Sometimes Wishes DO Come True

Cloverfield is unbridled 9/11 wish fulfillment.   It is eighty-five minutes of terrorist attack ejaculation.

In summary:  A group of American Apparel models (New Yorkers) are suddenly attacked by Godzilla (Al Qaeda)  and the Statue of Liberty (World Trade Centre) is destroyed.

However this time, instead of a fringe group loosely connected to a limited geographic-specific minority based on another continent, led my an extremist among extremists, financed by covert forces of its enemy and with limited power, reach and ability to live; the bad guy in Cloverfield is site-specific, non-philosophical (Other than in its dedication to kill all things New york, ergo, American, ergo lovers of Freedom, ergo, Christians) and tangible.

Cloverfield is everything that America wishes the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were.  It recreates a world where black people are looters (With the occasional sympathetic soldier-man) and the only other minority in Manhattan are honkeys who know more than the people in power.  Whose asinine decisions based on gut instinct, self righteousness and moral crapitude outweigh balanced and rational thought.  It is racist and jingoistic in the worst ways and helps remind and re-enforce the trauma of an event which is a weekly occurrence in other parts of the world.  However, since they're not white, they don't really matter.  Much like the Arabs, Hispanics and other minorities which are killed with glee in Cloverfield while the lives of a few shallow rich white people are given the gravitas of a nation.

Thank God everyones dies in the end.  (Spoiler!)  They all deserve it.  It's just a pity this plays further into the hands of idiots who misunderstand their ethnic and cultural majority to be a minority and believe racists who tell them bullshit.

For such a short movie this feels long and while it has some good special effects it makes believe that the strongest military power in the world in Just Not Good Enough.  While I'm a fan of right-wing movies, I'm not a fan of propaganda and this is the worst kind.

The trailer sums it up: Kinda boring then kinda exciting then kind of even more exciting though if you think about it, kind of dumb and wait a minute, why is the Statue of Liberty's head so small?  And if that doesn't bother you or take you out of the moment or make you think your watching bullshit sold as gold, then bon appetite!

The End of the Trilogy of Terror

This should have been typed up on Saturday following my 3-day marathon of faux-grindhouse features.  After dealing with a fake grindhouse followed by a non-starter, I at last got around to The Real Deal.  I got around to:

The Dead Pit.

This was Tiger Blood:  Something low budget and objectively terrible.  After an epic pre-credit/ credit sequence that somehow took place in the late 60's but looked exactly like a late 80's GWAR video, I was subjected to...

90 minutes of boredom!  This was the perfect grindhouse film: full of great ideas, over the top acting, a plot that made no sense other than to serve the 4 or 5 really cool ideas the filmmakers had while sitting around in their moms basement stoned one night.

In a nutshell, this is about an insane asylum that has, in its basement... The Dead Pit where this crazy psychiatrist (Oxymoron, I know) experiments on people and then throws them into it.  He's killed in the first five minutes.

Flash forward 20 years to a woman with amnesia being admitted to the hospital for no reason what so ever.  She makes friends with a nurse who thinks it's okay to flirt with the patients, a sexy mad bomber who's not really crazy and you know this because he talks in a British accent and buh-buh-buh-Billy from One Flew Over the Cuckoos nest.  After being in the asylum for less than a minute she freaks out, causes an earthquake and brings the mad psychiatrist (Yes, yes, an oxymoron, I know) back to life along with all the bodies in... The Dead Pit.

For the next 45 minutes, nothing makes sense and people talk about stuff until there's been enough filler to make this a feature length movie.  Then the zombies break out, the most obvious of plot twists occurs and the climax happens in supermarionation and then there's another twist that makes the entire film redundant due to it's lack of sense!

This might sound amazing but it's really not.  I can't recommend... The Dead Pit even though I really, really, really want to.  It's that weird kind of so bad it's kinda good but really quite bad kinda movie.  The creator went on to produce the seminal sci-fi extravaganzas Lawnmower Man and Virtuosity so consider yourself warned.

This is the trailer.  Remember that like all true grindhouse films, this looks and sounds much cooler than it really is:

Lowering my Standards

So I watched Jonah Hex.  I've never read the comic so I have to assume that the films interpretation of the character is correct: His family was killed and he was scarred and left to die so he gained the power to talk to the dead and then because he didn't like the scar he already had, he double-scarred himself with a red-hot axe.

Jonah Hex stars a bunch of people playing themselves: Josh Brolin plays a guy in a western; John Malkovich an evil version of Falcor and Megan Fox plays a whore.

The film is eighty minutes long and contains at least 8 minutes of flashbacks to remind you what has happened.  So easily ten percent of this movie is repeats of the movie.  This is the power of movies: To make something so dull that you need to be reminded of what you saw right after you saw it.

In a nutshell:  Evil Falcor kills Jonah's family because Jonah realized war is bad and Evil Falcor thinks war is good.  Then Evil Falcor dies.  So Jonah becomes a bounty hunter.  Then Evil Falcor is alive again and planning to ruin Americas centennial.  So Jonah has to stop him and his super weapon.  The super weapon is a boat with a flame thrower on the back and a gatling gun which shoots sci-fi cannonballs in the front.  Over the course of the film we discover that Jonah can torture dead people, has a crow living inside of him (The crow is removed through the power of mud), and that snake people make worthy pit fighters.  Jonah Hex wins (Spoiler!) and invents the tradition of fireworks on the 4th of July.

Jonah Hex smacks of cowardice.  The original writers, Neveldine/ Taylor, are probably the most gifted writers (And exciting directors) working in Hollywood and while you can see the occasional moments of sheer insanity and contempt to humanity and/or logic, their script was re-written & tampered with to the point of weak-minded comprehension (Because I promise you friend that if they had had their way, nothing would have made sense.) and what's left is a PG13 mess.  Thanks to Jonah Hex I've realized PG13 is less a rating and more a warning that what you're about to see has been rendered offensively inoffensively offensive in the hope of losing less money.

Even Mastodon, one of the most exciting post-metal bands of the new century are rendered sterile and impotent in supplying the films so called soundtrack.

This movie is a missed opportunity in every way possible.  Here's the trailer which, if it were a person would be the asshole in high school who beat you up and then became your boss:

Movie Review

I made myself a little stupider today and puttered through Planet Terror.  I've avoided it because it seemed like it touched on too many of my movie fetishes in too knowing (wink, wink, nod, nod.) a way, essentially killing the joke.

Clocking in at just over an hour and a half the film is fairly gruelling and this is not counting that it unapologetically removes twenty minutes from itself just to get to the good stuff.  It's a long running complaint that I have with Robert Rodriguez's films.  There's literally too much.  While this could be considered something positive if you wanted to chill out in front of the TV and say "Holy shit, look at that!" every five minutes but after your thirty-sencond "Holy shit" moment, you can't help but get burned out an somewhat fed up by the third of seven head explosions.

Don't get me wrong, excess to make a point is a strategy/ technique which I enjoy but excess for the sake of it in this way is more indicative of a) someone needing an editor or b) someone needing to save some ideas for a sequel.

The inclusion of a watered down hipster version of The Dead Kennedy's Too Drunk to Fuck, a song about excess, sums up the movie.

Yet I enjoyed the dickens out of the film and would happily watch it 4 more times in ever increasing states of intoxication.  Maybe this has more to do with the day I've had but Mr. Rodriguez and his ability to utterly miss the point of what kind of a movie he was making made something so spectacularly stupid that, like the zombie plague it depicts, is highly contagious.

This is the trailer and yes, the heroine uses yoga to dodge a missile:

Movie Review: Broken Embraces

Hello,

My name is Broken Embraces or Los Abrazos Rotos to the pretentious. It is thanks to me that Stephen has realized that Almodovar is probably his favourite director even though I'm not the best movie that Almodovar has made in recent years.

I'm also quite a bit darker than many of his films containing one scene that can nearly be called an action scene and another moment at which E suddenly exclaimed "At what point did this become a Hitchcock movie?!"

In a nutshell (I would not like to give away more than my nutshell as to know any more about the hazelnut inside me would detract from the deliciousness of said hazelnut), I flip between two stories - one told in the present about a blind filmmaker who has mysteriously taken on a new name and identity and is shaken up when he discovers that a wealthy businessman has died; and events fourteen years earlier when said businessman becomes obsessed with a young woman whose father is dying of stomach cancer.

I'm a bit on the long side and, as such, meander a bit through the third act, especially after the connection between the two stories is revealed early on and the final fifteen minutes feels like a protracted denouement, albeit a hilarious protracted denouement. If you get Almodovar, you will enjoy me a lot. But if you don't like his whimsical style of colour, beauty, humour, whimsy, strong fully realized characters and complicated yet rewarding and accessible fast moving plots. Or reading subtitles. Then stay away.

Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss,
Broken Embraces

Movie Review: Inception

Hello,

I'm Inception, otherwise known as Shutter Island 2.

That's All I got. It was actually a really, really. Really good movie.
See it.

Movie Review: Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

Hello,

I'm Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, hereafter known simply as Precious. The reason why I have such an unwieldy name is because the producers (e.g., Oprah Winfrey) felt that that people would easily confuse me, a movie about incest-AIDS-poverty-teenage pregnancy-black-hispanic-ghetto life meets Dangerous Minds, with a movie about white teenagers with telekinetic powers who fight stuff. It's (not so) funny when you consider that there are two movies out there named Crash: One about how white people are racist cunts and the other about how white people want to have sex with car crashes. I guess white people are clever enough to figure out the gaping huge difference between the two films and that my target audience, perhaps, maybe, I don't know, black people, weren't considered smart enough to tell the difference by my producers (e.g., Oprah Winfrey).

And while I'm gritty and real, and so important that wealthy producers such as Oprah Winfrey felt guilty enough to sponsor me, there is a grim realness about and overweight nobody who dreams about achieving greatness and manages to achieve her dreams (really mediocrity) is remarkably true to life with regard to the lead actor, Something-Or-Other, an overweight nobody who achieves greatness yet only achieves mediocrity. Thus achieving nothing at all.

Kudos to Lenny Kravitz whose affair with Nichole Kidman managed to land him 10 minutes of screen time. Additional kudos to Mariah Carey's edgy performance where she appears in front of cameras without makeup and plays the most incompetent social worker ever.

Mo'nique is superlative as the most one dimensional bad guy since Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List: A cartoon baddy with not a single redeeming feature who turns a disturbing and troubled reality into a caricature.

So what am I about? In a nutshell, poor black people acting like violent poor black people with a double-minority Christ figure who saves them (As opposed to a white woman in, say, Dangerous Minds, it's a black lesbian in Precious. How cutting edge!)

I am a movie for wealthy black people to feel guilty about their achievements brought to you by a wealthy black woman who made a career aping Phil Donahue (e.g., Oprah Winfrey). I am condescending and apolitical The kind on film Uncle Phil would take Carlton to in an effort to 'keep it real.'

If you would like to see a film that is everything that I want to be, I recommend Clockers:



It's also based on a novel by an upper-class black writer with no lived experience of the subject matter but, unlike myself, Clockers does not have a rich, guilt-ridden producer behind me (e.g., Oprah Winfrey) and, instead, makes a political point and tries to find a solution to the problems I present. Also, as the director is also extremely political, it is understandable that Clockers did not get the recognition it deserves.

After all, The target audience for Vlockers isn't the kind of idiots who confuses telekinesis with incest.

Yours with love,
Precious

Movie Review: The Road

Hello,

I'm The Road and I'm really, really depressing. So depressing that I'm a bit like a vaccine against depression. I start out so sad and bleak that I've got nowhere to go afterwards. And unlike the book, upon which I'm based, which is tempered with a steady escalation of dread, mid-way through me you'll have cried so much that you've immunized yourself to me.

I'm also a little different from the book in that all the really horrific stuff is removed so that the true scope of the threat faced by the characters is lessened. Unlike the book, I also feature Charlize Theron. This is what separates the art-form of the novel from the art-form of film: Flashbacks involving Monster teaching Aragorn to play piano. Granted, film is a visual and auditory media so it makes sense when one adds these things to help the audience connect with the emotional plight of the characters. However, it raises the question of what does a film adaptation of a novel add to the experience? And let's keep in mind that there's a difference between adapting slam! Bang! Pow! The Bourne Ultimatum into a movie and a novel with little dialogue or action like, for example, The Road.

Overall I have great actors doing an excellent job. I even have a kid in it who manages to avoid being too annoying. I'm beautiful to look at in spite of one scene involving Viggo's ass. Normally Viggo's ass only adds to the beauty of a film but as it's got poo smeared all over it, his bum loses some of its lustre. But only some. Ironically, I gain points in an in that everything and everyone in me is really, really dirty. Convincingly dirty. So there's a kind of beauty in all the dirtiness that many films try for and few achieve.

Overall, if you've read the book and are curious and want to re-live the soul destroying depression all over again, give me a shot. You'll remember what a good book it was. If the idea of reading a 250 page Pulitzer Prize winning novel seems too strenuous, give me a watch and see what an adequately adapted film based on a superior novel looks like. Maybe it will give you a taste for reading. Maybe even reading a good book.

Yours sincerely,
The Road