More signs of the crapocalypse: Tiffany vs. Deborah Gibson edition
According to this, Tiff and Deb are going to wrestle in a swamp for a made-for-teevee movie.
Up next, Deborah Gibson, Tiffany, Lorenzo Lamas, Christopher Lambert, and the resurrected corpse of Gary Coleman star in "Mega Snakes on a Plane vs. 2012 Transformers: Part 2: The Revengining".
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Today's installment, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, is as strong an argument against comic-book movies as anyone could hope to make.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Which is not to say that watching this almost unbelievably ill-conceived grunt-a-thon is totally devoid of yuks. There's lots to laugh at, really. But it's mostly painful. Sure, it's depressing to see decent actors like Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber fuck around like this; but it's even more dispiriting to realize they, individually, made as much off this one film alone as I'm likely to net in my lifetime.
Anything positive to say? Well, there's lots of explosions, and awful dialog... so far, no. Hmm. That one guy from the Black Eyed Peas or something is in this... still no. He gets killed... nope. Not doin' it for me. Oh! I know. There's a lot of scenes, shot from above, where Wolvie looks up to the heavens and shouts "NOOOOOO" for a really long time. Er... yeah, this blew.
What is it about comic book movies that pisses me off so much? In this case, it's several things.
In the opening sequence, Wolverine is a child in the 1840s. His father is killed by some guy. (Here, incidentally, 1:30 into the film, is the first of many 'NOOOO' shots.) You never find out why. Kiddie Wolverine grows claws, stabs his father's killer. Killer grunts, says he (killer) is Wolverine's father, dies. Everyone present appears to buy this, including Wolverine. Wolverine, and some kid (Victor) whom he now knows to be his brother, flee into the woods because... well, actually, I don't know why. It's perfunctory and silly and has no place in the film. None of this should be in here. It's crap; it should have been cut out. But it wasn't.
Then comes the films' credit sequence, where Wolverine and his brother Victor are shown fighting in a series of (iconic American) wars. There they are, decked out in Union blue, knocking Johnny Cracker on the head. And faaaaade, and they're doughboys, giving Jerry the solid drubbing he'd so roundly deserved after the Somme. Guess what comes next? Correct! Storming the beach at Normandy! Next? If you said Korea, you fail, because that's too obscure for this film's target audience. Nope, it's 'Nam, baby. Where, as we find out, Victor's bloodlust has become too much for Wolverine to bear. Victor's out of control, as evidenced by his killing an American soldier. Wolverine intervenes, preventing Victor from killing any more white people, but it's too late. Both he and Victor are sentenced to die by firing squad.
Why do I hate this sequence so much? Because, for starters, why are two apparently ageless Canadians fighting in the U.S. Army in one easily-recognized war after another? What, they just like killing? There's plenty of opportunity all around the world to kill people. If killing's your thing, you don't need a war to do it. You certainly don't need to be part of a highly regimented, poorly-paid outfit like the U.S. Army. I highly doubt that whoever wrote this screenplay has ever been anywhere near an actual military unit, let alone a war. Life in the military is crashingly dull most of the time; there's no way these guys would be career soldiers. And during wartime, it's immeasurably worse. It's boredom and privation and shitty food and no women and farting, smelly, horny, desperate, terrified men everywhere. It sucks balls. If these two just like killing that much, why aren't they with the Belgians in the Congo, or the French in Algeria, or, dare I say it, with the Einsatzgruppen on the eastern front?
Wolverine: THE TRUE STORY
Well, because Wolverine at least is supposed to be a good guy, deep down inside, and hence American. Also, because contemporary illiterates don't know jack shit about fronts Americans didn't fight on.
Anyhoo, it gets worse, because in saunters a slimy Army officer named Stryker (these names, sigh) who offers the brothers positions in an all-mutant unit, wherein they go about killing the shit out of all kinds of people again. This causes Wolverine to once again have a crisis of conscience, this time precipitating his leaving the unit for the wilds of Canada. This, too, bothers me. In one sequence, we're treated to mutant killing-porn, as our squad makes mincemeat out of a bunch of guys guarding some building in Lagos, Nigeria. Who they are, who they work for, what they are doing with their lives is never mentioned. Remember that, because it will be important in a minute. For now, just remember that Wolverine doesn't blink at the carnage. In the next sequence, the squad is holding an African village hostage, demanding to obtain the location of some chunk of rock that you know what fuck it, it doesn't matter. Stryker and Victor are all about to go medieval on the villagers when Wolverine has his moral crisis.
So what's wrong with this? It's in the subtext. The men guarding the building, those poor dopes, well, their deaths obviously aren't worth bothering oneself over. They're the bad guys, duh. They must be. They're henchmen. They had guns and shot at our heroes when attacked. They worked for a gangster or something. Never mind that maybe they'd just signed up for a bit of standing around to collect a paycheck. Maybe they're providing for fourteen siblings and an AIDS-stricken mother. Hell, maybe they're just some poor illiterate sod yanked out of the village from the next scene, an AK-47 shoved roughly into their trembling teenaged hands. You know, like what actually happens in Africa. Fuck all that, we have to show that the mutants are badasses, and that means lots of people are gonna die. Now, the villagers, that's a different story. There are they to demonstrate Wolverine's innate goodness, therefore, they must be spared. So much the better if they are weak and cowering, as that just makes them more pathetic.
God I hate this movie. Moving on.
We next encounter Wolverine living in Canada, in the sufficiently salt-of-the-Earth profession of logging. More easy-schmeasy, lazy character notes follow as his collar is shown to be as blue as his true-blue love for an oddly attractive schoolteacher in Nowhereville, Canada. Then... DUM DUM DUMM... the bad guys from his past resurface, including Victor, who is apparently on some kind of revenge-bender for some imagined slight. Hijinks ensue, Wolverine is betrayed over and over, lots and lots of people die. Wolverine is tricked by Stryker into undergoing "the most painful imaginable" operation to bond his skeleton with the ultra-strong metal Adamantium (don't ask) in order to make him into an unstoppable killing machine. Upon discovering he's been set up yet again Wolverine flees.
Actually, I just realized something. Almost everyone in this movie that demonstrates even the beginnings of human decency gets offed. No spoiler alert here. I'm just saying.
It gets shitty and stays that way for a remarkably long time, until the final sequence, when, unbelievably, it gets worse. Let me set the stage for you here. This movie has a villain. There's another character, a mutant with mind-control capabilities, who has been dicked over by the villian for years. Our mind-control-mutant (MCM) is lying on the ground, dying. Villain stands over MCM, about to deliver the coup de grâce, when MCM makes a final mind-control push on the villain. Now: MCM could have villain shoot himself, but no. Instead we get a vapid speech about how doing so "would make us no better than him", leaving villain alive to be villainous another day. It's pointless and awful in every respect and oh-so-comic-booky that it makes me want to puke. If you'll excuse me now I'll be off to get some pepto.
G.I. Joe – The Rise of Cobra
Sometimes I ask myself what my life is all about. Why I do what I do. Why I sit around in my free time and watch these awful movies. And sometimes, like after watching today's installment, G.I. Joe - The Rise of Cobra, I can't come up with any good answers.
I LIKE FRUIT CUPS DUUUUUHHH...
This is a film of determined and unrelenting stupidity. Coming from Stephen Sommers, who started out okay with The Mummy, got kinda 'meh' with The Mummy Returns, and dove headlong into worse-than-Uwe-Boll territory with the execrable, inexcusable Van Helsing, G.I. Joe manages — unbelievably — to be his worst film yet. Because the script was written by idiots.
So many questions. The general in charge of the Joes (Dennis Quaid, for some reason) knows "all about" Duke, but he didn't know that Duke was engaged to The Baroness (nee Anna DeCobray, cute) a mere four years previous... during the time when he, the general, was actively trying to recruit Duke, no less. Why? Because the script was written by idiots.
Christopher Eccleston, as our baddie, is an arms dealer. He has spent "billions of Euro and ten years" building four — count 'em, four — nanotech warheads for NATO, but he decides to steal them back surreptitiously. Indeed, this is what passes for plot here. Why he just doesn't make a couple more (after all, he owns the friggin' factory and all the parts and shit) is a question not only not answered, it remains unasked. Because the script was written by idiots.
The Baroness has to take over a particle accelerator in Paris to "weaponize" the stolen warheads. This makes no sense whatsoever, so WTF. Because the script was written by idiots.
Each warhead has an individual kill switch that renders it ineffective. One, and one switch only per warhead. You'd think someone would have ordered a couple of backup kill switches, but no. Because the script was written by idiots.
Scarlett mentions some fucking dribble so inane that I can't quite remember it clearly, but it had something to do with "emotions not being real scientifically" and that "they (emotions) can't be quantified" and therefore "they don't exist for me" or some such bollocks. This is supposed to be her character note, BTW. Because she graduated from college at the age of twelve and is some kind of genius, the scriptwriters though this was the sort of thing really smart people would say. Because the script was written by idiots.
Oh, there's lots of other things wrong with this movie, right down to the shite soundtrack and the clearly sub-par CGI, but mostly, it's the stupidity of the whole affair than proves most enervating. I actually found myself longing for a Michael Bay film during this. Maybe not one of the Transformers movies, but I dunno, The Island maybe. Just not this. Never again.
Cloverfield
NYC gets eaten again. Couldn't it have been Vegas? That I'd pay to see.
The key to understanding why today's installment, Cloverfield, is so bad is hidden in the DVD release's special features section. Specifically, the "Making of Cloverfield" short lays it all bare. Go ahead and watch it, I'll wait.
...
Okay, you're back. What did you notice about the 'making of' featurette? That's right. The self-congratulatory gushing about how they ad-libbed, how they made L.A. look like New York, how they "broke new ground in filmaking", and especially how they kept EVERYTHING A SECRET. The makers of Cloverfield were so wrapped up in, so enamored of, the way they were making the movie that they totally lost sight of what they were making.
Which, sadly, is comically bad. J.J. Abrams is a good storyteller, or at least is capable of telling compelling stories, and you can catch glimpses of what might have been. One of the painful aspects of this film—one of many—is that there's so, so many ways it could have been unbelievably awesome, hiding beneath the surface. But, being as intoxicated as they were with their own cleverness, the makers of Cloverfield completely botched the operation.
What's wrong here? The inconsistent verite doesn't work when there's a giant monster on the loose. Sure, the effects are spectacular at times, but that doesn't matter when one of the characters is able to place a call, on his cell phone, to his mother while hiding in the subway from the attacking monster. Not one cell phone on the entire eastern seaboard would be worth a tinker's damn in such a scenario, but Rob's magic phone connects like Sammy Sosa with a slowball. This isn't a minor gripe. It's a colossal, magnificent stupidity. So is the video camera with batteries potent enough to power an aircraft carrier.
But that's nothing. It gets so, so much worse. Again, the "making of" short holds the key. In it, Abrams mentions how he went to Japan, and how that got him thinking of Godzilla, and how iconic Godzy is over there, and how he wished "we" had "something like that". Umm, okay. Fair enough: Godzilla is iconic, and making an iconic monster is a worthwhile pursuit, I'll grant. But J.J., come on. Godzilla is iconic because Godzilla movies are about Godzilla. Godzilla movies aren't about immediately unlikeable Gen-Y crybabies. Godzilla movies are all about bringin' the noise and fucking up Tokyo. (Well, and also irritating, precocious children, but nothing's perfect.) Cloverfield's monster might be totally cool, but you don't see enough of it, ever, to really know. The footage of it is doled out in a miserly fashion, except in one staggeringly stupid sequence toward the end.
In between the nauseating shaky-cam hysterics, there's a lot of surprisingly tedious interaction between various non-entity characters. Actually "characters" is the wrong word, since there's no point in these people existing, let alone being featured in a movie. They're just there, alternatively panicking and staring blankly into space. Granted, the film makes a stab at providing a human element, and subsequent tension, by following some guy named Rob as he tries to find some chick he once banged amidst the chaos, but I guarantee you won't give a shit. You won't like Rob or his idiot brother or his idiot friend. You won't remember their female companions because they don't say or do anything remotely interesting, and you sure as hell won't care what happens to them, provided it happens quickly.
What were they thinking? Seriously, why did anyone think, even for a moment, that audiences would identify with this troupe of assclowns? I've been searching high and low for an answer, but I'll admit, I'm completely stumped. If I didn't know better, I'd think that Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, that satanic duo, had written this. No, on second thought, as bad as their characters are, they're at least fleshed out to the "stereotype" or "parody" level. Rob and Co. here... hell, they could have just propped up cardboard cutouts of Abercrombie and Fitch models in front of a greenscreen. Add some ADR of alternating shrieking and mumbling, throw in a few explosions, and you're set. Cloverfield 2: The Apocalypse coming soon to the bargain-bin at T.J. Maxx.
The Hangover
THE PAIN, THE PAIN
Comedy is the riskiest and most demanding of all performance arts. When it's done wrong, there is no saving it. This applies to comedy as a cinematic genre, of course. To me, a bad-movie aficionado, bad films can nevertheless be entertaining: the thriller that fails to thrill, the mockbuster non-stravaganza, the dud romance and the overwrought melodrama all can provide top-notch hilarity, at least in principle. But a bad comedy? There is nothing worse than an unfunny comedy, as there is nothing to be done with them. Ask the guys from Best Brains, the folks what done brought MST3K to life. There's a reason why they only did one straightforward comedy in ten years — 1967's Catalina Caper. Namely, it sucked. It really was one of the least funny MST3K episodes, right up there with Monster A-Go-Go.
Now before I slip into full-bore rant mode, let me make some preliminary, clarifying statements about today's installment, The Hangover. Far as I can tell, its critics fall into two camps: outright morons complaining of its lack of "star power", and those that focus on its crudity, its juvenilia, and its sexism. And fair enough, as the humor is crude, juvenile, and sexist. But that doesn't bother me, not in the least. What bothers me is that its humor isn't funny. Not once, for that matter, did I find myself wishing for Vince Vaughn or Jack Black to replace Zach Galifianakis. I was too busy wishing for the pain to end.
Unbelievably, Roger Ebert actually seemed to have liked this movie, but all he gives by way of explanation is "The Hangover is a funny movie, flat out, all the way through. Its setup is funny. Every situation is funny. Most of the dialogue is funny almost line by line"... Now, to be fair, the setup is funny, or at least has the potential to be funny. Three comically mismatched adventurers come to in a trashed hotel room, missing money, teeth, memory, and their engaged buddy, the man they were supposed to be watching out for on his last bachelor fling. Throw in Galifanakis (one of the funniest men alive), Ed Helms, and Jeffery Fuckin' Tambor ferchissakes, and you should have had comedy gold. What you get is awful, a punishingly unfunny waste of time. It's a fiasco of comedy fails.
There's three fundamental problems here. Number one, the first thing this movie does after the opening credits roll is jump the shark, and it continues to jump every freakin' shark it can find, as a matter of course, from beginning to end. With no context, and no setup, Galifianakis drops his pants to reveal he's wearing weird, assless underwear. I mean we're not into the movie proper for twenty seconds and they're already dropping their pants? Not a good sign, but it only gets worse when the second problem becomes evident: there's not a single sympathetic character. NOTE TO HOLLYWOOD: there has to be a sympathetic character. HAS TO. Get that through your thick skulls. For addlepated young adults raised on reality television it may be different, but in a comedy populated mostly by self-absorbed weirdos it is crucial that you have an everyman/straightman/recognizable human being as a foil. If Arrested Development were nothing but Gob and Lucille and Tobias acting nutters, it would run aground. So while Michael Bluth isn't the funniest character in the show, he is the most important, the emotional anchor, the reason it all works. He's like The Dude's Rug: he pulls the room together. The Hangover has no emotional center, no real human beings. Instead it has caricatures: the weird guy, the sleazebag, the pussywhipped milquetoast.
But it's the third of the film's fundamental flaws that really puts the pain in this prescription. Every joke, every setup is really really stupid, and really really obvious, and the film grimly, determinedly, grinds through them anyway. Early in the film, the characters discover that the bathroom of their hotel suite is occupied by a tiger—an actual, live tiger. Now, this is already enormously over the top, unfunny, and unecessary, but if they'd just let it go at that maybe I'd forgive it. But no. They have Galifianakis go into the bathroom, do a double-take on the tiger, and go into a spaz routine that would shame Lou Costello. Whereupon he goes out and informs Brad Cooper, who doesn't believe him, who then sticks his head through the door and... Jesus, it's tedious even providing a synopsis. And the whole goddamned movie is like that. Helm's girlfriend is a ludicrously unlikeable hag, a miserable, glass-shard-radiating bitch, but The Hangover won't let that one come and go. Ohhh no, you get not one, not two, but a seemingly uncountable number of scenes in which Helms grits his teeth and suffers the presence of this castrating hound of hell, and the only thing missing is the laughtrack. In another scene, a some fat fucking kid with a face any decent person feels compelled to punch gets to shoot Galifianakis in the face with a taser. Not only to they telegraph this one, they do it in slow motion.
So it goes. One shitty, drawn-out gag after another parades across the screen. At one and 3/4 hours it feels as long as the siege of Stalingrad, but nowhere near as funny. Even the movie's soundtrack sucks, a pitiless melange of cheap-pimpin' hood rap and shitty autotuned covers of pop songs. It is aggressively, wantonly bad. If this movie were a person I would tell them to get the fuck out of my house and never darken my door again. I would then threaten them with a baseball bat. God, I hate this movie.
Drag Me To Hell
Drag Me to the Theater is more like it
If you live within, say, two hundred miles of an Indian casino of some sort, you'll likely have run across an ad for a concert at the casino featuring some washed-up band of sixties-or-seventies-or-eighties has-beens. Now, there's nothing inherently pathetic about old bands touring. But when the bands are museum pieces, having produced no new music in the decades since their last hit, or are pale imitations of their former selves, consisting of only one original member or even no original members, that's when things start smelling fishy. When fifty- and sixty year-olds haul their creaky bodies up on stage and shake their flabby butts to some insipid pop jingle for the benefit of their even fatter audience, the members of which harbor only the vaguest memories of the band in the first place (except for the one or two really really crazy fans)... yeah, that just makes me want to cry. It's even worse in bands where there was a decided binomial distribution in charisma, and the charismatic guy isn't around anymore, like the DKs without Jello, Van Halen without Diamond Dave, or the Sunshine Band without K.C.
You may be asking why I'm bringing this up. It's not because I've been to Konoktai Harbor recently; rather, it's because I just sat through Drag Me To Hell, a film whose closest analog is one of those dottering, washed-up one-hit-wonder casino bands no longer in possession of their former cool-as-ice frontman. In this case, it's Sam Raimi trying to recapture the the funky comedic horror of his early successes, the Evil Dead triptych, particularly Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn. Problem is, Raimi doesn't have Bruce Campbell along for the ride this time, or even anyone vaguely like him. It's not like he found even a Sammy Hagar to sub for David Lee Roth; it's like they got that other guy from Wham! to sub for David Lee Roth. Raimi applies the ED2 formula ruthlessly, but without Campbell's combination of smarmy charmball and sympathetic put-upon everyman, it fails harder than a Bond villain's henchman.
Everything about this movie malfunctioned. Every gag fell flat, every scare merely annoys (and can you PLEASE lay off the jump scares, guys? That shit's as dead as Dillinger) and even the patented Raimi gross-outs are laughable for all the wrong reasons. The harder Raimi tries, the worse the result. Most aspects of this movie are either (a) completely useless, having no justification for their existence whatsoever or (b) grimly, comically awry, missing their mark by miles.
Let's start with the characters. Our protagonist Christine (Alison Lohman) is a cypher; a former farm girl (and "Pork Queen"), the brief allusions to her childhood and alcoholic mother are more interesting than anything about her contemporary life as a loan officer. She has an aggressively bland boyfriend (Justin Long) who is such a nonentity I can't remember his name and I just watched the damned thing. His father is clueless, his mother is a horrible shrew. Christine's boss, while ostensibly a man in his forties, rather has the soul of a fickle fourteen-year-old girl. There's also Stu, a mind-bogglingly scummy co-worker, and some fortune teller guy who I think they call Ram Dass. And, last but certainly not least, the Crazy Old Gypsy Lady Whose Name I Also Forgot Already, who is quite possibly the worst human being ever.
See, Crazy Old Gypsy (hereafter: Cog) goes to Christine's bank, looking for yet another extension on her mortgage. You can just taste the tension already, huh? Anyhoo, Christine declines Cog her third extension, because Christine's bucking for the open Assistant Manager position and... well, I don't really know what that has to do with anything but the movie seems to think the two things are related and fuck it, Christine tells her no. Cog goes all old-world on our heroine, prostrating herself on the floor and basically acting like a moron. Cog accuses Christine of "shaming" her, which apparently is a grievous sin since Cog is "a proud woman". Now let's examine this claim a bit more closely. At this point, we've seen Cog tapping her filthy, cracked fingernails on Christine's desk, hacking up her lungs and spitting into her hand, taking out her rotten dentures and cleaning them with her handkerchief, and throwing herself on the floor of a bank and wailing like denied child. Yep, the very picture of pride, an image confirmed a moment later when security guards escort Cog from the bank out to her filthy, battered tuna boat of a car. Clearly Cog is a woman of immense dignity.
Indeed, Cog's dignity is so deep and fundamental to her character that later that evening, when she breaks into Christine's car for a little Michael Myers-style stalking, she... well, she waits in Christine's car in order to ambush her. Kinda speaks for itself. There then follows the single most ludicrous fight scene in the history of cinema, and yes, I meant to say that. I've seen the fight between Sly Stallone and David Carradine in Death Race 2000. This is crazier.
It's also when the film officially falls apart. This is the moment when Raimi pulls out that ol' black magic. It's when you're supposed to think, "hoo boy, here it comes! We're in for a real old-school treat!" So: you're at the casino, some opening band no one's ever heard of has come and gone, and "Black Sabbath" has taken the stage, or at least a drummer, a bassist, and a guitarist calling themselves Black Sabbath are on stage. Not Geezer Butler and Bill Ward and Tony Iommi, but whatever. They're playing say, the intro to War Pigs, and you're thinking this just might be okay and you're waiting for Ozzy to jump out on stage and belt out the opening lines, but instead of Ozzy it's some guy who used to sing backup for Mott The Hoople or something. Your drink is watery, your wallet is empty and you realize it's going to be a long, disturbing night.
That's what this fight scene is like.
Cut to the chase: Cog curses Christine. This particular curse is nasty, since it involves summoning a demon, a "Lamia" to torment Christine for three days, then, literally, drag her off to an eternity of torment. This is such a immense stupidity that I can't even wrap my fucking head around it, but I'll try. There's two things in particular about this that piss me off:
- Lamiae are female; indeed in many myths, they serve as the dark side of femininity itself. From Aristophanes to Samuel Coleridge's "Christabel", the Lamia has been portrayed many, many times, in many, many ways, but never as a male, as in this movie. Why they did this is a total mystery.
- The curse subjects the victim to eternal damnation in Hell. Regardless of what one thinks of the Christian world-view and Heaven and Hell and all that, it's pretty well established that in that cosmology, God and God alone decides who goes to Hell, not some Chrysler-driving old hag with shitty dentures. No one in the entire movie questions this conceit in the least degree.
The rest of the movie has one of two tones: long, lingering shots of Christine sloooooowly walking towards some threatening sound somewhere, and laughably off-the-mark attempts at Evil Dead-style gross-outs. None of it works, because no one—not one single character—is likable. There's no identification with any of these drips, so there's no drama, no tension. There's no fun to be had in the levitating, possessed-by-demons onlookers, or the splattering heads, sprays of blood, popping eyeballs, or showers of maggoty vomit, and damnit, there should be. But it's just not there. It's just that sad simulacra of a once-decent band going through the motions in order to pay off the IRS. And there's no Bruce Campbell, either. WTF is up with that?
Terror Train
Special holiday / childhood flashback / inaugural edition!
Yes folks, it's that time of the year for special treats. For having that extra cookie, that one more piece of fudge, the oh-hell-one-for-the-road-can't-hurt martini. In other words, it's time to revel in self-abuse because come January tenth or fifteenth or so, we'll all be back in the gym, eatin' South Beach and basically hewing the line.
One of three slashers JLC was in that year alone.
Basically hewing the line. Yeah, I'll clean up my physical diet, but psychically the poison parade will continue unabated. Remember, I watch bad movies so you don't have to. I take the punishment and pass the savings on to you. In that spirit, I'm announcing the inauguration of my new series: Instantly Regrettable. Wherein I trawl through the bottom of Netflix's Instant-Watch barrel, finding only the choicest muddy bottom-feeders and subjecting my eyeballs to the fail.
Seeing as how this is a serious endeavor, I've decided to ease into it a tad and kick off the series by revisiting an old fave from my childhood: 1980's scream-queen Canuxploitation classic, Terror Train, directed by the hilariously named Roger Spottiswoode. This is the real deal, folks: Jaime Lee Curtis herself is in this, not some second-rate imitator. Ben Johnson (the very definition of 'venerable') and David Copperfield round out the star power.
So much for the film's strengths. The rest of the film is comprehensible only if you understand the period's slasher cinema, which is to say, if you were an adolescent boy in the late 70s-early 80s. Or rather, if you paid any attention to the string of Halloween knock-offs that sought to progressively out-do each other in the wacky-kill department. (A progression whose absurd apogee was predicted and satirized in 1981's Student Bodies). The vaporously thin plot centers around a group of frat boys and their girlfriends celebrating their college graduation with a rail-bound, costumed bacchanalia. Unfortunately for our characters, they all played a part in a frat prank gone wrong three years earlier, in which a timid pledge named Kenny was sexually humiliated with a corpse. Kenny was driven insane by the prank, and now he's back for revenge. There's no doubt whatsoever that Kenny is the killer; the film tries to build tension via the masquerade. Since everyone is masked, Kenny can hide in plain sight, a conceit that the film milks dry.
Curtis stars as Alana, who as a student was suckered into pranking Kenny by her easily duped boyfriend, Mo. Mo is clearly second fiddle to the frat's charismatic natural leader and prank mastermind, Doc (Hart Bochner). ( I'll skip ahead a bit and let you know that one of the film's most entertaining sequences features Doc in a hysterical fit, screeching like a wildcat. A feminine, feminine wildcat). Alana has always (PLOT POINT) been remorseful for mindfucking Kenny, but Doc and Mo are just too gangsta to care.
As her brethren start to croak, Alana, assisted by the train's conductor Carne (Johnson) tries to find out who Kenny is. Their suspicions immediately fall on The Magician, played by David Copperfield's hair—no, I'm mistaken, the man himself is under that fountain of hair. Copperfield was hired specifically for the party (because nothing says frat party like a magic act) along with an overdosed-on-quaaludes funk band whose guitarist totally looks like Janice from the Muppet Show. Copperfield's act provides the film's only true glance at "entertainment", and only partly because Copperfield is a gifted magician. His sleight-of-hand, while impressive, takes a back seat to his act's resemblance to Gob Bluth's. If you're an Arrested Development fan you simply have to watch this movie, for the magic show alone.
While Curtis and Johnson seek to track down the killer, the bodies start to pile up, in more and more absurd ways. Indeed, the kills, while certainly tame by today's standards, really take the cake. They are ludicrously improbable; all the more so when you recall all this is supposed to be happening on a moving train. After about an hour, the tedium sets in, but at just over 90 minutes, it doesn't drag on too long. If you sit this thing out to the end, you'll be treated to several tiny little bizarre pleasures, none of which are substantial in their own right, but which add up to a worthwhile bad movie experience. Watch for the casual drug use (a sure sign it was filmed in '79) like the scene where a student offers a conductor a joint (an offer readily accepted). In fact, a little chronic is advised to help you through this thing.
Star Trek (2009)
Star Trek. Shatner-free since 2009.
I kind of hate this movie, but only kind of. Actually, some of it is fine, but there's aspects of it that plain piss me off, so I'm ambivalent. It's not the retconning; I'm familiar enough with the Trek universe but by no means a committed Trekker, so I wasn't concerned about 'authenticity' or the like. It was the opening credits that got me started.
No, it's not that J.J. Abrams directed. I like pretty much everything he's done, except for the hilariously godawful Cloverfield. And yes, all the action sequences are in confuse-O-vision™, but that may or may not have been his fault. It was, rather, the names Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. If you follow the links you'll see that they are responsible for scripting that cinematic Auschwitz, that mortal offense against everything decent and worth defending in the world, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. So let's just say we weren't off to a good start.
Lest there be any confusion, I'll state right up front that Star Trek is nowhere near as bad a movie as T:RotF. Damning with faint praise, maybe, but there are worthwhile aspects on hand here. Overall, the primary cast does a decent job. The young Spock (Zachary Quinto) is in particular a slightly more believable creature than Leonard Nimoy's iconic Vulcan, but this probably has more to do with the character reflecting modern sensibilities than anything else. I also like seeing Simon Pegg (as Scotty) and Karl Urban (as Bones) in movies; they're good actors and deserve the work, but they're given fuck-all to do here (for Urban, it's standing around looking pained, and Pegg is tasked with comic gurgling). Really, the only truly ridiculous character here is Anton Yelchin's Chekov; Bullwinkle cartoons had more subtle Russian accents. Chris Pine does fine as Kirk, but his character is insufferable by design. There's something of a running gag the film makes in a Freudian acknowledgement of this—young Kirk gets beaten and/or strangled by another character, on average, once every ten minutes. It happens with enough regularity to be the trigger for a drinking game.
Which leads me to the first of this film's fatal flaws. There's no chance, not even a mathematical one, of any main character dying, so there's no point in going to great lengths to show them in mortal peril, as the film's many action sequences do. Zero tension is generated thusly, because you know they will live long and prosper and all that shit. Abrams and crew try to inject the movie with the adrenaline of gee-whiz visuals and crash-bang-kapow in order to keep its heart beating, but it just doesn't work.
Because really all they have to work with are the memories of anyone who's seen any part of the Star Trek universe so far, which is statistically everyone. They can trot out a character, and no matter how clever they are with the winking and nudging, they simply have to reference that character's tropes. (Scotty's "I'm giving her all I can, cap'n!" actually sorta-kinda works, but McCoy's "Damnit, I'm a doctor not a physicist!" is 100% affectation. There was just no good place in the script for McCoy's "I'm a doctor" line, but that doesn't stop Orci and Kurtzman, our fearless duo. No, they just crammed it in there anyway.) This can make for good fun (like when Ensign Nobody picks the red jumpsuit for the aweigh team mission, you know he's gonna bite it) but it's not a way to build tension and it's not a way to generate interest in these people as human sentient beings. What you need, at the least, is a story worth telling, and Orci and Kurtzman don't have one.
Instead, what we get is some gobbledygook about time-traveling Romulans, led by a cat named Nero (Eric Bana), in a huge-ass spaceship, looking to destroy Vulcan and Earth because Spock failed, as very, very old man, to prevent Romulus from being burned to a crisp by a supernova. Key to Nero's plan is a giant laser drill that bores a hole to the victim planet's core, wherin "red matter" is injected, causing the planet to turn into a black hole. Said drill hangs from Nero's ship by a huge chain. Oh, and it takes like twenty minutes to drill to the planet's core.
And this is what leads us to the second, and really really unforgivable, of the film's fatal flaws. Because when Nero attacks Vulcan, of all places, the entire planet's 6-billion plus inhabitants just stand around with blank looks on their faces as if to say, huh, ain't that some shit. Apparently it occurs to no one to just shoot the stupid thing out of the sky (a tactic that proves unsurprisingly effective when Nero attacks Earth in the same manner). Because of this mass collective failure of (ahem) logic, Vulcan gets destroyed.
Now, let me be clear. It's not the time-travel retconning part of "Vulcan gets destroyed" that pisses me off; it's the mental crotch kick of the way the movie goes about destroying Vulcan that pisses me off. It's a middle finger jammed into your cerebral cortex. It's pure Orci and Kurtzman, and it hurts.
There's some minor-in-comparison WTFs here as well, like the third-year starfleet officer candidates getting motion sick on the shuttle leaving Earth, or Kirk's wide-eyed, unsophisticated, and totally out-of-character farmboy ooh-ahh routine as they approach the Enterprise for the first time. Harder to swallow, though, is the fate of old Spock. Nimoy returns as the aged Spock (God bless him and all that, but he's really really old now and his voice is distractingly 'denturey') who was marooned by Nero on a desolate, frozen Hoth-like world for thirty some-odd years. Now there's two things about this that make absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever:
- In a flashback, the movie shows Spock witnessing the destruction of Vulcan by merely looking up into the sky. Indeed, this was the reason Nero marooned him there, so he could witness the destruction of his planet the way Nero had to witness the destruction of Romulus. But Vulcan, in the sky of the other planet, is quite large, larger than our moon appears. Let's say that the moon was turned into a black hole suddenly. Would life on Earth be, shall we say, affected in any way by this eventuality? Because this frozen planet seems somehow strangely immune to the cosmic turmoil right next door. Note that this is not explained away; rather is is simply never mentioned.
- Come to that, how is it even possible in the Trek-iverse that this planet is all but uninhabited? There's a Starfleet friggin' outpost on the planet, some "fifteen miles" from the cave that Spock has lived in for thirty years. Why didn't Spock go to the damned outpost and get his geriatric ass saved? Why, for that matter, on a class-M planet less than a hour's travel from Vulcan, is there only one lonely Starfleet outpost? Why isn't the planet terraformed, climate-controlled and populated all to hell?
Never mind. It hardly matters, as no one involved in the production of this thing seems to give a damn about such matters. Then again, this is coming from the writers who brought you T:RotF. Here, the destruction of Vulcan (i.e., the deliberate genocide of billions) is only a plot device intended to get Spock to show emotion. Here, Kirk's backstory (including his notorious fiddling with the Kobiashi Maru simulation) is ham-handed, silly, and cliche-laden. Those of you looking for a little logical continuity along with your retroactive continuity are going to be sorely disappointed. Fanbois and the easily amused will find enough in-jokes and pretty shiny things to to keep them distracted for two hours, but everyone else can give this a pass.
Titanic
the loooooooooove boat...
I can remember thinking, way back in 1997, that Titanic epitomized a very disturbing trend society seemed to be following. Like the Super Bowl, it seemed like spectacle for the sake of spectacle, a vast shiny jewel in Hollywood's shimmery kingdom of desire. And so, out of counter-culturey disdain, I avoided, assiduously, ever watching it, claiming that dedicating the purchase price of a ticket and three hours of my life was akin to paying tithe to Pharaoh. My hipster credentials thus secured (having previously been placed in some jeopardy by my decision to cave in to pressure and watch Forrest Gump) I continued with my life, only to see Hollywood's offerings become baser and baser.
Well, fate has finally caught up with me. I can now say I've joined with the rest of the world and seen this movie. Yes, I watched it on purpose. No one held a gun to my head, though at times I'd wished they had. God help me, but I have seen Titanic.
I happen to think that a straightforward review is pointless, since I was obviously the last man in the world to have seen it. Instead, I have a lot of questions that perhaps you, dear reader, may be able to answer:
- What were they thinking?
- Why was it so very, very, long?
- Why did Billy Zane wear more makeup than Kate Winslett?
- Why didn't Jack just climb up on the door with Rose?
- What did happen to Sven, anyway?
And so on. There's a lot in this movie that's just plain silly, and I'm not talking about Jack's lampoony what's-a-matta-yoo Italian friend. You ever been to a funereal, and heard a well-meaning person say awkward weird things in a misguided attempt at consoling someone? And the bereaved, whatever they may actually think about the gobbeldygook that just came out of the well-meaning person's mouth, they just smile and say thank you and tell themselves well they meant well, that's what matters. I mean silly in that sense. For instance: at the very tippy-end of the movie, when Rose goes off to her reward, she meets up again with Jack, in the entrance to the rich people's ballroom. Why Jack's ghost would be allowed to dally about for seventy some-odd years with the ghosts of his social superiors, we'll never know. Why they'd all be waiting around for Rose to show up, that's another mystery. Why they would all applaud—let alone care, or even notice—when Jack and Rose kiss is a deep, fathomless enigma. Really, it makes no sense. And yet, like the polite bereaved person at the funereal, we are supposed to smile and say thank you and feel appreciative to that wonderful nice movie that meant well and just wanted you to feel better.
But all of that pales in comparison to the biggest WTF the movie has to offer. It's obvious early on that Rose is still, after all these years, in possession of the diamond, so I guess any tension around that plotline was supposed to be based around the "when will she reveal it" question. I mean, really, what else would she do with it, toss it in the fucking ocean OH MY WTFBBQ did she just do that ferchrissakes.
This is what takes Titanic from a mere overlong, overhyped, overpraised, tedious slog and into the realm of pure evil. Out of all of the things that Rose could have done with this extremely valuable jewel, this extremely valuable jewel of some historical significance no less, she decided to throw it in the ocean where it can do no good for no one. She could have sold it, started a charitable organization, and helped thousands. She could have eliminated vitamin-A deficiency blindness worldwide, or eased the tremendous (but easily treatable) suffering caused by anaemia in Southeast Asia. Hell, she could have bought iPods for deaf kids, or something, anything, but no. She tosses it in the fucking ocean.
This isn't a minor gripe. This is a big deal, all the more so because we're supposed to like it. It's supposed to be a grand romantic gesture; it's supposed to make to you go ahhh, isn't that lovely. No, it's not lovely. It's absurdly selfish. It's childish. It's plain stupid and despicable and you're supposed to like it.
Well, I for one don't like it. So there.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Holy Christ. I have never hated a film as much as I hate Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I'll get to the specifics in a minute, but first I need to just relax, collect myself, and breathe. Calm down before I break something. Soak in the Buddhadharma a bit; appeal to Avilokiteshvara, Bodhisattva of Compassion, for wisdom and understanding; om mani padme hum...
look upon this and despair
Okay. It's not just that this film is dumb. It's not just that it's inchoate, sub-juvenile, noisy mayhem (it is a Michael Bay film, after all—what did you expect?) It's not even that it's an utter, damnably shameful waste of the talent of John Turturro, or that it's two-and-a-half hours of having your eyes getting kicked in their balls. No, what sets this film apart, what really distinguishes it from the rest of the loud ugly big-budget psychic junk food that Hollywood serves up year in and year out, is that T:RotF serves as a temple to the god of waste. This movie is so wasteful of everything, so shameful and atavistic, that it forments political instability. It raises the possibility of actual revolution.
I'm not kidding. One day, films like this will be looked back on as a major contributing factor to the collapse of the commercial-industrial order that created it. Sure, big-budget Hollywood crap is, practically by definition, wasteful. Perfectly good cars get blown up; gratuitous sets are assembled, then torn down and the materials tossed away; "actors" command obscene salaries; megawatts of electricity are squandered on rendering farms for useless CGI. Few films have such a concentration and volume of those wretched realities as does today's entry, but its distinction lies not just in degree, but in kind. There is a malfeasance at work here that transforms (ahem) this film from clangy-shiny-bread-and-circus mundanity to a sparkling exemplar of fascist art.
Yeah, I went there. I said it and I meant it. I know there has been something akin to a fad lately of declaring blockbusters "fascist", but that doesn't mean the assessments are necessarily off-base. Likewise, I think the charge that critics who claim 'fascism' are psychologizing their targets is overblown. Anecdotally, many of my film-buff colleagues claim that Bay is merely a buffoon: a hack, however overpaid. I claim here and now, however, that such a dismissal is wrongheaded, in much the same way that it was wrong to dismiss George W. Bush as some kind of affable moron. (Indeed, T:RotF could almost serve as a primer on the Bush years.) Bay is clearly in love with power, and that, more than anything, is what comes seeping through every frame. More specifically, it's not a simple fetishizing of the masculine form (ala 300) or the portrayal of violence as a path to redemption (viz. Gladiator); rather it's the power Bay has to produce so much waste. Aside from the real-world waste involved in producing such a film (staggering though it is) the film itself fetishizes and revels in waste and destruction. For instance, there is a scene where the Great Pyramid at Giza is ripped apart by a giant robot with huge, swaying, wrecking-ball testicles (for real). While this is clearly emblematic of what I'm getting at here, there's more subtle variations on the theme, as well.
Here's one. A central premise of the plot is that the Autobots (the good robots) are in a secret alliance with humanity to fight the Decepticons (bad bots!), and a key proviso of said alliance is that humans, for some utterly retarded reason, are to do "the majority of the fighting first", calling in Autobot reinforcements only as necessary. Hence, in the opening setpiece, the battle between puny humans and giant robot goes much as you'd expect: humans get stomped, and badly. Eventually, the Autobots are engaged and they quickly put an end to the shenanigans slaughter of defenseless humans. We then cut to a scene where military leaders are discussing the results of the previous action with Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots. The gist of the conversation is that the casualty counts on such raids has been too high. Which means, supposedly, that this scene has played out before. So what we have here is a world in which super-intelligent space robots working with our top military leaders have devised an overall battle strategy little changed from that of the Somme. Here, it's human lives being wasted.
Want more? You know that stock character in most action films, the government bureaucrat meddling in the affairs of the noble military? The one who's imperious when he has the upper hand, but sniveling and useless when the chips are down? Yeah, he's here, laying waste to the notion that force isn't everything. (In Bay's universe, governments are useful only to the extent that they are paternalistic providers of military hardware, diplomacy always fails, intellectuals are craven, and opponents are motivated purely by spite and evil—which of course know no bounds and are therefore insatiable. Hence, the bad guy's plan is to "blow up the sun", a stupidity not seen since Plan 9 From Outer Space. No wait, that's unfair, because in Plan 9 the aliens were trying to prevent the accidental destruction of the sun, not the intentional destruction of the sun. So there you have it. This movie is actually worse than Plan 9. "This world will be forever dark!" rasps the baddy, apparently unaware that Earth would be more than merely dark were the sun blown up.)
Here's another. Nobody—and I mean nobody, not even John Waters—can make beauty creepy like Michael Bay. Most obviously I'm talking here about Megan Fox, but Bay has this notion that females in general are to be dipped in bronzer and baked in a tanning booth until they are both brownish-orange and have a hard shiny candy shell. There's no denying that Fox is an attractive woman, at least in real life. Here, she's a walking crème brûlée. It's Bay saying to his audience, "I know she's pretty. I'm going to paint her like a circus clown anyway." He gives the same treatment to Isabel Lucas, with the added indignity of a panty shot, a robotic tail, and not one, but two scenes in which she tries to seduce Shia LaBeouf. My god, what people will do to forge a career in pictures.
(FYI, "indignity" gets a new definition when you consider what Julie White, as LaBeouf's motormouth mother, goes through. While taking LaBeouf to college she eats some pot brownies and, instead of developing more appreciation for Charles Mingus, she goes beserk. Reefer Madness is vérité in comparison.)
That's how this film goes: it's 2+ hours of a middle finger in your face. Princeton University is an upscale and perpetual Spring Break bash (I went to Chico State and I never saw parties like that. I mean really.) Two dogs hump each other several times in the first half hour, and a robot humps Fox's leg. Somehow, there's nothing funny about either. Rainn Wilson is wasted in a brief role as the lamest stereotype of a arrogant professorial blowhard ever (seriously, Glen Beck's "comedy" is more nuanced). John Turturro isn't just wasted, he's humilated, literally embarrassed, in a scene where he not only drops his pants, but drops his pants to reveal he's wearing a scanty thong. Two new autobots—Wheelie and Skids—provide a shuck-and-jive routine so clownish as to shame Jar-Jar Binks, and, if that wasn't bad enough, they were voiced by Tom Kenny, a profoundly funny guy from the beloved Mr. Show. So now they've tarnished that memory.
But perhaps the most subtle waste is the way in which all the purported "entertainment" fails to entertain. The common apologia—"calm down, it's just dumb stuff for ten-year-olds"—falls down here, as well. There are numberless "battles" in this film, all filmed in confuse-O-vision™, and in every last one of them it's actually impossible to tell the autobots from the decepticons. I don't think, as many other reviewers apparently do, that this is an accident of Bay's "frenetic style" or the "whiplash editing". I think it's 100% intentional and not a byproduct at all. The film is saying, in effect, "Don't bother yourself with moral considerations, or following a narrative, or investing emotionally in character arcs. In fact, there's no point in even telling the combatants apart. What matters is (ooof!) there's big shiny (crash!) things beating each other up (kapow!) on screen. During one of the talky bits, go get another coke."
In fact, everything about this heap of shit says "fuck you" to the audience, and there will come a day when even the dopiest among us will tire of such treatment. That day may not be far off. While this movie has plenty of morons who claim to have thought it was "fun", there were many more who got the hint that they were being insulted. Children—ritalin-addled, always-entertained modern children—walked out of this thing thinking they'd been had. Parents by the truckload began to rue the day Bay was born, and though they shelled out the cash all the same, they became just a little bit less likely to do it again next time.
Indeed, I hate this film so much I actively despise anyone who likes even a part of it. My plan is to dedicate the rest of my life to building a time machine, so I can go into the future and get the technology to reanimate the dead. I will then take my time machine, go back to the present, and resurrect Bruce Lee, so I can get him to kick Michael Bay in the junk. Then Bruce and I will go back in time, find Bay's father, and Bruce will kick him in the junk, repeatedly, until he can't make babies anymore and then we won't have to worry about Bay being born and making these terrible movies.
I'll let you know how it goes.