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.
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.
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.