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We Still Kill the Old Way (2014)
A Throwback to the Michael Winner Era
Full disclosure here: I only watched the first fifteen minutes of this, and turned it off for a number of reasons. So take what I write with that in mind. I suppose the best thing to say is that this is definitely a throwback to the vigilante movies of the late Michael Winner, who made his mark with the similar in theme Death Wish in 1974.
This is not necessarily a good thing. This movie shares Winner's perfunctory and clumsy direction, and a sledgehammer wit reminiscent of bad silent comedy. Then there was his need to paint bad guys as subguttural enemies of mankind. The director of this movie shares all of these traits. Especially the last. In the brief sequence I saw, we witness a gang break into a flat, graffiti all over the place, urinate on furniture, and the lead thug disrespects his girl and later gets her raped by his own gang. I haven't seen him throw a kitten into a meat grinder, but I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if that was shown later, just in case we didn't get that, yes, these are bad guys.
And yes, I've seen enough revenge movies to understand the reason for this (to make the bad guys' inevitable demise all the more satisfying). Except that in most revenge movies, it's an ordinary guy, an Everyman, who gets pushed to the edge and has to fight back. Here, some retired London gangsters, who probably did things just as bad as the hoodies they're battling.
So, I switched off. Not because I'm squeamish (I was practically breastfed on Italian zombie gutmunchers) but because these story lines no longer interest me.
Space Station 76 (2014)
Well Made, Well Acted - Still Disappointing
When I first heard about this movie, I was quite interested in it. I grew up watching those sci-fi movies and TV shows from the 70s, all those leisure suits and haircuts and the wonderfully cheap special effects. Retro is my thing, and anything with punk in it – steampunk, dieselpunk, atompunk – so I was looking forward to seeing Space Station 76.
Now, for the positives: it was well made, well acted (especially from Liv Tyler, Patrick Wilson and young Kylie Rogers), well directed. In addition, it looked like something that could have been made in the Seventies, which was obviously the intention: the computer graphics, the smoking, the Valium, the beige, the videocassettes, the robot therapist (although the exterior space shots and interior zero- gravity scenes looked a little too good – no strings to be seen!).
Where it fell for me was the story. This is *not* a science fiction movie. It may be set in space and the future, with all the expected trappings, but it could just as easily had been set in a suburban street in the Seventies, or in a groovy apartment complex. The plot lines are all very human and Earthbound (and certainly not anything that would have been part of any movie or show from the era): the alcoholic, closeted gay Captain, the lonely little girl who can't keep her pets alive, the bitter couples in the broken, empty relationships where even affairs are just masturbation by proxy, and the infertile Assistant Captain who arrives onboard the station (although everyone keeps calling it a ship) unwittingly brings all the tensions to the surface. There's an asteroid headed for the station, an obvious metaphor for the proverbial lid that's about to blow among them, but it doesn't really play a part in all of this.
I had read the other reviews that warned not to expect Galaxy Quest, Spaceballs, Red Dwarf or other laugh out space comedies, and I'm not some neophyte cinephile unfamiliar with black comedy, but I had expected *some* laughs. I laughed once. More often than not, I was sad, which was more a testament to the performances. Billing this as a comedy, even a black comedy, is misleading.
To be honest, I'm not sure who this might be for: the sci-fi fans will be mostly disappointed, as will the comedy fans, and those looking some adult psychodrama might be confused by the retro-future setting.
The Digital Dead: Rise of the Zombies (2014)
Inept By All Possible Standards
Oh God, it's inept. I try to find some good in everything I see, but the Pollyanna in me was poisoned by watching this. This had no redeeming features whatsoever: *Inept animation (98% of it consists of still shots, so hardly classed as "animated") *Inept voice work (half of it sounding like Stephen Hawking's hillbilly cousins, and yes, I know it's all computer generated, but really...) *Inept concept (a witch, complete with pointed hat and Elvira castoffs, and her Goth vampire minions help a bunch of 10 year old girls survive the coming zombie apocalypse by giving them a high-tech automated compound complete with pint size spandex uniforms, weapons and MREs) *Inept "casting" ("starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing", or rather inept young animated versions of them) *Inept plotting (this is all over the place. A zombie apocalypse commences, but later the girls have time to go to a pool party. And that's probably the most sensible part). Why prepubescent girls? Who was this made for? I watched a half hour of it before turning it off, so perhaps it got better. But I'm not gonna take the chance.
Rise of the Fellowship (2013)
Disappointing Despite its Potential...
I hadn't heard about this until a friend told me about it, and at first the information and trailers I'd seen had been confusing. was it called RISE OF THE FELLOWSHIP, or FELLOWS HIP? Was it, as the first title (and one of the trailers I'd seen) suggested, an Asylum ripoff of a certain bunch of Middle Earth and Hobbit movies? If so, then the synopsis I'd read, making it a contemporary story about a bunch of gamers playing at Lord of the Rings, was wrong. As it turned out, it was the latter, which I was much more inclined to watch. But I didn't get past the first thirty minutes. The direction and execution of it is very good, adapting the look of Peter Jackson's movies and music to reflect the experiences of the lead characters, reminding me of the D&D episode of NBC's Community, one of their best episodes. But the acting was poor throughout, all Over The Top effusive projection, reminiscent of some bad kid's show (the guy who played the store owner was particularly guilty of this). The writing is a bit too expository (there must be better ways of showing that the lead character has a brother rather than the brother having to pretty much say "I'm your brother"), and the idea of the entire universe being against you might have been more appealing when I was a teenager, but it seems more trite now. In comparison, I preferred the movie Zero Charisma, also about a gamer but not painting him as a paragon of good, and when the world seems against him, there's actually some legitimate reasons for it.
I may return to it and give it another go, but not now.
God Bless America (2011)
Self-Indulgent and Incoherent
Goldthwaite shows talent, as an actor and director, but his writing skills fall short. The story is a slice of self-indulgent, incoherent wish fulfillment, where the protagonist, Frank, finds himself divorced, out of work (and didn't Frank have any union representative or worker's rights of appeal against a summary dismissal like that?) and apparently dying of a brain tumor. Throughout the start we see his daydreams of killing those people who dare annoy him (including an opening shot of him shooting dead a baby for the terrible crime of crying, an act that would immediately put off any mature individual watching from identifying with him, let alone caring about him), but now he apparently he is going to set out on a quest to destroy all those people who are "bad" for America, which includes American Idol, Christian protesters, spoiled reality show stars, and people who talk in movie theaters. Now here's the thing: we're supposed to feel sympathy for Frank because life has got him down. But we see nothing of any attempts on his part to make life better, except to pick up a gun and arbitrarily kill people (what, are douchebags who talk in theaters really more worthy of killing than the incompetent doctor who misdiagnosed him and set him on this murderous road?), dragging along a teenage girl ala LEON or KICK-ASS. We're then treated to long diatribes from the main characters about what they hate, telling each other or their victims before killing them, like they were Internet trolls sitting up all night posting on forums about Obama/Romney/Kardashian or whoever else they feel superior over. It becomes elitist. I'm not overly enamored with reality shows, but I'm not going to tell people I'm better than they are for not watching. And it becomes hypocritical, because if Frank is going to kill the reality show makers and reporters and Christian protesters, he has to kill all the people who watch and love and support them. It's like those facile people who blame the scientists for creating the atomic bomb - not the military who dropped it, and especially not the politicians who instigated it - because then we should be held accountable for its creation. But I digress. Again I say Bobcat has talent, but next time he should avoid vanity projects and get someone else to write a more coherent, balanced script.
Across the Universe (2007)
Just What the World Needed...
...a remake of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978). A pretentious, overblown collection of songs sung by non-actors, in a flimsy, incoherent plot and pace which I suppose one could say is a homage to the hippie movies of the 60s, although the driving force here might be lack of creativity rather than chemical ingestion. Anyone looking to base a school report on the Times That Were a Changing by watching this might also want to consult Species II for their biology essay and Timeline for their physics exam. Nice to know the remaining Beatles will be living the rest of their lives in comfort by selling out their songs to this movie. I was really worried about them.
Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009)
Good Timing, Hollywood
Amazing how overly sensitive Hollywood can be - sometimes. Like when the Challenger shuttle blew up - you pulled the release of Spacecamp (1986), a movie about a space shuttle disaster. After the 9/11 attacks, you pulled Collateral Damage (2002).
But, when dealing with the Recession/Depression/Credit Crunch, something affecting tens of millions of families all over the world, causing debt, unemployment, homelessness, misery, a problem that will be ongoing for years, will you think about pulling a movie about a brainless bimbo who goes off and spends far more than she could possibly afford, on something as trivial and pointless as clothes and accessories? No. And why? Because despite churning out unfunny SNL alumni films and pointless remakes of movies and TV shows and bombastic Michael Bey explogasms, none of which people really want to see, you're still going to be in your jobs, driving around in your air-conditioned SUVs chugging down double iced mocha-choca-caffine frappacinos while ignoring the teeming masses on the pavements living in cardboard condos holding up signs saying Will Work For Food. Gee, I wish I was a movie executive.
The Love Guru (2008)
Such An Embarrassment of Non-Riches
I'm glad I wasn't in the UK's Celebrity Big Brother House this year. Not because I wouldn't have enjoyed meeting some of the others, but because at one stage fellow house mate Verne Troyer might have asked me about the last film he did with his best friend, and I wouldn't be comfortable lying to him and denying that I thought The Love Guru was a cinematic mutant mistakenly allowed to live and breathe rather than be put to a merciful sleep in the development stage.
Hey, I like Mike Myers. He has a measure of talent and charisma and likability, and I applaud his deserved financial and critical success with the Wayne's World and Austin Powers films (though he went one movie too far with Goldmember). Having said that, Myers, like his fellow SNL alumnus Will Ferrell, is like a kid wandering about a shop eating food off the shelves and generally behaving like someone in desperate need of supervision and guidance. Let's be honest, Ferrell's last decent leading role was in Anchorman (2004), and while he's been fine in supporting work like The Producers (2005), everything else that he's had a hand in has been a series of embarrassments of varying levels. And sadly, Myers can too easily fall into the same degree of arrested development.
People who know me know that I may go on about a lot of bad movies, but more often than not, I enjoyed watching them, and perversely can watch them again. This one, however, I'm ashamed that I ever wasted bandwidth getting it, let alone consider watching it again.
Myers' characters have always been one-note, with a limited appeal. But his latest Guru Pitka went too far when he thought of writing it down; in comparison, his Beatnik poet Charlie from So I Married An Axe Murderer (1993) was a character of multi-layered nuance, and more importantly, one that people would much rather watch. The very concept should have been seen as potentially execrable and insulting to Hindus. Yes, I know he tries to get around this in the movie by claiming that Pitka wasn't really a Hindu, but an American raised by Hindus, but like so much else in this movie, that attempt fails miserably given what passes for humor.
Hey, I like Dumb Humor when it's done right. Dodgeball, Epic Movie, Jay and Silent Bob. But the gags in The Love Guru come in three flavors: racist, gross and infantile, and in various mixtures thereof. The racist names he came up with (Harenmahkeester, Satchabigknoba) is the sort of thing an ignorant ten-year-old kid would come up with to make the other ignorant ten-year-old kids in the playground laugh. Yes, isn't it hilarious that Indian people all have big long names? The rest of the atrocity is filled with other dodgy names like Coach Cherkov and Dick Pants, as well as alleged jokes about snot balls and nose hairs, humping elephants, food prepared to look like genitals, and buckets of urine all of which probably would have sounded funny in 1988 in the writers' brainstorming sessions in the SNL offices at 3am when you're doped up on caffeine, but I honestly can't believe that a 45-year-old man wrote this crap down in 2008 and thought this would be funny in any other circumstances.
And the execution of these so-called gags is almost consistently accompanied by Myers with the same sort of mugging grin to the camera that he perfected with Wayne Campbell and Austin Powers the difference here being that those other characters had moments where they really were humorous, but seeing Myers try it with Pitka is akin to watching an inept magician fail every trick, but still take a rehearsed bow after each one, oblivious to the negative reaction he's getting from his audience. And worse, he drives the jokes so deep into the ground, again and again, you expect them to bump into Hilary Swank piloting her subterranean machine around the Earth's Core.
And the storyline carrying these non-gags, like the sores on the back of a leper, is just as awful: a guru seeking fame and a spot on Oprah counsels a Canadian hockey player who wants to win back his wife from a rival, Jacques "Le Coq" Grande, who apparently is well-endowed (Get it? Le Coq Grande?). Another lesson to learn, Mike: Sports Themes Aren't Funny. Canadian Sports Themes Aren't Funny, Cubed. It may give you the chance to hang about with your heroes, but it's a waste of time for the rest of us. Some have tried to point out the satire in Pitka's self-help philosophies, but satire only works when it makes a point, and doesn't just appear indistinguishable from the targets it's allegedly satirizing.
In case I haven't made it clear, this is a Bad Film. Not So Bad It's Good, like The Oxford Murders (2008). This is embarrassing on levels I haven't seen in ages. Some bad movies have people in it who can rise above the mediocrity, but this one is like quicksand, sucking people down and suffocating them. And I'm not talking about the likes of Verne Troyer, Jessica Alba and Justin Timberlake, who were basically employees who probably needed the money, or the cameos from Oprah and Val Kilmer. I'm talking about Ben F**king Kingsley.
How does a respected Oscar winner go from playing Gandhi to playing Guru Tugginmypudha?
Diary of the Dead (2007)
Disappointed But Still a Romero Fan
I lost my zombie chastity at age 10 watching Bob Clark's Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things on WOR-TV one Saturday night, 30+ years ago; I slept with a kitchen knife under my mattress that summer. But if Clark broke me in, it was Romero, and a midnight re-screening of Dawn of the Dead I snuck into when I was 14, who became my sugar daddy in the intervening decades (okay, I'm leaving this weird analogy behind now...). All of his Dead movies have been flawed but interesting, and I've never left disappointed.
Until, sadly, Diary of the Dead. And I was disappointed at being disappointed, for a number of reasons:
1. The POV approach. It wasn't Romero's fault that Cloverfield beat him to the cinemas and reintroduced the Blair Witch touch to the masses, but he also tried to have his cake and eat it to, by including music and POV from security cameras and other cameras than the principal one, thus diminishing the immediate, subjective feel to it (yes, I know Diary is meant to be a package put together by one of the film's characters, but still
)
2. Romero's message about the detachment of those who record rather than experience events, and the complicity of the audience in going along with this state of affairs, is bluntly and repeatedly hammered out. Romero's messages in past films, when he had them, were more subtly presented. The only excuse he could have for this is if he was being true to the character of the film students, some of whom I've known to present their works as if their messages are new and revelatory (e.g. War is bad, Relationships are Difficult, etc.) sorry, students
:-) This need to hammer home the message leads to repeated dialogue and unlikely actions from several characters throughout the movie, standing there while friends and loved ones are attacked, or commenting on it instead of just smashing the damn cameras.
3. The bad acting/characters. I've made this a slash because the performers may be better than the lines they have to deliver, and I want to be gracious. None of them made any impression on me, except for Scott Wentworth as the British professor, the only principal character over the age of 30, and therefore automatically more interesting to me than the gaggle of one-dimensional wrinkle-free brats populating this film (and so many other horror films nowadays, and spare me the lecture on the target audiences demographics, Romero's been around long enough to know that younger actors are only good for nude scenes and monster fodder). And I'm not being ageist, because I know plenty of teens/twenty-somethings who are multi-dimensional, significant people. I realize that the main characters were meant to be the film students, but surely some others could have tagged along so that we could get other viewpoints about the crisis unfolding around them?
4. The self-referential notions at the beginning. I liked the bit about the dead walking, not running (I remain on the side of the Walker debate, probably because with my middle-aged paunch I could better escape them than the turbo-charged dead in other movies), but when the characters began talking about women falling in horror movies and such, I wanted to Scream (joke intended).
5. A movie with an ending to that hasn't yelled "this is just the start of a new trilogy" so much since Jumper.
I sound so negative. I don't mean to be. There were parts that I really admired. There were novel new ways to attack the dead with dynamite, scythes, acid, resuscitators (ironic, that). I liked the reaffirmation of the rule confirmed in Land of the Dead that anyone who dies will come back, not just those bitten by the zombies. The Deaf Amish Guy with a mean throwing arm made me laugh. And the Zombie Clown was unforgettable; Can't Sleep, the Clowns Will Eat Me, indeed
It's a less epic, more personal work, and it's obvious that George enjoyed making it, being as independent as when he started out, and I'd still rather see something from him than many other directors out there. But tone down the message, and hire a more diverse group of talented actors (or give them more to work with) so that we can identify with and thus care more about them.
And I promise I'll be there, as excited as I was the first time I saw one of his movies...
Epic Movie (2007)
Gonna Try and Say Something Positive About This...
I have a personal policy against condemning any film, or book, or TV show, or band, or comedian, utterly. There's enough negativity out there from the flamers, the trolls, people who like to spew venom and hide behind their cybernetic anonymity. Besides, why should we listen to the opinions of others, going into something lacking an open mind, just following sheepishly on advance word or The Buzz, or the words of some mealy-mouthed critic who was probably a failed filmmaker-novelist-musician taking it out on others who at least have made an attempt at something? Give everyone a fair chance, man!
Does this mean that Epic Movie defied the critics and turned out to be a good movie? NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Are you kidding? It was dross! But no, I am determined not to add to the general negative karma that's floating on the electronic ether. Stay positive, stay positive.
Thankfully I didn't spend any money on this, just lost a bet and had it given to me to watch, before passing it onto my 12-year-old niece, whose friends had watched it and liked it. Upon viewing it herself, she liked it too, though she's astute enough to be equally embarrassed at liking it. And having seen it as well, it was initially successful at the box office, and was trimmed on general release to get a wider audience, as only 12 year olds would appreciate it. 12 year olds who undergo involuntary spasms of laughter when they hear swear words and sub-Carry On puns ("Harry Beaver", anyone?), and generally have sufficient attention deficit to half-watch it while ruminating over whether or not Johnny Depp is hotter than Orlando Bloom. (He is, by the way. I'm straight, and even I know he's hotter than most main sequence suns in our galaxy.)
Epic Movie has been made by the same people who did Date Movie, and to judge from the titles, presumably also Not Another Teen Movie and the Scary Movie series. Or maybe they all attended the same grade-school classes where all their best jokes were written. I think I saw Scary Movie once, so I'm certain I've seen them all: some semi-talented and talented people embarrass themselves to varying degrees while spoofing other films in amazingly limp and uncreative fashions. No, spoofing's too strong a word; that implies even a measure of wit involved- No, wait! I'm starting to contradict my earlier Mission Statement on promoting positivity. take a deep breath, start again
The plot is a Frankenstein monster of, you guessed it, epic movies like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Da Vinci Code and The X-Men, with minor organs in the beast garnered from less epic fare such as Borat, Nacho Libre, and Snakes on a Plane. Again, I can't use the word "spoof" here, because there's almost no attempt at any wit or satire with these. And no, I don't count showing Magneto with a giant Warner Brothers cartoon-style magnet on his head, or calling the Narnia villainess the White B*tch instead of Witch, or having Willy Wonka as a cannibalistic maniac. Mel Brooks at his worst remains superior to what's offered here, because he at least can recreate the target scenes and provide jokes, however lame. Yes, I have just stated that there are worse films than Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and I'm sticking by that claim with Galilean tenacity.
What makes it more tragic than deplorable is that there seems to be a genuine, professional attempt to make a decent film (some scenes demonstrate at least an aptitude at creativity) as well as rich, faithful recreations of many of the various elements of the original films. Of special note is Crispin Glover's uncanny impression of Depp's Wonka, and SNL's Darrell Hammond's equally laudable copy of Depp's Jack Sparrow. But giving nothing but accurate recreations is no more funny than that class clown who thought it was amusement in itself to mimic everyone's voices around him.
It's as if the screenwriters abandoned the notion of providing humor in favor of letting the audience play Reference Bingo and go, "Oh yeah, they took that bit from The Fast and The Furious!" But not totally; there are brief moments that made me chuckle, maybe even laugh if I'd had another beer in me. But it becomes embarrassing, like watching a drunken friend humiliate himself by trying to walk a straight line in an effort to prove his sobriety when everyone knows he can barely manage a few steps. And when they weren't mostly failing to be funny, they had their characters break into hip-hop gyrations. The first time, seeing Oompa Loompas do it, is almost funny. Seeing pirates do it, then mythical warriors, then mutants following, and this tenuous bungee cord of a gag is ready to snap
The four leads are forgettable, as they're meant to be, and I expect nothing less- no! Stop that, it's mean! It's not as if the better, more talented performers who appear could do much better with what they were given: Fred Willard, Jennifer Coolidge, Glover and Hammond have appeared in some of the funniest films around, and I'm confident enough in their abilities that they'll survive this.
There you go: the scenery looked nice, I almost laughed out loud, and I liked some of the performers to wish them better roles than what they had here. See? That was positive enough, wasn't it? Take that, Samuel Johnson!