Announcing The Return of the Full-On Cage Experience
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…
…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.
Summer Movie Poll Madness
England just got substantially less green and pleasant. Temperatures have plummeted, and I’m having to wander around the house in a pair of warm slackerpants (and yes, in case you were wondering, I am a nerd). There’s no use denying it. Even though the local cinemas are clogged with top-of-the-line blockbusting audience-pleasers — such as The Soloist, Surrogates, and the Fame remake which made critics pine for the Alan Parker original in defiance of all that is holy — it’s fair to say the Summer Movie Season (aka My Christmas) is now over. And what an exciting time it was! Four million romantic comedies came out and actually did well, everything seemed to be 3D all of a sudden, and Michael Bay became the most hated film director on Earth, an event which apparently annoyed previous title holder Roman Polanski so much he gave himself up to the rozzers just to remind everyone what an asshole he is.
Compared to last summer, it was a pretty underwhelming few months, with the odd high spot and pleasant surprise tucked away. Nevertheless, there was at least one stone-cold masterpiece, and even flat and kinda pointless movies often had something to recommend them (I’m looking at you, Meryl). There was also the occasional spectacular failure, the sort of disastrous and ill-thought-out fuck-up that gives the Summer Movie Season its bad reputation. So, in the interest of collating an overview of what people loved and hated this summer, I have begun two polls, asking for your favourite and least favourite movies of the 2009 summer season. The list is the same in both:
- Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy
- Zooey Hall
- Pixar’s The Bucket List
- Quentin Tarantino Presents: Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece
- Final Destination: We’re Trying To Get Inside Your Eyeballs
- Eric Bana Is: An Endearing Aussie Cuckold
- Christopher Johnson and Wikus Van Der Merwe’s Excellent Adventure
- Harry Potter And The Toenail of Effervescence
- Terminator 4: When Third Acts Collapse
- Cover Me With Drool, Drop An Anvil On Me, Then Drag Me To Hell
- The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming
- Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience)
- Eric Bana Is: An Absentee Time-Travelling Husband
- X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine
- G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES!
- Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision)
- That’s No Moon; It’s Hott Sam Rockwell’s Talent!
- When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican
- Eric Bana Is: An Especially Tetchy Romulan
- STREEP, TUCCI & LYNCH vs. a Blogger and her Annoying Husband
- Night at the Museum: Sound, Fury, & Nothing
- Futile and Fatuous
- Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan!
- The Shaking [Cameras] of Pelham 123
- Oh Will Ferrell. A TV Show Remake? We Want Anchorman 2 KTHXBAI
As I’ve never used PollDaddy before, I don’t really know what I’m doing. There’s a good chance I’ve got this wrong and it will all implode, taking all the votes with it, but then Blogger once started to randomly excise votes from polls I had going over there, so I’m sort of prepared for crappy functionality. Anyway, please vote in this poll. I’ll close it and collate the data later this year. Apologies if I’ve missed out a movie you feel passionately about. Feel free to leave a comment if I have.
ETA: I just checked out PollDaddy. Once you’ve voted on the poll you can leave comments. Click on the comment link and it takes you to a dedicated page for each poll. Oh, the future. Next you’ll be telling me you can embed videos in blogposts.
Some Thoughts On G.I. Joseph, AKA The Cobra Also Rises
Today I saw Stephen Sommers’ first film since Van Helsing threatened to kill his career in a flurry of poorly CGI’d werewolf hair. As G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra bombarded my eyeballs with a seemingly endless parade of gloomily-lit bases, bland outfits, and incompetently filmed carnage, several thoughts flitted through my brain. I suspect these thoughts were my brain’s self-defence program, to prevent my sanity from tumbling, unhindered by rational thought, into a swirling vortex of suicide-inducing ennui.
Things I liked about G.I. Tract: Cobrasonic:
- The tech is often a lot of fun. There’s a lot of force-gun action that’s great for throwing people and jeeps around the screen, and for at least the first hour there isn’t a single scene that doesn’t have some peculiar technological madness kicking off in the frame. For a while, this was enough to make me think I would love the movie on some gut level.
- It’s mostly set in underground or underwater bases, and the antagonists are gleefully supervillainous. It’s so unapologetically broad that it wins you over at first.
- Sienna Miller has never been used well in a popular movie until now. She’s oddly endearing as the tortured villain The Baroness.
- Actually, the cast is very impressive, for the most part. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Christopher Ecclestone, Jonathan Pryce, Dennis Quaid, Saïd Taghmaoui, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (yes, Cesar and Mr. Eko finally meet beyond the grave!)… Some of them are actually good, as well. (Taghmaoui wins out.)
Things I did not like about G.I. Bill: The Rose of Cairo:
Unfortunately, those great actors are not only forced to play second fiddle to Channing Tatum — who appears to be an especially inexpressive golem of some kind — and Marlon Wayons¹, but also to gabble the most flat and silly dialogue at a speed that must have required some kind of fourth-dimensional voice-coaching. Every scene featuring dialogue is packed so full of exposition that there is no room for nuance, inflection, or emotion. It’s just a long scream of “DUKE WE NEED TO LOCATE THE BASE AND FIND THE KILLSWITCH FOR THE NANOMITES I’M ON IT SIR WE HAVE TO GET TO PARIS BEFORE THEY WEAPONISE THOSE WARHEADS YOU GOT IT DUKE SUIT UP SOLDIER!” The action scenes should be a respite from the hectic shouting, but they’re nothing but a tumult of shattering planet. By the time the credits rolled, I was draped across my seat, utterly defeated by the barrage of aggressive nonsense. Imagine being verbally assaulted by a gamma-irradiated Jerky Boy. That’s G.I. Joe.
Why do that? Partially because Stephen Sommers, while having some expertise at handling the technical aspects of his movies, has absolutely no idea how to modulate scenes. As with everything else he’s made, every scene is played like a big finish, with everyone operating at full tilt. This is, of course, a lot like Michael Bay’s modus operandi, but even though Bay’s movies are poorly paced, they are at least paced in some form. As I’ve said on here before, Sommers just does FASTslowFASTslowFASTslow, with the only variation being the length of the FAST scenes. In G.I. Joe, the first action scene is about eight minutes long. The second is thirteen minutes long. The Paris sequence feels like it lasts an hour. The big finish in the underwater base might still be going on. I left the cinema ten hours ago but the room was still shaking. THE JOES HAD TO FIND THE KILLSWITCH TO DEACTIVATE THE NANOMITES BEFORE THEY DESTROYED WARSHINGTON! I hope they did. Regrettably, I needed to put my head down somewhere.
That’s why the dialogue gets rattled out like minigun rounds. Sommers is presented with a script containing 108 pages. That’s 108 minutes. The action scenes probably account for 40 pages, which is not enough action for Sommers, who is like a little boy playing with toys, contriving ever more silly ways to keep his playtime going². So, those 68 pages of dialogue are squished down to 48 by making everyone talk like they’re on fast forward, and the action is dragged out for 20 extra pages. There is approximately an hour of things blowing up. That shit even tires me out, and I usually thrive on this stuff.
Of course, Sommers also cannot film action properly. The camera is way too close, the explosions are shot in such a way as to obstruct what is happening, and the fighting is poorly choreographed. The swordfights between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow are too short, set in spaces too small, and keep stopping and starting. No flow, no thrill.
There is also a poor use of environment, with every setting being used the same way (jeep flips over ten times, man flies through air, other man crashes through wall, another jeep flips through the air, thing explodes as jeep hits it, man flips through air and hits jeep, jeep hits man in mid-air, etc.). The main action scenes are in a forest, the G.I. Joe base, Paris, and the Cobra base, but they’re all completely interchangeable. There are only one or two elements that differentiate them (a train in Paris, water in the Cobra base), but otherwise it’s the same clanging bullshit. Plus, he underlights everything. I say this with all honesty: Bay the action director pisses all over Sommers the action director. It’s not saying much, but I stand by that.
The effects are all over the place. Digital Domain are doing a lot of heavy lifting this year, now that Michael Bay runs the show. Their effects are generally very very good, and have a very distinctive textured feel, but they over-reach at times here. The Accelerator suits looked so cool in previews, but onscreen they’re boring to look at (those glum colours are shown up by Iron Man’s red and gold), and move really haphazardly. I know they’re like mad exo-skeletons and make their wearers more agile and whatever, but in the Paris scene they just seem like ragdolls. There’s no sense of weight or power. It’s just circus flipping and stuff. The effects on Snake Eyes are marginally better, as he is not meant to be augmented like the other “Joes”³, but even then he’s on a truck that doesn’t even seem to be a part of the scene. None of them do. It’s like Sommers got hold of some holiday footage in Paris and clumsily stuck some exploding ragdolls in the middle of it.
Plus, stop hurting Paris, you dick. Seeing some of the very streets we recently walked along get treated like a warzone made me surprisingly angry. When the Eiffel tower got wrecked, I felt the red rage. Leave the beautiful city alone, you crass douchebag.
Going back to the script problems for a moment, the majority of the important character beats are revealed through flashbacks, with the modern settings used primarily to display explosions of various size. That’s not very sleek storytelling, but I wouldn’t really have a problem with it, were those flashbacks not ushered in with the relevant character breaking off from yelling about NANOMITE TECHNOLOGY to stare into the middle distance. All it needs is the wobbly dissolve to be one step below Falcon Crest. Maybe Lost has ruined this old flashback cliche, but whatever it is, most of the laughs I got from this was from the use of this hoary old trick. If I were more generous, I’d say Sommers is having a laugh, but as the movie is devoid of intentional humour (don’t forget, Marlon Wayans is in it), I strongly doubt that.
Anyone who has seen Ray Park act, as Toad in X-Men or Gurning Cockney Wanker in the Bertolucci-homage Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever, knows that you’re best off hiring him for his prodigious martial arts skills, and for anything else you hire Peter Serafinowicz to voice him, or figure out a way to shut him up. This movie casts him as a silent ninja-type in a full body suit and weird visor, which is fine for me, but why oh why did they ruin the effect of the mask with a weird rubber mouth?
Those full rubber lips, perpetually in a half-open pose of surprise, make him look like a half-ninja/half yokel cyborg man. Remember the bit in The Man With Two Brains where Dr. Hfuhruhurr puts wax lips on Anne Uumellmahaye’s brain jar so he has something to kiss? It looks like someone did that to Snake Eyes.
As for the rest of the costumes, the only ones that make an impression are the skintight leather catsuits on Sienna Miller and Rachel Nichols. Not because I’m a big horndog, but because the rest of the outfits are either bland Accelerator suits or generic camo gear. Sadly, Miller and Nichols appear to have the same sexytailor, but then Sommers apparently doesn’t see a reason to differentiate (their hair is different colours, after all).
It’s the same with the vehicles. The big underwater finale features a battle between Joeboats and Cobrasubs, with both kinds of vehicle looking almost identical. At the start of the battle they’re on either side of the screen, so you know one is bad, the other is good. Two seconds later and it’s just pixels swimming about. This is not a joke: I honestly longed for the Star Wars prequels. At least there the vehicles are distinct, and eccentric too (Naboo ships are just so pretty.)
So yeah, Nichols and Miller show much cleavage during the scenes where they are running around shouting “WE HAVE TO GET TO THE BASE BEFORE THE TERRORISTS FIRE THE ROCKETS!” or “WE HAVE TO FIRE THE ROCKETS BEFORE THE JOES GET TO THE BASE!”, so I can imagine they will be popular with the millions of pubescent boys in the audience, but even though this is the usual shit, G.I. Joe is far less objectionable than Transformers 2. The leatherclad ladies of Joe are at least given personalities of a sort, and do stuff to further the plot, unlike Megan Fox in Bay’s movie. Plus, there aren’t two robots called Step and Fetchit or whatever they were called. So Joe has that on it’s side, and I’m sort of grateful for it. This belongs in the “Good Things” list, FYI.
Things I wasn’t sure about in Sloppy Joe: That’s So Cobra!:
- Midway through the movie, in Snake Eyes’ flashback — which, if I recall correctly, starts with the same “looking into the distance” thing even though Snake Eyes’ eyes are hidden behind a bulbous visor — we’re treated to the sight of two twelve-year olds kicking the shit out of each other, kung fu style. I really don’t know whether that was sick genius or deeply fucked up.
- I was thrilled to see two of the most respected actors of their respective generations clad in silly masks or poorly animated metal heads walking around their submarine base and intoning dread words of purest evil. It was even better when they got captured two seconds after reaching their pinnacle of superevil, and then hastily shoved away in a hi-tech prison the end. Even with the SHOCK CODA that is utterly unshocking, it felt like Sommers just got bored of his toys and put them down to go and play Dropzone on his Commodore 64. By then, I knew how he felt. That it is left open for a sequel with shameless desperation just ruined my day. Probably because I know I’ll see the damnable thing as well.
Luckily for Sommers, this has probably been my worst ever week for movies, what with Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li giving X-Men Origins: Wolverine a run for its money as worst film of the year. As a result I think better of G.I. Joe than I usually would, but it’s still shit, because Stephen Sommers is a terrible filmmaker, and even if you get Stuart “Collateral” Beattie to script it, Sommers will still do his best to wreck it in the name of improvement.
I’ve said this before elsewhere, but it sums up why I don’t like his movies, so I have to repeat it. When I was a kid, I hated when action movies would feature talking and boring stuff when they should surely just have wall-to-wall action. Now that I’m older I look back on those movies and feel deeply ashamed for doubting the wisdom of the directors. For example, I’m currently rewatching and loving a lot of Walter Hill movies, and those long, action-free passages are more thrilling than most action movies made in the last ten years because Hill’s approach, imbuing his films with unapologetic machismo, raises tension levels through the roof. Sommers, on the other hand, has only one setting: GO JOES GO! It’s too much and not enough, simultaneously.
¹ Sadly operating in Dungeons-and-Dragons mode, not Requiem-For-A-Dream mode.
² “I’ve finally killed you, Cobra Commander, after an epic two-hour battle!”
“Ah hah! Your bullet was deflected by my armour again. Now we shall fight to the death once more!” Etc.
³ The use of the term “Joes” to describe the soldiers causes much unintentional laughter, though it’s an uncomfortable laugh when it’s Dennis Quaid forced to talk about how “WE’RE GONNA GET ALL OUR JOES BACK!” I was hoping that, if he got some bad news from Ripcord or Duke, he’d growl, “SAY IT AIN’T SO, JOES!”
…Where I Try To Defend Michael Bay, And Can’t Even Convince Myself
Daisyhellcakes once asked me if I defend Michael Bay just to be difficult and controversial, and I admitted that the most all-caps-boldiest exclamations that I trot out are just nonsense. If I were to rank directors in a huge list from good to bad (don’t tempt me to do that. I probably would if prompted), he’d be nowhere near the top, but more importantly he’d be nowhere near the bottom either. He’s lazily blamed for everything that is stupid and awful about spectacular Hollywood product, and for tainting the cultural well so much that the whole world suffers. The hatred aimed at him is startling. I halfheartedly defended him on the AV Club once, and was told by another commenter that I obviously knew nothing about cinema, and should keep my opinion about everything else to myself. I’ll admit I’m no Bordwell or Thompson, but my opinion on Bay is a little more nuanced than, “Me like when hot broads dance and the house blow up”.
Any filmmaker who becomes successful enough to achieve name recognition status is bound to attract critical dismissal, and that will intensify if the filmmaker has annoying quirks that are overused. For example, Paul Haggis’ inability to keep subtext subtextual, instead making his characters voice motivation or revelation out loud, drives me up the wall. Even his rewrite work on Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace makes that mistake. Tarantino’s magpie tendencies irk a lot of critics, especially when he steals from disreputable pop culture artifacts that they already dislike. Spielberg has had his knocks many times in the past. I can imagine he’s never going to invite Henry Jaglom around for dinner, as the guy has been bitching about him being a poor filmmaker for decades now.
Bay is a different beast altogether. He’s directing movies by a set of rules he has made up for himself, and that style bears only a passing resemblance to the work of others. As if brought up watching nothing but early Tony Scott movies, he seemingly has no idea of how the big picture will flow, choosing instead to focus on each individual shot, making them pop as much as he can. As a result, it’s not just the whole movie that doesn’t flow. Even relatively short scenes are haphazardly paced. This car chase from The Rock has great individual moments, but stops and starts with no understanding of how jarring that must be for the viewer.
I would never think to defend Bay as a man who makes great films in entirety. Even my favourite Bay movie, Armageddon, is full of embarrassing, and indefensible, flaws. Even so, he’s no Robert Luketic, or Shawn Levy, or Jon Avnet, three directors right off the top of my head who have never been responsible for even a single memorable shot, let alone scene or film. Of course, he’s also not James Cameron (I make this point because True Lies is on ITV2 right now, and, as shaky as that film is, the action scenes are almost perfection). I think Bay’s movies are fascinating, and with regards to the criticism he draws, Drew McWeeny brilliantly (and, obviously, accidentally) summed up how I feel about him in a Tweet I just spotted.
[To another Twitterer] How can you rail against the excess? Bay is what we have PAID Hollywood to evolve into. We reward the escalation of the absurd, then cry about it when it reaches its logical conclusion.
In the interest of not misrepresenting McWeeny, I’ll point out that he later adds that he doesn’t think he’s the best action director in Hollywood. Neither do I, but he is the most spectacular director in the whole world, a Cecil B. DeMille with subscriptions to Guns & Ammo and FHM. When Bay gets to do his thing right, you are getting to see something that no other filmmaker on Earth would or can do. He shoots fast and loose and spends his money on the outrageous stuff, and can conjure up images that sear themselves into your brain.
As McWeeny says, this is not the same as saying he’s a good filmmaker. He’s just a unique one, and I feel an obligation to articulate my conflicted feelings, especially considering almost all critics are dismissing his movies with such kneejerk vehemence that they’re not even bothering to fact-check, which is often a sign that the reviewer considers the movie beneath contempt. I’ve reviewed films in an almost professional capacity before, and I’ve had press packs, so I know most of these errors can be avoided*. (Though being annoyed by overly complex plots that make little sense are another thing: see below for my own problems with T:ROTF.)
So I was desperate to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, mostly because I was hoping he would get right the things he got wrong in the first one. As those flaws were the usual things (pacing mistakes, clunky humour, Jazz being a terrible racial stereotype, etc.), I was basically hoping that this would be Bay’s best movie, removing some of the clutter but keeping the crazy. That’s the key: keeping the stuff that he does better than anyone. Even though I want other filmmakers to create coherent movies with a steady, escalating pace, I want Bay to do what Bay does best. The worst thing he could do would be to play into the hands of those critics who say his movies are all BOOM and no plot, racing from one scene to another without a pause, doing nothing more than amping up every moment with no concern for character development. Sadly, that’s exactly what he has done with T:ROTF, and the result is a deeply frustrating experience.
For the first ninety minutes, I was absolutely amazed at what I was seeing. Even more so than the shocking and ramshackle Bad Boys II, Bay is throwing the kitchen sink at the audience (and then shooting it with a sabot round). The first scene in the movie features a tribe of Cro-Magnon fighting early Cybertronians, for crying out loud. Okay, so they look more like they should be hanging out with Zoolander than hunting bison, but still, kudos to the man. For the next section of the movie, the film throws so many peculiar and outrageous visuals and concepts, that I drove Canyon crazy with my various quiet exclamations of joy. By the time Megatron and Starscream hang out on one of the moons of Saturn (seriously), I was convinced that this was going to be my favourite movie of the summer.
And then it all goes horribly wrong. The moment that the action abruptly shifts to Egypt, the movie slams into neutral, with scene after scene falling flat. The novelty of the early scenes disappears, replaced by a tedious crawl across numerous deserts, seemingly to showcase the cars that have been mostly missing by this point. Several scenes could be excised completely, and should have. It was nice to see Deep Roy as the ha ha ha so tiny border guard, but the movie would have been so much better without it. This is not the first time he’s made this mistake, but usually he doesn’t put so many of these extraneous and excruciating scenes in the final hour.
In fact, the endless trek from Egypt to Jordan and back again (I think that was the route) seems to only be there because, for some baffling reason, Bay and the writers thought that having the characters just appear at the Pyramids for the big finish would somehow be unbelievable, so we have to see their full trip. Why is he getting squeamish about this now? I don’t care how they get there, especially if the trip seems to have been filmed in real time. If I want a travelogue, I’ll watch a Michael Palin show. This is a Bay movie. If you’re going to use a “Space Bridge” to teleport the main characters to Egypt, then teleport them to the exact spot needed to maximise the action. And yet no. Because audiences have been clamouring to see National Lampoon’s Egyptian Vacation.
The desert setting also steps on the toes of the earlier film. Transformers had a perfectly fine and short action scene set in a desert, as the survivors of the opening base attack fight against Scorponok. It was about five minutes long, had Tyrese bellowing “BRING THE RAIN!” into a walkie-talkie, and featured a bunch of exploding buildings. Those wide open spaces worked well for a mid-movie action scene, and made the final city scenes even more exciting, as we got to see a bunch of robots fighting in contrasted dark and cramped streets with no respite. That scene remains one of my all-time favourites.
The finale of Transformers 2 just looks like a bigger version of that desert scene, with little of the original’s intensity, though it does have some fun stuff involving the Pyramids¹. Sam and Mikaela make their way very slowly through a village, with intercutting of Josh Duhamel looking frustrated. No one says BRING THE RAIN!, though it does crop up on a napkin or something earlier on. Everything seems to move at normal film speed, which is like half Bay-speed. At this point in the movie my ass was really hurting from sitting in the crappy Waterloo IMAX seats, and instead of being riveted I just kept fidgeting. Yes, I use my ass as a guide to how exciting a movie is.
More exasperating than the inappropriate locale, even though Bay’s movies have not been known for their well sketched character arcs, the finale is littered with momentum-robbing scenes such as the whole “I love you” thing between Sam and Mikaela (really? This is a big deal?), Kevin Dunn telling his son to go and do the right thing (an emotional beat that makes no sense as Dunn, at the start of the film, couldn’t care less about his son leaving), and Sam’s “death”, which reflects the big “death” midway through the movie (I won’t spoil it). Why does Bay suddenly care about these things? I can barely remember The Island, and maybe there was an arc in that, but I don’t even think there was one in Pearl Harbor, the most conventional movie he has made. I expect tonal errors from Bay, but this was worse than usual.
Only after leaving the cinema with a deflated heart (it sounds like a deadly condition, but the only symptom is whining on the internet) did I realise that there was a lot more wrong with the movie than just the broken finale. McWeeny recently hinted that the first sentence in his forthcoming HitFix Motion/Captured review would be, “I have never felt more like a third nipple than I did, as a screenwriter, while watching Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen.” I can’t wait to find out what he means by that, though I think it might have something to do with how the excessive plot — and I do mean excessive — is crammed into about three five minute-long scenes filled beyond breaking point with insane amounts of exposition, while huge stretches of the movie would probably, on paper, look like a list of fight scenes. It’s that rare kind of movie that is simultaneously overcomplicated and embarrassingly simplistic.
Instead of just trying to come up with a simple way to orchestrate some robot fighting, we get tons of backstory. Cybertronians have visited Earth before, and one of them was going to destroy us in order to harvest energy, but a civil war broke out and then there were a bunch of Primes, and they are magic or something, and the All-Spark is in Sam’s head, or it’s something else, and there is a key, and a cipher, and a Matrix of Awesomeness, and an afterlife, and probably a bunch of elves, and… It’s absurdly complicated stuff, with one very silly plot-thread (Megatron demanding the world hand over Sam so he can extract his brain, or something) that takes over the latter half of the movie. For every quirky moment and fun concept, there’s ten stupid complications that mean nothing. By the time Jetfire turned up for his shot at the Exposition Of The Year award, I had completely lost the plot, not helped by my efforts to guess the identity of the British actor playing the elderly robot².
To me, these are big problems, even when taking Bay’s singular style into account. However, it’s becoming clear that the biggest problem people are going to have with the movie are Mudflap and Skids, the comedy relief duo who shuck and jive through much of the finale. Why am I using this outdated African-American phrase? It seems apt considering that these two robots are the most startling racial stereotypes I’ve seen on the big screen since Crash, only this time they’re meant to be funny and not “educational”.
While sitting in the cinema I had huge difficulty reconciling what I was seeing with what I thought Bay was trying to do (have a couple of affable idiots break up the tedium of the cross-country trek with their wacky exploits), and for a while after I wondered if they were meant to be a spoof of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence from Bad Boys (a Bad Boys II poster is on display in one character’s room, and their banter is as forced as that between Smith and Lawrence). Now, with hindsight, that I realise that’s even worse than just two racist caricatures. Is he personally attacking two people he has worked with before? And the guy doing the voices for them is white? We’re talking about Jar-Jar Binks-esque wrongness on an epic scale.
The disconnect I suffered during the movie was similar to the shock I felt during Star Wars: The Clone Wars when Ziro the Hutt appeared, but my overall opinion of that character is astonishment that Lucas could have thought that was all right. With Mudflap and Skids, I was uncomfortable during the movie, and now I’m outright pissed off. It’s made the dreadful caricaturing of Jazz in the first movie (a black Transformer that breakdances and then gets ignominiously killed in the final act) seem even more glaring. Bay deserves the shitstorm that’s heading his way.
I mean, it’s becoming fairly obvious that he has a real problem with women, so much so that you could almost forget it’s happening until the camera shoots so far up plastic “hottie” Alice‘s skirt that it qualifies as a proctological exam. Megan Fox does little more than pout and get dragged around the desert by LaBeouf and Duhamel, not even getting a hero moment like she did in the first film³. Other than Fox and Isabel Lucas, the only other female characters with any dialogue are the holographic women on the transforming motorbikes (ZOMG is Bay saying women are bikes?), and Sam’s mother, played by Julie White.
Being the only non-simpering non-hottie in the film, she has to do several unglamorous things, usually involving pratfalls. One scene with her getting high on hash brownies is particularly uncalled-for. Nevertheless, she deserves all the credit in the world for managing to make these stupid moments work. She might give the best performance in the film. Maybe, in future, Bay should consider giving more roles to women who have talents beyond looking orange and pouty.
So, it was a washout, right? Except that for a while, as I said earlier, the film flies. Even with the inclusion of the awful Alice subplot, and lots of shenanigans involving kitchenbots, there is a lot to enjoy. The new set-up for the Autobots, working in conjunction with the humans to fight rogue Decepticons, is hugely promising, and the opening in Shanghai is astonishing and ambitious. Even better, the forest fight between Optimus and three Decepticons is one of the film highlights of the year, especially as it is filmed in full IMAX.
Seeing Optimus to actual scale is something I won’t forget any time soon. Much is made of Bay’s direction of action, and how the rapidly moving camera and quick cuts serve to render all of his scenes incomprehensible, but there are many worse action directors out there. Considering how overwhelmed I was by the terrible action in Eagle Eye, or by the much better but still swooshy Star Trek (both of which I saw on IMAX), this didn’t upset me at all. That was something I was not expecting.
There is even some evidence of playfulness from the notoriously grouchy man. Considering his parodic sense of patriotism, it amuses me greatly that he manages to destroy Paris again (the first time was at the end of Armageddon, a scene that got a cheer here in England each time I saw it on the big screen), and I can imagine all sorts of noses being put out of joint by his destruction of a library about an hour in. If you’re responsible for some of the most successful movies of the past fifteen years, you can afford to poke fun at your image like that.
As I’ve said, I did like a lot of it. I saw one person lazily Tweeting this morning that they thought this was as bad as Batman and Robin. Don’t believe it for a second: this has much much more to recommend it, even if just as an occasionally exhilarating aural and visual assault. Also great: Glenn Morshower returning, this time as General Morshower (seriously); Tony Todd doing some great voicework as The Fallen, a robot with a fantastic gangly design; trying to catch sight of the cast on poor Shia’s hand in early scenes; terrific sound editing, far better than critics are saying; a greater sense of the robots as actual characters, especially Starscream and Megatron. Plus, even if the finale is not perfect, it does feature some mind-boggling moments. I’m really hoping that the previous Academy snub of the Transformers effects team is not repeated. They’ve topped themselves this time out, especially as they’re operating in IMAX for some of the most complicated moments.
Even so, it’s a movie that wouldn’t let me like it as much as I wanted to. If I’m going to defend Bay in future, the guy has got to meet me halfway. The awful Ebonicbots and the Auton women have got to go. Right now, I’d rather he tried to make another movie in the more sober style of The Island than keep this lower-than-lowest common denominator stuff going. It’s becoming hard work waiting for him to grow up, but then, if we lose the racism and misogyny (which I’m sure he doesn’t see as such), will we lose the rest? And is “the rest” worth keeping if the man is going out of his way to perpetuate bullshit jock philosophy like this? All of a sudden those Bay films in my collection look a little less appealing. Let’s hope his next movie is either an adaptation of The Beauty Myth or a remake of Amistad.
* In fact, one of the first movies I ever saw at a press screening was Bad Boys. Maybe that’s why I’m forgiving of Bay’s films.
¹ Full disclosure. As soon as I saw the first trailer with shots of the Pyramids, my heart sank. A project I have been working on for some time had a big finale in the shadow of the Pyramids, and so I guess I have to scrap all of that. A shame, as it would have been so awesome that brains would have melted while watching it, even though the project involved a C-list comic character that no one likes. Nevertheless, my disappointment with the finale was not rooted in this, as I got over that frustration a long time ago.
² Amazingly, it’s Jon Turturro.
This means he spends a lot of his screentime arguing with himself.
³ Though, to be honest, LaBeouf gets little more to do other than run into danger and get blown up. Another flaw of the film: adding human characters and not really knowing what to do with them, which particularly irks when you like LaBeouf, as I do.
ETA: Here is McWeeny’s review of T:ROTF. Of all the reviews I have read in the past few days, this might be the only one that actually addressed specifics of what the film is like. Trust someone as perceptive and fair as McWeeny to watch the movie and review what he is seeing instead of just scribbling “Michael Bay is a douchebag” in his Moleskine a thousand times.
‘Twas Here My Summer Exploded
Summertime! Or, as Prince of Freshland Willard Smith once put it, summersummersummertime! All of its joys (such as the sunshine, the wasps, the ever-present sheen of sticky sweat) pale into insignificance next to my favourite thing in the world ever; the summer movie season. As usual, the anticipation is bound to be much more nourishing than the actual movies themselves, though last year saw an unprecedented bumper crop of excellent popcorn entertainment which should, technically, raise my excitement to even greater levels, what with the summer movie season finally offering brainfood as well as robot wars. Sadly, that 2009 highwater mark and the recent writer’s strike means I’m less excited about this year’s line-up. Sure, I’ll see a fair few, but there’s only one or two I’m goggle-eyed with obnoxious enthusiasm over. My face is sad.
Those who know me have a pretty good idea which movies have me froth-mouthed, but I’ll save that for now, because I’m more interested in what you, the readers of this blog, are most excited about. Just like last year, I want to see what is getting this small cross-section of people most pumped. Sadly, due to RL complications, I forgot to do this earlier, and have therefore included a film that has already been released (The Further Adventures of Logan T. Loganstein And His Whirring Claws Of Kill), but perhaps, if you’ve already seen it, you enjoyed it so much you can’t wait to see it again! I gather it’s depressingly bad hella-exciting. Anyway, here’s the list.
- Terminator Franchise: Salvage Operation
- I’d Rather Be Dragged To Hell Than Watch Spider-Man 3 Again
- JJ Abrams Risks Death by Unwashed Nerd Rage-On
- Transmogrifiers 2: Return of the Awesome
- The Curious Case of Wolverine Wutton
- Angels, Demons, and Probably Ewan McGregor’s Schlong
- Another Worthless Woody Allen Movie
- The Unnecessary Remaking of Pelham 123
- (500) Days of Self-Conscious Indie Movie Quirk
- The Time-Travelling Bana
- Harry Potter and the Thing in the Place with the Whatsit
- Demetri Martin + Ang Lee + Hippies = WTF?
- District 9 (AKA Neill Blomkamp Rocks Your Face Off)
- Hott Sam Rockwell’s Lunar Oscar Bid
- Pixar’s Whassup, Bitches?
- Depp and Bale in: Untouchablesque
- Sacha Baron Cohen and the Inevitable Lawsuits
- G.I. Joe: The Struggle to Give a Shit
- Quentin Tarantino and the Broken Spellcheck
- Final Destination: Rube Goldberg’s Revenge
- Judd Apatow’s Self-Loathing People (feat. The RZA!)
Seriously! The RZA is in the next Judd Apatow movie! I can’t wait, though I’d much rather see a full-length Bobby Digital film than some navel-gazing James L. Brooks homage, no matter how good it is. Anyway, the poll will be up in a sec, and will be around for approximately numerous weeks.
Worst Movies of 2007 Face/Off! (Results)
If you’re wondering why the slight delay in this, it’s not that I’m really crappy with numbers, but that I’ve spent the past two days playing Guitar Hero III (until I got as far as Cherub Rock on Hard and gave up, weeping), Super Mario Galaxy (a masterpiece), and John Woo’s Stranglehold, which is not the best game ever made, but is the best gaming sequel to a legendary action movie masterpiece featuring Chow Yun Fat and cameo appearances by John Woo ever made, and as such is fully deserving of my time. As for the two movies, the scoring is as arbitrary as before, but with them I hope to give a sense of what watching both movies was like. Both movies are glossy and dumb, but only one will end up in my collection of bad movies.
I Know Who Killed Me
Cast: Lindsay Lohan: -7
Neal McDonough: -2
Julia Ormond: 1
Brian Geraghty: -4
Donovan Scott: -9
Paula Marshall: 4
Total: -17
A justifiably crappy score, with the professionals doing their best to keep things afloat while the director fiddles, and the amateurs running around putting even bigger holes in the boat. The filmboat. ::sigh:: Darn metaphors! All that said, bonus points for casting the likeable Paula Marshall in a smaller role. She’s been notoriously bad at getting a job on shows that don’t get cancelled mid-season or earlier, and I’m hoping that turning up in crud like this is the bottom of a curve and now her prospects will improve. Donovan Scott plays the sheriff of Bluetown, and though he’s only in a couple of scenes, he’s appalling, like a benevolent, Santa-like version of the sheriff in The Blair Witch Project 2: Post-Modernism Go Boom. Thank Crom Sivertson and Hammond had no idea what to do with the police, otherwise he would have been in it more.
Plot elements specific to these films:
Unintentional humour unsullied by nasty taste from subject matter: -4
Coherence: -1
Economical use of flashbacks: -1
Delivery of big audience-baiting moments: -6
Subtle use of motifs: -8
Avoidance of deus ex machina: 4
Total: -16
If you see this film, or have seen this film, then you know that that -8 for motifs is more than justified. There’s no need to go on about the colour scheme any more, or the fact that I found it hard to laugh at due to the sleaziness (though the robot bits of Lohan certainly kept us entertained, but I will add that for all the incompetence on show, at least the film had an interesting internal logic (when it eschewed the nonsensical flashbacks). It was a definitely interesting idea, and had been worked out fairly well, at least at the script stage. Can you tell I’m trying to find something good to say about it? Erm, the strip club seemed like it was run fairly efficiently?
Miscellaneous:
Originality: 2
Liveliness: -3
Enthusiasm for project: 5
Avoidance of cliche: -7
Unique Selling Points: 3
Production values: 3
Total: 3
Finally, some positive numbers! A particularly good one for enthusiasm, because I believe Sivertson thought this was the big ticket, the stepping stone into the big time, and tried very hard to make an impression, throwing in semi-nudity and torture and colour and sex and look at me look at me I’m making a big movie bigger than anything Lucky McKee ever did! Unfortunately, it’s crap. Still, again I have to take my hat off for the surprising payoff to the mystery.
I Know Who Killed Me overall total = -30
While Sivertson has managed to create a slasher thriller that has some kind of ambition, the sheer cynicism of it wrecks the project entirely. Who knows if Hammond’s script could have been salvaged if given to someone who knows how to hold back on the symbolism, not to mention thinking twice about casting someone whose real life does not bear up well to comparisons with the main character’s life. I just couldn’t get past the sleaziness of the project; casting Lohan might have seemed like a great idea at the time, but in retrospect it’s as if Sivertson and his cohorts were picking the last bits of dignity from the corpse of Lohan’s career. As I said before, I really do hope this is not the case, and she can make a comeback. And not wear blue. With her pale skin, it really isn’t her colour.
D-War
Cast: Jason Behr: -7
Amanda Brooks: -8
Robert Forster: 2
Chris Mulkey: -4
Craig Robinson: 1
Michael Shamus Wiles: -5
Total: -21
Dear God, where to begin? Only Craig Robinson and Robert Forster stand out at all here, and even then it’s a close call. Forster in particular is asked to do some pretty silly things (meditating in mid-air, comedically faking a heart attack, pretending to be a martial-arts wizard), and phones it in pretty badly. Behr and Brooks, however, don’t even manage that. Behr has zero charisma, and Brooks looks somnabulent, angry, frustrated, and disgusted with herself for getting the part. It’s a monumentally feeble performance. I guess she has very little to work with, and might have been directed to act like someone who had just woken up whenever Shim said action, but I don’t see why. As for Michael Shamus Wiles as Evil General, he was passably evil, in a pantomimey way. He was also okay at pretending to be in charge of a bunch of people. However, if the antagonist of your film is a big serpent, you really need to have a interesting human character to boo and hiss at, but he had no chemistry. You know, this film is so false and so empty it seems weird to judge it in this way. Did the actors hit their marks? I guess so. Did they fluff their lines? Not on the takes they used. That’s as much as you could hope for.
Plot elements specific to these films:
Unintentional humour unsullied by nasty taste from subject matter: 8
Coherence: -7
Economical use of flashbacks: -5
Delivery of big audience-baiting moments: 6
Subtle use of motifs: 0
Avoidance of deus ex machina: -9
Total = -7
I think it was fairly obvious from the fact that I wrote twice as much about this film that I enjoyed it much more than I Know Who Killed Me. I laughed from beginning to end, mostly because I couldn’t believe how inept it was. In a normal studio situation surely someone would have realised that the script was unusable, and have other writers come in. Here Shim was fully in charge with no oversight, and the result has to be seen to be believed. Robert McKee’s theories of storytelling annoy as many people as they delight, but this is proof that he’s onto something. Shim breaks almost all of McKee’s rules, not because he has mastered them, but because he has no idea what they are, and has merely cobbled together bits from other films and stuck them together in some kind of order that resembles the movies he’s stolen them from. As much as any writer should watch Chinatown or Casablanca (and my personal choice, Midnight Run), they should also see something like this, because it’s a total failure, primarily because of the non-plot. Still, the big action scenes, the wow moments he built everything around, are wonderful. I may have hated most of the plotting and acting, but when a pilot pulled out a gun and started shooting at the dragon hanging off the side of his helicopter, I went a little crazy with excitement. Only some poor effects and filming ruin it, but still, for a dragon fan, it’s the nuts.
Miscellaneous:
Originality: 0
Liveliness: 3
Enthusiasm for project: 5
Avoidance of cliche: -6
Unique Selling Points: 4
Production values: 6
Total = 12
For all of his ineptitude, Shim (seen here impersonating Ricky Gervais) knows how to cover his back with some actual talent. He hired Bruckheimer/Bay regular Steve Jablonsky to handle the soundtrack, and Mark Mangini to work on sound design (he did some great work on The Mist this year, in a monster movie two-fer). They do good work here, and it definitely helps Shim create the illusion that he knows what he’s doing, but even a little attention to what’s going on shows him up as a chancer. His previous movie, Yonggary, was such a catastrophic flop and disaster (after he promised to turn the Korean film industry into a powerhouse to rival Hollywood) that he had to get it right this time. Seems he figured he could do that by filming in L.A. with an American crew, which is a hell of a screw-you to Korean filmmakers. Anyone who has seen recent Korean movies knows there are some incredibly talented people there, and Shim should have been alerted to the fact that even when you take a holiday, you can’t take a holiday from yourself. Or something. What I’m trying to say is, Hyung-Rae Shim, your movies are always going to be shit until you fire yourself. Don’t blame the caterers. We can tell who messed up.
D-War overall total = -16
So there you go. I Know Who Killed Me gets the lowest score, so can be safely filed in the Awful Bad Movie file. It’s silly, it’s pretentious, it’s dreary, and it features some horrible performances from people who have a horrible aura of desperation around them that would sour you on the movie even if it wasn’t so nasty. D-War, on the other hand, is a big silly disaster, with film-student errors, egregious plotholes, Saturday-morning-serial acting, and a huge FX blowout featuring monsters fighting the military. If you watch it in the wrong frame of mind you might think I’m mad for recommending it, but watch it with a bunch of friends knowing full well you’re going to be watching a big turd of a movie, and it’s up there with Dreamcatcher and Albert Pyun’s Ticker. I hated it so much I loved it. And now, I’m going to see if I can find an Evil General action figure online. Wish me luck!
Worst Movies of 2007 Face/Off! (D-War)
It’s been a good year for dragon-lovers. Naomi Novik published the fourth book in the Temeraire series (I’ve yet to read it, but Canyon seemed to like it a lot), Beowulf ended with a superb fight between the Cockney/Geat warrior and an awesome firebreathing beast, and Enchanted featured an endearingly camp purple dragon voiced by Susan Sarandon and designed by genius monster-mind Crash McCreery.
Oddly, though, the big draw for us was a big-budget Korean fantasy-action flick starring a guy off Roswell, Robert “Alligator” Forster, and Daryl from The Office. It promised huge battle scenes, a plethora of dragons, and city-wide destruction on a similar scale to Transformers. Though early word was horribly negative, I was still intrigued and psyched. Come on! Wicked awesome dragons, powered by Korean ingenuity and let loose on LA! That sounded like a perfect movie, but that’s assuming that film is made by someone who understands how to write a coherent screenplay, or how to block actors, or how to direct them, or how to pace a movie, or…
Basically, I’m saying dragon mayhem only works when you’ve got someone behind the camera who knows more about directing than that the words “action” and “cut” make the actors start and stop reciting heavy-handed, overly-complicated and incomprehensible exposition. Hyung-Rae Shim is most definitely not that man.
We should have taken as a warning the tagline on the poster above and on the D-War homepage: “Since THE DAWN of LEGEND, Absolutely UNIMAGINABLE affair OCCURS on THE HUMAN RACE. They are LOOKING for SOMEONE. SOMEONE WHO has been CHOSEN by HEAVEN…” If they’re not bothering to translate something properly, we’re in for a pretty haphazardly made film. That’s not to say Shim doesn’t have some faith in his own ability. According to this SciFi Japan review, when bragging about the scale and ambition of D-War, Shim said, “LORD OF THE RINGS was made in a field, but we’ve shot in the heart of LA.” Somewhere in New Zealand, Peter Jackson is humbled.
As if possessed by the Satanic ghost of Dr. Uwe Boll, director of the maddeningly complex Alone In The Dark, D-War opens with an animated crawl explaining the story of a race of serpent things, and the birth of a magical woman every 500 years who contains a spirit power sent from heaven that will transform creatures called Imugis into Celestial Dragons. If a good Imugi gets hold of this power, then everything is fine, but if an evil Imugi wins out, we’re screwed. This is apparently taken from Korean myth, though from the complexity of it, and the fact that it so often contradicts itself, it seems to be taken from all of Korean myth at the same time. I spent a long time trying to make out what the hell was being conveyed to me, and it was time wasted. I don’t think Shim understands what it means either.
We then cut to modern day L.A., to find an enormous gouge in the landscape. Just to confuse matters more, a Native American is shouting about how we have awakened “them”. Hey, Native American dude, stop claiming incomprehensible Korean myths as your own! Chris Mulkey and a fellow FBI flunky are investigating this disaster, at which point our journalist hero Ethan, played by blank slate Jason Behr, and his cameraman Bruce (a much livelier Craig Robinson), appear and harangue the Feds. After Mulkey and the Mulkey-Flunky rudely tell Ethan to get lost he sees a weird object being unearthed which later turns out to be a dragon scale.
After returning to his office, where he seems to be under the impression it’s a Bad Taste Fashion day for charity, Behr mulls over the events of the morning (in echoey voiceover), and suddenly remembers a visit to an antiques store he made as a kid, where he is blasted with magical energy by a similar dragon scale and then treated to a long expositional lecture from Robert Forster. Then he remembers being given a large magical amulet, even though he’s actually wearing it at the time. Is he Guy Pearce in Memento? Who forgets these kinds of things? I mean, it’s twice as big as an iPod and has pointy bits on it.
The flashback to his childhood contains even more exposition than the opening crawl, with Forster going into immensely confusing detail about the Imugi and the spirit power called the Yu I Joo, which is a gift from heaven for good Imugi, but there is a bad Imuji called Buraki who wants the Yu I Joo. Heaven sends down two guys, a warrior (called Haram) and a magician, to save the day. That’s all? Forster makes it sound like it would be a bad thing if Baraki gets the Yu I Joo, but Heaven only sends two guys, one of whom (the warrior) is next to useless? What’s worse, the Yu I Joo manifests within a woman (Narin) on her twentieth birthday, and then she has to find a good Imugi before a bad Imugi gets her. Even Royal Mail has a more reliable system that that.
Just to make things more complicated, the flashback flashes back again, to ancient Korea, where a village is destroyed by evil forces looking for Narin, the possessor of the Yu I Joo. It’s very dramatic, very silly, and very badly filmed, except for the bravura effects moments. In that respect it reminds me of Return of the Jedi. During non-effects sequences, Richard Marquand seems unable to inject any life or pace into the movie, but as soon as ILM take over, the film turns into a rollercoaster. Same here. When Shim’s effects team are responsible for what’s onscreen, the film is enormous fun for all the right reasons. When Shim is behind the camera directing actors, it all goes horribly, hilariously wrong.
Also, it’s a pointless scene. The village might be much larger than I would expect a village to be, but it’s surrounded by a flimsy wall and has a couple of cannons to protect the inhabitants. Buraki sends his evil general (who according to the press notes, goes by the name of Evil General) to retrieve the Yu I Joo, and his army comprises about 50000 soldiers and monsters who raze the village to the ground with ease. There’s some memorable carnage, but what made me laugh most was that in the middle of the explosions and villager-crushings and infantry stampedes, there’s a dramatic shot of one of the large creatures (called a Dawdler) knocking over a two foot high wall that serves no purpose, except perhaps to keep a couple of chickens from running off. It gets the same treatment as the genocide. Perhaps they’re the monarchs of the chicken kingdom.
Sadly, while that scene is very big and silly and satisfying, for the first two thirds of the movie we have to contend with numerous stilted dialogue scenes, repetitive deus ex machinas, poorly staged fight scenes and, I’m not kidding, yet more exposition. My God, at times it feels like we’re watching The Silmarillion as filmed by a teenager obsessed with Rampage and Age of Empire.
What’s worse is that the in-world rules make no sense. Why has Heaven come up with this incredibly complicated Yu I Joo delivery system? Put it in a hott girl, bake for twenty years, and then watch as the bad “guy” swoops in and eats her? What’s worse is they don’t take into account the inevitable love affair between Haram and Narin, which makes Narin not want to serve up the Yu I Joo to the good Imugi, choosing instead to kill herself (and Haram) before either Buraki or the good Imugi can get to her, meaning the whole ridiculous ordeal gets repeated 500 years later, with a girl called Sarah becoming the new holder of the Yu I Joo, and Ethan becoming the new protector thanks to some handy reincarnation, though he doesn’t inherit any combat skills or dress sense.
Basically, what Shim must have written down when he started this project is, “Find reason for big monsters to chase young couple around city so I can destroy it.” Unfortunately, he went crazy trying to make it seem like there was more plot there, and a lot of time is spent while he adds layer upon layer of exposition on the core. Seriously, if Forster had just said, “Heaven made this hott chick all powerful so she could promote a monster but another monster wants the job more so you’ve got to get her out of here otherwise we’re screwed now go and run around and get into lots of destructive scrapes!” I would have respected it a lot more.
If you think I’ve spent too long talking about a flashback scene, please bear in mind that this scene is fifteen minutes long. I’m not exaggerating; I just timed it. The only other movie I’ve seen do that is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and this movie is not Crouching Tiger (though the dragons do miraculously remain hidden for the majority of the movie, and in the middle of L.A., no less).
For all the time spent explaining the identity of main characters (for instance, Forster turns out to be the wizard, who has been hanging around for 500 years waiting for Behr to appear, which is a massively depressing prospect), and the backstory of the dragons, none is spent explaining why the Feds hate Behr on sight, or what the gouge is (the viewer can figure it’s Buraki’s work, but you’d have to take a leap of logic to figure it), and what effect it has had on the populace. Also, as in I Know Who Killed Me, for the majority of the movie the police characters appear to have been included only because Shim thinks they have to be included, though he doesn’t know what to do with them other than have them say, “You mean it’s organic?” or “We have to find this girl!” They do nothing to further the plot and remain clueless throughout. At least, that’s what happens for the majority of the movie (see below).
When the flashback finally ends and Ethan begins to act on his memories (i.e. he tells Bruce to use his amazing Google skills to search for all of the Sarahs in LA), we’re introduced to the correct Sarah, played by Amanda Brooks. She is the reincarnation of Narin, though has also seemingly forgotten her heritage until this moment. Or perhaps she knows all about it, which is equally odd. If I knew I was the container into which Heaven has poured a mighty mystical force that must be used to give an enormous ancient serpent an upgrade, I’d probably base my whole life around it and probably try to make some money off it. Instead she just appears to be a moody valley girl who hangs out at the gym.
Maybe her relentlessly dour expression is her way of dealing with her responsibility. She doesn’t smile once during the movie, and barely registers any effort in the role. Maybe that was a direction from Shim, but how unappealing does this make her? Inexplicably she has a friend who tries to cheer her up, but all she does in return is whine about wanting to stay at home and sulk. What with Behr’s blandness and her misery, the only reason they could ever find each other attractive is by being the reincarnated spirits of two doomed losers from 16th Century Korea.
Not long after being introduced and realising she is in great danger from attack by Buraki’s forces, Sarah does the safest thing possible; going drinking with her friend to drown her seemingly epic sorrows. After leaving early with an attack of the Whiny Dullness, she’s assaulted by some random fratty muggers, and is in serious trouble until out of the blue Robert Forster appears and rescues her with some effortless (i.e. lazily filmed) martial arts moments. After saving her ass, he slopes off into the night, probably so he can listen to The Delfonics in his car.
She ends up reporting the event to the police, and while she does it a random photographer walks through the station, takes a photo of her, and is chased off. Peculiar, I thought, but then a couple of scenes later, while Ethan is moaning to Bruce that he’s a jerk for not being able to find the right Sarah out of several thousand with only the description of a Yu I Joo-brand birthmark to go on, the photographer (who works there, of course), walks past them and mentions that he just met a Sarah who got into a fight and hey, here’s a photo of her! Was the photographer called Mr. P. Lotdevice?
For various reasons too illogical to try to parse here, Sarah gets committed to a hospital (for having bad dreams about Evil General, it seems), and goes berserk with a plastic knife. Or as berserk as someone who is unable to act can get. Before she can hurt anyone Ethan arrives, but his path is blocked by an officious nurse. Fortunately a kindly doctor sneaks him into the room, meaning he and Sarah finally meet again after 500 years (romance!), just as Buraki attacks the hospital. They flee, again with the help of the kindly doctor, who waits until they’ve gone and morphs into Robert Forster! I have no idea why he hides his identity from them in this way. Maybe 500 years of waiting around has made him playful. Or shy. There follows another funky effects sequence, with Buraki chasing Sarah, Ethan, and Bruce through an underground car park, though they manage to outrun it. This happens several times; a small car outruns a 300 foot long snake. There’s asking the audience to suspend disbelief, and then there’s not giving a damn what the audience thinks.
Upon eluding Buraki, Bruce’s car slams into Evil General, who looks like he’s going for a stroll down the centre of the road. Cloaked in magical armour, he knocks Bruce around for a bit and then electrocutes him (Craig Robinson’s high-pitched yelp of pain is the only moment of actual comedy in the entire film). Ethan ineffectually stands around, allowing Evil General to almost grab Sarah and do terribly obscure magical things to her when, hilariously, another car comes out of nowhere and runs him over again.
At first I thought that this scene would go on for a few hours, with a succession of cars taking turns knocking the guy over, but no, Ethan and Sarah just get into it (leaving the electrified Bruce behind), and drive off. A bit later they are randomly dropped off near a beach (because lovers like to walk along beaches, right?), and as they walk away, the woman driving the car turns into… Robert Forster! Every movie should have Robert Forster materialise whenever they can’t think of a way to resolve a situation.
While the romantic leads sleepwalk through their lines, on the other side of town a bunch of FBI dudes sleepwalk through their own lines, and agree that Buraki is following Sarah, and is located in a cave nearby. They seem to arrive at this conclusion through divine intervention, because even though they act like there’s proof it’s following her and momentarily hiding in a cave, they don’t show it. They do have one elusive thing they can be proud of finding; a picture of Sarah smiling! It’s an endearingly goofy picture.
Thanks to this snake-finding breakthrough, a bunch of tooled up guys with guns go to the cave, though I wonder if anyone told them they would be going up against an enormous evil snake, as their reaction to Buraki’s dramatic appearance is to freak out, fire aimlessly into the air, and then get killed. Actually, I’m not sure if I remember Buraki killing any of them. Instead they get blown up by Evil General, who seems to thrive in non-road environments.
Sarah and Ethan go visit a hypnotist neuroscientist or something (played by Holmes Osborne, completing a 2007 bad movie two-fer with Southland Tales). In an echo of John Boorman’s catastrophic Exorcist II he sticks electrodes on Sarah and triggers a flashback (thankfully a short one) for no apparent reason, and Buraki finds them, for no apparent reason, before chasing them. Leaving behind Holmes Osbourne, they get away. For no apparent reason. If the overused motif of I Know Who Killed Me is making everything blue, the overused motif here is events happening because Shim has decided they have to. It’s a perfect example of inept plotting, and should be shown in film schools as a warning. I Know Who Killed Me has some clumsy plotting and dimwitted flashbacks that fill up time, but nothing on this scale.
After escaping Buraki Sarah and Ethan meet up with Bruce (who isn’t dead even though they left him behind with Evil General), and then go for a coffee to chat about their day. The scene ends with, yes, Buraki appearing out of nowhere. He/It crashes through some walls, stops them getting away by throwing a car at them, and then waits around instead of attacking them, giving a bunch of cops time to shoot at him (and no they don’t transform into a mini-army of Robert Forster, which is a shame). Their gunfire stops Buraki in his tracks, giving Ethan and Sarah time to escape. Bruce, on the other hand, gets left behind.
Luckily this confrontation triggers the best scene in the movie, an effects tour-de-force with Bulcos, Dawdlers, Shaconnes and Atrox (Atroxes? Atroxi? Erm…) attacking L.A. en masse. It means nothing, and is only there to get the punters in, but it’s great anyway.
It’s on a smaller scale than the similar scenes at the end of Transformers, and doesn’t work narratively (more as a sequence of cool shots), but it’s still worth watching the movie just for these scenes. As before, the FX shots are much more vibrant and imaginative than the rest of the movie. I would say it’s down to some second unit director’s superior understanding of filmmaking, but from that SciFi Japan feature, Shim was indeed on set in LA, firing his ADs for worrying about tanks ruining the roads. Unless he was joking. The only things that let the scene down are a couple of less than perfect effect shots, and a bad bit of editing that leaves a bunch of tanks and machine-gunners firing at an empty street.
While chaos reigns, Ethan and Sarah climb to the top of a skyscraper so they can catch a helicopter out of there, only to find that snakes can climb things, a point proved by the appearance of Buraki up in their respective grills. Stupidly they hop onto the helicopter, which is promptly grabbed by Buraki. With no hesitation, Ethan and Sarah leap out, leaving the pilot behind. He dies moments later.
While Buraki is peppered with minigun shells, our undynamic heroes get back to street level and are found by Chris Mulkey and the Mulkey-Flunky, who whisk them away to a basement somewhere. Good idea, I thought, until Mulkey pulls a gun on Sarah and threatens to kill her, stating that the only way to stop Buraki is to destroy the Yu I Joo. It’s an amazing moment. He knows about this shit? How? He’s not mentioned any of it for the entire rest of the film, but now he knows all about it? It’s… I just… Oh, what’s the use. Thankfully the Mulkey-Flunky knocks him out, or shoots him, or something. I can’t remember the details as I had my head in my hands for a few minutes. They get away, though. And leave the flunky behind.
So they escape! For two minutes, and then a bunch of Bulcos blow their car up, enabling them to capture our heroes. I have no idea how long they are meant to be unconscious, but when Ethan wakes up, he’s on the steps of an enormous structure that looks way too much like Barad-Dur. I’ve never been to LA, but I think I’d know if an enormous evil-looking obsidian castle was built nearby. Still, suck on that, Jackson. He’s filming in LA, not a field! Loser.
Buraki, Evil General, and thousands of Atroxesixi are in attendance, waiting for Sarah to cough up the Yu I Joo, but Ethan’s having none of it. Using some wondrously inept fight moves he battles Evil General, getting thrown around like the bundle of second-hand clothes he looks like, and is about to be killed when Evil General’s sword touches the amulet which had been forgotten about by everyone, and it activates, killing all of the Atroxiites and Evil General in a burst of mystical CGI whooshiness. Hooray! This seemingly summons the fashionably late good Imugi, and a battle ensues between him/her and Buraki. Taking a cue from Ethan, it is crap at fighting, and it looks bad until Sarah decides, “Fuck this, I’m bored,” and burps up the Yu I Joo.
Just as Buraki is about to grab it, she moves it with magical powers so that the good Imugi can get it, in the biggest and most dramatic “psyche!” moment in film history. With that the good Imugi becomes a Celestial Dragon, complete with funky chinese-dragon-whiskers, and the battle is won easily. It’s another terrific FX sequence. However, don’t get thinking it’s going to end well. Sarah dies in Ethan’s arms, and then appears before him as, I shit you not, a glowing fairy, promising to love him forever in Heaven. At this point, Canyon and I were torn between laughing our asses off and shouting swearwords at the screen.
The best part of that is that both the good Imugi and Sarah the Dragon Fairy both float off to Heaven, leaving Ethan behind. Yeah, how does that feel, you inconsiderate asshole? If only Bruce could feel the schadenfreude.
A Large List Of Movies I Enjoyed This Year (Updated With Canyon’s Picks So It’s Even Larger!)
Happy New Year, denizens of the internet! The holiday season is over, unhappy workers are returning to their nasty offices, and I’m cleaning the house. But, before I get into the rest of it, here is an absurdly long list that has missed off a million things either because we’ve not seen certain films that stand a good chance of getting on here (Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, Tekkon Kinkreet, Rescue Dawn, etc.), and because I’m forgetful. There was a supporting actor performance this year that I loved but I can’t remember who it was now. That’s as annoying as later remembering that I wanted to give music of the year shout-outs to Tenacious D’s Master Exploder (song of the decade) and Steven Seagal’s album Mojo Priest (not the hilarious hubristic disaster people expected it to be; I actually quite like it).
Anyway, here is as complete a list as I can make. Note that the worst film winner is not yet decided. Over the next few days I intend to decide who should win this coveted prize with a Worst Film of 2007 Face/Off special! So stay tuned. Also, I’m hoping that at some point Canyon will include her best and worsts of the year. I’m not 100% sure what her list will look like, though I get the feeling it will be fairly different. I look forward to reading it.
Favourite movies of the year:
1=: Zodiac – A perfect movie about an obsessive quest made by an obsessive perfectionist.
1=: Ratatouille – A perfect movie about a perfectionist and the obsessive quest for perfection.
2: The Bourne Ultimatum – Like being beaten up by a film. But in a good way. Best threequel ever, best action film of the decade.
3: Black Book – Moral quagmires, betrayal, sex, death, twists, violence, blonde women being mistreated by the world but keeping their dignity even when doused in shit. Hitchcock would have loved it.
4: Once – My favourite romantic movie in ooooh, aeons. Lovely soundtrack too.
5: The Darjeeling Limited – Wes Anderson triumphs again! Yeah, I said it.
6: Grindhouse – Sorry to say it, but only the full version gives you the full effect. Fuck you, Weinsteins.
7: Exiled – Johnnie To’s gangster masterpiece. The most unpredictable film of the year (other than I’m Not There, but who knows what the hell Todd Haynes was thinking with that).
8: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – Possibly the best ensemble cast of the year, certainly the best photographed. Hypnotic brilliance.
9: Paprika – A feast for the eyes, and featuring a heroine that I want to see return in a billion sequels.
10: The King of Kong – Best documentary I’ve seen since the magnificent Capturing the Friedmans. No other documentary I’ve seen has made me so angry and so overjoyed. Who’d have thought real life could be this interesting?
Honourable mentions:
I Am Legend
Jindabyne
Hot Fuzz
Superbad
3:10 to Yuma
Honourable honourable mentions (there were a lot of good films out this year):
Gone Baby Gone
The Mist
Sunshine
Transformers
Black Snake Moan
Honourable honourable honourable mentions (I mean, seriously, a lot):
The Lives of Others
Beowulf
Charlie Wilson’s War
Knocked Up
The Lookout
Favourite movies released in the US in 2006 but then released in the UK in 2007 and were good enough to get a mention here anyway:
The Fountain, Curse of the Golden Flower
Movies that are not getting included because I need to see them a couple more times before I know whether I was crazy about them or not:
No Country For Old Men, I’m Not There
Movie that I didn’t want to like because the director is an asshole but damn it’s a lot of fun:
Apocalypto
Worst movie:
To be decided between I Know Who Killed Me and D-War (Runners-up: Bubble Fiction Boom or Bust, Spider-Man 3, Southland Tales, The Reaping, Next)
Most pointless movie:
Ocean’s Thirteen
Best actor:
Chris Cooper – Breach / Casey Affleck – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Gone Baby Gone (Runner-up: Will Smith – I Am Legend, Kurt Russell – Death Proof, Viggo Mortenson – Eastern Promises)
Best actress:
Laura Linney – Jindabyne (Runner-up: Gong Li – Curse of the Golden Flower, Carice Van Houten – Black Book, Marketa Irglova – Once)
Best supporting actor:
John Carroll Lynch – Zodiac (Runner-up: Chris Evans – Sunshine / Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Sam Rockwell – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang – Exiled) (ETA: OMG how could I forget! James Marsden’s hilarious performance in Enchanted! Easily the best thing about the movie.)
Best Supporting Actress:
Robin Wright Penn – Beowulf (Runner-up: Marcia Gay Harden – The Mist, Amara Karan – The Darjeeling Limited, Sairse Ronan – Atonement)
Most entertaining performance in a bad movie:
Nicholas Cage – Ghost Rider
Worst actor:
Patrick Dempsey – Enchanted (Runner-up: Jason Behr – D-War)
Worst actress:
Lindsay Lohan – I Know Who Killed Me (Runner-up: Amanda Brooks – D-War, Claire Danes – Stardust)
Best hero:
Remy the Rat – Ratatouille (Runner-up: Rachel Stein – Black Book, Paprika – Paprika, McLovin – Superbad, King Leonidas – 300)
Best villain:
Anton Chigurh – No Country for Old Men (Runner-up: Billy Mitchell – The King of Kong, Stuntman Mike – Death Proof, Anton Grubitz – The Lives of Others, Mrs. Carmody – The Mist)
Worst hero:
Ghost Rider – Ghost Rider (Runner-up: Elizabeth Swann – Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Ethan Kendrick – D-War, “Jack” – D-War)
Worst villain:
Thomas Gabriel – Die Hard 4.0 (Runner-up: Venom – Spider-Man 3, Doctor Doom – Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Evil General – D-War)
Biggest badass of the year:
Zoe Bell – Death Proof
Best Director:
Brad Bird – Ratatouille (Runner up: Paul Greengrass – The Bourne Ultimatum, David Fincher – Zodiac)
Worst Director:
To be decided between Chris Sivertson – I Know Who Killed Me and Hyung-Rae Shim – D-War) (Runner-up: Mark Steven Johnson – Ghost Rider, Richard Kelly – Southland Tales, Lee Tamahori – Next)
“Stop perving, Grandad!” director of the year:
Mike Nichols – Charlie Wilson’s War. We get it, Mike, Charlie Wilson was a big perv, but that doesn’t excuse the leering shots of boobs and butts, nor does it even begin to explain why you cast Emily Blunt and then made her sit around in next to no clothes for five minutes and then not have her appear for the rest of the film. (Runner-up: Michael Bay – Tranformers. Megan Fox is not that hot, so please stop staring at her oiled midriff, kthx)
Best cinematographer:
Roger Deakins – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country For Old Men (Runner-up: Harris Savides – Zodiac, Robert Yeoman – The Darjeeling Limited)
Best sound design:
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Runner-up: I Am Legend, Tranformers)
Best visual effects:
Transformers (Runner-up: The Fountain, Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End)
Most improved director:
Danny Boyle – Sunshine. I’ve always been frustrated by the lionisation of Boyle, whose movies feature pretty shots and no overall coherence or concept of how one shot has to link into another (Michael Bay gets accused of this yet I think he’s much better at creating a whole movie than Boyle, and yes, I know that is considered heresy. Whatever!). Sunshine is the first film where he gets it totally right. The whole movie is an perfectly sustained audio-visual assault. He can be proud of it.
Runner-up: Len Wiseman – Die Hard 4.0. I’ve found Wiseman to be a hack with a bland visual style and little imagination, but even though Die Hard 4.0 shared the same monochrome look of his vampire movies, the action scenes featured some wonderfully imaginative moments, not counting the Jurassic Park 2 rip-off with the car in the elevator shaft. I was very pleasantly surprised. Still got a shit villain, though. Did Hans Gruber have no more brothers?
Most precipitous drop in directorial ability:
Sam Raimi – Spider-Man 3. Jaredan maintains Raimi purposely sabotaged the movie as a screw-you to Sony for making him include Venom, and I can’t argue with him. I can’t believe someone as talented and conscientious as Raimi could poop out something as dreadful as this. Let’s hope he improves soon, as he’s still top of the list of directors capable of pulling off The Hobbit.
Disappointment of the year:
Spider-Man 3 (Runner-up: Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End, Eastern Promises)
Most overrated film of the year:
Atonement. Stately, respectable, well-crafted, pretty. It’s all of those. It’s also empty, features some really dodgy acting, and makes no sense until the final twist comes into play. Then it’s all very affecting, but for an hour, the movie is filled with head-scratchers and logical leaps. (Runner-up: 28 Weeks Later)
Most underrated film of the year:
Hot Fuzz. Has none of the respectable cachet of Atonement, but is possibly the most carefully crafted British film in decades. Repeat viewings unearth a wealth of detail and beautiful structure. If only critics loved Point Break and the films of Michael Bay the way they should, they would have appreciated its genius. (Runner-up: Curse of the Golden Flower)
Best comic adaptation of the year:
300. I don’t even like it that much, but the competition (Spider-Man 3, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider) is pitiful. Persepolis is almost certainly going to be better, even though Marjane Satrapi is not really a comic writer/artist, more like a writer who draws the odd picture.
Best schadenfreude:
The Brothers Affleck prove to a sceptical world that they are awesome, to the massive happiness of myself.
Best comeback of the year:
Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for Charlie Wilson’s War was his best in ages; smart, funny, irreverent, and only a bit pompous. It went a long way towards making up for Studio 60.
Best action scene of the year:
Jason Bourne vs. Desh – The Bourne Ultimatum (Runner-up: Autobots and humanity vs. Decepticons vs. a city – Transformers, motoring ladies vs. Stuntman Mike – Death Proof, Viggo’s genitalia vs. hitmen – Eastern Promises)
Best non-action scene of the year:
Anton Ego eats a meal – Ratatouille (Runner-up: Cops interrogate John Carroll Lynch – Zodiac, every conversation between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Hot Fuzz)
Best musical moment of the year:
Marketa Irglova sings on her way back home – Once (Runner-up: Samuel L. Jackson sings Stack-O-Lee to a writhing sweaty mass of people – Black Snake Moan, Justin Timberlake lipsynchs to All These Things That I’ve Done by The Killers – Southland Tales)
Most WTF ending of the year:
The Mist – I cannot spoil it, and am still not sure whether I liked it or not, but I will say this: once seen, never ever forgotten.
Most bullshit death of the year:
Jazz going out like a punk in Transformers. Okay, so Megatron is five times taller, but still, that was not acceptable. (Runner-up: the various “tragic” moments at the end of Spider-Man 3)
Most wasted actors of the year:
Chow Yun Fat – Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End (Runner-up: Emily Blunt – Charlie Wilson’s War, Thomas Haden Church – Spider-Man 3)
Biggest jerks of the Year:
The Weinsteins’ decision to block the international release of Grindhouse may have been borne of their fears of financial ruin, but the dismissive attitude they have towards international audiences, and the lack of understanding they have of the movie itself (individually hardly anyone likes the films, but together they are perfect entertainment) is notable. Just remember, next time they push for a film to win an Oscar with their bully tactics, it’s got nothing to do with championing the film. They’re only in it for themselves.
Best screw-you of the year:
Kurt Russell mouthing off against the Weinsteins at the Cannes Film Festival. Just like Snake Plissken would! Now go appear in a bunch of movies next year because you are so awesome, okay?
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Canyon’s Mostly Redundant End-of-Year List
Though you might have caught on that Admiral Neck is very fond of end-of-year list-making, I myself am not. I do love reading other people’s lists, I have to admit, and I appreciate the opportunity to step back, think about the year as a whole, and organize your thoughts. The problem for me is that I often don’t feel there are ten movies made every year that I will remember and really love as time goes on (the same goes with books and music and tv shows — most years will produce maybe three or four of each). With most movies I enjoy in a given year, “Oh yeah, that’s a good movie” is the first thought that springs to mind when I think about them later — not “Wow, what a haunting, life-changing masterpiece that was.”
I get that it’s probably the same for everybody, but I feel wrong memorializing merely good movies in a top-ten list when they probably won’t matter much to me in the long run. I guess this is kind of unfair to the very good movies I leave off, but it’s my list and I’ll do what I want. Also, Admiral Neck and I have very similar tastes, so I mostly have the same movies on as he does, and I liked all the other movies he mentioned mostly as much as he did (except The Darjeeling Limited, because I have been burned by Wes Anderson too many times and refused to see what was by all accounts another dollhouse whimsy-fest). Okay, enough clearing-of-throat preamble: my seven favorite movies of the year (I could stretch this to ten, but I feel a bit wrong doing it, so I won’t).
Top Seven
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — One of the most gorgeous movies I’ve ever seen (the visuals in the train-robbery scene will stay with me a long time); the comparisons to Terrence Malick are apt, but this film is no rip-off (as if that would even be a bad thing). The narration was moving and elegiac and wonderfully literary, the pace was perfect, many scenes were incredibly haunting (especially the fantastic ending), and Casey Affleck needs awards shoved between his tiny Chiclet teeth immediately.
Ratatouille -- I adore The Iron Giant but was disappointed with The Incredibles (apparently I was the only person on earth who was), but this movie had Admiral Neck and I sobbing like little babies. I would have cried more if we hadn’t been in public. Gorgeous animation, wonderfully funny, with a turn by Peter O’Toole that made me choke up over a discourse on the role of critics. That’s some writin’, Brad Bird! And damn you, by the way, for making me cry more at your movies than even one of Joss Whedon’s.
Zodiac — Another one that stayed with me for weeks afterward. A meta-comment on obsession that was scary, funny, thought-provoking, and ended perfectly.
(Note: All three of the movies above are what I’d consider the haunting-masterpiece variety.)
I Am Legend — Yeah, I said it. I think the movie was very unfairly derided as being a typical Will Smith flashy blockbuster, a sci-fi FX-extravaganza with no brain and no heart. (And it almost was — Admiral Neck got hold of the original script, and it’s absolutely terrible, and the kind of movie you can imagine would have been perfect for Michael Bay [he was previously attached to direct].) Instead, it’s a quiet, thoughtful, incredibly moving meditation on isolation and loneliness, and the main character’s slow descent into madness. I don’t often agree with Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek (though I love reading her reviews), but I think she was mostly on the mark about this one. I don’t agree with the complaint I’ve often heard about the ending — I think it flows very well with what came before, and while I think the God stuff and the very end were missteps, those aren’t the moments that stayed with me. The shots of a deserted New York are incredible, the action set-pieces are brilliant, and I haven’t been able to get some scenes out of my mind since I saw it. There might have even been more sobbing during this than during Ratatouille (though I blame Admiral Neck for being a big crier himself and dragging me down with him).
Once — My favorite musical of the year (though who knows if Sweeney Todd would have bested it; that doesn’t come out here till January, thanks distributors!!!!!). Wonderful performances, beautiful songs — I went on about it earlier this year so won’t belabor it, but it was absolutely lovely.
3:10 to Yuma — The second-best Western of the year — perhaps a bit too neatly wrapped up at the end, but that’s kind of what I liked about the ending, that even though Russell Crowe’s actions are seemingly out of character, they make perfect sense in the context of the movie. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone but me, but I loved the symmetry of it.
Grindhouse — Planet Terror was a perfect spoof — mocking grindhouse movies with hilarious accuracy but incredibly clever in its own right. Death Proof wasn’t a grindhouse spoof by any stretch of the imagination — it was more of a Tarantino movie badly filmed and scratched up — but it was brilliant in its own right (people moaned about it, but would they really want two back-to-back straight spoofs?).
Black Book — Straight up Verhoevenly goodness. In Dutch!
Best Coen brothers movie I’ve seen, but which still left me a bit cold: No Country for Old Men
Movie I thought I’d hate and, much to Admiral Neck’s gloating joy, I really, really liked: The Bourne Ultimatum
Favorite bad movie: Ghost Rider, mostly because of the weird character quirks Nicolas Cage adds to his performance
Biggest disappointment: Eastern Promises (I loved History of Violence and consider it one of those elusive masterpieces, so it was a huge disappointment to find that this barely felt like a movie)
Movies I liked but am a bit ashamed to admit to: Music and Lyrics, Hairspray, Transformers (and potentially Dan in Real Life, as it’s supposed to be a lot better than the mawkish trailer makes it seem)
Movies that would probably be on my list if they came out in the UK in %#$($# December like they should have: Walk Hard, There Will Be Blood, Juno, Sweeney Todd, Into the Wild, Away From Her, National Treasure 2: Book of Seeeeeecrets, No End in Sight
And you thought Ghost Rider was bad
Yes, as I was saying. Brett Leonard. Director of The Lawnmower Man, which was famously Flowers for Algernon with unpleasant cyber-rape, Pierce Brosnan in a tight bodysuit, and a sequel that would get on any bottom 10 movies list. Adapter of Dean Koontz’ Hideaway, with Jeff Goldblum dying, coming back to life, chasing a serial killer, and ending up psychically battling with said killer in an outrageous FX blow-out for no other reason than that Leonard was the “Lawnmower Man guy” and it was kind of expected of him. Helmer of Virtuosity, with Denzel Washington as a disgraced cop with a robotic arm, and Russell “Le Roq” Crowe as a living serial-killer-program made flesh by something to do with very silly non-science. I think the word “nanobots” was bandied around at one point. Seems I don’t remember much of it, except that I liked it more than I should have. Denzel! Le Roq! Come on! Bear in mind I have very low standards.
But not so low that I could find anything good to say about Man-Thing, his adaptation of the Marvel comic. To clarify, Man-Thing is not a euphemism for penis. He’s an ecological, mystical, gooey being living in the Florida Everglades which doubles as the Nexus of All Realities. His full history is available on Wikipedia, and is more interesting than any attempt of mine to recap it. I have so little interest in the character, even though it was often written by Steve Gerber, the writer behind the magnificent Howard the Duck. I’ve not read Swamp Thing either. Not even Alan Moore’s legendary run. I guess I just don’t like reading about non-communicative magical swamp dwelling half-men, even when it’s well-written.
Man-Thing the movie is not well-written. It doesn’t seem to be written at all. I certainly couldn’t tell what was going on. There’s a town called Bywater with a new sheriff who investigates a bunch of disappearances, and there’s an evil oil baron who has built his rig in the middle of the Nexus, and Man-Thing is pissed, and a shaman is pissed too, and Man-Thing kills everyone except for the sheriff and his hott new eco-warrior girlfriend, even though he had the chance and I was wishing for it really a lot, and then Man-Thing disappears in a swamp-tornado thing. Oh, sorry. Spoiler alert!
I could fart a more imaginative and coherent plot. It was written by Hans Rodionoff, who also wrote an excellent horror comic for Vertigo called Mnemovore. It was original, and creepy, and intelligent. If it were adapted as a film, I’d be first in line. So why is Man-Thing such an abomination? Was it the budgetary constraints? Its genesis was amusing. Marvel announced an alliance with Lionsgate Films, supposedly for a series of low-budget adaptations of Marvel properties, and promised they would all get a cinema release. So far, we’ve had the disappointing but entertaining Punisher, with Tom “Homeless Dad” Jane and John “Hairpiece” Travolta, and Man-Thing, which ended up being a Sci-Fi Channel TV movie. Avi Arad’s expensive pants are on fire right now.
Anyway, Marvel are getting flack for the recent drop in quality of their films. I loved the first two X-Men movies and liked the first two Spideys, but other than that their output is disappointing. I admit, with great reluctance, to a fondness for the Fantastic Four movies. They’re awful, but they’re light and fun. And, contrary to the beliefs of a few unhinged individuals on the internet, they are better than the astonishingly bad Olle Sassone / Roger Corman version, which featured a frantically gesticulating Doom…
…making up for the fact that you couldn’t see his face by voguing in the middle of every line, and ended with Reed Richards’ bendy arm…
…played by a rubber pole with a glove on it, waving out of the top of a limousine. Daredevil was okayish, Elektra was very bad, Ghost Rider was appalling (yet my love for lean slices of Nicolas Cage ham saved it. Just). However, compared to Man-Thing, they are all masterpieces. Well, not Ghost Rider, but you get my point.
First strike against it, filming it in Australia with a bunch of actors who can’t be bothered to master a Louisiana accent (yes, not only is it set in the wrong state, it’s filmed in the wrong country). Worst of all is the lead, “hunky” Matthew Le Nevez as the new sheriff who arrives to clean up this one-monster town, dagnabbit.
There’s laconic (which is good), and there’s lifeless (more of a problem). Le Nevez crushes each cliched line under a mortis-like monotone that would make Zooey Deschanel jealous, if she could be bothered to muster the energy. When he’s not doing that he walks around like a Gerry Anderson puppet, arms and legs wobbling away. I really wish I could find his walk on YouTube. Trey Parker and Matt Stone could have saved a fortune if they’d hired him for Team America: World Police.
The rest of the cast are dreadful too, but for the opposite reason, as if attending an all-you-can-eat scenery buffet. The main villain, Frederick Schist, is played by character actor Jack Thompson, who is usually much better than this. I’ll blame Brett Leonard for leading him astray. The love interest is played by Transformers “hottie” Rachael Taylor. I’m still pissed at her for taking screentime away from Buffy and Angel vet Tom Lenk in Transformers. He was cast as a nerdy IT tech who is significantly less hott than Taylor (though significantly more talented), and so is deemed surplus to requirements 15 minutes into the movie. Damn you Michael Bay!
The chemistry between Taylor and Le Nevez is blistering! Well, actually it’s barely recognisable as such, mostly because both actors seem unaware of each other for most of the movie, until Leonard randomly screams out, “Mack on each other, craven acting dogs!” and they suddenly start kissing on each other’s face parts for no apparent reason. It’s as if two strangers on a bus started getting busy right in front of you, and equally as discombobulating.
Of course, all of this is mere window dressing. We watched the damn thing for some Man-Thing action, and we sure got a couple of minutes of it. Luckily for our titular non-hero, various characters like to enter the swamp for very little reason other than to get killed. Again, we could see no reason for this. For all we knew, Man-Thing was phoning Bywater for takeout, and the townsfolk were all moonlighting as delivery men because of the high turnover. After many hints as to what he looks like, we finally see that…er…
Oh great, an Ent with tentacles and red contacts. Worth every penny. Still, it’s good news for Stephen Hopkins’ The Reaping. Watching Man-Thing a couple of days earlier meant that The Reaping wasn’t the worst film set in a Louisiana swamp that we’ve seen this week.
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Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
