

RATING: * * * (Out of five)

P.S.: One more, but it’s a good one:

Customs Agent: Anything to declare?

Cousin Avi: Yeah. Don’t go to England.

THREE AMIGOS and FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF

2009-09-11T19:02:00.000-07:00

Some movies ripen with age. Others, rot.

Both FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF and THREE AMIGOS came out in 1986. I have/had fond memories of watching and rewatching both on basic cable sometime in the early 90's.
Inspired by being tired, I decided to pop them both in the DVD wayback machine and see how good they still were. Here are the results.

Watching FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF after surviving high school is a strangely rewarding experience. Some things are not as funny as I remember them, but for every old joke comes two more good ones out of the woodwork that I didn't even get as a kid.

Some of what seemed daring in 86, or 92, or whenever I first saw the movie, now seems quaint. A movie character talking straight to the camera? Text appearing onscreen to establish a point? A random music number?! Yeah, we get that a lot and have gotten it a lot since then. If not through rip-off films, than at least through many, many seasons of BLIND DATE.

But it's still a fun movie, and while the overall arc is predictable- they have a great day and learn life lessons!- the individual twists and turns are not. How many teenage comedies have a stop over in an art museum? Or make time for a subplot involving parking lot attendants who drive at fast speeds to the STAR WARS theme? Or point out that, if you marry the first person who is nice to you, it will probably end badly? Or have a visit from the singing nurse who likes to... er... 'pluck'. (Quite possibly the second funniest singing telegram joke in the movies) (No prizes for guessing the funniest singing telegram joke)

The movie also gets a lot of mileage out of Dean of Students Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), a man who we feel bad after a dog has messed up his face, but not bad enough to want to take it back. Jeffrey Jones, John Hughes found the perfect villain for a movie this light- someone who takes himself completely seriously, even in no one else in the movie does. And the subplots about the efforts to "save ferris" at the school generate constant laughs, or at least chuckles.

Perhaps the most striking thing is that while Ferris Bueller is the protagonist, he is not the hero. Oh sure, he's on screen most of the time, has the best lines and gets away with everything. (If you ever forget why you ever thought Matthew Broderick was funny or talented, like I have after his recent movies, re-watch this movie to remind yourself.) But while Bueller had a certain appeal back in the early Clinton years, now, the star of this movie is definitely Cameron (Alan Ruck). What was once the mopey sidekick is now the emotional lynchpin of the story. Cameron is the only one with anything really on the line. Even if Bueller does get caught- which is really his only worry in the world- one need not worry about Bueller. You could easily see him get expelled from his school, only to end up walking out of Yale with countless job offers. But Cameron has problems, both real and imagined, and it is his growth that gives the movie soul. It is he that sends the car through the window, and decides to make a stand, just for the principle of taking a stand. And while Bueller makes time to propose to his girlfriend (Mia Sara), it is Cameron that he stops the parade for to sing "Twist and Shout."

In short, FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF now seems less like a middle finger to the establishment, and more like a story about the happy friend who always had it easy trying to help the sad friend who never caught a break, also starring the happy friend's girlfriend as the third wheel. This is not a bad thing. Many movie characters say "this is the best day of my life", but when Cameron says it, you believe it. Part 80's time capsule, part high school parody, FERRIS qualifies as a mini classic not because it achieves anything great, but because it so easily makes you smile.

THREE AMIGOS, on the other hand, is not as funny as I remember it. In fact, not very funny at all. But as an added bonus, it is racist, stilted, strange and represents some kind of low point for Steve Martin and Martin Short; although to be fair, it's a mid career point for Chevy Chase. I laughed a lot during FERRIS BUELLER, which is what made me pop in THREE AMIGOS to continue the trend. But then the laughter stopped, and a depressing silence settled in.

Scene after scene clangs to the floor, without laughs or purpose which is odd when you consider the director is John Landis. This is the same man who gave us BLUES BROTHERS, COMING TO AMERICA and ANIMAL HOUSE? And even to a lesser extent, TRADING PLACES and SPIES LIKE US? Of course, he also gave us BLUES BROTHERS 2000, but this was 1986! He hadn't departed from the land of funny yet! What gives?

The concept is funny: three out of work actors who played silent screen desperadoes are summoned to Mexico, for what they assume will be a publicity appearance, and find they've actually been summoned to fight a local bandit. You will recall this same basic plot from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, or if you don't, you can also recall it from A BUGS LIFE. It is an old standby, and that's no excuse for how bad this movie is. It's also no excuse for why I thought this film was funny as a kid.

Consider this following bit of dialogue, after the amigos see a plane:

Chevy Chase: What is it doing here?
Martin Short: I think it's a mail plane.
Steve Martin: How can you tell?
Martin Short: Didn't you notice its little balls?

Martin Short proceeds to laugh hysterically at his own joke, which is not funny, which I guess is the real joke... that he's stupid, I guess. Steve Martin then laughs at him, playing the reaction as "I hear your joke and it is not funny because I know funny" and Chevy Chase stares off into the distance, squinting, playing the reaction as "Either I don't get it or I'm not paying attention in this scene." In fact, this little bit of comedic celluloid death is a perfect microcosm of what's wrong with the entire movie.

Short is playing the dumb earnest guy, which is not exactly his strong suit (you don't hire Martin Short to play dumb, you hire him to chew up the scenery). Steve Martin is playing the "I am smarter than you, the script and the audience watching this movie" version of Steve Martin, which is the furthest thing from funny that Steve Martin can do. That leaves Chevy Chase, standing around waiting for a paycheck, which is pretty much what Chevy Chase always does.

If you grew up on this movie, you are probably wondering why I am being so harsh. The answer is: because I grew up on this movie, and god, is it bad. Maybe it's because it's so predictable. FERRIS BUELLER at least had the sense that you weren't sure what was going to happen next, here, the movie calls out every development miles in advance. The creepy German says to be on the lookout for his weird friends? Why, of course the Amigos show up next! They treat these dandies with respect, you see, because they think they are Germans! Sigh.

Oh, there are the few good parts, which you no doubt remember: the villain's discussion of the word plethora, the shooting of the invisible swordsman and the music number where the horses jump in it. But for every good part, there are other parts that you remember being funny but in fact, aren't. The singing bush? It never actually pays off. The Amigos actual numbers? Boring and tedious. Even the music number with the horses suffers from how the awkward choice to set the whole thing on an obviously fake set. Sometimes a fake set is used to make a point, but when the rest of the movie is shot on location, I missed the point or the joke of a campfire scene behind a painted sunset.

The movie was funny when I was 12. Probably because it had three comedians who I knew (or decided I knew) were funny, in funny costumes, being cowboys. But over time, what was a funny light comedy becomes nothing more than three overpaid stars on the wrong comic page, strutting about on an expensive production without point or purpose. I was going to write "flailing about", but quite frankly, this movie needed more flailing. Or at least something that was more intense than sitting in a funny hat, waiting for the jokes to come.

Comedy, especially when it involves a lot of very funny but different people, is nothing without stakes or timing. The great comedies involve characters with everything on the line, who are actively invested in the events unfolding (GROUNDHOG DAY, GHOSTBUSTERS, BEST IN SHOW). But barring that, you can even have a very funny movie without emotional investment, if the jokes come fast enough and the timing is perfect (CLUE, THE NAKED GUN, AIRPLANE!)
John Landis should know, after all, he has made both types of comedies. Here, he made neither, and while he fooled me at 12, he ain't gonna fool me again.

You think I'm being mean to this little ol' 80's movie? Rent it again. I dare you. See if you laugh, or if instead you force yourself to make sounds that could qualify as laughter, to fool yourself into having a good time.

FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF: * * * * Stars (out of 5 stars)

THREE AMIGOS: * Stars (out of 5 stars)

P.S. To be fair, THREE AMIGOS does have a villain as funny as Principle Rooney, and his name is El Guapo (Alfonso Arau). He's the one who has a discussion of the word "plethora", and he is an example of what this movie could have been. I was reminded of Miguel Sandoval, who played the villainous drug dealer in the similarly-good-concept-awful-execution THE CREW. The one genuinely hilarious moment in that movie was his, where, after his goons accidentally burned down his own warehouse, he says, "You know what I am, you guys? A cliche'."

P.P.S. When was the last time Chevy Chase was funny? That's easy: Norm MacDonald's under-appreciated DIRTY WORK, where he played a gleefully corrupt doctor. When was Chevy Chase ever funny? That's harder: a complete analysis of IMDB turns up only five movies: FUNNY FARM, NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION, NATIONAL LAMPOON'S CHRISTMAS VACATION, NATIONAL LAMPOON'S EUROPEAN VACATION and CADDYSHACK.

Don't believe me? His last 20 years or so reveals the following evidence: MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN, FLETCH LIVES, CADDYSHACK II, NOTHING BUT TROUBLE, SNOW DAY, COPS AND ROBBERSONS, MAN OF THE HOUSE, VEGAS VACATION, ZOOM!, THE KARATE DOG, and the upcoming HOT TUB TIME MACHINE, NOT ANOTHER NOT ANOTHER MOVIE and GOOSE ON THE LOOSE.

Here is the trailer for GOOSE ON THE LOOSE. It also stars Tom Arnold as the voice of the Goose.

http://www.parkentertainment.com/goose.html

REVOLVER: A KIND OF REVIEW

2009-09-02T21:05:00.000-07:00

Brett Weiner, this one's for you.

You warned me about this movie. The reviews were toxic, as it was made at the height of Guy Ritchie being sucked into Madonna's Kabballah obsession. Other than Jason Staham, the only claim to fame in terms of casting was Andre 3000, that guy who played Big Pussy on the Sopranos, and the animated corpse of Ray Liotta.

I knew it was probably going to be bad, but I have a soft spot for Guy Ritchie. LOCK STOCK and SNATCH were a hell of a lot of fun. I haven't seen SWEPT AWAY, reviewed as the worst movie of the decade, but I'm willing to bet that Madonna can talk a lot of men into stupid things, so I won't hold that against him. Lord knows I've been talked into bad ideas before.

I still wasn't prepared for the three (3!) quotes about knowing your enemy that started the movie. Starting any movie with a quote on the screen is bad enough, but three? Really?

Anyway, the movie starts out with all of those quotes, some whiny narration from Jason Staham, and as mentioned, the animated corpse of Ray Liotta. Oh, and Jason Staham can correctly guess coin tosses, but hates elevators. And some guys get shot. It's like The Transporter directed by Darren Aronofsky.

So about 10 minutes into the movie, having no idea what was going on, other than Ray Liotta doesn't look so good, I dug up the short spoiler from moviepooper.com:

"Avi (Andre Benjamin) and Zach (Vincent Pastore) are the men who were on either side of Jake Green (Jason Statham) in prison. All their methods were an attempt to apply "The Formula", and thus save Jake's life."

That didn't help. I looked at the 'long spoiler':

"Jake Green decides not to kill Dorothy Macha (Ray Liotta), finally figuring out that the mysterious Sam Gold is actually part of his psyche. After a confrontation in a stalled elevator, Jake leaves that part of him behind, finally becoming his own person. After coming back to the loansharks, Avi and Zach, he finally realizes that they were the two prisoners on either side of him in the cell block, the ones who developed The Formula (the ideas allowing Jake to win any game of chance, and also what made him so good at chess). The two had been manipulating him from the moment he got out of prison (and all the way through the film, as well), in an effort to get him to realize that his mind was the real enemy, and not the people around him."

Based upon my ten minutes and this paragraph, I have decided to not finish REVOLVER. It's ten minutes of my life I'll never get back, but I reckoned I saved 100 by reading the 30 second spoiler. Remember: the real enemy is in your mind.

To those that would say this review is a total cop-out, you are correct. To those who rant at me as to why I waste my time watching godawful movies all the way through, you have won this round.

RATING: DNF (Did Not Finish)

P.S. Everyone gets one. In the case of Guy Ritchie, he gets SHERLOCK HOLMES. If that also stinks, I'm done with him.

Random!

2009-09-02T14:52:00.000-07:00

Your Simpsons/Kurosawa joke for the day:

Marge: C'mon Homer, Japan will be fun! You liked 'Rashomon'.

Homer: That’s not how I remember it.

Incidentally, along the lines of "if you haven't seen it, why aren't you Netflixing this right now?!", RASHOMON falls under the category of if you haven't seen it, why aren't you Netflixing this right now?

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS: REVIEW

2009-09-01T20:17:00.000-07:00

Some movies hit the moment just right. Others stand outside of the moment, and just exist as good movies. This is one of the latter.

How good is INGLORIOUS BASTERDS? Hitchcock good. The Pillowman good. Scorcese good. Brian De Palma when he's sane good. Pick your genre. It's up there. This is all the more promising because it comes from Quentin Tarantino, who we knew was good, but I don't think even he knew he was this good. We're a long way from Reservoir Dogs

I don't want to give anything away, because if you haven't seen it, you deserve to walk as unaware as possible. The trailers you have seen are accurate while being completely misleading. As INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is, indeed, a story of Brad Pitt's 8 boys, much in the same way that it's also a story about a newly-made orphan's revenge, Hilter's boorishness, Goebbels's insecurity, a Nazi Officer unlike any you've seen before and the most menacing eating of pastries ever put on film. Yes it is all of that, and more importantly, it's fun.

A WWII movie that's fun, you say? Preposterous. Tasteless. How dare you not take something serious, seriously. Some have even written that the movie is troubling or, worse, evil, for "anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong. " (Jonathan Rosenbaum- see below) Perhaps. Nazis are serious business. Just ask Mel Brooks.

But it's worth remarking that Shakespeare, Moliere and Gilbert and Sullivan got a lot more milegage out of seemingly-gentle parody than anything Strindberg or Ibsen ever wrote. The point being, you can make your serious art all you want about serious subjects, but to really kill the monsters of history, the best tactic is to deflate them. That doesn't mean you're not taking them seriously, it means you're serious about that cream pie you just slammed in their face.

That's Tarantino's method, anyway. He starts with a set up that is as dark as it is funny, scary as it is horrific, involving a silent game of chess played between two men talking what seems like minor details. Really, they're talking about human lives, and the fate of those lives will impact other lives. And with one decision made during this scene, a pinball is let loose that eventually ends up in a whole lotta people being dead. Not just here, but throughout the movie. And not in ways you expect.

Part of the strength of this scene, and many others, is that you KNOW you're watching a Tarantino movie. Any minute now, 88 ninjas will descend from nowhere and rape someone in the back closet while Kurt Russell drives by at 100mph. Why? Because that's the kind of stuff that happens in his movies. You're geared for anything. And a lot of the satisfaction comes from when things DON'T happen. This may sound boring; but one of the smarter things Hitchcock ever observed was the definition of suspense. If two men are talking with a bomb underneath their table, and the bomb goes off, that is action. If the bomb does not go off, it is suspense. I may have mangled the quote, but you get the idea.

Which is not to say that nothing happens in this movie, far from it, a lot of things do. It is generally true that when your traditional good looks hero walks into a room at about halfway through a movie, usually, he is walking out of it, otherwise the movie would be over. It is not true in this movie. Who would have thought that out of all of Tarantino's homages in this film- and he borrows from everywhere, from THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI to THE WIZARD OF OZ- his smartest move would be to take a page from the bible of DEEP BLUE SEA, of all things? You know what they say about homage. When you steal from another movie artfuly, it is homage. When you steal from another movie poorly, it is hackery.

But more than just playing with expectations, the movie soars on its performances. Not only from Brad Pitt- who is great as Lt. Aldo Raine - and Eli "HOSTEL" Roth- who is suprisingly good- but from the heroine and the villain. First, the heroine.

I've never seen Melanie Laurent before, and part of the advantage of not seeing someone perform is that you're not sure if they are actually performing. As the out-for-revenge Shosanna, she is so good that I wasn't sure if she was acting or if she just happened to be caught on camera while plotting the death of the entire Third Reich. Shosanna is a fictional avenger on scale with Medea, and Michael Corleone and the The Count of Monte Cristo.

The other key ingredient to the movie's success is the villain. You would think in a movie about killing Nazis, that villain would be Hitler. But you would be wrong: Hilter is the prize, the potential low hanging fruit who storms about like Baby Huey. Here, the real evil here is Col. Hans Landa, who is not only the embodiment of the darkness that lurks in the hearts of men (see Batman, The) but a genuniely hilarious and interesting character. He's the one in the beginning playing mental chess while drinking milk. Not only does he do bad things, not only does he eventually propose a deal worthy of the Devil, but he's smart too. Smart villains are almost always much more interesting foils, it's better to have to keep up with them than to have them try to keep up with us. (see Joker, The). I have never seen Christoph Waltz before, but after his performance as Col Hans Landa, I can't wait to see him again. Of all of his great moments, I think my favorite is when he asks what happened to the actresses's leg. When he gets his answer, he does what you would probably do. You'll see.

Some of the reviews I have read of this film (although the vast majority have been positive) are wise old men shaking their heads, wondering when Tarantino will grow up. Such a shame that he refuses to chose to trivialize important matters! Such a tragedy he cannot pick a constant genre or tone! How offensive that he refuses to stick to what actually happened instead of what could have!

History exists is in books and memories, and deserves at least one honest movie that gets it right. But here's the thing: WWII and all that happened therein has gotten that movie, time and time and time and time again. We know Nazis are evil. We know that the unthinkable happened, and could easily happen again, and maybe even is. We know that people deny the unthinkable with alarming ferocity, trying to rewrite history to suit their agendas. But this movie is not akin to "holocaust denial" (for this and more grouchy thoughts from a smart man that I cannot agree with, go to http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=16606 )

I say that while you can take on evil with a serious, straight portrayal, another way one way to take down monsters of history is to invent creatures of fiction who are or were powerful enough to take them down. (see America, Captain) I say that history would have been better with Shoshanna and Aldo Raine in existance, and on our side. I say that while Hans Landa is fictional, there were enough real life counterparts to mimic him that our need for heroes is greater than ever. I say that while Kill Bill was fun, Tarantino's choice to focus his fictional revenge on a real monster makes for one of the more powerful and energizing movies in a long time.

Life is too strange to tell every story about a dark time in the same solemn tone. Maybe it's a generational thing. I dunno. But I know that INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is a damn good movie.

RATING: * * * * * stars (out of 5)

P.S. There is one scene in this movie that does not work at all: not as exposition or parody. It features Mike Myers. It's not that he's bad, necessarily, it's that suddenly Dr. Evil is giving a briefing in a british accent. Odd.

RICHARD III: REVIEW

2009-09-01T18:53:00.000-07:00

It's not supposed to be like this.

I, who, when not being a huge nerd, am a drama snob; should be telling you to go out and Netflix this gem of a forgotten film RIGHT NOW. That's at least what my memory was telling me would happen when I Netflixed Ian McKellan's RICHARD III. After all, I studied it in my Shakespeare on Film class, and had fond memories. I love Ian McKellan. I love Richard III, the play. I love the idea of re-setting in a post WWII quasi-facist Britan. I love Jim Broadbent. I love Robert Downey, Jr. I'm neutral-postive on Annette Benning. And a tank going through a wall is, believe it or not, a great way to start an adaptation of the play.

This is the part where I tell you to run out and Netflix it. This is that not actually happening, because aside from Sir Ian himself, this movie is a glorious concept poorly filmed, unevenly acted and questionably cut.

Oh, it all starts well enough. A tank goes through a wall, a crippled man in a gas mask shoots helpless prisoners and rips of his mask it's- gasp- Ian McKellan! We then saunter into a grand party for the new king, which handily introduces all the characters while showing Richard III to be part of the world but outside it. Then he starts the famous opening monologue- the one about a winter of being pissed off- and the movie pulls off a small masterstroke, by having him deliver the first half as a laudatory speech and the second half to the audience in a urinal. Nice.

This set-up proves to be a tough act to follow, as after the party the pace slows and one gets distracted from the action. I found myself on facebook instead of in the movie. This is strange, as the play begins to pile up the bodies almost immediately, which is a useful dramatic tool. But save for the murder of George (and even that suffers from cuts), most of what we get is a series of unfortunate events to people we don't care much about, and Richard III grinning all the way.

Sir Ian pulls his weight: he sneers, he lords over his underlings, he delivers asides to the camera and seems to be having the time of his life. The rest of the cast looks adrift. Annette Benning has convinced me of many things over the years, but she could not convince me here that she knew the meaning of her lines. Robert Downey Jr. is in the movie too briefly to make much of an impression (of all the parts they could have given him, they give him Rivers? Really?) Jim Broadbent hits very broad notes as Buckingham, and while Lady Anne is a difficult role, and Kristen Scott Thomas is more than up to the task of handling the language, the movie torpedoes her with some strange choices. After playing the "Seduction over the corpse" scene fairly straight, they decided to have her show up at a fancy dinner, smiling at Richard III's jokes and smirking at his foes. It's a compete 180 that's not followed up on later, and complicates her character for no reason. She also is a drug addict in this version.

Maybe the problem was me. I know many of these scenes well, and while I am no prude when it comes to trimming Shakespeare, what we're left with is a lot of flavorless murders. The strange request by Richard for strawberries before he kills Hastings? Gone. The pleading from George that almost changes the murderer's minds? Gone. The moment where Buckingham observes that it's all Saint's Day, before he is murdered? Gone. And perhaps most crucially, Queen Margaret's cackling rant that warns them all of the impending doom? Gone. This last one is the greatest sin, because they went to the trouble to cast the impossibly great Maggie Smith, and then forgot to give her anything to do.

But I suspect most of the problem lies with the director, Richard Loncraine, who may know how to direct Ian McKellen but has proven himself incapble of delivering a movie. (His post RICHARD III adventures include WIMBELDON and FIREWALL.) You get the a strong sense of what he tried to do, without actually getting the end result. This Britan does not feel real, it feels desgined and filmed. The actors in stylish costumes reciting Shakespeare look like actors in stylish costumes reciting Shakespeare; which is fine unless you want people to actually understand and give a damn about what's going on. Richard III is not a meek play or character, if ever there was an excuse to grab the camera and throttle it, it's this material. And yet it feels almost stately, like the Kenneth Braugnah Shakespeare comedies, but without the fun.

The last scenes involve a helter-skelter civil war between Richard and Richmond. It is a troubling sign that one cannot follow the action, or care much about the result. It is a worse sign when you compare the battle to the infinitely better and smaller documentary Looking for Richard, which cross cut Al Pacino as Richard fighting 3 extras with Al Pacino's producer bitching about production costs; and choose the documentary. That's right- for all of this movie's explosions, a documentary about the filming of a play had a more exciting conclusion.

The movie's design and costumes are fantastic. There are six or seven good moments/well delivered lines. If you watch the trailer, you can see all of these moments, and the costumes. Lord knows that's how they got me into the theater in high school, and got me excited for class in college. Hell, I watched the trailer before I rewatched the movie, to get excited again. But the trailer's the best part of the movie, if only because it conjurers up a promise that the movie never delivers.

In short, if you want to watch Ian McKellen gallivant about, by all means. Otherwise, this is a movie for no one. Purists will hate the changes and the performances, casual viewers will be bored and the material remains obtuse and hard to engage for the "oh god, not shakespeare" crowd. It may be small news to tell you that I Netflixed a movie not worth watching (I could tell you the same of INKHEART) but to tell you the same news about what I thought was a great Shakespeare adaptation is, as the bard would say, a bummer.

RATING: * * Stars (Out of 5)

P.S. I never thought I would say this about any role Jim Broadbent has played, but after seeing his interpretation of Buckingham up against Kevin Spacey in LOOKING FOR RICHARD, I prefer the non Jim Broadbent version.

P.P.S. Of all the additions they made to the script, the worst is Stanley's nightmare where he imagines Richard's face being replaced with that of a wild hog. However, it's interesting that of all the fantasy/sci fi/comic book movies Ian McKellan has been in, it's the shakespeare movie that has him wearing a latex face with gross fangs.

Doesn't that picture look awesome? Doesn't make you want to see this movie? Well, don't.

3000 MILES TO GRACELAND: REVIEW

2009-08-23T18:22:00.000-07:00

F L A S H B A C K R E V I E W

Sometimes, we are forced to do unpleasant things in life. Unclogging a toilet, for example. Holding someone's head when they've had too much to drink. Recovering the "black box" from a crashed 747 while the wreckage is still on fire.

Seeing a Kevin Costner movie.

Although he may have been a huge star once, his recent string of movies (13 Days aside) have become progressively more painful to watch: Waterworld. The Postman. Message in a Bottle. For Love of the Game.

But there is nothing than can possibly prepare you for 3000 Miles to Graceland. No warning, no remark, no description can do this movie justice. It's hard to think of a recent movie that was so unbalanced in tone, so ineptly made, so tasteless, or so horribly acted.

This is not an exaggeration. We're talking below Get Carter.

Consider this: if one were to make a movie about Elvis impersonators robbing a casino in Las Vegas, what would be a good opening sequence? Shots of Elvis dancing and singing? Shots of Las Vegas with appropriate music? Fast cars driving in the desert? The gang getting their gear ready? Nope. If you're making 3000 Miles to Graceland, you show a badly animated clip of two computerized scorpions fighting to death while techno music blares in the background.

Consider again: if the plot of this movie consists of the criminals robbing a casino, wouldn't it make sense to include a scene explaining the scheme and how everyone got there? No such luck, as all of the Las Vegas heist takes place - with a minimum amount of dialogue - during the first 20 minutes. Then the real "fun" begins. Costner's character kills everyone except Kurt Russell and the film goes from absurd Las Vegas action movie to absurd Idaho chase movie. Add in a cute kid, Courtney Cox as a love interest, and the revelation that - brace yourself here - Kevin Costner is actually Elvis's love child, and you've got a movie!

We're talking worse than Battlefield Earth.

Possibly the worst part of this movie is its completely inconsistent tone. Never mind that the plot simply doesn't makes sense; this movie can't even decide what it's trying to be. When the heist at the casino goes wrong, the movie suddenly becomes The Matrix, with techno, guns blazing in slow motion, and bodies piling up everywhere. Then, when one of the gang is killed, the music suddenly turns into something out of Miami Vice and the cast members scream and moan as if a great wrong has been done. Seconds later, the body is thrown out of a helicopter, Con Air style.

This rapid change in tone makes the violent scenes more disturbing and the "emotional" scenes even sillier. Characters very close and unified in one scene shoot each other in the next. Cox's character is a sex object in one scene, a "hooker with a heart of gold" in the next, then a backstabber, then a hostage, all only to become a protective mother at the end.

Costner's character is the worst of all. Sometimes in control, sometimes demented, sometimes a ruthless killer, sometimes having a sense of honor - but always awful - he never finds a consistent tone or accent. He may have had some good roles once, but 3000 Miles to Graceland only goes to show that those days are over.

RATING: Zero Stars (out of 5)

P.S. This is the first Tufts Daily review that got me known as "that guy who wrote that 3000 Miles to Graceland review!" Also, in case you thought I was making up the scorpions

Scorpion MADNESS

DISTRICT 9: REVIEW

2009-08-20T20:17:00.000-07:00

Some movies come too soon or too late for their time. Others capture the moment. DISTRICT 9 is the latter.

Oh, it ain't perfect. It's two movies joined together- the first being a super intense mockumentary about the potential for awfulness in human beings; the second being a rock'em-sock'em alien blast-zone. Some will find the first too serious or dark; others will find the second half a let down compared to the issues raised in the first half. Some came for the social commentary; others for the blood spurt. And some will be mad that the movie isn't one or the other.

But this is the Summer of 2009. This is playing field where G.I. JOE, as over the top and houndingly bad as it is, plays as relief up against the bloated axis of celluloid evil known as WOLVERINE, TERMINATOR and TRANSFORMERS. Even for summer pulp, we want a hot burger, and instead we're getting cold leftovers spiced up with pop rocks (STAR TREK aside). Even Jaws had some interesting facts about sharks before they ate your face off. Where are the Iron Men of yesteryear?

This is all a long way of saying that DISTRICT 9 would be good in any year, but this year it's not only good, it's necessary. It's based on no one's TV show, comic book, toy or James Cameron. Not that any of that is fatal, it's just we haven't seen any big budget spectacle free of these qualities. And by big budget, I mean it cost 30 million dollars (!), which is roughly 1/5 the cost of WOLVERINE. To say it is better than WOLVERINE is an insult to the word 'better.'

Set in more or less the modern day, only with a 20 year rewrite of history, DISTRICT 9 has aliens land in South Africa in the 80's. Their ship is out of gas, and they're not welcome but there's no place for them to go, so they set up a refugee camp that's never got quite past the temporary stage. The Aliens are not cute or cuddly. They eat catfood like we eat McDonalds. They have hugely destructive weapons, which only they can use, but they don't have access to. They're called Prawns in the same tone and measure that people used to say "mick." Things go from awkward to dismal. The movie begins with the latest bright idea from the humans, which is to move them from District 9- the slum they currently inhabit- to District 10- a slum far away from the city. Out of sight, out of rage.

Wikus Van De Merwe (played by the unknown, fantastic Shartlo Copley) is the poor bastard they pick to lead the operation, who is narrating to an unknown camera crew, The Office style, about his job. He is a kind of chipper, low level manager type, capable of the most awful racism (well, alien-racism) (xenophobia?) (whatever) that is all the more shocking because it is so casual. I mean, he seems nice. Right up until he lights an alien nursary on fire, and cheerfully tells us that the popping sound we're hearing is eggs exploding.

Now hold on- these aliens are here to take our jobs/lives/plant eggs in our stomachs! Nope; this movie is smarter than that. The nursery looks gross, but it's only using electricity and a dead cow to propogate their young. No humans need die. They can eat us, but they'd rather not. They're basically peaceful. And when you're watching this little civil servant report the frying of an intelligent species with a smile, that's when that little voice in the back of your head starts chirping This Is WRONG...

This goes on for about an hour, as Wikus has something not-very-nice happen to him and is force to adapt. He makes a friend, an alien named "Christopher", for all the aliens have been given Christian names (in a deft move that uncomfortably reminded me of what America did to its natives). Slowly, both the audience and Wikus get to take a long, hard look in the mirror and realize that we have met the enemy, and it is us. As a poor budding law student, the over-reliance on getting people (aliens) to sign forms they do not understand to provide cover for unspeakable things really hit home.

All nice and legal, see?

The movie could have played it easy, by making the aliens cute or the 'bad guys' over the top general jerks. But man, are those aliens creepy. They're cousins of the Ridely Scott mold, right up until you meet an alien toddler who is chirping about going home. And most of the human antagonists are played straight, as cold but focused professionals. Not the boogeyman of Dick Cheney, but the cool focus of a Kissenger or Rumsfeld, up against superior alien technology. Only two characters ever cackle evilly, and they play as people, not types.

And then, after taking a long hard look at humanity, Wikus and Christopher get some guns and blow the hell out of everything.

I have seen many movies where someone blows the hell out of everything this summer. But not like this. The action is clear, real, viseral, fantastic and horrible. It's BLACK HAWK DOWN re-channeled through James Cameron's ALIENS. That it takes place in the heat of midday only adds to how much it hurts. Wikus makes for an oddly human protganist, a man who had nothing of a hero but plenty of a bastard in him, forced to do what it takes to survive, in ways he could not imagine. It's easy to give us a Gerald Butler and say, look, he was bad but now he is good, because he has muscles and a noble look. It is much harder to give us a wormy white collar casual racist and watch him, foothold by bloody foothold, become a better being.

Lost in much of this bloodsport are the ideas that the first half generates. There is a divide in thinking here: did the movie lose its nerve, or is the badda-boom the release we needed after so much general nastiness and hard questions? Or is this a lot of words to waste on a movie about giant lobsters who landed in South Africa?

Whether or not the decision to switch from docu-thriller to action-jackson was the correct one, there are other flaws. The movie drops and picks up the mockumentary when convenient to itself. It leaves a lot of unanswered questions and possible plot holes. It raises issues about genocide and apartheid that are more or less answered with human beings exploding. It will piss off alot of people, or make them lose their lunch. Personally, I found the use of Christopher's son to be overly manipulative. This will not be everyone's cup of tea. If you can't stand sci-fi gore, I cannot stress this enough, DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE.

But for 30 million dollars, first time (!) full length director Neil Blomkamp has done better than any of the other big guns this summer. Star Trek was the prettiest and shiniest re-boot, and has breathed new life into a defunct series. G.I. JOE amused me. HANGOVER amused me much more. UP moved me. But only DISTRICT 9 made me think while kicking my ass.

It's not what this movie is; its what will be possible because of it's success. If studios can get this kind of return on a rather small investment ($51 million domestic, pre-DVD and international, and counting) who knows what other bright filmmakers will be given the keys and the freedom to make something this good.

Should it have done more? Maybe. Should have been smarter or less gory? Arguable. Is it "better" than CHILDREN OF MEN? Probably not, but who cares? District 9 proves you don't need stars, a lot of money, or a popular toy line from the 80's to make excellent SciFi AND enthralling summer movie bubblegum. That is enough.

RATING: * * * * * (out of 5)

P.S. I am a film and sci fi nerd, and I plead guilty to possibly being a little overexcited. But I am a smart enough movie and sci-fi nerd to know whem I'm being pandered to. And believe me when I say I walked in with high expectations, and they were more than met.

P.P.S.: There is a phrase called a "boo" movie, where things jump out of the dark and go "Boo" and lots of people in the audience, including me, go "eek." Some people will not see a boo movie, even if they might like the subject matter otherwise. Wimps rejoice, DISTRICT 9 is not a "boo" movie. It's gross, and there is some real horror, but it's not from things grabbing you in the dark.

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE: REVIEW

2009-08-19T11:20:00.000-07:00

This is one of those movies where people either see it (reviews be damned) or you have no plans to see it (because damn those fans!). A review seems pointless. But I finally got around to seeing it, in IMAX no less. Keeping in mind I've only read book 1, but have seen all 6 movies, here is my report:

1. The Plot, or the lack of. Generally, when a movie is over two hours long and costs hundreds of million of dollars and features some of the finest actors of our time in character roles, it should have a plot. This hasn't stopped lots of big budget movies from going plotless (See Fallen, Transformers: Revenge of the ) But with the Harry Potter movies, plot usually hasn't been a problem. E.g.:

Harry Potter 1: We've got to find the Sorcerer's Stone!

Harry Potter 2: We've got to find the Chamber of Secrets!

Harry Potter 3: We've got to stop Gary Oldman from creeping me out!

And so on. There were other complications, but generally the theme was clear in each film. Even the fourth one, with its incoherent plotting, had a general structure of a tournament to keep it in line.

This time, the plot is roughly:

"We've got to get Jim Broadbent to confess to what happened in his modified memory dream while trying to make out with anybody except the people we actually like as much as possible!"

Huh? Wha? Exactly. When you're confused during a Michael Bay movie, that's perfectly normal. When you have no idea what's going on in a Harry Potter movie, you are in trouble. And often during this 153 minute slog, I was very, very confused. Often times, the movie seemed to be spinning its wheels; and when a major riddle was finally answered, it was anti-climactic at best. Speaking of...

2. The Climax, or lack of. For the love of God, if you know full well that a huge stretch of the book later turns out to be a pointless exercise (for the characters), DON'T SPEND A HUGE STRETCH OF MOVIE TIME ON IT. Harry and Dumbledore end up in a cave for reasons that are murky at best, and after what seems like forever, they finally get to an island of glass (or something) that results in Harry force-feeding Dumbledore cursed water (or something.) This goes on quite a bit, ending in a firestorm against little Gollum-type creatures. Then they get back, and after a poorly staged confrontation, it's revealed that everything that just happened was... not important at all. Even Harry Potter 4 had the decency to end with a wizard's duel; all we get here is some pithy comment about the scenery. Grr.

3. Ron Weasley. I'm sorry, I just no longer get the appeal of Ron Weasley. He's a crappy wizard, he's petulant and whiny, he's incredibly dense and his primary purpose seems to be either to get smacked around, say something dumb or to be an insensitive dick. He is always the first to do something stupid and the last to do something brave. Harry and Hermione have outgrown him; and it's no wonder that when Hermione gets all worked up over Ron kissing some other girl, I didn't believe it. Not because Emma Roberts is a bad actress, it's because the boy she's supposedly longing for is such a loser. The book version of Ron may play differently; but by movie six, it's pretty clear that the future holds many, many boring nights ahead for unhappily married Movie Ron and Hermione.

What a dip.

4. Hogwarts 90210. Much too much of this movie is dedicated to wizards sleeping, or rather, making faint comments about possibly sleeping with each other, or who's dating who or who's putting a spell on who. This wouldn't bug me if it was a) funny b) honest or c) important to the plot. Any of the three would do. But these kids seem drained of their rebellious natures that they picked up in 5, and seem only concerned with romances out of Degrassi Jr. High. Romances that consist of no conversations, just googly eyes and slamming doors. Romances that feel fueled by artifice, not real pain or longing. Romances that go out the window for the last 30 minutes, and add very little to the story. Even poor Harry and Ginny are robbed of anything meaningful to say to one another, save for when they get a chance to destroy a cursed book together. Even then, all Harry gets is a kiss; and somehow that equates to a relationship. Not in my high school, it didn't.

5. The X3 Flashback. There is a key flashback where we see a trusted teacher talking to a troubled youth. If you replace "magic" with "mutant," it's pretty much, verbatim, the same conversation that Professor X had with Jean Grey in X3. It also carries the same small amount of weight. Maybe there's just a general problem with scenes showing pure evil at a young age, it is always disappointing. I respect enough people's judgment about J.K. Rowling's books to guess that she does not view magic in the same light as special genetic powers that make cool things happen. The writer Steve Knowles, although he penned the other scripts, seems to have forgotten that. Pity.

I run a special school for mut- wizards....

6. Alan Rickman. Alan Rickman can do anything. He can read from a phone book and make it interesting. He can be so good that you can watch him in Bottle Shock and almost forget that it's a bad movie. But he cannot defeat a screenplay that causes him to reverse everything we know about his character 10 minutes in, and offer no explanation. I am told the book also offers no explanation (at least not until Book 7), but it plays awkwardly. Not as awkwardly as when he exclaims "I am the half blood prince!", but it's still pretty awkward. Don't worry, I didn't spoil anything for you, it doesn't matter who the damn prince is. Grrrrrrr.

7. Luna Lovegood. She's wonderful. She's weird. She's lovely. She's the only kid who seems to operate on a frequency not attuned to the plot, but instead to her own peculiar beat. More of her, please.

She SEEEES YOOOOUUUUUU

8. Villainy, or lack of. This movie is missing some serious heavy lifting in the baddie department. We get no direct shots of Voldermort; and he is missed. We see Helena Bonam Carter being weird, but it's not interesting; we've seen it before. We've seen ominous shots of some younger actor playing Tom Riddle, it's old hat. And while we do get a new villain of sorts- Fenrir Grayback- he doesn't have any lines, and seems more like an afterthought than something to chew on. Only Draco Malfoy, of all people, gets something to do. This is one of the few improvements, although, again, it goes nowhere when he wusses out.

9. The Outside World. Early on, a big deal is made of Voldermort's minions destroying a London city bridge and causing havoc. This, as far as I can tell, has no impact on the story and serves only to supply the editors with some footage of stuff blowing up for the trailer. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

10. The General sense of Wonder. It's gone. Save for a too-brief scene in a magic shop (which occurred just after (!) the damn IMAX 3D stopped working) there is no longer any sense of the impossible, the wonderful, the new or the unreal. Same ol' train, same ol' hogwarts, same ol' general sense of Dumbledore not telling Harry the whole story because otherwise the movie would be over. Gone are the moving staircases, the wonderful talking pictures, lots of little magic happening on the sides. Replacing it is more cryptic brooding and bad sex jokes.

There's no excuse for this. Don't give me that they changed the book. So did 3 and 5. Don't give me that they left stuff out. So did all of the movies. Even 4 had the decent self-respect to pull the action together for some kind of crisis.

The major death in the movie lands with all the impact of a spitball. I've teared up or been devastated for the death (or apparent death) of many a fictional character: Spock, Gandulf, Optimus Prime (in the animated movie), Commissioner Gordon and that dog from I Am Legend. Even if you know it's coming, it's still sad. In Harry Potter 6, I should have wept at the movie's end. Instead, I was relieved, because it meant the movie would be over.

Here is a movie better acted, directed and written than Transformers, Wolverine, Terminator AND the recently-defended-by-me G.I. Joe. Yet it is perhaps the most disappointing. Harry Potter 5 was great, and the same exact people put this together. The book the movie was based on is loved (unlike Harry Potter 5). They had all the resources and some of the best actors out there. They had extra time to edit, because it got pushed back from November to July. They had an audience ready and waiting to be taken on a long journey. And what did they get?

2+ hours of nothing but Jim Broadbent's Crappy Secret and Young Wizards Snogging. Even IMAX can't save that. This is not only the least of the series, it's the final nail in the cinematic coffin that is Summer 2009.

RATING: * * (out of Five)

P.S. If I had to rank the top five mainstream (i.e. not counting 500 DAYS OF SUMMER, etc. ) movies this summer, the list would be 1. UP 2. STAR TREK 3. HANGOVER. There is no four and five, because while I liked G.I. JOE and admired parts of PUBLIC ENEMIES, I refuse to put them on a this list simply because of a default.

P.P.S. There used to be only one movie I had seen that IMAX couldn't improve, namely, the awful POSEIDON. Now there are two. It doesn't help that it only lasts for 20 damn minutes. HULK. SMASH.

G.I. JOE: RISE OF COBRA

2009-08-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

G.I. JOE, THE RISE OF COBRA is absolutely perfect--without being actually any good.

Let me explain. You remember G.I. JOE. That was the show where the villains, Cobra, were always trying to take over the world in some spectacularly dumb-ass way, and G.I. JOE was there to stop them, eventually. It was a great formula. No matter how inexplicable Cobra's plot was (one involved a series of fast food restaurants- seriously: http://www.allmovie.com/work/gi-joe-red-rockets-glare-239483 ) it would reliably take the Joes about 15 minutes to figure it out, and 7 minutes to blow it up. GO JOE!

The show has never- and will never- be parodied better than in Homestarunner.com's the CHEAT COMMANDOS, featuring the immortal line, "It looks like Blue Laser's going to take advantage of Price Style's already low, low prices on paper towels and grout cleaner and use all the savings to make a button that will make it snow at the beach!" But I digress.

The point is, the original show was pretty stupid, yet fun. Pretty cool-looking and very thick heroes and villains battling it out with weapons that don't exist (...yet!) And the movie delivers just that- man, that ninja is cool, but whoops! G.I. Joe was completely unable to stop Cobra from blowing up the Eiffel tower! At least they managed to blow up half of Paris in their failed attempt. If you're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to blow up a fake version of a city, it might as well be Paris. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen blew up Venice, see where it got them.

The Joe's are led by Generic Action Hero Duke (Channing Tatum) and Hawk (Dennis Quaid.) You remember Dennis Quaid. He's pretty much right where you left him. Ray Park is Snake Eyes, who doesn't say much, and when you're a ninja clad in black, you don't have to. The President (Jonathan Pryce) hangs around and notes that it's perfectly understandable that the French are "upset" that the Eiffel Tower is, c'est catastrophe, no more. That green-skinned girl from Star Trek is back (Rachel Nichols), with the same red hair but less green skin as Scarlett. We don't know much about her, other than she's attractive and speaks Celtic. That's enough in this movie to out-pace Marlon Wayans, who is on hand to be the token black guy. Can we retire this stereotype already? I know it's played by one of the CREATORS of White Chicks, but that doesn't make it okay.

The villains are much better. The two main baddies, Destro (Christopher Eccleston) and Cobra Commander (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are locked in an over-acting contest that can only end in gales and gales of laughter. Cobra Commander wins, if only because he gets to breathe into a death mask for most of the movie. ("You.... will call me... COMMANDER... ") Storm Shadow is the white ninja, and the raging yang to Snake Eyes's sober yin. To say they fight to the death is no spoiler, for ninjas were put on this earth to do battle for man's amusement.

There can be only NONE.

And let's not forget the Baroness (Sienna Miller), whose primary purpose is to show cleavage and smirk. If she looks fake here, well, she looked and sounded pretty fake in the show. So if nothing else, her performance is authentic and she blows a lot of stuff... er, up.

This is all pretty silly stuff, but oddly, it rarely stops being entertaining. Only when various actors try to act (Tatum, Miller, Wayans; natch) do we get into trouble. No one cares that Scarlett's father taught her to never lose. No one cares that Destro's family was a scottish clan of weapon traders. We DO care about a giant underwater base that must be infiltrated by ninjas, surrounded by robotic fish and armed with a self-destruct mechanism that somehow causes ice to sink. Ice doesn't sink, but of course, that kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun isn't a super villain, so you takes your chances with reality when you enter a Stephen Sommers movie. This is the man who gave us The Mummy; he also, unfortunately gave us the The Mummy Returns. I'd say he's returned to form, but I'm not sure it's a compliment.

Great art this obviously isn't. Great trash it ain't either. But after Wolverine, Terminator and Transformers, it was nice to walk out laughing instead of shaking with rage or indifference. I thoroughly enjoyed how over-the-top and dumb this movie was, if only because the joke wasn't on me.

Is it idiotic? Yes. Worst script of the summer? Possibly. Laughably bad acting? Oh my. But key word here- LAUGHABLY bad. Laughing. As in, having a good time.

You want a good dumb movie? You've got your ticket. You want to see a sci-fi movie that matters? DISTRICT 9 just opened and I see it on Wed. Talk at you then.

RATING: * * * (out of 5)

P.S. 3 stars? Really? File this review under the Kombat, Mortal category: it does what it proposes to do, nothing more or less, and it is absolutely as advertised. If, under no circumstances, you could ever see yourself enjoying a movie called or about G.I. JOE, go ahead and downgrade the rating to one star.

P.P.S. Seriously. Cheat Commandos. Awesome.

I JUST HATE YOU SO MUCH!

TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN: REVIEW

2009-06-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

"How dare you come into this office and bark at me some kind of junk yard dog?! I AM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!" - Clear and Present Danger

That's pretty much what most critics (or at least 79% of them) have screamed at TRANSFORMERS 2: STUFF BLOWS UP. Really, they're screaming at Michael Bay. Why? Because no matter what they say, no matter what they do, they cannot destroy this man.

Fact: Every Michael Bay movie except the first BAD BOYS and THE ISLAND has made over 130 million dollars, domestically. And BAD BOYS made 75 million overseas. So really, the man has had one flop, THE ISLAND.

Fact: Pretty much every movie he has made except THE ROCK has been critically roasted.

Fact: When it comes to Michael Bay movies, no one gives a shit about the reviews.

Fact: Critics hate feeling powerless.

Oh, don't get me wrong. Critics have power over a lot of movies. Well reviewed broad mainstream movies rarely flop. And when broad mainstream movies with well known older actors get tepid notices, (see: TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3) they don't do as well. The good reviews for DARK KNIGHT brought in a huge audience that wouldn't have showed up otherwise. The reviews for CATWOMAN helped bury it.

But Michael Bay blows stuff up, teenagers pay attention. They get what they are promised (explosions), they leave happy. And except for THE ROCK (which I love), critics kept stabbing with their knives. And his movies made millions. So it went for years, until he decided to combine his explosion prowess with robots that turn into cars. You know, for kids!

Now, he is literally unstoppable. Kids and explosion addicts don't care about reviews, they care about the big badda boom. And the critics hate him, hate him, hate him (HATE HIM) for it. And they hate him more because he obviously does not give a rat's ass. He doesn't whine about being a misunderstood artist, he smiles and counts his millions. Any studio would want to work with him. Why not? They always get rich, as long as the movie can be explained in a tag line.

Lost in all this back and forth Bay-bashing is the movie itself, which is not very good. But given how much rancor was being directed towards it, you would think it was the second coming of BATTLEFIELD EARTH. Don't be fooled: it isn't. It is plot-less, it is overlong, it is repetitive and it is a bad Transformers story. But, if I had my druthers between watching WOLVERINE or TERMINATOR 4 or TRANSFORMERS 2 again, I'd choose the third, if I had to choose.

Why?

It's more fun. WOLVERINE and TERMINATOR were hampered by a sense that Very Important Things were going on the entire movie. Nothing very important goes on in Transformers, even though the fate of the world depends on Shia LeBouf's brain. It has never heard the words "over the top." First Michael Bay throws in the Kitchen Sink. Then he blows it up. So much stuff blows up in this movie, and some of it looks really cool. And the movie can still get mileage out of the Transformers Brand. Cars turning into robots turning into cars is cool, Optimus Prime is still cool, damn it all. And the performers mostly keep their shit together for most of the movie, which cannot be said for anyone in WOLVERINE or TERMINATOR.

But is it a good movie? Oh, lord no.

About the plot... there isn't one. TRANSFORMERS 1 had a (in retrospect) beautifully simple plot. Find the cube to save the world. Once they found the cube, keep it away from Megatron. It may not have been brilliant, but it was clear. TRANSFORMERS 2 has the equivalent of three or four different "things to find", in addition to plot threads about loyalty, faith, growing up, and Barack Obama is a Weenie. (There are many snide comments about the President negotiating with Decepticon terrorists) These threads are picked up and abandoned at random. The "things to find" are found often, then lost, with little to no effect. More than four times during the 2.5 hours, I had no idea what was going on.

And the additions to the cast of robots are NEVER PROPERLY INTRODUCED. The best sequence of the first movie was the introduction of the Autobots, where they first land, take their shape and say their names. It was almost magical. Here, we get a whole list of new characters without names or personality traits, who exist to be destroyed. We get no sense of any personality for most of the new good guys, except for the "twins", who are the best slice of racist pie since Jar Jar Binks. Seriously: one of them has a golden tooth, they make many jokes about popping caps in people's asses, and they don't do much readin'. As for the new bad guys, they barely say anything at all, except for poor Soundwave, who gets to sit in space and be the equivlanet of the Decepticon 'can you hear me now' guy. When a poorly animated cartoon designed to sell more toys has more personality than a 200 million dollar, 2.5 hour monstrosity, you are in serious ca-ca. Also, when a robot named "Wheelie" is only the third most annoying character in your movie, you are also in... well, you know. A stinky 2.5 hours.

About the 2.5 hours... Seriously? Michael Bay looked at the running time on the first movie and said, "what this needs is more"? I guess it would make sense if that running time was used to tell an epic tale, but this movie basically has two modes: uneven 'comic relief', and explosions. There is no reason to have there be more, except that Michael Bay demands it. The last 45 minutes involves an action scene in the desert. Some of it is utterly incomprehensible. What Tony Winner Julie White is doing in the desert running from explosions, I do not know.

But the bad stuff you knew. You knew it when you opened the first reviews. The question is (or was for me), but is it any fun? Kind of. Is it bad? Not as bad as you'd think. Is there any reason to see it? Not really. Even if you're a huge fan of the show? Not really. If you want to see a good TRANSFORMERS movie, rent the first one- it's better in almost every way. Or the actual TRANSFORMERS movie, the animated one, which WAS better in EVERY single way.

I saw this movie for 5 dollars at a 1pm matinee at a crappy rundown theater. That's about right.

RATING: 2 stars (out of 5).

P.S.: A moment of silence, please, for Jerry Bruckhemier, Michael Bay's old partner in crime. Based on the first few days, TRANSFORMERS 2 will be the biggest movie of the summer. Jerry Bruckhemier's big summer movie this year is a movie about secret agent guinea pigs. Michael Bay wins.

P.P.S.: The Fallen is a lame, aztek-looking evil robot who is much less impressive than Megatron. Unicron, you are missed.

I WISH I HAD MORE TO DO IN THIS MOVIE, MEGATRON.

New Final Thoughts: I stand by the original review, but this movie has gotten worse in my mind. That G.I. JOE is more fun is kind of the best egg you could throw at Michael Bay.

VGMRP: MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNHILIATION

2009-06-20T22:42:00.000-07:00

Some of the dialogue near the beginning of ANNHILATION:

Kitana: Mother? You're alive?!

Kitana's Mother: Too bad YOU.... will DIE!

You have to see this movie to believe it. On the other hand, that is too high a price. I realize that part of my praise for the first movie was "lots of kung fu, set to techno." I now must eat my words. This movie doesn't even pretend to make sense.

Characters appear without introduction, are quickly killed and never mentioned again. Performances are all over the map, but are uniformly bad. Major parts from the first movie are recast with the cheaper, non-union versions. Johnny Cage is killed off in the first 5 minutes, X3 Cyclops style. Villains who were killed in the last movie (Sub Zero, Reptile, Scorpion) appear again without explanation. Actually, full disclosure: They did explain one re-appearence.

Liu Kang: I killed you in the tournament.

Sub Zero: You killed my elder brother.

So forget coherency. Put it out of your heads. They weren't bothering, so why should I? But even once you've abandoned plot, character development, logic, emotional investment, coherent production design and all other meager pleasures of competent filmmaking, you're still left with one of the worst films ever made. Just look at this:

Nothing in the world can prepare you for the ineptness of the special effects. They are epically bad. They don't even meet the Wing Commander "Good Enough For a Video Game" standard. This is all the more astounding because the effects in Mortal Kombat were, overall, quite good. You were more or less convinced that what was happening on screen was actually happening. With Annhilation, all you're convinced of is that someone should have been fired.

Random bad guys fall from the sky like poorly-animated fireballs from a disaster movie. (Jaxx observes, "They don't even wear parachutes!") Lu Kang morphs into a dragon that even the makers of GODZILLA would be ashamed to put on screen. There is much talk of two worlds "merging", yet all we see are shoddily rendered landmarks with cartoony skeletons laying about. A killer robot shows up, and we can clearly see the stunt double's face behind the mask. And then there's this guy:

Just because you CAN use computers to make things appear onscreen, doesn't mean you SHOULD.

Special effects should either be hidden in plain sight, or transport you to a world of fantasy where you want to believe in the impossible. Or they should kick your ass and blow your mind. Or make you laugh at the sheer audacity of them. I'm not picky. But for all of the effort in ANNHILATION, they come up with less than even the makers of SUPER MARIO BROTHERS. Every effect takes you out of the movie, because you're not focusing on what just happened, you're wondering how they did it. And not in a good way. More in the, "how did they think this would work? Or that it was ready? Or that it was good?"

But even with good effects, the movie is wimpy fight scene after crappy fight scene, partnered with some of the crappiest after school special dialogue about teamwork ever written.
("We have to support each other... like a family!" says Raiden. "faith in yourself is all you need!") There is an idea where a movie can become much of muchness- like Transformers, and probably Transformers 2- but that requires a much to have much of. ANNHILATION can't even get that right. Liu Kang just beat up a robot named Smoke? If I haven't played the game, who the hell cares? Sure, the first movie didn't bother with backstory on Scorpion, but at least there was some build-up and tension before the fight. Here, we just get an announcement of who was just killed, sometimes not at all.

I saw this movie 2 years after the first one, I hated it then, and I hate it more now. They messed it up, big time. Sure, you can laugh at it. But at some point the movie crosses the line of camp and transforms into 96 minutes of LARP-Gone-Wild. (If you don't know what LARP is, you're probably happier for it.) After awhile the mockery becomes cruelty, and then self-inflicted pain.

Probably the best way to end is with this:

Rain: Two of earth's best warriors have already been taken. Kabal and Stryker.

Shao Kahn: Tell me, did you make them beg for the lives before you destroyed them?

Rain: But, Master, I thought if I let them live...

Shao Kahn: (slams down a giant hammer) I have no use for excuses! Rain, this will never happen again.

Rain: It will never happen agaARRGGHHHHH

(Rain gets thrown into pit of fire by Kahn)

We never found out who Rain was. And now, we never will. Just as well.

STAR RATING: Zero Stars (out of 5)

P.S.: Just watch this title screen for 90 minutes. It's better than watching the movie.

VGMRP: ALONE IN THE DARK

2009-06-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

Some say Uwe Boll is the new Ed Wood, Jr. I say... Yes!

Top Ten Moments from Alone In The Dark:

10) The Cabbie Assassin
Minutes into the movie, the lead bad guy picks up his phone and barks "Kill him!" We find out shortly that he is speaking to a bald assassin, who awaits Carnby (Christian Slater)'s arrival at the airport... in a yellow cab. Yes. The deadly killer awaits in a yellow cab, so he can be easily spotted while trying to kill Christian Slater with his death-cab. A crappy car chase ensues, and the incredulity increases when the evil taxi rams Carnby's taxi and the fender is dented, but seconds later when they turn a corner, the taxi is undamaged. After the inept car chase, Christan Slater throws the Cabbie Assassin through a window. Not to be outdone, Cabbie Assasin bursts through a door, Hulk-style, and punches an old man on general principle. Logic: 0, Ridiculously awful awesome fight scene: 1

9) Christian Slater is... Edward Carnby!
Ah, sweet, career destroyed Christian Slater. First, he tells a small child on a plane to basically go to hell, and then says in a narration "I bet you think I was an asshole to that kid back there!" Then he gets to say "I was tracking poachers across their lines in the Amazon when I hooked up with some ex-Chilean military trafficking artifacts on the black market. " He also wears the same costume throughout the entire movie, a trenchcoat and a black tank top. I'd say he needs a shave, but what he really needs is some whiskey. Or maybe I do.

8) Continuity Be Damned
You have to be paying a little bit of attention to catch the cab smash up continuity error. That would be when Cabbie Assassin's cab smashes into Christian Slater's Cab, only to be repaired second later. But it's hard to miss the giant hole of credibility at the end. Picture this: we see fields of slaughtered good guys in the dead of night, a walkie-talkie blaring messages to nobody. We see Christian Slater and Tara Reid climbing up to safety while Stephen Doriff is sacrificing himself to kill the monsters. Cut back to the empty field at night. Cut to the bomb going off. Cut to Slater and Reid coming out of a hole just in time- in BROAD FREAKING DAYLIGHT. We go from midnight to noon in seconds, and all it took was Stephen Dorrif's corpse.

7) The Random Ice Factory
Because Uwe Boll saw THE MATRIX that one time, he decided to use bullet time to show when he gets shot. It's probably the most expensive shot in the movie. Carnby fires two bullets, and we track them in slow motion. Why two bullets? So the first bullet can smash a block of ice, and the second bullet can travel through the ice particles. Why the Ice? Because it looks cool, damn it. Don't mess with Uwe Boll.

7.5) The Bullets Dont Actually Kill The Cabbie Assassin
That's right! We use bullet time to see the bullets hit the guy and then it doesn't do anything! The evil cabbie assassin and ends up skewered on spikes.

6) Tara Reid Sucks
No one's very good in this movie- Stephen Doriff looks disgusted with the material, and Slater's barely sober throughout-but Tara Reid wins the prize for trying hard and achieving so little. She has many bad moments, but the worst is when she mispronounces "Newfoundland" as "New Found Land." Not since Denise Richards was Dr. Christmas Jones, nuclear physicist, has science been so mistreated.
She also gets to hug Christian Slater, only to slap him seconds later and scream "I thought you were dead, asshole!" I miss Taradise.

5) The Support Characters from the Ed Wood Playbook

One of the hallmarks of Ed Wood, Jr.'s crapsterpieces are the johnny-on-the-spot supporting characters, awkwardly framed and spouting out backstory to our heroes. Mr. Wood usually had cops saying, "Whats this crazy talk about ghouls coming back from the dead these past few weeks, Sergeant Davis, and congrats on that promotion!" Here, we get four different unimportant characters rushing up and giving us awkward exposition, often in one unbroken shot, while every one else stands around waiting for someone to yell cut. So we have Character C telling Character B in front of Character A, "Why, Character A? She's the best archeologists in these parts!" Keep in mind that Character A is Tara Reid, playing an archelologist. It's a small consolation that soon after Character C talks, he/she/Stephen Doriff is killed.

4) The Dune-Esque Text Crawl.

The movie begins with the following narration, that we also see on screen:

"In 1967, mine workers discovered the first remnants of a long lost Native American civilization - The Abkani. The Abkani believed that there are two worlds on this planet, a world of light and a world of darkness. 10,000 years ago the Abkani opened a gate between these worlds. Before they could close it, something evil slipped through. The Abkani mysteriously vanished from the Earth. Only a few artifacts remained, hidden in the world's most remote places. These artifacts speak of terrifying creatures that thrive in the darkness, waiting for the day when the gate can be opened again. Bureau 713, the government's paranormal research agency, was established to uncover the dark secrets of this lost civilization. Under the direction of archaeologist Lionel Hudgens, Bureau 713 began collecting Abkani artifacts. When the government shut down his controversial research, Hudgens built a laboratory hidden within an abandonded gold mine. There, he conducted savage experiments on orphaned children in an attempt to merge man with creature. Hudgens victims survived as "sleepers" - lost souls awaiting the moment of their calling. "

Yeah.

3) The 'Ambigious' Ending

So, after Steven Doriff's corpse blows up with so much dynamite that it turns night into day (see number 8 above), Uwe Boll decided to get all artsy and end on a downer note- the aliens/ghosts/monsters/whatever have overrun the earth! Or at least the canadian city they got permission to film in! But the awesomely awful thing is, Uwe Boll forgot that his monsters don't kill to eat, they just kill to kill. So there are no bodies. Anywhere. Now that might be explained by the subtitle that says, "8:48 am, city evacuated!" But it doesn't explain all the cars in the middle of the street, left empty, with no bodies around. I think what happened was this- they got permission to shoot the streets early in the morning, with no one around. When someone pointed out that it just looked like a quiet sunday, and not the apocalypse, someone said, "What the hell, let's put an empty truck in the middle of the shot." And Uwe Boll said "I love making movies!"

2) The Villain's Shitty Plan

So you've got this mad professor. And he infects these kids with some kind of evil spirit alien thing. So that he can control them and some undetermined time in the future. And Christian Slater wants to stop that. I'm with you. The problem is, they get 'activated' halfway through the movie, and become weird zombie-esque guys... who get mowed down with machine gun bullets. And killed. And that's the last we see of them. The last 35 minutes doesn't even mention them. Mad professor can appearently control the alien things. If this was the case... what was he doing wasting 25 years with the kids? So that they could get mowed down my semi-automatic rifles? Was his actual plan to just open the door to the evil world? So he could get mauled? If you hold your breath long enough, it starts to make sense.

1) The "Protect the Perimeter!" Guy.

His name is Agent Miles. Right before our three "stars" go to face the evil, in the dark but not so alone, he is told, nay, demanded to PROTECT THE PERIMETER. His jaw tightens. Yes, he will, he says to himself. After getting in a petty lover's quarrel with the guy working on the generator, he bravely tells the other extras wearing paintball armor (seriously: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0369226/trivia) to PROTECT THE PERIMETER. This involves having lots of automatic rifles trained in the direction of the computer generated creatures. He has computer generated helicopters at his disposal, but they are no match for the computer generated creatures who have learned to jump into them. He also has a wall of tires at his disposal, and tells his men to wait until they've cleared it. This is so they can set off explosions behind the tires, out of our sight, and we hear the monsters squealing without having to actually animate them. What makes this whole sequence so special is that instead of following our characters who are, you know, Alone In The Dark, Boll keeps cutting back to Protect the Perimeter guy losing lots of troops to vicious pixels, until he is the last one left. The Perimeter is not Protected, but it doesn't impact our heroes in any way. The whole sequence is completely, wonderfully pointless. I guess the strategy was, "we paid for the CG, we're going to USE the CG!"

Listen to me: ALONE IN THE DARK is a real piece of shit. But with a bottle of Jack Daniels, in the right light, she's a star. One star, to be exact. But a star nonetheless.

STAR RATING: * (out of Five)

P.S. ALONE IN THE DARK is based on a creepy but dated video game about a detective locked in a mansion, trying to solve his way out before monsters get him. The gameplay was clunky but the experience got a lot of mileage out of the eery silences, the complex puzzles and the inherent mystery. This movie has no silences, complexity or mystery. But it does have a Perimeter.

PROTECT THE PERIMETER!

VGMRP: WING COMMANDER REVIEW

2009-06-07T13:32:00.000-07:00

Jesus.

I recently wrote about Star Trek and Space Movies being fun again. When is space not fun? When you're watching Wing Commander, that's when. We're not just talking a bad Video Game Movie, we're talking about one of the worst space movies ever made. There's lots of crash, bang boom; but there's an equal amount of "ugh", "you're kidding me," and "who gives a shit?"

Directed with love and incompetence by game creator Chris Roberts, Wing Commander attempts to bring the C-level saga of the Wing Commander games to the big screen, with dispiriting results. Wing Commander, the game, was a rip-off of Star Trek plotting (the Klingons-as-Russians Cold War) with Star Wars combat (lots of little starfighters shooting at each other, lots of anonymous pilots screaming, "I can't shake themmmmm AAAARRGGHHH-!!!"). The play mechanics weren't bad but the story was derivative, and with each game more convoluted and pointless. That was okay, because hey, you got to blow things up and fly around like a fighter pilot. The only thing from a story perspective that was worth a damn was the performance of Mark Hamill, simply because when given a script of fine cheese, he knows how to be a ham.

I regret to inform you Mark Hamill is not the star of Wing Commander: The Movie. I further regret to report that there is no reason to watch this movie, not even to laugh at how bad it is. The effects are good for a video game but bad for a movie, which mean they look fake without being hilariously so (you feel like it's a late 90's CD-ROM game on the screen). The script is mediocre and thoughtless through and through, with lots of poor writing, but nothing that's memorably bad. Nothing reaches the insanity of Super Mario Brothers, the vamping of Raul Julia in Street Fighter, or the shocks-the-conscience bad taste of Postal. Maybe Mark Hamill would have made something hilarious out of it, but instead we of ham we get the black hole of screen presence of cinema known as Freddie Prinze, Jr. Behold:

Commander Babe: Disobey my director and I'll have you court marshalled.

Freddie Prinze Jr.: Like I care.

The end result is a grab-bag of leftover story concepts from better sci-fi projects and a production design that was purchsed from the Space Salvation Army, coupled with men in curious uniforms shouting "hard to port!" as their ships try to avoid space torpedoes. The torpedoes make lots of WHOOSHING sounds despite the fact that space is a vacuum where sound cannot travel. The suspense of disbelief re: sound in space is stretched to the breaking point during awful sequence when everyone is told to be quiet, because "a space destroyer is hunting us!" They all stare and listen to the pinging above, like they're in a submarine. Never mind that they could be having the party of the century and NO ONE WOULD HEAR THEM, because in space, no one can hear Matthew Lillard scream. And he screams a lot in this movie.

In other words, WING COMMANDER doesn't have the wit to be epically bad, only epically boring.

For extra credit, the movie also rips off its plot from U-571/Enigma by having the main point of the plot being a stolen 'navcom machine.' See, if the Kilarathi/Klingons/Empire get their hands on it, why, they could control space travel and therefore win the war? What war, you ask? Oh, they want to destroy us. Why? Because they hate our freedom. Or something, I don't know. When they finally find the 'navcom' on a Kilrathi ship, they're so excited that they found that they leave it on the ship, leading one to wonder why the hell it was so important. Maybe it's because they're in such a hurry to get off the alien ship due to the quality of the aliens themselves: when we finally see them, they look shitter than the vampires in I Am Legend. Should they win the war, the universe will be populated with nothing but ugly, ugly children.

Anyway.There are two hard-won truths here:

1) unless your explorers/adventurers/rebe

ls/Wing Commanders/space plumbers touch down somewhere, on some planet, space movies become little more than actors on cheap sets looking at green-screens with varying levels of concern. Even Shatner had to land the ship every once in awhile.

2) Some video games shouldn't be adapted because they're plotless shoot'emups (Postal, Doom); others shouldn't be adapted because the material is both too ambitious and too thin at the same time. Wing Commander falls into the second category, where a credit prologue sequence tries to tell some 300 years of interstellar history, and at least a third of the dialogue is spent discussing the history and racist attitudes towards Pilgrims. But wait, aren't we hunting the Kilrathi? What is a Pilgrim anyway? What do they worship, exactly? Why am I watching this movie?

In short, Chris Robert's science fiction fantasies may have been enough to get you to the next level, but they're not enough for a major motion picture. It's the same lesson we learned yet again in Terminator Salvation: if you don't care about the characters, you don't care about if they get blown up by shitty antagonists.

There is not a single thing I can say for it in its favor; nothing that is good, fun, done well or even memorably bad. No clips to YouTube. No overacting to savor.

I saw this movie 10 years ago, and was pissed. Some 10 years later, I'm happy I only watched this crap via 10 youtube clips instead of renting it, but I would have been happier if I hadn't watched it at all. Hell, I would have been happier watching POSTAL again. At least that movie has monkeys. They were monkeys that were sexually assaulting Verne Troyer, but they were still monkeys, damn it.

STAR RATING: Zero Stars (out of 5)

P.S. Fox had such a low opinion of their own movie that they attached the first Star Wars: Phantom Menace trailer on it to get people to show up. They showed up, paid to watch the trailer and left. I remember a printed sign at the Box Office that said, "no refunds will be given for Wing Commander after the Star Wars trailer is shown." Happier days, before we knew what legacy Phantom Menace would bring.

P.P.S. Like Top Gun, all the pilots are hotshots who spend a lot of time taking off their breathing masks so that they can dramatically, slowly put them back on again. Why they need an extra breathing hose when they're in deep space, I do not know. Why the camera for all the cockpit scenes is zoomed in so close on the actors so you can't see what's outside their window I can guess: so they they wouldn't have to film the extra greenscreen.

Like I care!

VGMRP: POSTAL REVIEW

2009-05-29T13:21:00.000-07:00

A third of the way through POSTAL, only the second Uwe Boll movie I have seen, the director appears as himself, in a little german beer hat. "You know, there's a lot of rumors going around that my movies are financed with Nazi gold," he says, drinking a liter of beer, "And what should I say? You know, it's true. Someone must do something with the money."

Give the man credit, when Uwe Boll offends, he offends big. The nazi gold joke barely rates compared with some of the stuff that happens in this movie. POSTAL contains scenes about what "really" happened on the first 9/11 jet; namely, that after learning they'd only get 20 virgins in heaven, they decided to fly to the Bahamas before people broke the door down and crashed the plane into the twin towers. Uh, huh.

Postal the game was just an excuse to shoot people and laugh ironically about it. The movie is about the same thing, except that it's a COMEDY! More than that, it's an OFFENSIVE COMEDY! It says so right on the box:

Notice that the quote they run with isn't a positive quote, just a descriptive one.

Black or edgy comedy should be powered by the joke, not just the desire to make people lose their lunch. SOUTH PARK has practically mastered this, where you laugh and then you balk and then you laugh at yourself for laughing. But POSTAL, even when it does get some laughs, is usually so unremittingly stupid, awful or just plain racist that even Borat would feel awkward watching it.

Some other comic adventures involve a retarded jihadist who keeps forgetting to putting on his dynamite belt; a scene where our hero, "Postal Dude," using a live cat as a silencer (I spare you which end of the cat he uses); and later, after Postal Dude makes a big speech to the assorted villains about finding common ground, and someone helpfully shouts "Well we all hate Jews!" Yikes. The movie makes time to show a naked Dave Foley, and a 'comically' obsese woman who is too fat to get out of her own trailer. I didn't mind the part where the unhelpful lady at the welfare center got run over (and then run over again, and run over again) but how about the scene where a cop blows a chinese woman away with a shotgun for being a bad driver? Black comedy is a fine line, and Boll is the kind of douche who brings a slegehammer to a surgery.

I am in a quandary. Here we have one of the most offensive movies I have ever seen. And yet, it is a movie of one of the most reprehensible, offensive game series ever made, and it's on target. So... do I bring the critical fire, or do I say mission accomplished?

The answer is this: while this movie has more to do with the game than anything that happens in SUPER MARIO BROTHERS or STREET FIGHTER, just because it's accurate doesn't make it good. Or funny. And while I may have snickered or gasped at times, this is basically 100 minutes of a man playing with napalm who shouldn't even be allowed matches.

Even the good jokes get messed up. During a bizarre interview, "Postal Dude" is asked, "What is the difference between a duck?" Pause. Beat. He stares, whispers, "And?". They stare at him. Okay, funny. But then he screams "JESUS CHRIST WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE I CAME HERE FOR A JOB WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH A COCKSUCKING MOTHERFUCKING DUCK?!" And there goes whatever bit of humor that was being developed.

Some scenes achieve a kind of doomed grandeur, that almost (but not quite) transcend the material. A gunfight at a theme park takes out so many children that it stops being horrifying and becomes kind of surreal. J.K. Simmons plays a Senate Candidate who rants, "NASA does not exist. Every space mission you've seen is a Hollywood forgery! We did not land on the moon! There is no 'John Glen'!" Too bad he gets blown up by a suicide bomber 15 minutes in. More likely, they only paid him for one days work.

The most notable thing in the entire 100 minutes is Verne Troyer, aka Mini-Me. Oh, not at first, he's basically doing the same Verne Troyer bit he always does. Then he is raped by a thousand monkeys. Seriously: a thousand monkeys, on the screen, advancing on Mini-Me; and he screams, "No, not the horny monkeys!" It's not something you see everyday. One hopes.

But in all serious-ness: if you're dating someone and you want to break up, just go visit their folks and suggest you rent this movie. You'll be out of that engagement so fast it'll make your head explode.

GRADE: Zero Stars (Out of 5)

P.S. The maker of the game POSTAL shows up, in a giant penis costume, to fight Uwe Boll for "fucking up his game POSTAL." Yes, the maker of the game fights the director of the movie IN the movie. It's not funny, but it does happen.

P.P.S.: Spoiler alert- the movie ends with atomic bombs going off and the world being destroyed, just like the million times better Dr. Strangelove. At the end of Dr. Strangelove, you were left wondering if we might all deserve to get blown up, for how stupid we are. After POSTAL, you're sure of it.

VGMRP: SUPER MARIO BROTHERS

2009-05-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

SUPER MARIO BROTHERS:

We started with the arguable creative apex of the VGMRP, and we continue with the arguable creative nadir of video game movies, SUPER MARIO BROTHERS. It begins with some random guy in a Brooklyn accent narrating:

"A long long time ago, the Earth was ruled by dinosaurs. They were big, so not a lot of people went around hassing 'em. Actually, no people went around hassling 'em cuz there weren't any people yet. Just the first tiny mammals. Basically, life was good. Then something happened: a giant meteorite struck the Earth. Goodbye dinosaurs! But what if the dinosaurs weren't all destroyed? What if the impact of that meteor created a parallel dimension where the dinosaurs continued to thrive and evolve into intelligent, vicious, and aggressive beings... just like us? And hey, what if they found a way back? "

That's a lot of prologue to chew on, it might be the prologue of a quirky, fun movie. The problem is, it is immediately followed by the title card: SUPER MARIO BROTHERS.

And now, you know you are screwed.

Why? Because you know that the people behind this movie have no idea what the game is actually about. Making a movie out of the actual game of SMB may or may not be a good idea- most likely not a good idea, because if you DID make a true-to-game movie, it would look like this:

Drawn by that guy who does awesome work at www.drmcninja.com

That is an awesome drawing, but what makes the drawing work is what would make a live action movie fail. When you actually think about what happens in SMB, it's kind of insane. Maybe it works in a cartoon world, but real actors fighting real talking mushrooms with fireballs magically coming out of their hands? Mama Mia, you better hope there's some whiskey in that movie popcorn you're eating.

Luckily (or unluckily), the makers of this movie dodged the issue by producing the first film based on a video game which has almost nothing to do with the game they based it on. Yeah, it's got Mario (Bob Hoskins) and Luigi (John Leguizamo), and yeah they're plumbers who get sucked down a drain into another world. But once they go down the pipes, the world they encounter looks less like this:

Yay!

and more like this:

Uh.... what?

Not only is the movie inexplicable to casual movie-goers and parents who were dragged in by their children, but it's incoherent to fans. I grew up on Super Mario Brothers, and I have no fucking clue what is going on in this movie. Neither do the actors, as scene after scene seems to involve miserable human beings trying to explain to each other what the hell is going on. In other words, it is basically a documentary of notable actors trapped on a production from hell.

The plot is some nonsense about a de-evolving machine, a meteorite that can merge two worlds, an entire civilization that's descended from the dinosaurs, an ugly metropolis called Dino-Hattan and a king who was turned into a giant, city-wide piece of fungus. You know, just like the popular video game, Super Mario Brothers.

The only thing that feels accurate (unfortunately) is the ridiculous stereotyping of the Mario Brothers themselves, who at times sound like they are refugees from a sketch on The State:

Mario Mario: This can't be Manhattan.

Luigi Mario: I don't know, I haven't been to Manhattan in a couple weeks.

Mario Mario: Must have been a bad couple of weeks!

See? Just like all Brooklyn Plumbers, they hate everything that's not Italian and not Brooklyn. Another classic piece of dialogue:

Mario: Mama Mia!

Luigi: Pasta Fagoli!

Mario: Brooklyn Dodgers!

Both: Aeeeeeyyyyy!!!

The actors deal with this mess in their own ways: Bob Hoskins can barely conceal his contempt for the production, John Leguizamo looks excited to be in a movie, and Dennis Hopper (playing Koopa like a jerky CEO of a cigarette company) looks like he snorted some glue before each take.

And why not? According to the IMDB trivia page, the script was being rewritten each day, to the point that no one was paying attention anymore. Inexplicable scenes include a slow dance of goombas in an elevator, Dennis Hopper making strange demands about pizza at his moment of triumph, a six foot bouncer named Big Bertha (who looks like the demon love child of Grace Jones and Aretha Franklin) and my favorite bizarre trend, random cars smashing into each other for no reason. Seriously: there is a car chase in this movie, but cars seem to crash into each other whether the Mario Brothers are being chased or not. In fact, during the car sequence, a car flies onscreen and collides with a pile of garbage and IT WASN'T EVEN RUN OFF THE ROAD. It just blows up on principle.

It's only off-topic fan service that makes this movie have anything to do with the game... character names, vague references, sound cues, etc. It's as if they bought a script and changed the names; meaning that the fans aren't happy (and they weren't) and no one else cares enough to watch it (they didn't). The movie might have worked on its own terms, without any of the video game trappings, it's just weird enough. But what this means is that there is still a Mario Brothers movie that could be made that's actually about the game world that was created. For my part, I hope we never get to see "Super Mario Begins", if only because out of all the game worlds to make into a filmed story, the Mario universe is the most lacking. Mario's adventures are light fun on your Nintendo, but there's no depth or consistency to the world that merits further exploration.

While crass commercialism was the impetus behind this monstrosity, and the final result pleased no one, one must be fair. This movie is not the result of lazy hackery. The film's 2 directors, and a team of production designers, put a lot of time and effort into creating a new world out of whole cloth. I say this in the lightest of defenses, because the world they have created is hideous and bizarre. It's like Blade Runner as rendered by L. Ron Hubbard. They try so hard, yet they fail even harder.

SUPER MARIO BROTHERS plays like a fever dream, or a nightmare that's not so much scary as it is plain weird. I can't recommend it and I couldn't tell you when I'd ever want to watch it again, but I won't quickly forget it. Also, if I remember Mortal Kombat: Annihilation correctly, I've know what the bottom of the barrel looks like, and we're not there yet.

RATING: * (out of 5)

P.S. This is the first well meaning, horribly misconceived sci-fi project to feature the song "Love is the Drug" played in a nightmarish bar/dance sequence. The other was "Monkeybone." Noodle that one for awhile.

P.P.S. For a treasury of hilarious tidbits, check out the movie's IMDB trivia page, where I learned (among other things) that Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo would often drink to get through each day of filming. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108255/trivia

VGMRP: MORTAL KOMBAT

2009-05-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

We start the VGMRP with, arguably, the creative apex of video game movies: MORTAL KOMBAT.

After a bitchingly rad credit sequence involving flames and techno, our hero, Liu Kang, receives a telegram (!) that reads as follows:

LIU KANG

BROTHER DEAD. RETURN HOME.

GRANDFATHER

And that's all you need to know about Liu Kang, Bruce Lee stand in. We next meet Sonja Blade in the same kind of club that Blade frequents; namely, the rave where even a shotgun blast doesn't stop the party. She wants the guy who killed her partner, aka Token White Female Cop. Then we meet Johnny Cage on a set of a crappy action movie that, uncannily, resembles most of the crappy JCVD and Steven Segal action movies of the 90's. He's out to prove he's no fake, aka the ironic white action hero.

This is all the intro the game needed to these characters, and the same proves true for the movie. There is a kind of beautiful, stupid simplicity to a film that can introduce it's three protagnonists, all of their motivations, a villain threatening to destroy the world AND Christopher Lambert as a god of thunder in about ten minutes.

Oh my yes, Christopher Lambert. "You have been chosen to defend the fate of your planet in a tournament called Mortal Kombat!" and cackles like a crazy man, or like an actor paid thousands of dollars to goof around as the 'god of thunder.' It works either way.

But I'm being too glib. By sticking with archetypes and simple motivations (revenge, revenge, desire to prove oneself, desire to be Christopher Labert), we get who our heroes are and why they are there. Everything else is a collection of colorful villany and chop-socky.

The game wasn't complicated: two badass ninja/kung fu/aliens/monsters/gods/women fight to the tune of techno until one of them is defeated. Given the often dire history of video game movies, the praiseworthy thing is not that this movie got it right, but that it DIDN'T SCREW IT UP.

Overall, the movie is a sometimes uneasy mix of good and bad. For every deliciously hammy Christopher Lambert moment, you get Robin Shou trying to be the next Bruce Lee and failing. For every kind of awesome set and fight scene, you get a preposterous mid 90's CG effect that takes you right out of the movie (Reptile, I'm looking at you here.) For every fantastic villain death (Scorpion gets lit on fire, then his head gets split in half and then he explodes) there is a crappy villain death (Sub-Zero has a bucket of water thrown at him and he turn into an ice cube) And check out the Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-ManInRubberSuit they got to play 'Goro',

I AM A GIANT MUPPET

What tips the scales in the direction of awesome is the performance of Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Shang Tsung. This man was born to shout FINISH HIM, and he does. With great frequency. He also says FATALITY, FLAWLESS VICTORY, YOUR SOUL IS MINE and, my personal favorite, after Raiden says "Look, it has begun!" he screams IT HAS BEGUN. I could listen to this man read the phone book, as long as he was shouting it in a super intense voice.

Another great moment is when he promises "a taste of things to come", which involves a bunch of extras disrupting a banquet dinner in order to clear a path for Sub Zero to freeze some guy for no reason.

Multiple times during the 100 minutes, techno blares and ninjas fight each other in competent-but-not-mind-blowing PG-13 kung fu. And this is what it should be, it's what we came for. And by using the cg budget fleetingly and focusing more on two overgrown martial artists fighting in slow motion, the feeling you get when some guy totally gets his ass kicked in a somewhat credible way is not cringing, but is in fact satisfaction.

Of course, that assumes that what you WANT to watch is a bunch of kung fu fight set to techno, with a villain screaming FINISH HIM! But for the fans of Mortal Kombat, the game, that IS exactly what they wanted to watch. Yeah, some of the dramatic dialogue stinks ("Don't you dare do this to protect me, Johnny Cage!") but the over-the-top dialogue is fantastic ("Princess Kitana? The Emperor's Daughter?! She's over 10,000 years old!")

In other words, this star rating is not so much because it's a good movie (it's not) or even a great kung fu movie (it's not.) The movie works because, for once, damn it all, they didn't screw it up. I remember walking out of the theater as a kid, shouting "That was AWESOME!" My inner 14 year old still agrees. It may be trash, but it's good trash.

RATING: * * * (out of 5)

P.S. The director, Paul "W.S." Anderson, has made some movies that could charitably be called "God awful." They include Resident Evil, Soldier, and Alien vs. Preditor. Only two of his movies are worth a damn... namely, this one and Event Horizon. However, praise where praise is due... his action sequences are clear, easy to follow, have nice pacing and satisfying pay-offs. That he went onto make the incoherent (both visually and script wise) Resident Evil is a wonder.

P.P.S. The fan service still makes me smile, whether it's Scorpion shouting GET OVER HERE or Johnny Cage inexplicably having an autographed photo ready to throw down on an enemy's corpse. It didn't make any sense in the game, but it's awesome, and it belongs here.

I AM STILL AWESOME DESPITE BEING INTRODUCED IN THE EARLY 90'S

TERMINATOR: SALVATION REVIEW

2009-05-23T15:58:00.000-07:00

Giant dick, meet Robocop Lite!

TERMINATOR: SALVATION Review

"I offer you my summary of the story: Guy dies, finds himself resurrected, meets others, fights. That lasts for almost two hours." -Ebert

And how!

A lot of effort went into this movie, from the special effects crew and the technicians. You can tell that the director, the unexplainably self-titled 'McG,' cares about the Terminator saga. But what a joyless slog it is. When Macbeth bitches, this is what he's talking about.

The plot is best explained as above. It's worked before, it doesn't work here. Let me focus on the details. First, Christian Bale's performance as John Connor is a failure. I didn't care about him at all. I didn't believe he was a messiah, I didn't believe he was a hero, I didn't even believe he was human. But I did believe he was an actor who knew the project he was working on was, how you say, not so good. Bale is Bruce Wayne. Bale is Batman. Hell, Bale is even Patrick Bateman. But Bale's John Connor is a one-note dick, a joyless emotional robot who speaks in his Batman voice THE ENTIRE MOVIE. His speech about losing our humanity is laugh-worthy. How can he inspire humanity when he can't even inspire a movie audience? Hell, we've followed Shia LeBouf to fight Megatron; but Bale's John Connor couldn't lead a bunch of drunken law students to McDonalds. WHICH IS VERY EASY TO DO.

So that's half of the movie shot. Next, we have Marcus Wright, or the cyborg with feelings. As every trailer has already told you, he thinks he's human, but he's not. This is foretold in a prologue that is laced with symbolism, or at least Helena Bonaham Carter owing someone a favor. Sam Worthington does what he can- I've never seen him before, but ad campaigns promise I will see him again- but his story has been told before, and better. His character is made of the newest parts, but his story is off the shelf Frankenstein-Robocop-Blade Runner. What does it mean to be a machine who thinks he is a man? According to this movie, it means you get really upset when Helena Bonham Carter lectures you about your programming.

This leads to the third, and ultimately biggest problem with T4: Skynet. The supposedly biggest, baddest terminator of them all. The spawn of mechanical Satan. And yet, god help me, she (for she is played by Ms. Carter) is the crappiest villain out of all the Terminator movies. She is machine evolution backwards: after first learning to build and develop the Governor of California as a killing machine, she is left with a bad bond villain speech. She is trying to kill John Connor, see, and all her other plans have failed... so she's going to keep his father in the future, Kyle Reese, locked up as bait for John Connor to come within their grasp. This involves a convoluted plot to LET John Connor sneak in to Skynet, so it can... let him get close enough to destroy Skynet. Nevermind that the evil computer could shoot him countless times, or shoot his father, or use her Robocop-lite to shoot him, or any other ways that they could kill John Connor.

It's a dumb plan. Not only is not worth of supposedly the first computer to attain self-awareness, it's not worthy of Die Hard 2. So, basically, we have John "the giant dick" connor and Marcus "I'm not as interesting as I look" Wright fighting Sky "I'm about as smart as the villain in National Treasure" Net. Whoop de shit.

Let's be clear. This isn't Wolverine. The special effects are top notch, the plot is relatively straightforward, there are fewer lines that inspire huge groans and there are no musicians showing up in unexplainable costumes. It is competentBut if you're going to make a 200 million dollar popcorn movie (like Iron Man) and have zero moments of levity or self-parody (like Dark Knight), you better know what you're doing. You better have characters you care about, you better have a point and you better think things through. Explosions, even well done explosions, are not enough.

Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe I need more than just a constant series of explosions. Then again, maybe not- I'm the guy who liked Transformers, Live Free or Die Hard and Starship Troopers. I got nothing against robots beating the crap out of each other. But if you don't care about the tiny little people running around, or if the robots aren't named "Optimus Prime", after a point, it's just noise. And not even real noise; most of it is computer generated noise.

You did, McG. You made Michael Bay look good. I cared more about the characters in Armageddon than any of the survivors in this hunk of expensive junk.

RATING: * * (out of 5)

P.S. Arnold does make a cameo thanks to the 200 million dollar budget, without actually being in the movie. It's awesome, and the closest thing than a real Terminator moment we get.

P.P.S. The resistance has remarkably uneven powers. Sometimes they can summon air force bombers on radar, other times, they have to resort to short wave radios. Sometimes they have to hide on a submarine, sometimes they can have open air force bases. This either means that Skynet is even more incompetent than we thought, or (more likely) the screenwriters really didn't think about anything other than 'oh yeah, this would be cool.'

Vote Schwarzenegger.

STAR TREK: REVIEW

2009-05-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

Nerds rejoice: Space is fun again.

I'm serious. Space, and by space I mean lots of ships flying through it very quickly, hasn’t been for fun years. I don’t mean just Star Trek movies. Think about it: Star Wars I-III. Alien vs. Predator I and II. Wing *shudder* Commander. By my count, the last good space movie was The Fifth Element. That was in 1996. There’s been a lot of pain in terms of the watching spaceships explode department. It’s been crappy acting, effects, and George Lucas screenwriting the past 12 years.

All of that ends now. Star Trek may not be brilliant cinema, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun. It is also shiny, well-paced and a lot of things go boom. This already makes it superior summer entertainment. But as an added bonus at no extra cost, the dialogue induces no vomiting!

In fact, not only is the dialogue good, the acting is better. This is more than a pleasant surprise, it’s a new standard. Put it this way: you might have thought, while watching Attack of the Clones and wincing at the horrific acting and amazingly dull dialogue, “well, it’s the price I pay for watching a spaceship movie.” Now it is clear that, no, we can have our space and have acting too. J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek proves those George Lucas’s new Star Wars movies just plain sucked.

Oh, Star Trek ain’t perfect. The plot is (at times) a coat-rack to which to hang lots of bang, zoom and boom. The villain is pretty standard issue angry ugly guy. There is some business with creatures on an ice planet that seems forced. Time travel is used to duct tape over plot holes, some embarrassingly large. The movie doesn’t really have a central idea or concept. And five bucks to anyone who can tell me what the hell Winonna Ryder is doing in this movie.

But honestly? Who cares? The badass more than pays back the meh. The special effects are amazing, everything looks real or at least fun. It's never boring. The younger Kirk and Spock are excellent. We like them. We want to watch them do more. We see why they clash, and why they are friends.

The other original crew members are fun, too. Simon “Hot Fuzz” Pegg and John “Harold and Kumar” Cho do not disappoint, but special credit goes Karl “Doom” Urban, who is spot on as Bones McCoy. (Yes, he says “Damn, it Jim!” Yes, it’s awesome.)

The story also has surprises, some fun, some nasty. We’ve seen planets blow up in Star Trek before, but it’s usually followed by some time travel to save the day. Not this time. Like I said, bang, zoom and boom. But unlike most space movies, the boom and bang parts have real consequences. So lo and behold, when the special effects go nuts, you actually care. And, to your surprise, you do.

It's the summer. Movies are supposed to be fun, we also hope they will be good. Seeing Star Trek after Wolverine is like someone giving you a cold corona with a lime after you accidentally drank a skunked can of Papst Blue Ribbon at a bbq. It may not be perfect in form or execution, but god damn, did you need it.

RATING: * * * * (out of 5)

P.S. Lots of fun references for fans here. My favorite was seeing Kirk’s fabled Kobayashi Maru test. Over the top? Yes. But fun.

P.P.S. Leonard Nimoy is the classiest man to ever wear rubber ears.

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE: REVIEW

2009-05-02T16:25:00.000-07:00

Strike a pose.

X-MEN 4 REVIEW

How bad is X-men Origins: Wolverine (aka X4?)

Would you believe that Wolverine’s getting his claws is handled in about 4 minutes, with some of the worst dialogue since Fantastic Four?

Would you believe that a good half of Wolverine’s life is handled with a montage of him fighting in the Civil War, World Wars I and II and Vietnam? Would you believe this is also the credit sequence? That there is no explanation for why he’s lived, oh, say 200 years without aging past Hugh Jackman?

Would you believe that they got Will.i.am to play a mutant? Would you believe they gave him a funny hat to wear, for no reason?

How about Ryan Reynolds to play a mutant ninja? Would you believe he actually found a worse superhero movie to be in than Blade: Trinity?

Or the introduction of The Blob, where Wolverine calls him “Bub,” and the blob turns and says “Did you just call me…. BLOB?!” (Give Hugh Jackman some credit, the look on his face during this scene is priceless)

Would you believe they got this guy (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0404111/) to play the chief villain? I remember him from CSI and I actually saw Silver City, he sucked then, he’s worse now.

Would you believe that on at least two occasions (Meghan thought 3), Wolverine casts his eyes into the heavens and screams “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!”?

Yeah, it’s that bad.

An prequel is always an odd thing. They assumes that we know enough about the characters to a) care enough to know the back story and yet b) care without knowing the backstory. A Wolverine Prequel isn’t necessarily a bad idea, as a big plotline in movies 1 and 2 is, hey, where did he get those wonderful toys? We find out, and man, is it stupid.

Jackman looks lost, all of his charisma and most of his edge drained from previous performances in X and X2. It’s one thing when Wolverine doesn’t give a damn about anyone, and then occasionally does the right thing. It’s another when, in this movie, he’s constantly having to be the good guy who just wants to settle down to a peaceful life of lumberjacking. (I shit you not.) In other words, he’s bland, devoid of wit and boring.

Liev Schriber does what he can as the semi-villain, but Sabretooth has always been a one dimensional character for me. There may be comics, unread by me, that add depth. That depth is not to be found here. Basically he gets mad and rips stuff apart; his motivations unclear, save for desiring to beat up Wolverine.

The rest of the mutants exist to say their super cool names, and then get killed off. Some of them don’t even make it to the cool name part before getting offed. They either make no impression, or a not-so-good impression. Will.i.am, in particular, strikes me as a musician who wandered onto the set, and demanded a funny hat. The kid they got to play Gambit, the less said, the better.

It’s really kind of depressing, how this movie forgets the principle of a team of baddasses. You remember the principle of the team of baddasses.

a) introduce a hero.
b) Introduce a team of badasses to surround the hero, with other powers.
c) Introduce a threat that, individually, could kill the hero and every one of the team of baddesses… unless they come together as a team.
d) The team comes together or splits apart when facing this threat
e) Profit.

In this case, our team is introduced and dispensed with so quickly they barely get to leave a mark. It plays like a demo reel (this guy uses guns; THIS guy uses swords!) This means we get all the clichés without any of the enjoyment.

It all winds down to a final confrontation between Wolverine and a member of the team, who, again, was introduced and left behind so quickly that we forget he’s even in the movie. The final fight is nothing more than actors pretending to hurt each other in front of a green screen, and since we know that most of them can heal after getting stabbed, it’s pretty much a race to suckville. No points for guessing if Wolverine survives.

Any commentary on what it means to be a mutant is lost. Any attempt to make the consequences felt is laughable. The twists, when they come, are lame. If you actually see the movie (and you shouldn’t), see which twist you like less: how Woverine was set up, or what the villains are actually up to. Not much else to report, except that the special effects are not very good… which is odd, considering how much money this movie cost.

Which brings me to the final insult. How bad is X4? The real barometer isn’t X3; because that movie had the burden of trying to deliver on the promise of X1 and X2… and failed miserably. There were expectations with X3. They still had Ian McKellan in X3. There was a failure of competency with X3.

Consider X4 an attempt to reboot the series, after all, only two of the major characters are still in it (three if you count the villain.) So how bad is X4? From the special effects to the embarrassing, miscast acting and the awful plot twists, it’s as bad as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Yeah, I went there.

GRADE: * (out of 5)

P.S. Young Cyclops is in this movie. He gets more to do than he did in X3. Still lame.

P.P.S.: There’s a surprise cameo at the end by an older actor, who they decided to digitally make younger. The anti-aging effects are done so poorly that you’re not sure if you’re looking at the actor, a digital dummy of the actor, or a Madame Tussaud’s Wax impression. Whatever they did in Benjamin Button, I am officially more impressed.

You may not think it's funny, but it is unquestionably a hat.

MONSTERS VERSUS ALIENS: REVIEW (SHORT)

2009-03-29T22:00:00.000-07:00

There has only been one good movie with the word ‘vs’ in the title. That would be Kramer vs. Kramer (not to be confused with Freddy vs. Jason, or Alien vs Predator, or Tango v. Cash.) Monsters v. Aliens does not buck the trend, exactly- it’s not great, but it doesn’t suck either.

Reese Witherspoon is a Giant Woman, Will “GOB” Arnett is the missing link, and Seth Rogen is a brainless blob named B.O.B. They live in an underground cell, until an alien lands and starts messing up the joint. The alien is named Galaxhaar, played by Rainn Wilson, and he’s not nearly as funny as he thinks he is. Lots of stuff blows up real good, some of it resulting in laughs, others, in groans.

It’s pretty much an airplane movie, with the exception of the Steven Colbert as the President. If such a concept gives you the giggles, I assure you, it’s even funnier when he tries to communicate with the aliens via a Casio keyboard.

I also liked the absurdity of B.O.B.’s stupidty, which is inspired. (When everyone thinks the end is near and is saying goodbyes, B.O.B. muses: “I’ll see you guys tomorrow. For lunch.”)

But Madagascar 2 had 4 penguins and 2 lemurs. Monsters v. Aliens has but two funny creatures. Bolt only had one. You see how it goes.

RATING: * * Stars (out of 5)

P.S. I originally gave this movie a C+, but it's faded in memory, and I don't feel like it ever got to 3 star status. Not that 3 stars is some grand endorsement, but there's got to be some quality control around here.

TALE OF DESEREAUX REVIEW

2008-12-23T18:47:00.000-08:00

THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX: Review

First, there is only one Pixar. In addition to being fact, this is also the truth.

But just because there is only one Pixar, doesn't mean that other companies can't (or shouldn't) make animated films. I’ve already raved about Meet the Robinsons. Shrek (the first) is a minor classic. Robots had a good amount of charm. And Madagscar 2: Escape to Africa cracks me up just thinking about it.

But then there are movies like The Tale of Desperaux, where Pixar doesn’t even enter into it, except to say that they would never have attempted a movie like this. Not because it’s inherently a bad idea: mouse versus world, based on award winning novel. The problem is that the script was nowhere near read for filming. Source material is not enough. Golden Compass was also based on an award winning novel. And like Golden Compass, The Tale of Desperaux is made with love, care, and total incompetence.

Here are the various plots, as I understand them:

a) A young mouse is rejected from his home for his bravery and refusal to cower. He is brave and wants to be a knight.

b) A rat is an outcast for liking the sunlight and eating regular people food. He is sad.

c) A princess misses the rain, soup, and even the rats, and is sad.

d) A princess’s maid wishes to be a princess, and is bitter.

e) A chef is banned from making soup, and is berated by a magical vegetable man.

Got all that? There is also a sad human king who plays his guitar/ukulele thing because of his wife’s soup-related death, an evil rat king who is evil because it’s fun, a cat that thinks it is the beast from Return of the Jedi. Also, for reasons often narrated but seldom explained, because the king banned soup, the sun disappeared and the rain stopped and the color vanished from the land.

The movie makes about as much sense as Dune, and has a similar array of stars embarrassing themselves. Among the guilty parties include Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman, Emily Watson, Frank Langella, William H. Macy and Signorney Weaver, who has the worst job of the bunch, as the narrator. And she narrates endlessly, often pointlessly. (“Rats are rats, and nothing can change a rat.” “What would it be like for your name to be a bad word? How would that make you feel?” “How could you outlaw something as natural as the sun?”) This may work as the voice on the page, but here, it grinds the proceedings to a halt every time she opens her mouth.

The narration would be enough to sink the movie, but other choices torpedo it into oblivion. The plot rarely makes sense, as we constantly move between stories we understand little and care about less. There are too many characters, and the confusion compounds when some characters turn evil and then sympathetic, sometimes in the same scene. Desperaux, as the movie’s apparent lead, never changes much on his journey, and makes for an uninvolving, if plucky protagonist. (He's really brave!) (Really!) To call the ending an anticlimax would be an insult to anti-climaxes, as all the problems of the plot are resolved simply because the narrator says so (someone explain to me the relationship between soup and whether or not it rains.)

Because one poor choice deserves another, the movie’s creators are disciples of the Nathanial Hawthorne School of Lead Pipe Symbolism: each point about racism, facism, cowardice and how ugly people are invariably selfish lands with a cringe-inducing THUD on your head. See? Rats, like people, can change too! See, racism is bad, kids. So is banning soup. So is getting in fights with a magical vegetable man.

There is one scene where the movie comes to life. When Desperaux first reads a storybook, the images come to life in a wonderful stylized sequence. Rousing music is played, and we see why someone would want to drop everything to become a knight. It works. If they had followed that impulse, instead of all the racism allegories, we might have had something.

To be clear: the movie is competently animated and the dialogue is serviceable. The actors do what they can. All the raw materials are there for a wonderful fable, but the final product feels like someone left entire chunks of eggshell in the cake batter. I don’t care how noble your intentions are: the cake is inedible, and the movie is unwatchable. Give me Bolt anyday.

GRADE: * Star (Out of Five)

P.S. This movie is as bad as Golden Compass, but Golden Compass at least had Sam Elliot’s Moustache and Nicole Kidman slapping a monkey.

P.P.S. This movie, like Reign of Fire, has a false dragon advertising problem. Namely, there are no dragons in the movie, except for a dream sequence. Someone alert the Nerd Police. Oh, and here's the vegetable man:

BAD SANTA: REVIEW

2008-01-30T19:31:00.000-08:00

Note: Originally ran in the Tufts Daily

Every once in awhile, the ancient and unbending laws of movie clichés demand that we find a man in a bar, drunk. He is the experienced Professional, but retired, out of the game, quit for good and living in a bottle of whiskey.

In walks the Chief. After some hard-boiled banter, the Chief tells the Pro, "We have a problem. We can't solve it. We need you to come back... one last time." After initially refusing, the drunk eventually agrees. Later, it turns out that his long lost daughter (or wife, or dog) is involved in the intricate plot. Multiple explosions ensue, necessitating slow-motion photography.

Something like that must have happened when the Coen brothers asked Terry Zwigoff, the director of the bizarre documentary Crumb and the hilariously dark Ghost World, to direct Bad Santa. Each of those movies, while critically acclaimed, made no money and Zwigoff was quoted as saying he would never work again. The Coen brothers, the film's executive producers, probably said, "We have a script. It might destroy sentimental Christmas movies forever. We need you to come back... one last time... with a vengeance."

Zwigoff does not so much poke fun at the hollowness of the holidays but rather he pours gasoline on them, throws a match, watches it burn and then pours on cement, just to make sure.

Billy Bob Thornton plays Willie, the world's worst department store Santa. Willie smokes, drinks, swears, vomits, destroys fake reindeer and drinks some more. He snarls at his partner Marcus (Tony Cox), a dwarf playing Santa's Elf, "You can't hold liquor worth s-t." Marcus replies, "I weigh 97 pounds, dickhead. What's your excuse?"

Willie and Marcus are employed by the very nervous Bob (the late John Ritter), who twitches at the mere mention of sex, and are lorded over by the head of security, Gin, a funny but underused Bernie Mac. What their bosses don't know is that Willie and Marcus are a team of safecrackers, who have been hitting up department stores for eight Christmases in a row.

Three kinks hamper their plans this year. One, Willie has gotten so drunk and sloppy, that the duo might actually get fired before they can pull off the job. Two, as improbable as it may seem, Willie has found a girlfriend (Lauren Graham) with a Santa fetish, who will sleep with him any hour of the day... as long as he wears the Santa hat the entire time. Three -- and this is where it gets really sick -- is a butterball of a kid played by Brett Kelly, who decides that Willie must be the real Santa, and must be his friend. His only friend.

The boy's mother has "gone to live with Jesus and the Walnut People," and his dad is in jail. His only caretaker is a senile grandmother (Cloris Leachman) who is obsessed with making sandwiches. "I thought you might get me a present, Santa," the Kid whines to Willie, "because you didn't get me one last year. Or the year before that." We finally find out the Kid's name late in the movie. It is Thurman Merman.

While in the beginning it all seems dark and a little wrong, it only gets worse. And funnier. Willie has a habit of seducing plus-size ladies in the dressing rooms, The Kid gets a mega-wedgie every day on the way to the mall, Marcus accuses his boss of racial/vertical discrimination, and Bernie Mac's character shakes down little kids in video game stores.

The story meanders until Willie is forced to live at the Kid's house and starts to get attached to him, in the same way that one gets attached to a giant scar on their face. After one mega-wedgie too many, he tries to teach the Kid self-defense, which degenerates into a crotch kicking contest of hilarious proportions. You have not lived until you have seen Billy Bob Thornton punch a dwarf in the nuts. Eventually, Willie steps up for the Kid, resulting in the inspirational scene where he announces: "I beat the s-t out of some kids today. It made me feel good, you know, like I did something right." "Therapy," replies Marcus, "you need therapy. Years and years of therapy."

The movie is, as some critics have called it, one note, completely based on the gimmick of a vulgar Santa Claus. It is also dark and dirty with wall-to-wall vulgarity and tastelessness. But it's not boring, it isn't swamped in syrupy sentiment and the movie did not (thank god) have a heart of gold. The actors take their jobs seriously, the director hits the right notes, and the writing is refreshingly unconcerned with being hip and ironically distant.

It is the real deal: a direct answer to Disney, It's a Wonderful Life, and every crappy Tim Allen holiday movie ever made. It is an up-yours to those who say, without a sense of humor or reality, that this is the most wonderful time of the year. And it is the funniest movie I've seen in a long, long time.

RATING: * * * * (out of 5 Stars)

CABIN BOY: REVIEW

2008-01-20T19:01:00.000-08:00

CABIN BOY

I saw this movie as a kid, I remember liking it. But I also remember liking stupid movies as a kid. I also remember Entertainment Weekly giving it an F and a two line review. And David Letterman asking someone if they wanted to buy a monkey.

Thanks to the power of Brian Smallwood's lending, I shall review this movie as it happens to me.

...

Again.

TimeCode ahoy, and enjoy!

Credit Sequence:
A rousing score, with traditional bold credits and a sea chart... but the credits are interrupted with fish. Lots and lots of fish. It is not funny so much as odd. Also, Tim Burton produced this?

2:40:
Chris Elloitt is a fancy lad. I don't know what that means, except that he's wearing a wig and too short shorts, and is an ass.

4:40:
Alfred Molina plays a very small part of a professor. Doesn't embarass himself.

5:40:
Chris Elliot makes a joke about his large penis. Embarrasses himself.

9:30:
David Letterman plays some old crusty lowlife. Embarrasses himself, but makes a joke about a sock monkey, so it's okay.

11:20:
Andy Richter shows up. Instantly funnier than anything that's happened so far, and all he's done is stare at the screen.

13:25:
I retract the previous statement, as I have just seen Andy Richter impersonate a harem girl dancing. Yes, it was gross. No, he didn't take his shirt off. Chris Elliott responds with his one funny line so far: "Well, thank you for that, whatever that was."

15:06
James Gammond just showed up, the manager from Major League. This is the most positive development so far.

15:10
The “fishing ship” takes off, it’s a shitty model in a tank. Does not bode well.

24:30
Nothing of note has happened in the past ten minutes. The movie’s only 80 minutes long.

24:59
Straight from a John Waters/Steven King Nightmare, it’s Ricki Lake as the living masthead of the boat and two leathery cloud faces blowing wind from the skies.

26:10
Andy Richter just died.

28:55:
Crew banter:
“I don’t want to end up as flounder shit.”
“Yeah, those flounders are bloodthirsty bastards.”

30:59
Chris Elloitt has given James Gammond a bath, and I, I have gone blind.

35:10
A self described giant, fat ass floating cupcake just spit tobacco in Chris Ellott’s face. I swear to god I am not making this up.

See?! Giant Cucpake.

36:35:
Russ tamblyn, aka Dr. Jackobi from Twin Peaks, has a cameo as a sharkman.

37:35:
Sharkman is actually Chocki. We just heard the legend. I fear it’s a plot point.

43:58:
The romantic interest just showed up. She was trying to swim from Maryland to Maryland. This is the longest 80 minute of my life;

48:07
Also, worst water special effects ever, and I’ve seen Ed Wood movies.

52:00
It occurs to me the actor who’s playing the captain thinks he’s in an actual movie. Oh, and an iceburg just winked at Chris Elliott.

52:55
Iceberg is an abominable snowman. Attacking ship. This movie makes no sense.

54:45
they just defeated the snowman with their coffeemaker. There was no reason for that scene at all.

55:05:
The name of the boat is “The Filthy Whore.”

1:01:52
Chris Elliott just lost his virginity to a 6 armed woman.

1:02:00
Chris Elloitt to Love interest: “Let’s just say I’ve shed my feminine side… like a snake sheds its fur.” Then he makes out with her. I hate myself, and this movie, and everything.

1:03:00
The giant of the island just said, “I sold one lousy electronic toothbrush to a flying leprechaun.” I wish I was drunk. Or dead.

1:06:10:
Actual funny line: "We've got to stop him from getting his grubby hands on The Filithy Whore!"

1:07:32
I think this is the climax of the movie: Chris Elloitt just rode his love interest like a dolphin, (as in, she swam him out to sea) grabbed a pen from the giant’s pocket protector, but the giant got the upper hand, then the sharkman, Chocki, showed up and saved Elliott. Now, Elliott is choking the giant with his the giant's own leather belt. Now, the Giant's dead.

1:10:00.
There are only 10 minutes left in the movie, according to the DVD case.

1:14:10
Chris Elliott’s father, Bob Elliott, shows up as the boy’s father. Embarasses himself.

1:15:25:
“Oh, Nathanial, your words melt like butter in my brain!” says the love interest.

1:16:45:
Movie over. Brain hurts.

1:16:46
Must kill Brian Smallwood.

Grade: Zero Stars (out of Five)

I AM LEGEND: REVIEW (SHORT)

2008-01-03T18:45:00.000-08:00

Emma Thompson, seen only in video-tape flashback, invents a vaccine for cancer. It ends up killing or horribly mutating most of the world, except for one man. This is one of the more plausible developments of the movie, and I wish it was explored more. The whole world wants a cure for cancer, and who wouldn't line up to drink the Kool-Aid? (Side effects include: starring in a Will Smith movie.)

So Will Smith is literally the last man on earth, marooned on the island of Manhattan, the only human who can walk in the daylight. At night, he must lock himself in, and hope that the nightmares- both in his head and outside his house- go away.

It's a hell of a setup. There are many philosophical implications to it, largely ignored during the movie, save some lame talk about "God's Plan." But give Smith some credit, he is incredibly watchable on his own, and it took some gumption to get this story filmed. After all, Cast Away- the only movie that comes to mind for comparison- barely made its money back, and most people remember it purely for the volleyball. Here, most people will remember this movie for the dog, Sam. Lesson learned: never work with animals, or humanized balls.

The movie is gripping, until it isn't- about an hour into the 90 minute movie. The special effects are fantastic, until they're not- about an hour into the 90 minute movie. Sense the theme? Basically, you're talking an original thought spun out about as long as it can be (which is an hour), followed by a standard 30 minute zombie/vampire movie.

This would be fine, if the creatures weren't so damn lame. It is amazing to me that they could spend so much to make us buy the New York of the Future, and shortchange us on the monsters. Simply put, the creatures are digital, they are uninteresting, and they are crappy. I kept waiting for one of the vampires to actually speak, or have a plan more complicated than "Kill the Human", but, alas.

Still, if a movie does one thing better than anyone else ever has, it's worthy of praise. And I Am Legend sets a new standard for New York of the Future. It officially replaces Vanilla Sky for "best creepy deserted New York scene", it makes Day After Tomorrow look like Escape From New York in terms of special effects, and Will Smith makes the Last Man on Earth schtick work. You totally buy that he is real, that the city is real, that the dread is real. The problem is, the monsters aren't real. They aren't scary. They're just kind of silly.

Am I glad I saw it? Sure. Do you need to see it, if you haven't? Nah.

RATING: * * * Stars (out of 5 )

P.S. Small quibble: in New York of the Future, everything is falling apart, except for the Fords, Mac computers, and DVDs of Goodnight and Good Luck. Those are still fine and shiny, so we can be sure to see which brands last longer.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS: REVIEW

2007-12-29T18:35:00.000-08:00

Now I understand.

When I sit there, trying to explain how unbelievably awesome the movie/book/video game/internet cartoon I am fascinated with is, and the person next to me is trying very hard, but ultimately, just has a blank, pleasant smile on their face. I get it now. I must get something, anyway after sitting through The Golden Compass, which cost some 180 million dollars and is…

Well, it’s hard to finish the sentence. Is The Golden Compass an allegory about religion telling us what to believe? It is a rip-roaring fantasy adventure, with animals that talk and a machine telling us the way? Is it a rip-off of Dune, where everyone’s talking about a certain item (spice or dust) but no one actually knows what it is? Ya got me. All I know is, 2 hours later, I was very confused and 12 dollars poorer.

The Golden Compass is based on book one of His Dark Materials, a fantasy series unread by me but beloved by many. If this sounds familiar, it’s because you can fill in the blank and be talking about Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Jim Carrey and basically be talking about the same thing. I’ve read none of the above, save Harry 1, and I have no doubt my life is poorer for it. But I’ve seen all of the movies, and loved Rings, admire Harry and scratched my head at Snicket. But with all of those films, even the last one- which did not produce the anticipated sequels and was hated by many who love the books- made some semblance of sense. Cliff’s Notes was not required to appreciate the journey. And if details were missing, the logic of the adventures remained. (Who’s the good guys? Who’s the bad guys? Is that hat talking? Is that Orlando Bloom as an elf? Okay, I got it.)

Here, we are doomed almost from the start, as the movie takes a page out of Dune and tries to explain the entire world in about two minutes. Star Wars has proved the wheel that many have tried to reinvent, with it’s dense text prologue followed by rapid excitement. Who cares if none of the previous made sense, there’s spaceships fighting! Even the Fellowship of the Ring wisely kept it’s prologue to just about the ring itself, leaving the rest of the world for us to discover. Here, we get Eva Green giving us a rapid outline of principles, ideas and character classes, along with which dice we should use when figuring out our characters’ attributes, before plopping us next to our heroes: a bland yet plucky girl and her whiny, rodent spirit guide. I kid you not.

I won’t go into the rest of it- mainly because I do not understand, and to the extent I understand, I do not care- but something must have gone very, very wrong in the translation from book to film. Many characters are introduced, given funny names and intense makeup, only to be discarded. The editing is so clunky that whenever the film tries to build momentum, it suddenly shifts us halfway across the galaxy (or planet, or wherever the hell we are) to tell us some other plot development that obscures more than it reveals. We are told that in this world, one’s soul has the form of an animal that follows the person, but we are not told why. (The book apparently supplies a reason, all I can tell you is that Nicole Kidman’s character’s spirit was a monkey)

There are children being experimented on in a lab, where the lab technicians run around in costumes that seem more appropriate for the later Alien movies. We are not told why (or if I was, I missed it.) There are blimps and old tycoots with guns and huns with swords and electricity, and bland villains who look like Cossacks but sound German and ultimately get slaughtered because, well, the good guys gotta fight somebody.

We are told there are polar bears who are fierce, articulate, and want to be human (or have souls) (namely, the animal souls for an animal) (or whatever). Nevermind the last two parts, let’s discuss the scene where one of these bears fights another. This scene stands alone as effective, not because it makes sense, but because polar-bears fighting to the death is not something you see everyday. We can add the following to the laws of bad-assery: when one creature kills another by ripping off the bottom part of its jaw, it shall be awesome.

Let us also briefly discuss Sam Elliott, he of the mighty mustache and who narrated The Big Lebowski. He’s in this movie, and there is a scene where he speaks with the polar bears, and there is no doubt- whatsoever- that he believes he is talking to a talking polar bear. “You involved in this Turkey Shoot?” he asks, and he probably actually said that line to a ping pong ball on a stick, but, hey, I bought it. Sam Elliott is a treasure of an actor, he should work more, hopefully in better projects than this.

I am told the books are amazing. I am assured that all the contradictions are explained. And I do not care, because the movie left me befuddled, bewildered and be-pissed off. No doubt there is depth, wonder, and a consistency of thought in the fantasy world created by theses novels. But this movie makes Beowulf look competent, Pirates of the Carribean 2 and 3 look clear, and Star Wars I-III look deep. A lesson can be learned here: do not hire the man who created American Pie to direct your 180 million dollar fantasy franchise launch.

To sum up the best parts of the film: polar bears fighting, Sam Elliot’s mustache, and Nicole Kidman slapping a monkey. I just saved you 12 dollars. You are welcome.

Grade: * Stars (out of 5)

P.S. I forgot to mention the Golden Compass itself. The Golden Compass is a device, that, when put in the right young girl's hand, tells the script what to do next. On the whole, it is poorly made and doesn't work very well.

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD

2007-12-15T19:16:00.000-08:00

Now here is an American crime story for the ages. I say American because there are notes here that are particularly those of this country, along the lines of O’Neill, where shame and greed and remorse and randomness all play supporting roles. Only in America could two men rob their parents, only to be struck with guilt that it was mom running the story that day, instead of dad. Oh, and she knows where the gun is, and tries to be a hero. Oops.

Before The Devil Knows Your Dead is as good and depressing as No Country for Old Men, but it has something that filmed lacked. And if I knew what it was, I’d tell you. I thought maybe it was the fact that it was a lack of good men facing evil, like Zodiac. But no, here are men just as bad and doomed and unlikable as No Country, but I find myself more pulled into their stories. Scene after scene, 3 characters walk into a room and you have no idea which 2 of them will walk out.

You deserve to walk in with as little info as possible- I’ve probably already said too much- but suffice to say that Ethan Hawke has never been better, Phillip Seymour Hoffman is batting a thousand between this and Charlie Wilson’s War, and Albert Finney is… well, it’s relatively easy for a sad old man character to be powerful, but hard to make him this specific. The story cuts back and forth between these two brothers and their father, the women who orbit their lives, and where they were before and after a robbery. The robbery goes bad, as many film robberies tend to do, but in a way so simple and so spectacular it’s some kind of genius.

Once it goes bad, things get worse. The brothers needed money before the robbery, and they need it even more afterwards. To quote the last funny movie Chevy Chase made in the past fifteen years: “What I don't understand is... when you owe a bookie a lot of money, and he, say, blows off one of your toes, you still owe him the money.” Something along those lines happens here, as twist after twist happens to screw these crooks. They deserve it, but you feel for them- after all, it sounded so plausible on paper.

There are many virtuoso moments. Hoffman’s monologue after shooting up. The way the camera glides over the table as Finney makes a huge decision. Hawke’s eyes when he realizes that he’s picked exactly the wrong time to lose his driver’s license. And Marisa Tormei, who is naked multiple times in this movie (for reasons both realistic and possibly gratuitous), but is only emotionally revealed in her final scene, where she goes for broke in trying to get a reaction out of her husband. And when she does exit, it goes from pathos to farce, and we’re reminded that it always looks easy to make a Big Exit, but is in fact hard to do without looking silly. Especially when you don’t have cab fare.

I cannot express adequately how this movie moved me in ways that No Country did not. Maybe it was because I wasn’t on a journey in the face of oblique evil, or traveling with a man who didn’t give a shit about anything. Maybe it was because, while these two men were born losers and went out losers, there was that sad poetry I was missing. All they wanted was a bit of money. A bunch of bodies later, they still need the money, but now they’re out of time. You know you’ve been watching a great movie when, near the end, a character has gun to his head, and he says “Go ahead, you’ll be doing me a favor.” The line is not original. What is original is that he means it, he’s right, and yet you still care about what happens to him. And then, man oh man, what happens next. You could have called this movie “Of Mice and Men,” and it’d be accurate. Certainly, it would be more interesting for those 7th graders.

RATING: * * * * * (out of 5 stars)

P.S. Fair warning- this movie starts with a naked Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Theres also a naked Marisa Tomei, but I figured you'd rather know about the Hoff first.

P.P.S. That Chevy Chase movie is "Dirty Work"

MICHAEL CLAYTON: REVIEW

2007-10-17T19:24:00.000-07:00

Note: Spoilers.

What a disquieting, great film this is. There is a profound sadness to it, and George Clooney’s performance. But it’s the kind of film that makes you take a look at your top ten list, shake your head sadly and rip it to shreds. It’s that good.

Playing the title character, Clooney is about as good as he’s ever been, which is saying something. Michael Clayton looks like Danny Ocean, talks like Danny Ocean and knows people like Danny Ocean. But lord, is he not Danny Ocean.

Danny Ocean, after all, is the kind of man who would drop anything to pay back someone who screwed his friend, even if the one doing the screwing was Al Pacino. (See: Ocean’s Thirteen) Michael Clayton would like to be that man, would love to be that man, but Michael really only has two friends in this world: his son, and his colleague Arthur (Tom Wilkinson.) And Arthur just took his pants off at a deposition.

Arthur and Michael work for a big important law firm, the kind that usually play villains in big important movies. You know, the kind where an Issue is being discussed, and there’s a lot of money to be made by keeping that issue buried, along with the bodies that start piling up. The pants incident is only the tip of the iceberg, as Arthur goes off of his meds and begins a manic-depressive spiral to undo the wrongs of “20% of my life!”

That 20 percent remark is from a monologue, delivered offscreen in the beginning and repeated onscreen later on. Tom Wilkinson is excellent as Arthur, who manages to bring a doomed, quixotic grandeur to Arthur. Going mad isn’t pretty, but, as he tells Michael without quite saying it, it’s better than trying to remain sane by justifying madness. Populating the edges of this world is Tilda Swinton (who was awfully scary in Narnia) and Sydney Pollack (who was the only good thing about Eyes Wide Shut.) Swinton manages to make an entirely real and pathetic character out of a patchwork of scenes, and Pollack yet again brings a gravity to the kind of character who has seen it all, and will still be at work tomorrow.

But the majority of the movie is about Michael Clayton, and it is remarkable how interesting of a journey it is. Clooney is in much better shape than he was in Syriana, yet looks older, and more tired than he did in that movie. In Syriana, his character had a purpose. Hell, in Ocean’s 11-13, he had a purpose.

Here he has a drive but no target, a bunch of phone numbers but no one to talk to. He can solve everyone’s problems but his own. This sounds trite, but it isn’t. The movie pulls it off. It pulls off explosions, secret agents, cover-ups, powerful men with stern expressions and urgent cell phone calls, even a poker scene, all the trappings of Grisham-esque fiction. It pulls it off because it plays fair, and plays for keeps.

There is a scene near the end where we fear (or I feared) all might be lost. It’s a staged showdown, played expertly by Clooney and Swinton, and it careens dangerously towards the end of one of those big important movies. Is it impossible to have a movie about corruption without a scene where someone is wearing a wire? (Even Wall Street had one of those.)

But the next scene, the final one, is breathtaking. All the man wanted was to save his friend. Instead, he gets a cab ride to nowhere, paid for with money he doesn’t have. Yeah, sure he did the right thing, but so what? What now?

Michael Clayton, the hero. Michael Clayton, the poor sap.

Rating: * * * * * (out of 5 Stars)

P.S. Not only did this movie make me question why the hell I'm in law school, it was my favorite movie of 2007.

OCEAN'S 13: REVIEW

2007-06-15T22:07:00.000-07:00

The original (remake) of Ocean’s 11 was good and entertaining without being necessary. Ocean’s 12 was necessary, without being good or entertaining. Ocean’s 13, finally, is entertaining without being necessary or even very good. If you hold your breath long enough, it starts to make sense.

I was a great admirer of Ocean’s 11, which was proved among many things that some of the biggest stars in Hollywood can have some fun and not take it all so seriously. (It was also the last good thing Andy Garcia has done) I was drunk when I saw Ocean’s 12, and I laughed some but remembered little, and never felt the compulsion to see it again. But here at last is the final (maybe) chapter of the silliest trilogy since The Naked Gun movies, and I must report that it is a good popcorn movie, if not a good movie.

The plot, in brief: Elliot Gould, who, as you recall, was The Guy With The Money in the previous movies, is tired of robbing and stealing. He decides to place all of his bets with Al Pacino, who, as you recall- no, wait that was Andy Garcia. Al Pacino is Willie Bank, Steve Wynn-esque builder of Vegas hotels, and he’s a real piece of work. He lets down/screws over Elliot Gould gently, so gently that Gould almost drops dead of a heart attack right on the construction site.

Enter the boys. (The absence of Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta Jones are dealt with via a single line, repeated three times.) Their dual rationale for dropping everything and spending all their money on revenge is a) This isn’t right and b) He’d do it for us. It’s not much, but on does not attend Ocean’s 13 looking for a revenge plot of Hamlet.

The rest of the movie is basically Movie Stars Screwing With Al Pacino, as they try and sabotage the opening of his new hotel. Some of their escapades are inspired (they manage to start a small revolution in Mexico just to fix the craps dice) and others are routine (the good old fashioned, “that helicopter’s flying away with my safe!”) Whether you enjoy that or not is up to you, I had a wonderful time.

We know that in real life Brad Pitt and George Clooney do very important things, like saving orphans from Canada, so it’s nice to make believe that they’d hang out and watch the Bellagio fountain like any other tourists. Matt Damon does his “No really guys, I can do this” schtick again, which is surprisingly still funny. Less funny is Bernie Mac’s “I’m Bernie Mac” schtick, which gets older all the time. In fairness, they don’t give him much to do, nor do most of the rest of the original eleven, who seem to be there mostly because otherwise they’d have to change the title.

Al Pacino has been Al Pacino for awhile now, but nobody does it better. He certainly does it better than Harrison Ford playing Harrison Ford, or, dare I say it, Andy Garcia playing Andy Garcia. And if he underplays it a bit (or phones it in, you tell me) all the better, since the closer he is to reality, the more he’s a real sonofabitch. Eddie Izzard makes a fun cameo, and Ellen Barkin manages to take a slightly sexist role and turn it right back into outright satire on the movie. The absence of any other women isn’t really a problem, since these movies have always been about a boys club. There is one good line and one great joke, neither of which I will give away here.

That leaves only one thing, and you’re probably still scratching your head: why the second movie was necessary, again? Ocean’s 12, let’s face it, stunk. I was wary when I saw the trailer for another sequel. However, while 12 was a lousy heist movie, it told us more about these characters and firmly established their relationships. In other words, based on the first movie, there’s no way these guys would drop everything to help out one of their own. But after the second movie, where they went to hell and back to save themselves; maybe they would this time. Also, if this movie had been the sequel, it would have seemed old hat- they rob Vegas again? This time, I was thankful, since I knew that would mean there would be an actual heist, and the villain wouldn’t have an impenetrable French accent. (remember, screenwriters: villain is an asshole, good; villain is a douchebag, bad)

Ocean’s 13 is nothing new, but like a burger from your favorite diner, it’s familiar. It’s like coming home, and while Ocean’s 11 retains the crown for number one “if it’s on TNT I will watch it” movie, if this was on after it, I might just stick around.

RATING: * * * Stars (out of 5)

P.S. There is no thirteenth member, and by my count, they lost one since the last movie.

P.P.S. Oh what a BIG MAN YOU ARE!

SURFS UP: REVIEW

2007-06-10T22:13:00.000-07:00

When you're going to use pixels to make a cartoon, so the saying goes, or so it should, remember that you're going up against Pixar. They are King of the digital cartoon empire.

Of course, Pixar also has to compete with Pixar itself. And when Pixar’s CARS came out, a movie which I liked but did not love, a lot of people I know pronounced it unfunny and boring.

Pixar regularly delivers some of the best animated films of our time, so when they deliver something less than that, people get pissed. Fair ball.

CARS was charming, funny and provided a trivia answer that will stand the test of time (namely, “What was Larry The Cable Guy’s best movie?”) However, my biggest question was why Pixar had gone to all that trouble just to remake DOC HOLLYWOOD. You remember DOC HOLLYWOOD?

Of course you do.

That was the one where Michael J. Fox, on the way to become a world famous plastic surgeon, gets stuck in a small town for a few months only to fall in love, make real friends, and discover the pleasures of small town life. That was pretty much the plot of Cars, except Marty McFly was replaced by Owen “paycheck” Wilson as a talking car, and they added Paul “what the hell I’m Paul Newman” Newman as the crusty old forgotten veteran for good measure. The main points were the same, though: arrogant hero from the city, turned humble and wise by a small town, which he finds love and does good work. Done.

Now comes Surf’s Up, the latest attempt to cash in on PDA (Penguins Doing Anything), and while you make think the movie is a rip off of HAPPY FEET or MARCH OF THE PENGUINS; it is in fact a rip off of CARS.

Arrogant hero? Check. Amazingly stupid yet stupidly profound best friend? Check. Slightly-independent-yet-ultimately-making-goo-goo eyes-at-the-hero-heroine? Check. Grizzled old veteran who wants to be left alone, only returns to train the hero? Check. Some kind of sporting event that The Hero Has A Lot To Learn About? Check. A fake version of ESPN that involves whatever talking creatures we have acting like they’re sports reporters? Check. Check. Check! A+!

These characters and concepts have worked before and will work again, but not in this movie. Of course, the biggest difference, and the one I’m sure the writers are the most proud of, is the framework that this tired structure is presented in. The entire film is shot in the fake-doc-improv style of Spinal Tap, Waiting For Guffman, and the unfairly forgotten Drop Dead Gorgeous. So you have characters wandering verbally, riffing to the camera about whatever is going on. You get the voices of the unseen documentarians, or in this case, penguin documentarians. You get some funny cutaways, as when the hero steps on a sea urchin, and suddenly we get an interview with Bob the Sea Urchin (“Look at my spines! Broken, broken and broken!!”) You get the standard issue, character says he did A, and we see live footage of him doing B. And so on.

The format is solid, if done well. It has never been done to my knowledge in an animated film, which means it has never been done before. But before we start cashing those originality checks, I must make the following charge:

Quite simply, this movie cheats.

The ‘camera’ crew is there when needed, but forgotten when not. We often see things that there’s NO WAY the camera crew could have seen, and last time I checked, documentary filmmakers don’t use song montages. (I counted at least four in this film) Two characters will chat as if they’re the only people on the beach, and then suddenly the characters turn around and start shouting at the camera crew. Who are these guys? Why are they making this documentary? And who, exactly, is watching it? Who’s watching the fake ESPN network anyway? I don’t recall any TV’s on the island. I realize I’m talking about a penguin movie, but when you introduce a flashy new element, you better have a flashy new reason for it being there.

I mean, seriously. Who is watching this?

Animated films are short for several reasons. In addition to the fact that kids can only sit for so long and theater operators want to have as many showings as possible, the fact is- it’s hard to keep inspiration going for much longer than that. We (and kids) expect more from animated characters. The jokes must be funnier, the plot developments must come faster, the world must expand as vast as our imaginations. And, in order to jump that hurdle from ‘diversion’ to ‘engaging’, the movie must be tightly plotted. Reexamine most of the Pixar films, and while there’s a plethora of jokes and heart you will also find an economy of plot points and wonderful pacing. A minute wasted in animation feels longer than real movies, because we’re actively aware that the world they’re living in is utterly artificial. A real cow moves slowly, an animated cow better move it’s butt or be reaaaaally funny standing there.

I digress. The point is, the Waiting For Guffman docu-style ultimately defeats Surf’s Up, because characters should only be talking to the audience when there’s something desperately important and/or funny that the audience must know right now. By definition, in a fake-u-doc, they’re killing time because they have nowhere else to be, which is the joke. Real people with nowhere else to be can be hilarious. However, without more information on why the penguin surfing documentary must be made, these birds are basically wasting our goddamn time.

Visually, the movie is stunning. The voicework ranges from adequate (James Woods phoning it in) to good (Jeff Bridges riffing on his Big Lebowski character) The penguins are cute if indistinctive, and Chicken Joe (Jon Heder) the sidekick has some great moments. But it all adds up to a profoundly mediocre film that is not funny enough to justify its laziness.

This movie only wants to be loved, surf some waves and make some money. Which is fine. But I’m thinking only the second is going to happen, and even then, the movie doesn’t make a convicing case as to why we should care. Will kids like it? Hell, maybe. But against Pixar, even Cars, this thing doesn’t have a chance.

Rating: * * Stars (Out of 5)

P.S. The less said about the scene where the Jeff Bridges penguin pees on the Shia Lebouf penguin, the better.

SMOKIN' ACES: REVIEW

2007-01-28T22:25:00.000-08:00

“Make it make sense!” pleads Ryan Reynolds to Andy Garcia.

Wrong line, wrong movie, wrong person to ask, Mr. Reynolds: Andy Garcia has been in more turkeys than are worth mentioning, and he doesn’t have any answers for you as to what the hell is going on and why you signed up to do it.

Ryan Reynolds is arguably the lead of Smoking Aces, which is writer/director Joe Caranahan’s craptatstic follow-up to his solid Narc. Reynolds and Ray Liotta (also in Narc, and much better) play FBI agents who learn of a plot to assassinate Buddy “Aces” Israel (Jeremy Piven) a drugged-out mob snitch.

Isreal has a floor to himself at a Lake Tahoe Casino, where he spends his days doing cocaine, grimacing at hookers and berating his underlings. He’s about to sign a deal with Andy Garcia (played with dead-on accuracy by Andy Garcia) to give up la cosa nostra, and so the mob decides to sign a deal with anyone with a gun to kill him: $1,000,000 to the man, woman, Ben Affleck or neo nazi who can successfully retrieve the heart of Mr. Israel. I can only imagine what Jon Stewart or Steven Colbert could do with a premise entitled “Bring Me The Still Beating Heart of Entourage’s Jeremy Piven,” and believe me, I’d rather write about it and you’d rather read about it, but on we go.

So the premise is basically, ‘shoot-out at the casino.’ Throwing reality and logic out the window for the moment, this isn’t a necessarily terrible idea. Every quirky version of hit man and violent maniac you can think of leaps at the bait, resulting in carnage and ironic bullets flying every which way. Like Lock Stock or Casino Royale or Ocean’s 11, this movie looks like it’s cobbled out of old parts with new polish, which can be worth watching.

But after the first 20 minutes of set up and one-liners, a deep dread begin to set in, as one realizes that for any action movie to work, you have to at least care what happens to the cardboard cut-outs. Die Hard became a trilogy not because of the big bangs, but because of John McClane. This, on the other hand, isn’t Die Hard. Or Die Hard With a Vengeance. Hell, it isn’t even Die Hard 2: Die Harder

I often thought of 3,000 Miles To Graceland during this long two hours, in the same way that a shark-attack victim would think of Jaws. No, that’s not fair: 3,000 Miles To Graceland had Kevin Costner trying to be cool, which is something I would not wish on my worst enemy.

But Smoking Aces is a carrier of many of the same genetic diseases that plagued Graceland: no control over tone, no sense of coherency in plot-building or action choreography, and no characters worth giving a damn about. They’re all potentially interesting yet disappointingly thin sketches: the quasi-lesbian female assassin team, the three random Boston tough guys (lead by Ben Affleck, natch), two different ‘man-of-a-thousand-faces’ murderers, and the random neo-nazi punk guys. I say random because their accents seem to change at the drop of a hat, two of them keep trying to hump one another and they barely have any dialogue. They do sure like killing though, hyuck.

One by one (or in some cases, all at once) these bad-anime esque caricatures off one another, while Israel does more drugs and the FBI guys run around shouting at people. Oh, and for little to no reason, Matthew Fox (LOST) plays a nerdy security guard who is not long for this world, and a kid who has ADD tries to karate chop one of the hit men in the balls. I mention the kid because, he easily took up about 5 minutes of the movie (complete with three slow-mo shots,) and then we never seem him again. It’s less that we want a pay off and more, what the hell was that about.

What the hell is any of this movie about? If it’s a shooting gallery, why do the action scenes come in such abbreviated clips that it’s impossible to enjoy them, much less follow them? If it’s tongue in cheek, why the almost-serious scenes between characters that are-they MUST be- written by by computer, featuring “You sold us out!” and “This wasn’t part of the deal!” Why the scenes between Piven and his (ha!) entourage where it almost seems like someone is acting, only to be interrupted by jizz jokes? Why do characters sometimes die after one bullet wound, but others take about 15 to die? And if all the bodies and the carnage were leading up to the howlingly awful twist ending, don’t you think that’s what the movie should have, I don’t know, been more about? Why? I’ll tell you why. Because Joe Carnahan is a god-damn genius, and he doesn’t care who knows it.

Smoking Aces is a direct-to-video, masturbatory Snatch rip-off peppered with Usual-Suspect twist pills, so that you feel less jerked around by the time that it’s over. The effect is putting an anti-bacterial bandaid on a gushing blood wound: it ain’t going to help. This movie (spoiler alert, if you actually like pain and plan on seeing this movie) kills Ben Affleck in the first 20 minutes, and it still isn’t enough to make it worth watching.

Actually, truth in reporting: worth watching is one character: the lawyer with no pants, played by Jason Bateman (Arrested Development). I’m not sure what he was doing in the movie, I’m not sure why he had no pants on or why he had half of a bunny suit in his hotel room, but he at least was a loser in an original, painfully hilarious way. “Could you do me a favor?” he asks, “when you find Isreal… could you rape him? Just, just, rape him. God, I hope he resists when you catch him. I hope he bruises easily.” I’m not saying his character was tasteful or even likeable, but at least he was different, at least he brings more to the table than a desire to look cool while holding a gun.

I will say this for Smoking Aces: for all of it’s wretched excess and dumb-dumb writing, I was not bored. I was appalled, I was insulted, I was incredulous, but I was also glued to my seat as a slack-jawed, bug-eyed spectator of liquid horror. This is the sort of movie where, after shooting Ben Affleck in the face and playing his jaw like a puppet, a man later sits on his own chainsaw in the middle of a gun battle. You cannot help but wonder what lows that kind of movie will sink to next.

RATING: * Star (out of 5)