Category Archives: Alex Proyas

Listmania ‘09! The Worst Movies Of The Year

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It’s arguable that I shouldn’t pick over the very worst movies of the year, that I should concentrate on the good and embrace positivity, but hell, I sat through these clunkers out of curiosity and got a whole heap of pain in return, so I’m going to make something of that experience. If that means writing a lot of words about how dreadful and misguided these films are, then so be it. Sadly, I know for a fact that this list contains movies that are loved by family members, friends, and Twitter acquaintances. Conversations about these films have previously been conducted with care, as I attempted to not give away my feelings about said films for fear of causing offence. As a result, pre-emptive apologies are due to all those who love movies on this list. If you derived pleasure from these films, that’s awesome. I’m genuinely glad that you had a great time with them. I’m just recounting my subjective experience of these films, and if they differ from yours, it is not a personal thing. Though it should go without saying, I feel it necessary to state that I consider it bad form to judge a person because of their opinion. I’ll like you or love you no matter what, and my disagreement doesn’t reflect a judgement upon you. Unless you like the number one movie on this list. If you do, there’s no helping you.

And so, with that defensive caveat in place, on with the hatred:

Worst Movies of the Year:

25. Angels and Demons

Ron Howard’s second attempt at breathing life into Dan Brown’s clunky prose was far more successful than The Da Vinci Code, and even managed to hold our attention for its duration. Only after the credits roll do you realise how extravagantly silly the movie was, and how little had actually happened. A harmless and entertaining failure, maybe, but a failure nonetheless.

24. Surrogates

Adapted from a graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, Jonathan Mostow’s satire on the lure of social media and fears of modern disconnection was ill-served by two things: being directed by Jonathan Mostow, and being a satire on the lure of social media and fears of modern disconnection. Luddite witterings about the awful effects of reliance on new communication technologies are irksome already before being further mangled by Mostow, whose dead eye for action renders the movie as lifeless as its robotic characters. Any good ideas from the original comic are sadly buried under a layer of drabness.

23. The Hangover

A nervous nerd, a socially inept madman, and a gigantic, charmless wanker act like pricks in Las Vegas for two hours, and we pay millions of dollars to see it. Irreverent behaviour like this is always going to be appealing, but Todd Phillips has never been able to bring these moments to any kind of life in any of his previous comedies, and he fails again here. Jokes fall flat, comedic situations are resolved in witless fashion, and convicted rapist Mike Tyson is brought on as an ostensibly daring addition to an overstuffed cast, and succeeds in doing nothing but making the whole enterprise unpalatable without being funny. The main trio — all talented guys — are utterly wasted here.

22. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it was far more entertaining than Stephen Sommers’ leaden-footed series of explosions and bellowed exposition. Poorly staged action, predictable character arcs, boring tech designs, and most regrettably no spark of Bay-style madness. It also gives Channing Tatum more unwarranted screentime and squanders the talents of Rachel Nichols, Christopher Ecclestone and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The worst toy-based movie of the year, by a nose. GO JOES! GO FAR AWAY!

21. Orphan

George Ratliff’s fascinating Bad Seed thriller Joshua was only given a small release a couple of years ago, but is good enough to warrant chasing it down. Ostensibly similar, but far inferior, Jaume Collet-Serra’s hysterical and misjudged horror movie brings an Eastern-European Other into an affluent family with A Dark Past and runs through a litany of thriller cliches with excessive energy. Crashing unsubtlety is only the beginning of Orphan‘s problems. Narrative implausibilities pile up the further in we progress, leading to a hysterical finale with a truly demented and silly twist. Kudos to Dark Castle for getting Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard onboard to lend a veneer of respectability, but boo to them too for making those actors look so horribly lost.

20. Paul Blart: Mall Cop

In 2008 Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions did the world a great favour and produced the delightful House Bunny, starring the ever-magnificent Anna Faris. The world didn’t really seem to be bothered by this excellent gift, and it made minor money at the box office. In 2009 Happy Madison bankrolled Kevin James’ simplistic mall cop movie, despite the fact that the script contained no jokes even though it was obviously meant to be playing with the Die Hard template. Fertile ground, you’d think. However, when this short Ben Stiller sketch contains more funny lines than your entire movie, you know you’re in trouble. And yet it grossed way way more than House Bunny. ::sadface::

19. The Box

Richard Kelly attempts to redeem himself for the failure of Southland Tales by making a straight adaptation of Richard Matheson’s excellent short story, exploring the moral quandary therein with thoughtfulness and maturity. Only kidding! He garbles the whole thing with a needlessly complicated and confusing plot about aliens and morality tests and dimensional portals and the afterlife and chickens and sentient masonry and water and water and water and water and oh God, someone please stop him. (Warning: it does not feature chickens and sentient masonry. Please don’t watch it because that makes it sound more interesting.)

18. Knowing

How depressing to see a technically ambitious and interesting SF director like Alex Proyas trot out something so illogical and exploitative. With Nicolas Cage asleep and Rose Byrne in shriek-mode, there is little here for an audience to empathise with, and if this tale of extinction and salvation works at all, it’s because of a couple of grandiose setpieces, especially a poignant moment at the end set to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Other than that, it’s a muddle of poorly explained philosophy and New Age and Christian symbolism, and ends up as nothing more than a religious wet-dream, with the odious and smug conversion of our atheist protagonist at the last-second. Remember, the caves won’t save the Chuldren! Only blindly trusting the Sky-People will!

17. Away We Go

What could have been a vaguely interesting article in The New Yorker about Dave Eggers’ experiences during his girlfriend’s pregnancy was instead turned into a bloated and pointless road movie, an exercise in narcissism filled with unpleasant stereotypes broadly played by an array of actors far too talented to be left adrift here. At its best it could have been vaguely diverting, but then Sam Mendes horribly misjudges the tone of the film. His flat visuals and clunky control of pace consign this movie to oblivion.

16. The Taking of Pelham 123

It’s bad enough that anyone thought it necessary to remake this story, one already told twice before and one of those times in remarkable fashion, without it being tackled with such cack-handed aggression. Tony Scott’s sledgehammer style removes almost all of the character from John Godey’s original story, and then Brian Helgeland rubs salt into the wound by adding needlessly coarse dialogue. It’s also hobbled by a depressingly low-energy performance from the usually dependable Denzel Washington, and an even more depressingly high-energy performance from a never-worse John Travolta. It gets more wrong than it gets right.

15. I Love You, Beth Cooper

Larry Doyle’s screenplay probably had some interesting things to say about teenage life, expectations, and sexuality, not to mention referencing pretty much every great (and not so great) teen comedy of the past couple of decades, but you would never know that under the usual empty gloss of Chris Columbus’ direction. All subtlety or purpose is crushed by Columbus’ predictably awful take on the subject matter, with his tone-deaf approach being too crass to make the sweet moments connect, or too prudish to make the bawdy stuff go far enough to become memorable. It’s also utterly unfunny. Not a single joke lands. How is this man still making movies?

14. The Blind Side

Michael Lewis is a smart man and I reckon his book — upon which John Lee Hancock’s feel-good drama is based — is far more interesting than this. It will also have the benefit of not being a trite and patronising two-hour-long pat-on-the-back for affluent white Christian folk who took in lost youngster Michael Oher even though he is depicted here as an African-American Lenny sans rabbit. Wrong-headed in the extreme, this film contains less wit and insight into human behaviour than any randomly selected three-minute-long scene from any episode of Friday Night Lights. FNL also has the benefit of not featuring the dreadful Tim McGraw or Jae Head as the most annoyingly precocious child actor in film history.

13. Dragonball Evolution

Pretty much nothing in this horrible, joyless commercial product works, but it is especially irksome to see something that mangles another cultural work being made by James Wong. His X-Files work had always been so entertaining, the first Final Destination was an endearingly bleak project, and The One was an interesting project that could have worked with a few rewrites and a bigger budget. Since then he has floundered, and this awful sub-Matrix Kung-Fu pastiche is a true lowpoint. It made Chow Yun Fat almost unwatchably smug too. Horrible from overcomplicated beginning to incomprehensible end.

12. Twilight: New Moon

Even the world’s most powerful supercomputer, when given the requisite raw data and a million years to generate alternate scenarios with it, could not create a movie as tedious as this. A stagnant narrative mess filled with singularly unappealing, navel-gazing brats, this pop culture phenomenon continues to fascinate millions while doing little more than running on the spot. It takes an especially bad franchise to alienate a nerd such as myself, but Twilight: New Moon managed it by celebrating dysfunctional romantic relationships while being even less entertaining than the dreary original. The only bright spot was a demented performance by Michael Sheen. Other than that berserk cameo, there is nothing to recommend the most sloppily constructed movie of the year.

11. The Proposal

Romantic comedies are going through a really bad patch. The genre was represented by more cynical and shoddily made exercises than ever before. With only The Invention of Lying and (500) Days of Summer attempting to do anything new with the genre, this year’s commercial enterprises at least tried to do one thing that the genre does really well: explore the gulf in behavioural expectations between men and women in an age where we are more aware than ever of our differences and similarities. This is not to say this was done well, though. The Proposal was essentially a by-the-numbers trainwreck of comedy misunderstandings, last-minute changes of heart, and hilarious grandmothers, this time played by an unwatchable Betty White crushing jokes underfoot with obnoxious relish. Yet another terrible Sandra Bullock movie in ’09.

10. Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire

As with The Blind Side, life for poor African-Americans is here depicted as a kind of hell that even Heironymous Bosch would shrink from painting. Lee Daniels’ tawdry and exploitative adaptation of poet Sapphire’s novel of urban deprivation and depravity is a relentlessly nightmarish vision. If it were a kind of satire on the Boy-Called-It phenomenon of tell-all child abuse memoirs Precious might hold some tasteless appeal, but instead it is an insult to those who suffer real abuse every day. This racially insensitive melodrama’s only worth — other than in giving a showcase to a strong cast who work hard to make Daniels’ scattershot direction seem better than it really is —  is in celebrating those who strive to maintain support systems in America’s most deprived areas. Those hardworking Samaritans deserve a better tribute than this, though.

9. The Ugly Truth

The Proposal was marginally successful by dint of having Ryan Reynolds in the cast. The Ugly Truth, however, is a disaster on every level. Its odious reinforcement of cultural stereotypes about gender behaviour would be bad enough without featuring a mugging Gerard Butler defining “comedy timing” as “jutting out your chin at certain points in a sentence”. Nevertheless, compared to the joyless charm-void that is Katherine Heigl, he’s Spencer Tracy. While Butler tries to tell jokes, Heigl says every line with the same intonation and emphasis, making it impossible to tell where she is meant to be funny. Maybe she’s not meant to be. Bad-movie legend Robert Luketic has no idea how to modulate tone (or light or frame shots), saving his energy for the big vibrating panties scene: a joke so laboured and cringe-inducing that it should have killed this reductive mess on the spot.

8. Love Happens

Jason Reitman’s adaptation of Walter Kirn’s novel Up In The Air struck me as an insincere and mechanical exercise in sentimentality. I was deeply disappointed by it. Then I saw Love Happens and for a few minutes I felt like writing a letter to Reitman thanking him for every choice he made that stopped him from making something as wholly empty as this. Though Jennifer Aniston looks right at home in such uninspiring fare, Aaron Eckhart is wasted as a man dealing with that romance genre staple: the loss of his wife. Judy Greer, John Carroll Lynch, and Martin Sheen look like they’re praying for someone to rescue them from this openly manipulative farrago. Tricky to get stories about traumatic grief right. This didn’t even try. It makes Nights in Rodanthe look like Gone With The Wind.

7. Obsessed

Somehow a guy who directed episodes of The Wire and Deadwood thought it would be nice to launch his film career by directing a Hallmark Channel movie about evil temps written by the guy who wrote Star Trek V. The nicest thing that can be said about it is that it seems to have been made with a post-racial America in mind. The sympathetic protagonists are African-American and the evil antagonist is Caucasian: a fact that generates no discussion about race or the exploitation of black people in contemporary America. Sadly, I doubt that the filmmakers thought we had progressed beyond the point where this wasn’t worth commenting on: they just didn’t really know what to say, and so ignored the narrative minefield. That left us with a neutered Fatal Attraction clone with flat performances, ugly lighting, and ten minutes of an otherwise unused Beyonce beating up Ali Larter in the signposted finale.

6. My Sister’s Keeper

All I’ve experienced of Jodi Picoult’s work is her terrible run on Wonder Woman, where she revealed absolute ignorance of everything that made the character exciting. This syrupy and insincere adaptation of her novel doesn’t make the idea of reading her books any more appealing. A terrific cast — plus Cameron Diaz in full-on squawk mode — battle with a mountain of disease-of-the-week cliches, all served up in an unconventionally fractured narrative that could be considered avant-garde. I suspect it’s actually just that Nick Cassavetes didn’t really know what he was doing. Yet another shitty movie cynically treating emotional turmoil as grist to the mawkish mill. It gets added evilness points for misrepresenting scientific endeavour as morally compromised by inventing a fantasy scenario designed to scare incurious people into distrusting doctors.

5. The Boat That Rocked

Richard Curtis seems to think that English history is a Lego set that he can use to construct any old fantasy about our cultural past that he likes and no one will mind. When garbling historical events for obvious comedic effect in Blackadder, the result was a superb sitcom. Here it is just another exercise in using the devalued Cool Brittannia brand to hide the fact that England is painfully uncool, and making respectable actors put on drainpipe trousers and do the Twist on the deck of a boat for no reason is like watching the Queen trying to crunk. Curtis also seems to have forgotten how to tell a story: the meandering digressions featured here do not count as narrative. Pointless, needlessly hectic, overlong, unamusing and shoddily filmed, The Boat That Rocked almost represented the nadir of Britain’s film output in 2009. Almost.

4. All About Steve

The Year of Bullock was not a 100% financial success, but it was a total washout. This baffling movie represented the lowpoint of her Trilogy of Awful, and stands as a true curio. Why was this film made? The judgement of everyone involved must be called into question, because it honestly feels like no one knew what was going on at any point during its development and production. Was it an attempt at Farrelly-Brothers-style gross-out comedy? A celebration of the outsider? A denunciation of the outsider? A pro-life pastiche? A remake of Twister? All that is certain is that Bullock is insufferable here, stalking an embarrassed-looking Bradley Cooper across America while his colleagues enable her for no easily-identifiable reason. No one behaves like a human being until the sentimental finale where the grinding tone change paints protagonist Mary Horowitz as an admirable hero and everyone who has previously resented her falls into line to praise her. It’s utterly incomprehensible and nigh-unwatchable.

3. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li

Steven E. DeSouza’s original Street Fighter movie is treated like cinematic dog-doo by game fans and non-fans alike, but hopefully it will be revisited in the wake of this franchise revamp and seen as the light and entertaining diversion it actually is. Because this new Street Fighter movie sure isn’t light, and it sure isn’t entertaining. While the game features exaggerated movements, fantasy elements and imaginatively rendered characters, writer Justin Marks and director Andrzej Bartkowiak make the mistake of treating the game to a Batman Begins / Casino Royale-style revamp that strips every appealing element from the source material and leaving a tedious revenge plot against an unscrupulous entrepreneur in its place. Easily the most boring action movie of the year, it also features one of the worst performances, from oily Chris Klein. To be honest, he’s almost bad enough to earn a recommendation. His oleaginous demeanour and hilarious tough-guy mannerisms are the most entertaining things to be found here.

2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Arguably the worst, most misguided and compromised big budget summer action movie ever made. To fanboys it represents yet another slap in the face from Tom Rothman, yet again mangling the things about a franchise that make that franchise appealing in the first place, as well as cutting budgets, altering the shooting script, and overriding director Gavin Hood. However, it’s not just nerd-preciousness that powers this rage against the money-making machine. Nothing in this cynical enterprise works, from the set design to the dialogue to the hideous effects to the casting (not counting Ryan Reynolds or Taylor Kitsch). The broad-strokes narrative desperately tries to match up Marvel’s Origin story with the beginning of the X-Men trilogy, but manages to taint all of the movies with its half-arsed stink. I can’t remember ever feeling so cheated by a superhero movie, or so horrified at how brazenly my love of these characters was being manipulated by a man who does not care a jot about their history.

1. Lesbian Vampire Killers

Someone shoe-horned everything that is wrong and miserable about British culture into one movie for the convenience of those of us who cringe at the thought of lad-mags, shoddy horror comedies that are neither funny nor scary, piss-poor “gentle” sitcoms (i.e. they contain no jokes), and traditional British directorial ineptitude. Horne and Corden — who are to Morecambe and Wise as dysentery is to tasty dessert toppings — mug their way through a joke-free and plagiaristic “romp” in which very nearly all women are sexually voracious and scantily-clad gay hotties who appear to be filled with what could be semen, considering how they explode in a shower of white goop when they are “amusingly” killed by the horny protagonists. It doesn’t even have the courtesy to be outrageously tasteless like the horror comedies it emulates so ineptly. It’s just tacky, stupid, gormless, tedious, misogynistic, and puerile. It also single-handedly negates all of the good will generated by British movies made by BBC Films and Film4, dragging the British Film Industry back in time to a period when Carry On films represented our most visible contribution to the world of cinema. If it could be deported, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Worst film of the year? Fuck that. Worst film of the decade, more like.

More to come, hopefully, including Best Actor and Actress, Worst Actor and Actress, and “awards” for directors, writers, and a cinematographer that I dissed last year.

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (106-91)

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Longtime readers will know that I’m a fiend for lists the way Sonny Crockett is a fiend for mojitos. Don’t believe me? Check out this blurry video:

My Best of 2009 movie list has been percolating for a while now, with only a few contenders for best or worst film to come before I shut things down at the end of December (oh yes, I won’t stop watching until I’m sure I have it right). Meanwhile, even though I’m uncomfortable with the idea of this decade being 1999-2009, I’ve been pondering my own best of the decade list. This should be something to be excited about, and yet until last week I just couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for it. When I search my soul I come to the uncomfortable but inescapable conclusion that it’s because any list I would come up with would both be horribly incomplete and would betray my populist taste. What makes me more uncomfortable than that is realising that such an admission makes me uncomfortable at all.

Any list I could make for this decade is already off to a bad start when I admit that I’ve yet to see many of the best reviewed and most beloved movies of recent times. The gaps in my viewing history include Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return, and anything by Wong Kar Wai, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, or the Dardennes. I’ve also only seen a couple of (terrific) movies by Claire Denis and a single, memorable one by Michael Haneke. Some film buff I am. This short list is merely the tip of the iceberg. According to this list, I might as well not consider myself a film lover at all, as I’m not looking for movie excellence in the right places (though the entire list is invalidated by the praise for Woody Allen’s technically disastrous and intellectually vapid Cassandra’s Dream: surely one of the ten worst films of the decade).

All of that shame over my taste is wrapped up in feelings of mortification over class and intellectualism and authenticity and so many other things. I know that none of it is important but the expression of some kind of discernment in my opinion helps to legitimise my amateur film criticism, something I take very seriously even when I talk about things that readers might consider beneath contempt (my defence of Michael Bay, for instance, or my enthusiasm for The Dark Knight). Therefore it scares me to openly admit that I’m a sucker for a well-choreographed action scene with some pretty explosions included. No one wants to admit to enjoying those movies without losing their credibility, so why should I be the one to stick my neck out?

Maybe it’s time to get over those silly fears and say it loud: I’m a fan of populist cinema. Yes, I can appreciate works of cinematic art on many levels, though perhaps I might have greater difficulty expressing that appreciation or placing those works in context with works by other artists. However, when I talk about how much I love Joel Silver movies of the 80s and 90s, or Bruckheimer’s output in the late 90s to the current day, I’m on firmer ground. Perhaps this is why Shades of Caruso concentrates on those movies: it’s safer to talk about the joy I get from seeing a movie by the Wachowski Siblings than it is to attempt to unpick the works of Abbas Kiarostami. Any list I would make for the past decade would skew heavily towards populist movies, partially because most of the movies I’ve seen were major releases by Western writers and directors, but also because these are the movies that speak directly to me.

It was upon staring at that shame, and the shame I feel for having that shame, that I said bollocks to it and compiled this list. I hereby reject that shame, expel it from my soul, and embrace the movies that filled my soul with joy or heart-ache. The construction of this list is helped by the clear cut-off point in my past: 1999 was the year I moved out of my hometown for the second time and headed to London, where I found enough time and opportunity to attend more movies. As a result my enthusiasm increased, until I had no choice but to start a blog to use as a pressure valve for this energy. I’ve seen hundreds of movies in that time, and so I expect this list to be incomplete and filled with egregious misses, plus some movies have been missed off (Pan’s Labyrinth) or put low on the list (No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood) because I’ve only seen them once. I’ll need to revisit them with a clear head, free of hype, to do them justice.

One more caveat: I’ve not included films from this year. I know, this seems to make the whole process pointless, but I like to have at least a little gap between seeing a movie and putting it in a list this big. The End-Of-Year lists are made with the proviso that I understand how my opinion will change over time, and watching films right up until Dec 31st means I will be cramming in movies even though my opinion of them has yet to settle. Who knows whether time will be kind to these movies or not. I’ve certainly been surprised with how some movies I initially loved have dropped out of my favour, and others that I enjoyed well enough on first viewing are not breaking into the top fifty. For the record, at least three from my forthcoming 2009 list would definitely qualify for inclusion here, but I don’t want to add them now as the year has yet to finish, and I’m hoping two or three more will qualify. Perhaps when I’ve finished compiling my 2009 lists, I will write an addendum explaining where they would go in this list.

And so, here is the first part of my list of the best 106 movies of the period 1999-2008. Why 106? Because I just couldn’t leave the last six movies off without writing a little bit about them, as I enjoyed them greatly and felt they would never in a million years get any list love otherwise. As this post has already run on, I’ll only list the first 16 here, and the next 90 films will be revealed as the week progresses. Yes yes, there are simpler ways of doing this, but anyone who knows me will understand that when there is an easy way and a hard way to do anything, I will ignore both and then do something completely self-indulgent that makes a mockery of my original goal. Just play along. I’ve kept my explanations for why I love these movies as short as I can. I hope I’ve lauded a secret favourite of yours, dear reader, one that has been snubbed by every critic in the land.

Honorary Bad Movie Inclusion — The Room

It is quite simply the worst movie ever made, but its rewatch value, its quotability, and the fearless depiction of the dreadful inner life of its emotionally immature writer and director make it almost infinitely fascinating. Its inclusion here is no reflection of its quality, but of the hold it has over anyone who watches it. It’s a true curio.

106. Avalon

After leaving a screening of Avalon, my viewing companion commented that there is good boring and bad boring, and this was a perfect example of the former. Starkly beautiful and glacially paced, Mamoru Oshii’s ode to the power of gaming predicts a future where our desire to transcend our mundane world will drive us to abandon it.

105. Kung Fu Hustle

What made me love Stephen Chow’s madcap martial arts comedy wasn’t the expertly choreographed actions scenes, great though they were. Neither was it the broad humour, though I enjoyed that too. The best thing about it was how the wacky tone morphed into effective dramatic energy. At first you laugh at the caricatures, but by the final act you fear for their safety.

104. The Mothman Prophecies

Poorly marketed as a bog-standard X-Files-esque alien abduction flick, this dread-soaked thriller is more interested in dramatising our insignificance in the face of supernatural forces that move us around like game pieces. Strong performances and meticulous direction from Mark Pellington help to ground the potentially silly project.

103. Moulin Rouge

At his worst, Baz Luhrmann is a vulgar artiste who has zero impulse control, but when his approach works, it can wrench your heart open. This fearlessly sincere musical is the most successful example of the Luhrman effect. Though many have resisted its garish onslaught, my cynicism melted twenty minutes in and stayed that way.

102. The Rundown (aka Welcome To The Jungle)

What should have been the gateway drug to the paradise that is Loving The Rock instead faltered at the box office, but who cares? For its sheer exuberance and demented asides — not to mention a totally hatstand performance by Christopher Walken — this Midnight Sprint shall be remembered and adored.

101. Solaris

Though Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Stanislav Lem’s SF classic fails to capture the essence of that novel (as does the previous version by Andrei Tarkovsky), the result explores equally interesting philosophical questions. Clooney excels as a bereaved astronaut forced to confront living memories of his dead wife, a celestial manifestation distorted by his yearning and twisted perceptions of reality.

100. Mushishi

Katsuhiro Otomo’s live-action adaptation of Yuki Urushibara’s manga is a curious beast. Though overlong, the tale of Mushi master Ginko’s journey through a polluted and hostile pastoral land is a feast for the eyes. The gloomy atmospherics and cascade of ideas more than make up for any flaws.

99. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

Kevin Smith’s low-budget comedies often fail to fly thanks to their self-imposed parochial restrictions. His ambitious and controversial religious satire Dogma was an improvement upon those early movies but this self-lacerating road-movie was the one that really worked, and well enough to finally make me appreciate his scatological shtick.

98. I Heart Huckabees

It achieved an awful notoriety as the movie where director David O. Russell lost his mind on set and bollocked Lily Tomlin, but I Heart Huckabees was also a disorienting blend of philosophy and Dada-esque nonsense, often incomprehensible but almost always entertaining. However, unlike many chaotic cult movies (ahem, Richard Kelly), this actually made sense if you unfocused your brain while watching.

97. Shanghai Knights

Shanghai Noon was fun, and the pairing of Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson was more successful than the tiresome team-up of Chan and Chris Tucker in the Rush Hour movies. The London-set sequel was a massive improvement, mostly because helmer David Dobkin was the only US director who seemed willing to spend time with Chan to create fights almost as complex and funny as his classic Hong Kong work.

96. Michael Clayton

Clooney again in full force, this time as a corporate fixer who gets messed around once too often. What could have been a rote corporate thriller instead becomes a fascinating character study, one where terrible decisions are made in good faith, and good decisions happen for the wrong reasons. It also propelled Tilda Swinton into stardom: for this I am eternally grateful.

95. Mulholland Drive

Is it poor form to admit that upon first viewing I didn’t understand anything about David Lynch’s tinsel-town nightmare? All that I knew was that the final scene was almost unwatchably terrifying. Days later, the mood of dread still lingered. That residual horror — and Naomi Watts’ excellent star-making performance — is enough to justify inclusion on this list.

94. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Easy to forget how big an impact this movie had on first release. Even though the final installment of the trilogy ripped all of the fun from the franchise, the first is still a near-perfect swashbuckler. The first appearance of Captain Jack Sparrow is a contender for Best Entrance of the Decade.

93. The Prestige

Initially the blatantly obvious “twist” at the end of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation soured an experience that had been extremely pleasurable. Upon repeated viewings, it becomes apparent that the Transported Man trick is not the point of the movie. Instead, Nolan is more interested in painting a picture of a man driven to unthinkable acts because of his thirst for revenge. Compared to dreadful fallout of that psychological damage, magic is nothing.

92. The Chronicles of Riddick

Many choose to focus on the flaws and hubris of David Twohy’s Space-Conan-meets-Lord-of-the-Rings hybrid, but that occasionally inspired vision – and that amazing twist ending — are enough to justify the entire ambitious, galaxy-hopping project. Another film where the cult grows every year, with the prospect of a continuation of the saga now tantalisingly close.

91. eXistenZ

Arriving between the reality-warping brain food of Alex Proyas’ Dark City and The Wachowski’s Matrix, Cronenberg’s only self-scripted film of the decade was greeted with an initial burst of excitement and then seemed to be forgotten. A shame. It’s his most playful movie since Naked Lunch, skipping gleefully between levels of reality and throwing in traditionally unpleasant body horror with abandon.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Keep checking back to see more updates as the week progresses.

Announcing The Return of the Full-On Cage Experience

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Recently I defended Michael Bay (while simultaneously expressing how odious his movies can be), and now I rush to the defense of another man used as a lazy punchline to a billion deeply unfunny jokes about bad cinema: the acting colossus called Nicolas Cage. As with Bay, Cage is treated like a cautionary tale about how that vile, Chthonic monolith called Hollywood can drive people insane with greed, how talented individuals can lose their way and begin a descent from making art to making dross. He is accused of sleepwalking through films, cashing checks, appearing in unworthy crowd-pleasing dreck, and working with anti-cinematic infidels. His personal life is raked over (he keeps impulsively marrying women! He calls his kid a silly name! He buys too much crap!), his eccentricities treated as signs of mental illness, and his success used as example number two in the case against modern culture (example one being the success of Bay). Only Ben Affleck is treated with less respect, a fact that I intend to address in a future post where I defend him too. (I’m serious about that. Affleck is awesome.)

There are millions who seem to love to take a short-cut in thinking and just refer to Cage as a has-been with no understanding of what a joke he has become, though Cage’s most famous critic has been Sean Penn, the former friend who once told the New York Times, “Nic Cage is no longer an actor. He could be again, but now he’s more like a…performer”. This was said around the time that Cage appeared in two Bruckheimer productions — The Rock and Con Air — which seems to be the one thing an artist can do that will sink his credibility. Why did Penn single out Cage for that and not Cage’s co-stars Ed Harris, or Sean Connery, or John Cusack, or John Malkovich? They’re respected actors who have won awards and are considered to be fine actors, but Cage falls into the line of fire for moving from carefully considered character pieces like Leaving Las Vegas to action movies, three of which he did in a row (the third being the classic John Woo SF actioner Face/Off). His wildly broad performances in those movies were almost certainly a factor, but then he has always given broad performances, within which lie subtle moments (see also Wild At Heart, Birdy, Peggy Sue Got Married, etc.). They’re entertaining displays of eye-rolling crowd-pleasing acting pyrotechnics, but there’s a soul there too. This is what I think of as getting The Full-On Cage Experience, with madness and soulfulness tied together. Penn could never pull off anything like that. When he mugs, he ends up wrecking the movie.

By all that’s holy and unholy, how much better was Penn in Milk, or Dead Man Walking (incidentally, that’s one of my favourite screen performances of all time)? It’s not even a fair competition. Besides, this accusation, insinuating that Cage is no longer an actor, is rich coming from someone who appeared in I Am Sam. I’ll take an entertaining and unpretentious actor having fun playing a demonic avenger with a flaming skull than some humourless chide wasting his talent on Oscar-baiting bullshit like that any day of the week. Sadly, Penn’s not the only one who thinks Cage has pissed his talent away. In this little essay, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman compares Cage to Dr. Wesley T. Snipes, which is prescient considering Cage’s current tax woes, but while Snipes has descended into Direct-To-DVD hell, Cage is still working on big-budget movies and smaller curios, still attracting the viewing public, and still cranking out performances that are — at best — thrilling, and — at worst — merely entertaining.

The one argument that genuinely annoys me is the one where Cage is cranking out piss-poor, lazy performances since his last truly astonishing performance in Jonze and Kaufman’s Adaptation. I’ve often said that I think his work in that (along with his work in Leaving Las Vegas and Raising Arizona) deserves a coveted Shades of Caruso Free Pass…

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…but of all the movies he has made since, only three performances really disappointed me: his work as Benjamin Gates in the first National Treasure movie, where he seemed awfully tired; his creepy performance in Next, the empty action thriller adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s clever short story; and his catatonic turn as a greasy-haired loser assassin in the disastrous remake of Bangkok Dangerous, which I suspect he took so he could get a holiday in Thailand. That last one really did give me cause for concern, but Gleiberman likes to make out that Cage is regularly signing on for “grade-Z genre schlockers”, which apparently include Ghost Rider and The Wicker Man. Neither of them are good movies, but they were not developed as low-budget cash-ins. Ghost Rider was obviously meant to be a big comic book adaptation, with a pretty good cast and a $110m budget, and even if it was absolutely dire, it was made with love by fans of the character, of which Cage is one.

The Wicker Man is a dumb-ass movie by any standards, but it’s made by Neil LaBute, who was once a promising director. He could have turned in a thoughtless remake of the excellent original (which would fit under Gleiberman’s umbrella of “genre schlocker”) but instead made something personal, for better or worse. For all its faults it’s obviously of a part with his other movies, dealing with his favourite themes of misanthropy, deceit, misogyny, fear of opening up to others, and gynophobia. I’ve occasionally argued that The Wicker Man is a satire on male fear of impotence and castration, a paranoid comical fantasy about a scheming cabal of exaggerated feminist ballbreakers who are out to destroy the penis, turning all men into drones and semen-donors whose sexuality is merely a sacrifice of power to the almighty womb in order to replenish the earth with children.

Sadly, even if this was LaBute’s intention — and even if Cage was in on this project for that reason alone — it’s still ridiculous and poorly made and filled with wonderfully camp moments. Cage maintains that the comedic aspects of the movie were not lost on him. In an interview with Spike Jonze, Drew McWeeny discusses meeting Cage, and Jonze is full of praise:

Jonze: I love [Cage]. We had the best time working together. He really works and focuses.
McWeeny: His publicist was a little wary of me being there, I guess, because he doesn’t do a lot of press and he doesn’t allow press around a lot, but he really was very accessible once I’d been there for a few days, and he kind of warmed up to me. And he was really just fascinating. I loved chatting with him about stuff.
Jonze: Totally chill.
McWeeny: Yeah. And I think far more self-aware than most people think. Like I think some people think Nic is in this vacuum and doesn’t realize how crazy some of his performances are. I got the feeling he was totally aware of how people perceive things. We were talking about THE WICKER MAN, and he was like, “How do people call that an unintentional comedy? I’m in a bear suit kicking Lelee Sobieski in the throat. I know it’s funny.”
Jonze: He just takes it so seriously that nobody knows how to take him. Like PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, I was like, “What is that?” Like I was 15 so I didn’t really know.
McWeeny: I just love how you can always count on him to push things further, like VAMPIRE’S KISS. He ate a roach, man.
Jonze: And also just the insanity of that performance, just the balls-out fearlessness.

Is it enough that Cage is aware of the ridiculousness of the movies he is appearing in? For me it is. I strongly suspect Cage is the most easily bored person in the world, and unfortunately that is paired with the ability to get work in movies that pay millions of dollars for him to spend on cars and comics and castles. Some of the films he has been in lately are truly awful, and I would never argue that they weren’t. Neverthless, I watch them for those flashes of manic commitment from Cage — The Partial Cage Experience — that delight me so. Are they valid acting choices, or is he merely trying to entertain himself while he trudges through formulaic populist bilge? As far as I’m concerned, even if he’s merely trying to entertain himself, he succeeding in entertaining me, and surely that’s what counts.

The only other popular actors that delight me as much are Clooney (who can do pathos and comedy equally well), Streep (who is always the best thing about everything she has ever been in), and maybe Jeff Bridges. Even those fine actors have not given me as much pleasure as Cage does, even when you forget about his early, golden years and concentrate on this bizarre stretch of poor movies. Since Adaptation we’ve had the insanity of Not The Bees…

…a literally hysterical fiery transformation…

…a Shout-Off with Rose Byrne (who is utterly overmatched, despite her invention of the word “chuldren”)…

…a run in with an obnoxious know-it-all child (the best part of which is how he treats the kid like an adult for most of the scene)…

…and a frustrating teaser of what could be his finest hour, if ever Rob Zombie got the money to make it…

His willingness to make fun of himself is the thing that keeps his crazy public and professional persona viable, and though many of his actions seem completely deranged, I honestly believe he’s playing a trick on us. Can someone who makes a series of adverts like these really be unintentionally weird?

(N.B. Anyone who has a sense of humour about themselves gets a break from me. Even the reportedly tyrannical and insensitive director Michael Bay gets points for playing up to his image with this commercial for Verizon:)

I’m a fully paid up Cage fan. For entertainment value, he can’t be beat. To see a person with such intelligence, quirkiness, restlessness, fearlessness, and energy do his thing in such big-screen movies is a rare thrill. If I squint I can see why Cage is now considered a hack by critics and film-watchers, because it’s easy to confuse being in a terrible movie and actually being terrible, but I worry that maybe people are also turned off by his intensity and his allegiance to the weird. The odd soporific performance aside, perhaps what baffles people the most is seeing him devote so much energy to projects that they feel don’t deserve it. Personally, I think that’s admirable. He’s getting paid enough, after all. Dance, you fucking monkey! Dance for your millions!

And yet even though I revel in his passionate and unpredictable work in crud, I’ve become concerned that we would never get another performance out of Cage that is as electrifying as his best work (disclaimer: I’ve not seen Lord of War or The Weather Man, and some have said he gives solid, rounded performances in both). Once upon a time he would work with Lynch and Scorsese, and the performances he gave were over-the-top yet grounded in some kind of emotional profundity, but lately those performances — while entertaining, memorable, and stronger than popular wisdom would have you believe — are lacking that extra fire. Well, I’m happy to report the return of The Full-On Cage Experience, as he takes on the task of being the 21st Century Klaus Kinski. More on that tomorrow, when I review Werner Herzog’s excellent Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

Here Comes The Sun (To Destroy The Earth With Mutated Neutrinos in 2012)

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HERE BE SPOILERS! YE HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Last year Roland Emmerich took a break from making movies about demolishing civilisation so he could make a movie about the birth of civilisation. It seems Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser realised just how unbelievably boring it is to watch ancient Caucasian Rasta wannabes trek dozens of miles from icy tundra to scorching desert, and has returned to super-demolish civilisation as a weirdly nihilistic apology for the stultifying 10,000 BC. 2012 is possibly the last word in disaster movies, offering cataclysmic disaster porn on a scale even Emmerich has never been able to achieve before, and for that perverse dedication to kicking Earth in the ass as often as possible it’s tempting to respect the man. Just like Irwin Allen and Cecil B. DeMille before him, Emmerich thinks he knows what audiences want, and he’ll bend over backwards to give it to you.

This time the threat to Earth is not aliens or global warming but the sun, which magically becomes supercharged due to galactic alignment and begins firing mutated super-neutrinos at our planet, causing the core to heat up, thus melting the Earth’s crust and causing the tectonic plates that make up the surface to shift around like cards being shuffled on a table by a six year old. You have no idea how much fun it is to write that ridiculous unscientific sentence. Even better, a news report early in the movie refers to this as a Solar Climax, which means we’re going to be killed off by Mutated Neutrino Bukkake. For this moment, and for keeping the Mayan Calendar/New Age Nonsense to a pleasing minimum, 2012 will be kept off this year’s Shades of Caruso Worst Films List, despite the numerous flaws and annoyances that pop up through the rest of the film.

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This imminent disaster is partially discovered by geologist Adrian Helmsley, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who — after exclaiming “My God!” for the first of many times — convinces grubby politician Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) to begin plans to save humanity. These involve building Arks to house humans, animals (mostly giraffes, for some reason), and works of art, but as America doesn’t seem up to the job, they outsource the work to China. This is not a joke. It actually happens. To make matters worse, the Arks are actually located in Tibet, but Tibet is not mentioned once in the movie, even though there are a bunch of Tibetan characters included. Those shots in the trailers and posters of a Tibetan monk? He’s Chinese, okay? For god’s sake, don’t tell Richard Gere.

As Emmerich knows that his disaster epics require a cast of characters comprising normal folks alongside the frowning politicians and scientists, we are also introduced to Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a failed SF writer and divorcee forced to drive a limo for a living. Through a series of insanely improbable coincidences that beggar belief, he finds out about the imminent destruction of the Earth after encounters with both Helmsley (who is his biggest fan) and Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson), a high-larious pickle-eating conspiracy theorist broadcasting from Yellowstone.

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Curtis goes from sceptic to believer just in time to evacuate his wife Kate (Amanda Peet, given nothing to do except fret about her kids), children Lilly and Noah (geddit!?!?), and wife’s new boyfriend Gordon, who all but wears an expiry date on his forehead. In a bravura effects sequence our protagonists drive through LA as an earthquake sends the entire city into the ocean, and Emmerich at first treats it like a fun park ride. As this scene is showing the deaths of millions of people this seems rather distasteful, but by the end of it we get to see faceless virtual people falling out of crumbling buildings, and tears are momentarily shed. This surface level grief for the billions soon to die features prominently through much of the film, though this promotional clip has excised almost every hint of the tragedy unfolding.

After this lucky escape via plane, complete with a race down a collapsing runway and some nifty flying past obstacles, our heroes go back to Yellowstone, which promptly explodes with what appears to be nuclear force, requiring another lucky escape via plane, complete with almost identical race down a collapsing runway and some nifty flying past obstacles. From there they progress to Las Vegas to hook up with a caricature from Russia (crooked billionaire Yuri Karpov, played with zero subtlety and maximum sterotyping by Zlatko Buric) and his two children, a bimbo trophy wife and a bodyguard/pilot. It’s not long before our expanded group of heroes get another lucky escape via plane, complete with yet another race down a collapsing runway and some nifty flying past obstacles. By this time we’re about an hour and thirty into the movie, and I figured the worst case scenario was another half an hour with two or three more races down collapsing runways. Well, I have good and bad news. After Las Vegas crumbles into an enormous chasm, there is only one more plane-based drama scene involving a glacier. The bad news is that the film is 160 minutes long, so there’s another 70 odd minutes of people looking at screens with ominous graphics and then exclaiming “My God!”

thandieanddanny

While all this is happening, we also get to meet the President (a shaky Danny Glover) and his daughter Laura (yet another weak performance from Thandie Newton), Helmsley’s dad Harry (Blu Mankuma) and his jazz partner Tony (a sadly underused George Segal), the occasional bunch of nameless bystanders who will act as catastrophe-fodder, and a group of Tibetans Chinese who just seem to be hanging around to be utilised in the final (fifth) act. This portion of the movie prominently features the other big theme of the movie: characters giving other characters permission to leave them to die so we can keep the plot moving without getting too worried about the majority of the human race dying in terror and agony.

Noble President Danny Glover decides to stay behind for no apparent reason, as does the Italian president. Unusually for a mainstream movie, both men make a point of praying for salvation, and then die. At least one other character makes a sign of the cross and then dies two seconds later. This approach to the effect of belief in the face of disaster is far more entertaining than the rampant symbolism and mealy-mouthed anti-reason bullshit of Alex Proyas’ Knowing which, as one AV Club commenter said, showed “God” destroying the world just so he could convert one atheist into a believer. 2012 seems to have none of that, with man’s will and science prevailing in the face of cosmically delivered oblivion, which is a message Proyas’ sappy movie was not even slightly interested in conveying. In 2012 the only other characters who even broach the subject of faith are the Tibetans Chinese, but they survive. Hours after seeing the movie I’m still trying to parse what this means, other than that the movie likes to point out that these guys live on a mountain, are obviously not as advanced as the rest of us, are super-honourable and spiritual, and killing them would be very mean.

peetandtibetanlady

In the film’s final hour we see the epic scale of humanity’s plans for survival, with huge ships poking out of the side of a mountain, ready to cut through the rising oceans after the crust of the Earth breaks apart and sinks. For a movie with such an ambivalent relationship with religion, it lays on the Ark stuff pretty thick, though Emmerich is mostly concerned with dramatising poorly written debates about the morality of leaving people behind to die. Ponderous and cyclical debates litter the last two acts of the movie, even after the symbolic parting-permission granted by President Danny Glover. Helmsley is one of the chosen few, and his disgust at the sight of rich men and women, aristocrats, royalty, and the slimy upper classes who have bought their way onto the Arks boils over. He even gets to throw a goblet across the room as if he was Jesus the Geologist. I’m still getting over the fact that the guys who organised this project to save humanity thought goblets were the preferred drinking vessels of the last vestiges of humanity.

Already sickened by Anheuser’s ruthless extermination of anyone who threatened to blow the whistle on the Mutated Neutrino Bukkake, things get worse when — for the third or fourth time in the movie — Helmsley’s calculations are proved to be wrong and the submergence of Tibet China is closer than he thinks. With thousands of potential survivors about to be stranded due to time constraints, Helmsley rebels and makes a plea for the heads of state to open their gates and let the people on, using the writings of Jackson Curtis to teach our leaders to show their humanity by saving others. To the horror of super-meanie Platt, the leaders do this, and everyone else — including the nasty Russian businessman — gets to have a hero moment.

wetpeople

The amount of fake drama flying around by this point is quite staggering, what with the act of getting the survivors onboard taking a couple of minutes (making the previous excuses for their abandonment inexplicable), but there is more to come. Our original band of heroes — who have flown from Las Vegas to the mountain base with the help of a fortuitous tectonic shift — have made their way to the same ark containing our other main characters (a 33% chance of getting it right, I guess), and in their haste to sneak on board cause a hydraulic meltdown that kills Gordon (long overdue) and stops the big door at the back of the boat from closing. With a tidal wave minutes away, can John Cusack fix the hydraulics and save the day? After 15 very very hectic minutes featuring a runaway Airforce One, Mount Everest, and a hint of comedy giraffe poo, he does, miraculously surviving drowning and a grievous head wound thanks to what seems like the intervention of a squeamish focus group. Does this mean he will appear in the proposed TV series sequel with the survivors pitching up in Africa? Our survey says no.

It might sound like I hated the movie, but as with almost all of Emmerich’s movies, it has enough bombastic energy and commitment to spectacle to make the first viewing seem like an absolute blast. There is so much madness here, so much effort expended to keep topping itself with senses-battering set-pieces that the silliness is easily ignored. With your forebrain melted by the visual and aural onslaught, it’s easy to give up your critical faculties, and more than once I found myself anxiously wringing my hands as one character or another found themselves in grave danger. It’s only once the movie is over that you realise the exhausting  fifteen minute suspense sequence at the end revolves around closing a door. Kudos to Emmerich for generating so much tension out of such a small thing, but still, they’re just closing a door. Two people die doing it. It’s a bit of overkill.

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However, if you’re trying to make the ultimate disaster movie — as I suspect Emmerich is trying to do — overkill is the name of the game. Bad news for actors who spend 65% of their screentime on some gimballed set screaming at exploding mountains off camera, but good news for anyone who takes pleasure from seeing extravagantly rendered visions of enormous peril. Believe me, this movie features some of the most impressively detailed and imaginative effects sequences of all time. It’s much easier to be swept away by Emmerich’s fantasies of global doom when they are so beautiful. Ghastly and kind of pornographic, yes, but overwhelming to look at. The LA earthquake scene above might be the most impressive sequence in the film (a shame that it comes so early), but the Yellowstone eruption comes close to topping it. Some of the visuals are truly the stuff of nightmares, and I doff my cap to Digital Domain, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Double Negative, Scanline, and Uncharted Territory for knocking it out of the park. If you’re going to see this, it’s best you see it on the biggest screen possible, just to drink in the complexity of those FX blowouts.

His debt to the rest of the disaster movie genre is obvious. Throughout 2012 we’re reminded of Dante’s Peak, Volcano, Earthquake, Meteor, When Worlds Collide, When Time Ran Out and The Poseidon Adventure. All we needed were a burning building and a swarm of killer bees drunk on mutated neutrinos and we’d have the full set. The similarities to his own movies are numerous too, from the cutesy old people (Segal and Mankuma in this, Judd Hirsch in Independence Day), to the nefarious politicians or soldiers  (Platt in this, James Rebhorn in Independence Day, Kevin Dunn in Godzilla, and Kenneth Welsh in The Day After Tomorrow), to the redneck eccentrics driving around in camper vans (Harrelson in this, Randy Quaid in Independence Day), to the dog that almost gets killed but is saved at the last minute in a display of simply astounding manipulative excess. The dog rescue in 2012 will very probably dwarf your memory of the dog rescue in Independence Day, it’s so contrived.

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But then contrivance is the lifeblood of Emmerich’s films, with tight plotting replaced by clunkily convenient narrative steps needed to get characters from one hazardous and spectacular situation to another. Part of the fun to be had with 2012 is guessing how our heroes will get from America to the Ark base on the other side of the world, and then seeing Emmerich provide the easiest and silliest answers possible. Jackson just happens to know a Russian billionaire getting on an Ark, and just happens to meet a conspiracy theorist who knew some scientists who have been killed by the government, and Jackson just happened to know one of those scientists, and he just happens to meet Helmsley, who just happens to love his terrible SF novel, and Jackson just happens to have lost his wife to a plastic surgeon who can fly and who once operated on the trophy wife of the Russian billionaire who is getting on the Ark… No wonder Emmerich is not too concerned with the deaths of billions. He seems to think there’s only about twenty people on the planet.

That said, 2012 spends far more time pondering the unpleasant logistics of selecting survivors than I thought it would, considering how Emmerich usually skates over difficult emotions as quickly as he can. There’s an argument that Emmerich and Kloser were only adding this plot thread in because they love having self-serving bureaucrats as villains in their movies, and seeing a creep like Anheuser beaten by the non-more-inspirational Helmsley will make audiences cheer. Take that, pencil-pusher who doesn’t understand what it is to be human! Maybe I could swallow this because even when addressing the themes of extinction, this is a lighter movie than another movie about the end of the world: Mimi Leder’s Doomsday fantasy Deep Impact. That had similar subject matter, but used the conventions of the disaster movie genre to explore the emotional cost of surviving an impending cataclysm, with much less voyeuristic sadism on display.

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That movie was written by death-obsessed Buddhist Bruce Joel Rubin (whom I have talked about before), and with its seemingly endless parade of tearful farewells and last minute reconciliations is one of cinema’s great downers. Emmerich is not about to let that happen, so while we get hints of reflection on the fate of billions, once the White House has been destroyed and the older fathers (Glover, Mankuma and Segal) have been killed, he pretty much acts as if there are only the survivors left to think about, and all further talk of saving humanity refers only to the Ark passengers. Easier to hit an upbeat tone at the end as “everyone” got saved. Does it make me a bad person that I preferred this shameless emotional whitewash to Deep Impact‘s po-faced and pessimistic treatise on extinction and mortality?

Without that deeply reflective and enquiring approach — to his credit Emmerich asks the questions, but he doesn’t seem to want to hear the answers — we’re left with BOOM-gasm setpieces, shameless emotional exploitation and a cavalcade of trite dialogue. There’s no line too obvious or cliched for Emmerich, but even though it is perfectly right to rail against the lack of imagination shown by him and his collaborator Kloser, you have to give him props for yet again gathering a cast of entertaining character actors to give those weak words some life, or even selling clangingly obvious Emmerich conventions such as having a character say “There’s nothing to worry about,” and then having a building fall on them or their mode of transport malfunction horribly (this happens numerous times). Though the female characters have almost nothing to do, at least we get to see Cusack, Platt (operating at approximately 68% Platt-ocity), Harrelson (channeling Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now), and Glover doing their best to breathe life into this word-stodge. It even has a late appearance by Stephen McHattie as the captain of one of the Arks, which means the movie scores 10 bonus McHattie points.

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Best of all is Chiwetel Ejiofor, who steals the movie in the first couple of scenes and then runs away at warp speed, leaving everyone else in the dust. He’s always been an impressive figure on screen, but here he makes you believe in very nearly everything that is going on. Only the final speech about humanity and honour and compassion and big fucking BLAH defeats him, but then it would defeat anyone. It’s a monolith of banal sentiment, but Ejiofor still gives it all he has. Though Cusack is ostensibly the lead in the film, it’s Ejiofor’s conviction and commitment to the project that will have the biggest impact on audiences. Maybe this will be the movie to make people sit up and notice his immense talent. If so, then all of this expensive and ghoulish guilty-pleasure death-pr0n will not have been made in vain.

some of the most impressively detailed and imaginative effects sequences of all time. It’s much easier to be swept away by Emmerich’s fantasies of global doom when they are so beautiful. Ghastly and kind of pornographic, yes, but so stunning to look at. The LA earthquake seen above might be the most impressive sequence in the film (a shame that it comes so early), but the Yellowstone eruption comes close to topping it. Some of the visuals are truly the stuff of nightmares, and I doff my cap to Digital Domain, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Double Negative, Scanline, and Uncharted Territory for knocking it out of the park. If you’re going to see this, it’s best you see it on the biggest screen possible, just to drink in the complexity of those FX blowouts.

Adventures In Awesome: Want! Now! (2)

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And no, I’m not talking about Kablamo (1) again, and I’m not talking about the obscenely expensive Rock Band (2). I’m talking about this.


I’ve gone on about The Matrix a lot lately, and my love of the Wachowskis (3), but I never go on about Alex Proyas’ Dark City, mostly because I keep forgetting about it. The Matrix, which shared some similarities with Dark City, came later but was so unlike everything I’d seen before that it eclipsed the previous film. Plus, you know, the fighting. The wonderful, wonderful fighting.

It’s a shame, as Dark City is excellent, dealing as it does with issues of memory and identity, and features at least two things I’ve always wanted to see (4) for every one thing I didn’t (5). Plus, lots of pre-Jack-Bauer panting from Keifer Sutherland. It’s a corker, and an interesting companion piece to writer Lem Dobbs’ other forgotten mindbender, Kafka, which I always felt was given a hard time for no other reason that Steven Soderbergh was due a kicking from critics (6).


Alex Proyas is one of those directors I also tend to forget exists, but he’s three for three in my book (7), and I’ll always be interested in his work, even when it looks like he’s put Nicolas Cage in another movie about knowing the future, which worked out really badly last time (8). That this is a director’s cut intrigues me. I think it’s a fine movie, but the first hour moves at such a hectic clip (compared to the perfectly judged final hour) that I often wondered if there had been some tinkering done to get us to the really crazy stuff. It goes so fast Graeme Revell’s music doesn’t pause for a second. It makes the first forty minutes or so feel like a single scene. Very odd. Perhaps that might be different with a new cut. We shall see.

So, anyway, we want this. On Blu-Ray. Which would mean we would have to buy a Blu-Ray player. And then re-buy my entire DVD collection on the new format. ::cries:: Please consider this installments 2-145 of Want! Now! Or maybe I’ll just wait for holo-players and/or cortex downloads.


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(1) Not to be confused with the popular Psychlo beverage Kerbango.

(2) Okay, I do want it, but unless I find a competition I can enter soon, I’m going to have to forget about it. If anyone hears of any UK competitions to win it, please leave a comment directing me to it so I can win it and ease my pangs.

(3) I’ve talked Canyon into seeing it at the IMAX this Friday. Yes, I am personally committed to saving this movie from oblivion/infamy!

(4) Richard O’Brien as a bad guy! Exciting psychic thinkoffs between floating people!

(5) Rufus Sewell with an unconvincing American accent.

(6) Turns out I was on the right track, and Soderbergh knew it. In Down and Dirty Pictures (which is essential reading for anyone interested in movies), Soderbergh says (on p.79):

I was going to get my head handed to me on my second film, pretty much no matter what I did. That’s what I was prepared for. In a way I decided I would go out in flames by making a movie that had a really big bull’s-eye on its chest.

That’s probably his low self-esteem talking, because otherwise it’s a bit of a smack in the mouth to Dobbs. Anyway, there are some mild similarities between the two, and I recommend you catch it if you get a chance, though apologies if the presence of Keith Allen gives you nightmares or episodes of nausea.

(7) Yes yes yes, I, Robot is not perfect, but it features some amazing set-pieces, and it bludgeoned me into acquiescence inspired me to buy some black leather Converse sneakers that I love, so it gets a free pass.

(8) He’s also rumoured to be the number one pick to direct a Silver Surfer movie. Shades of Caruso approves!