Category Archives: X-Men

Abraham Lincoln: WTF Generator

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If you’re a subscriber to this blog, there’s a chance you wince whenever you get an email saying there’s a new post, or when you click the link to the main page and then scroll down to see how long it is, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll again, and head past a few images that haven’t even started to load yet, and then keep scrolling, and by now you feel like Ed Harris at the end of The Abyss, because you keep scrolling and Jesus Christ, the space-age lung goop is drying up or something, where are the glowing aliens with their magical water technology? Well worry not. You won’t have to dive too far. There’s not going to be much in this review of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, because there’s not much in the movie.

Based on Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel of the same name, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter creates an alternate history in which Abraham Lincoln becomes a vampire hunter. Now, I want you to ponder that idea. I want you to think beyond your initial reaction, which is probably, “I wonder what the hashtag game is”. Imagine now that you have to expand that, and come up with a story with three acts, antagonist/protagonist relationships, an inciting incident, and all the other important storytelling elements, extrapolating from that initial absurd collision of history and fantasy fiction.

I bet you come up with a story involving a tragic past, a quest for vengeance, a mentor with a dark secret, and some smattering of historical elements, adding plenty of winking references to the absurdity of the premise because it’s just so silly. You’ll start to write a synopsis down, and it’ll go okay for a bit, but after a while you’ll feel like you’re wasting an opportunity to do something with some oomph, and you’ll think that there’s possibly more to this idea than just some daft jokes. Perhaps there’s something deeper to be said, drawing a parallel between the mythical relationship between vampires and their prey, and the real-world relationship between Southern plantation owners and their slaves. Maybe there’s more to this story. Out go the jokes, in come the metaphors.

Which is what has happened here, though this can only be said with a million caveats. AL:VH has been reshot and recut so extensively that it’s impossible to judge it accurately with any confidence, because any clues to the filmmakers’ original intentions have been lost somewhere in the editing room. Alarm bells ring early on with some clumsy time-skipping and conveniently expositional voiceovers; they become klaxons midway through when Lincoln’s narration fills in large character arcs with a single line, and we go from Senate-debating Lincoln to president to civil war in the space of approximately 30 seconds.

So perhaps a longer cut, or an earlier cut, exists in which the connection between slavery and vampirism is made clearly, instead of here alluded to at times as some kind of equivalence, with slave traders sharing space with monsters who feast on the blood of the slaves — the merest hint of an idea, and not a particularly interesting one — but usually ignored in favour of generic monstery evil. Nevertheless, even if this metaphor worked more clearly — the repeated line, “as long as one man is a slave, no man is free”, is obviously meant to bear the weight of the imagined comparison — it’s still a miscalculation that cannot be fixed, at least as far as I can see.

This is not to say genre fiction cannot represent complicated and controversial themes. I’ve previously argued that genre fiction is often the best way to tackle such things. Artists freed of the obligation to depict real situations accurately — which never works out well and only creates discord between opposing sides of an issue — can tackle complex themes through metaphors that speak more forcefully than mere hectoring. Blade Runner‘s commentary on slavery, X-Men‘s metaphorical portrayal of the effects of racism and/or homophobia, The Handmaid’s Tale‘s horrific and timely parable about the subjugation of women, Attack The Block‘s depiction of protagonists ignored by society until they can only find self-respect through criminality, before finding a real cause by defending their neighbours against a force that, as one character says, “is so black you almost can’t see it” (I’m paraphrasing a bit from memory).

The genre fiction-as-gateway-to-truth argument doesn’t apply with AL:VH, and in fact detracts from it. The real Lincoln fought against slavery already (I think that’s a well-known fact), but instead of this being Abe’s own ideological conviction, albeit a more complicated position than is often depicted, now we’re presented with some needless alternate history in which he hates vampires more. Lincoln’s position, one which was controversial enough that it tore a country apart, was a brave one, and to depict it here as being as much an act of revenge against the vampires who killed Lincoln’s mother as an effort to right a disgusting injustice is incredibly problematic.

Even worse, it recasts real world tragedies as the consequences of inconsequential fictional events. The battle of Gettysburg is almost lost because of the presence of Confederate vampires who burst through the lines and massacre Union soldiers. The trade and abduction of slaves into the South is merely an appeasement gesture to keep vampires from invading the North. Lincoln’s mother Nancy died of “milk sickness”, and his son Willie died of typhoid, but here it’s because of vampires; in the latter case the boy’s death is an act of vengeance from the vampires who want to strike at Lincoln for opposing their plans to subjugate all of America.

Yes, not only is the actual death of the actual son of an actual president of the actual United States used as a manipulative plot point, his murder is avenged by Mary Lincoln, who shoots the murderous vampire with a silver bullet. A woman who in real life suffered from clinical depression caused by her grief is here cast as a vengeance-stricken action-hero-in-waiting, who gets to re-balance the scales of right and wrong with yet another tedious slow-motion mini-action scene. These people may be dead and may have no descendants, but even so, this was real tragedy, turned into a predictable dramatic beat in an undistinguished action movie. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” doesn’t even cover it. [1]

AL:VH is wrong on so many levels that by the middle of the movie I was openly saying, “What the fuck?” out loud at the screen in the hope that the manager would notice my anguish and set fire to the projector. [2] It’s possible that the movie would be easier to swallow if it played the premise for laughs, even though the central conceit would struggle to fill out a College Humor skit. That might mitigate the gratuitous co-opting of real-world tragedy, replacing the tasteless dabbling in humourless social commentary with plays on the action-horror genre, or by appropriating Grindhouse exploitation tropes in much the same way Tarantino managed with Inglourious Basterds — a cheeky riff on real-world events that so obviously existed within an alternate universe beholden to cinematic rules that Tarantino could shockingly assassinate Hitler at the end and miraculously pull the moment off.

But Timur Bekmambetov and Seth Grahame-Smith (and the one known re-writer, Simon Kinberg, credited on the poster but not in the film) don’t seem interested in trying to derive any fun out of that thin jokey idea, and instead doubles-down on the seriousness. Again, theoretically this approach could work, but only if dealing with a fictional premise. Grahame-Smith kickstarted this sub-genre of fiction with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and that may be easier to swallow. But it doesn’t matter that this doesn’t present itself as historically accurate (only an idiot would think it was, of course); using tragic historical events as raw material for a frivolous action movie made by people deluded enough to think they’re making a statement is a colossal misjudgement.

The end result is ponderous, derivative, dull, and nauseating. It’s not even interesting as a Timur Bekmambetov movie. He’s never made anything good, but he has a visual imagination that has its own pleasures. He specialises in hollow treats, but what treats they can be. Anyone hoping for something as delightfully silly as the Loom of Fate or bullet-bending a la miserable nerd wank-fantasy Wanted will be very disappointed. Those signature moments are few and far-between here, likely a consequence of the (relatively) low budget. Instead of his usual bravura set-pieces, there’s so much ramping that it should immediately be retitled Abraham Lincoln: Rampire Hunter.

And yet this could become the most beautiful unnecessary movie of the year. Whoever decided to hire Caleb Deschanel as the cinematographer deserves a medal, or censure; I’m not sure which yet. The last thing he worked on was Jim Sheridan’s appalling Dream House; two movies before that the ethically muddled My Sister’s Keeper. Both terrible, both luminously shot. It’s heartbreaking seeing him squander his talent on this chaff, and I hope that William Friedkin’s Killer Joe is a break from this trend. Deschanel’s work on AL:VH is flashier than his stunning, ASC Award-winning work on Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot [3],  but there is pleasure to be derived from these autumnal colours, the American past repainted with a palette of auburn and rust, piercing blue moonlight serving as contrast.

It doesn’t matter, though, and neither does the commendably focused work from star Benjamin Walker [4], co-stars Mackie and Simpson, and underused acting titan Alan Tudyk. Even if you’re not troubled by the misappropriation of real events, there’s nothing else going on here. It’s not educational [5], it’s repetitive, and the use of vampire mythology is confounding. The vampires have magical rules about not killing each other that exist only to power a silly mid-movie twist (involving that hoary old trope, the vampire hunter’s trainer), they can be hurt by silver, and can walk around in daylight, meaning there’s no reason they can’t just take over the world. They’re barely even vampires, merely inhuman cannon fodder to be dispatched by our axe-spinning hero.

This is the kind of soul-deadening guff that defies mockery, though one outburst by Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a bad-movie-hall-of-famer. Otherwise it’s just an Underworld prequel with a silly punchline gimmick, less interesting than even the second Blade sequel, as competent as Scott Charles Stewart’s Priest but with a dodgy historical aspect, as poorly edited as an Uwe Boll Bloodrayne movie; just another crappy vampire movie that has no reason to exist, and probably no audience to desire it. The reason this one stings the eyes more than the others is that it thinks it has the right to play with tragic events that haven’t quite scarred America, because in order for the wounds of slavery and civil war to be scars they’d have to heal first.

Return 1. One example among many: the character of Joshua Speed, one of Lincoln’s circle of friends, is obviously meant to have mixed feelings about Lincoln’s urge to stop slavery; there are hints that this version of Speed (played by future Old Dependable Jimmi Simpson) has similar doubts to the real Speed, but this sub-plot has been utterly removed so that at one moment he’s seemingly hostile to Lincoln’s African-American friend William Johnson (played by current Old Dependable Anthony Mackie), and the next they’re besties. Ten seconds later, he’s gone from being oblivious to vampires to being a member of Lincoln’s mysteriously efficient vamp-killing gang, with one hasty line of exposition to paper over the poorly edited excision.

Return 2. For those clutching their pearls, don’t worry; the rushed release of this movie, which betrays the studio’s shame at making it in the first place, meant there was nobody sitting anywhere nearby. Or maybe the room filled up after I got in and they were struck dumb by the hypnotic monotony of this film’s familiar rhythms.

Return 3. A movie that also distorts history but only just enough to seem like truth, which is even more insidious and despicable than this gallumphing failure’s gauche error.

Return 4. I look forward to seeing Benjamin Walker play Young Bryan Mills in Taken Begins, because dang, he’s the spitting image of Liam Neeson in this, making me even sadder that the aging pretend-pugilist isn’t playing the actual non-vampire-hunting Abraham Lincoln in Spielberg’s forthcoming biopic.

Return 5. Actually, there is evidence that some effort has been put into depicting some elements of Lincoln’s life in a new context. In real life Lincoln put off marrying Mary, which some have thought to be proof that the president was gay, but here Lincoln’s reticence is borne of his fear of involving the woman he loves in his vampire hunting. As for William Johnson, the free African-American who acted as Lincoln’s personal valet, he just fills the role of Falcon to Abe’s Captain America, on duty for exposition-delivering needs, providing proof of Abe’s liberal credentials, and getting in a little bit of vampire hammering at the end. His actual history isn’t mentioned, and even his past is fictionalised; here he features in Abe’s past in order to dramatise the future president’s first encounter with slavery and vampires. The stories of slaves and even free men once more sidelined.

Austin Superpowers In: The Mutant Who Shagged Me

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Regular readers will probably already know about my passionate hatred for X-Men Origins: Wolverine in: The Origin of The Man They Call Wolverine: The Pre-X-Men Years, which I thought was the worst major studio big-budget release OF ALL TIME, until the unforgivable Alice in Wonderland arrived and surpassed even that milestone with dispiriting ease. Many comic and superhero fans will argue that Brett Ratner’s X-Men: the Last Stand represents the franchise’s low-point, but that is at least coherent, despite its flaws, and has a sense of the operatic about it; essential if you’re adapting the legendary Dark Phoenix saga. Ratner and screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn may have fumbled that mighty arc, but they didn’t forget the basic rules of filmmaking, which is what everyone who worked on Wolverine seemed to do.

So rejoice that Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class is better than both of those movies. It has some of the strongest acting in the franchise, some stand-out moments of undeniable superpower coolness to rival X2: X-Men United, is made with an awareness of what makes these some of these characters tick, and has some beautifully observed emotional scenes that capture the loneliness and self-loathing felt by the mutant heroes and anti-heroes – here once more standing in for all of society’s outcasts. Hell, just for casting Shades of Caruso favourite Michael “Sickeningly Hot And Talented” Fassbender as Magneto – my favourite comics supervillain, and possibly my favourite movie supervillain too – means this stands apart from the last two feeble movies.

But that doesn’t mean it’s actually good. Those praiseworthy elements are but jewels peeking out from a garbage dump composed of woeful dialogue, tonal misjudgements and surprisingly poor production values. Those few praiseworthy performances, and the emotional truth they convey, are sadly betrayed by bad editing and photography that make the whole enterprise look like it was only finished a couple of weeks ago in a mad sprint to beat the release deadline. Yet again Fox shortchanges the creatives; by now the Fox execs know the fans will watch these movies even when they’re bad (and even when they’re leaked onto the internet a couple of weeks before release). All they needed to do to make us forget the last two failures was raise expectations a little higher, and the mystifying critical praise XM:FC has received in recent weeks has ensured that.

And yet it all starts so well, mostly by focusing on Erik Lensherr’s tragic childhood and vengeful youth. Opening at exactly the same point as the first X-Men is a lovely touch, and the subsequent scene with Kevin Bacon’s evil Nazi scientist triggering Magneto’s powers with an act of horrific cruelty is brilliantly effective, evoking memories of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Christoph Waltz’s magnificently horrible Hans Landa. The next few scenes, intercutting between Magneto’s quest to find the Nazi scientist – now going by the name of Sebastian Shaw – and young Charles Xavier’s first encounter and subsequent friendship with Raven Darkholme, are very promising.

This is pretty good stuff, especially Magneto’s Nazi-killing rampage, and hints that the long-considered X-Men Origins: Magneto could have been a far more interesting proposition than first thought (Sheldon Turner and Bryan Singer, who wrote the un-shot scripts for that movie, are given a story credit here, though don’t bring that up to Vaughn or he’ll cut a bitch). Giving Raven, aka Mystique, a bigger part to play in the X-Men movie mythos is a superb choice; what was previously a side-lined character in the first trilogy has now become a tragic figure along the same lines as Anna Paquin’s Rogue. Her desperate need to be loved creates an ache at the centre of this movie that generates many of its best moments.

The wheels start to come off as soon as the Hellfire Club arrive, with Kevin Bacon now dressed like Austin Powers in his groovy nightclub shagpad, and January Jones occupying a lady-shaped space on-screen in her smalls. Much has been made of the film’s retro aesthetic and vaguely Bondian plot involving the Cold War, but Vaughn pitches the tone too far towards the wacky end of the spectrum. The moment the Hellfire Club escapes from an attack in a submarine with all white interiors and an office complete with paintings evokes the Adam West Batman movie with the Joker, Penguin, and Riddler teaming up with Catwoman to dehydrate the members of the United Nations. From that moment on, the movie is, quite aptly, sunk.

The Austin Powers references in this review are entirely deliberate. As Daisyhellcakes said when we stumbled, disappointed, from the sweltering heat of Portobello Road’s Electric Cinema, “At times it felt as if it was trying to be like a comedy, but nothing in it was funny.” Vaughn seems to think he can play up to the inherent absurdity of the X-Men by making the tone silly, but his hectic, discombobulating editing from one plot thread to another makes this tonal decision utterly incomprehensible, at least early on.

For example, McAvoy plays Xavier as a lecherous and oblivious dope getting pissed in Oxford, Kevin Bacon plays Sebastian Shaw as a mustache-twirling pantomime villain complete with silly-looking henchmen, and Rose Byrne’s CIA agent Moira MacTaggart (yes, she’s not a scientist anymore) spends an excruciating scene walking around in her underwear to what is either comic effect, or… I just don’t know what. Meanwhile, Magneto is an grim, badass avenging angel of death hunting down and murdering Nazis. With no apparent narrative framework in place to connect these two differing tone, we flip back and forth between what feel like different movies, never really staying in place long enough to get comfortable or to get a sense of what the final shape of the narrative will be.

This tonal mish-mash is made worse whenever Vaughn evokes memories of Bryan Singer’s two superior franchise entries. It feels as if Singer’s achievement – balancing the unavoidable absurdity of the superhero genre with a seriousness of purpose and respect that triggered a surge in its popularity – has been forgotten or underestimated in the ten years since the first X-Men. He understood the characters, recognised their pain and made sure that even when he was puncturing the pomposity of the genre, there was a solemness to the characters that never really went away. That’s not to say he piled on the modish pain; those movies were still fun, but they were weighty.

Vaughn’s movie is the opposite of weighty for much of its length, with only the Magneto and Mystique arcs – and one final, brilliant showdown – providing respite from the shockingly daft proceedings. While this might mean the franchise now finds a new audience, it also means that what was so welcome in Singer’s movies has now been utterly eradicated. Even Ratner’s movie honoured that atmosphere of sadness more than Wolverine and First Class (by which I mean Wolverine cried again). And yes, I expect spluttering indignation at that statement, but if it makes you feel better I really did hate it.

I get that there is a vocal section of fandom (and non-fandom) that will welcome the excision of the grim dramatics, but this comes at the expense of drama; there is almost no sense within First Class that there is anything at stake until midway through the big finale, pretty much as soon as the awful wire-work chase between Angel and Banshee is finally, mercifully over. Even the mid-movie action scene with the Hellfire Club attacking the CIA compound housing the proto-X-Men is curiously unsuspenseful, feeling more like a staccato compilation of action beats than a coherent set-piece.

The woeful editing again undercuts this tension by hurrying past big moments, rarely showing the consequences of actions or emotional beats. Than again, there are also numerous narrative shortcuts taken throughout that smack of budgetary restraint or release-date haste, many of which involve shaky effects (one shot of Beast running fast made me want to walk out of the cinema and never look back) or tricks as unintentionally hilarious as rotating the frame to depict a spinning plane. I understand that Fox are not in the business of spending money on their superhero films, prefering instead to cynically rely on marketing muscle to get audiences into cinemas, but some of these choices are farcical, robbing the movie of any authority.

However we should all also be grateful to Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence, who give their all yet again, selling their tragic roles brilliantly; it’s arguable that their commitment is worth the extortionate ticket price all on their own. This is Fassbender’s highest-profile role yet, and allows him to supply young Magneto with new superpowers; insane hotness, charisma and the ability to be the only person on the planet to look good in rollneck sweaters. The man will be a star by the end of the weekend, hopefully. Lawrence proves that she’s no flash-in-the-pan with another nuanced performance. Though I was initially sceptical, the decision to cast her as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games really seems shrewd now.

James McAvoy is okay, though the choice to make his arc a transition from tiresomely enthusiastic dope to noble martyr in a wheelchair is nowhere near as well-drawn as Erik’s transition into ruthless human-hating Magneto (and even that isn’t done as well as you would hope, with some leaps of faith required of the viewer by the final act). It doesn’t help that I could understand only about half of his dialogue. His chemistry with Fassbender is good, though; the decision to make them play chess in unusual locales, less so. That’s not as bad as his repeated gesture of pressing his fingers to his temple whenever using his powers. In keeping with this movie’s unfortunate resemblance to the Austin Powers movie, McAvoy’s gesture is now the equivalent of Dr. Evil’s pinky move (thanks to Daisyhellcakes for spotting that).

It’s the rest of the cast that let the side down badly. Poor January Jones, in her white undies, cannot even convey “I’m thinking at you with my supertelepathy” with any sense of conviction, and when required to speak everything falls apart. Less a snarky ice-maiden than a mildly bored housewife who doesn’t really like her lot in life (what a surprise!), she lets the fans down. Part of me had hoped that a combination of directorial effort and superior writing would entice a better performance from her, but one moment, where she gets some ice for her sexist boss Shaw and sighs dramatically to convey her sadness, is a contender for laziest acting choice in thespian history.

At least she gets some stuff to do. Some of the kids playing the proto-X-Men end up coming off as deeply unlikeable (Caleb Landry Jones’ Banshee is particularly irksome), but then they’re so underwritten they can’t really be blamed for that (re: Landry Jones, he was good in The Last Exorcist, so I will point blame elsewhere). Rose Byrne uses her patented Worried Face, and brandishes a gun at one point. Perhaps this is intentional; MacTaggart only really seems to be in the movie to be mocked by the other characters. Another actor, playing Matt Craven’s second-in-command, gives one of the most bizarre hammy performances I’ve ever seen in a major motion picture. I couldn’t take my eyes off him; not a compliment, I should stress. I won’t name him, as I feel bad enough about this complaining already.

The poorly-judged and frankly amateurish problems don’t stop there. The compositions are always slightly off, undercutting the tension almost as much as the imprecise editing. Jokes are attempted but fail. Scenes are cut too short to generate emotions, and those scenes that are longer often trundle along with no point – a stilted introduction scene with the proto-X-Men bonding in a cafeteria is particularly painful to watch, though that’s nothing compared to a risible late-movie training montage that lacks the dramatic gravity of the “Montage!” scene in Team America. And seriously, if you can watch the final conversation between Xavier and Moira without cringing, then you’re a sturdier person than I.

It doesn’t help that Vaughn takes on way too much for one movie. That dreadful rush to fill in the blanks that made the last half an hour of Revenge of the Sith feel so hysterically cramped lasts throughout First Class‘ entire two hour run. Two movies would have given plenty of time for Vaughn to tell every story he wants to tell here, and then some. Instead its a mad gambol from Poland to Westchester to Switzerland to Oxford to Argentina to Las Vegas back to Oxford and then to Washington and eventually Russia for about five minutes and then etc. etc. etc. Locales flash by, character moments are introduced then dropped, momentous events happen and are then left behind with no room for reflection or pause because another momentous event is right on its tail. The effect is that nothing sticks; a problem that affected Ratner’s X-Men movie. Except for odd flashes, the movie left me feeling utterly cold.

That was how Vaughn’s first two movies – Layer Cake and Stardust – made me feel. They were all surface, with enough evidence that Vaughn was obviously trying very hard to make those movies memorable but only as noble failures. Kick-Ass qualified as a pure triumph, however (at least IMO), and made this movie such an appealing prospect. Who knows what went wrong – or what addition to the equation made Kick-Ass go so right – but that doesn’t change the fact that this is not the movie we fans had hoped for. Oh sure, as a nerd it occasionally made me very happy. There are a couple of delightful cameos that prove this was made with a certain amount of love, and for that I’m grateful.

So, it’s better than X-Men: The Last Stand and Wolverine, but really only by default. Vaughn and Goldman and the Fringe writing duo of Ashley Stentz and Zack Miller (who also wrote the far superior Thor) obviously care about the characters and the franchise, but for one reason or another it just feels more like a badly-made parody than a drama. Many have claimed that this movie shows the franchise still has legs, but it really needs a far more drastic shake-up than just revisiting the old material from a different angle. It needs a Nolanising, if you will. By that I don’t mean a serious, realistic take; more that a good filmmaker needs to come along and, with the backing of his studio, commits as fully to making the X-Universe work as Nolan or Singer did – as might have happened if Darren Aronofsky did make The Wolverine. Because right now, these regrettably laughable rush-jobs just aren’t cutting it anymore.

Listmania ‘09! The Worst Movies Of The Year

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

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

Worst Movies of the Year:

25. Angels and Demons

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

24. Surrogates

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

23. The Hangover

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

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

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

21. Orphan

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

20. Paul Blart: Mall Cop

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

19. The Box

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

18. Knowing

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

17. Away We Go

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

16. The Taking of Pelham 123

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

15. I Love You, Beth Cooper

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

14. The Blind Side

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

13. Dragonball Evolution

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

12. Twilight: New Moon

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

11. The Proposal

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

10. Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire

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

9. The Ugly Truth

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

8. Love Happens

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

7. Obsessed

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

6. My Sister’s Keeper

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

5. The Boat That Rocked

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

4. All About Steve

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

3. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li

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

2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine

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

1. Lesbian Vampire Killers

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

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

Summer Movies Poll: Readers Choice Bonanza

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Many moons ago I asked readers to cast their votes for best and worst movies of the summer season circa 2009. First: Best.

  • Eric Bana Is: An Especially Tetchy Romulan – 7 (25%)
  • Quentin Tarantino Presents: Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece - 7 (25%)
  • Christopher Johnson and Wikus Van Der Merwe’s Excellent Adventure – 4 (14%)
  • That’s No Moon; It’s Hott Sam Rockwell’s Talent! – 3 (11%)
  • Pixar’s The Bucket List – 4 (14%)
  • Cover Me With Drool, Drop An Anvil On Me, Then Drag Me To Hell – 2 (7%)
  • G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES! – 1 (4%)
  • Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience) – 0 (0%)
  • Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision) – 0 (0%)
  • When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican – 0 (0%)
  • STREEP, TUCCI & LYNCH vs. a Blogger and her Annoying Husband – 0 (0%)
  • Night at the Museum: Sound, Fury, & Nothing – 0 (0%)
  • Futile and Fatuous – 0 (0%)
  • Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan! – 0 (0%)
  • The Shaking [Cameras] of Pelham 123 – 0 (0%)
  • Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy – 0 (0%)
  • X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine – 0 (0%)
  • Eric Bana Is: An Absentee Time-Travelling Husband – 0 (0%)
  • The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming – 0 (0%)
  • Terminator 4: When Third Acts Collapse – 0 (0%)
  • Harry Potter And The Toenail of Effervescence – 0 (0%)
  • Eric Bana Is: An Endearing Aussie Cuckold – 0 (0%)
  • Final Destination: We’re Trying To Get Inside Your Eyeballs – 0 (0%)
  • Zooey Hall – 0 (0%)
  • Oh Will Ferrell. A TV Show Remake? We Want Anchorman 2 KTHXBAI – 0 (0%)

The number of high votes for Star Trek are no surprise at all. People have been calling for a light, fun movie with some substance during summer for years now, and Star Trek‘s blindingly bright visuals and hectic tone hit the spot, disregarding the fact that all of the fun surrounds the genocide of several billion Vulcans in the middle of the film. Yay summer movies! I’m a little more surprised that Inglourious Basterds (or, as the TV spots would have us believe, Inglourious!) got that many votes. Not because it doesn’t deserve them: more because many who liked it only seemed to just about like it, not love it with a passion. Perhaps there are more of us out there who think it’s a flat-out masterpiece and one of the greatest movies of the decade. Did the former camp vote for it because they thought “good enough” made it better than everything else on the list?

It was a great summer for genre fans, with the release of two audacious low-budget SF movies that were good enough and popular enough to stop nerds complaining about the success of less intellectually ambitious mainstream SF movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and — later in the year — Avatar. Ha ha! Only kidding. Nerds will never stop being mad about mainstream filmmakers making money off their beloved genres. For a while there it felt like the only reason Moon and District 9 were being praised by nerds was that they were not Michael Bay movies, and indeed Duncan Jones’ film was the anti-thesis of big budget pyro-movies. The rush to praise them for what they were not meant it took a while for anyone to spot that there were problems with both of them. Moon‘s considered pace was refreshing, but at times faltered on the wrong side of slow, and it was perhaps not as surprising as it thought it was. District 9‘s problems were more glaring: the sub-plot about how Nigerian gangs dabbled in prostitution and cannibalism was horribly ill-judged. I could see where Neill Blomkamp was going with it — i.e. painting a picture of all of humanity as a broken, venal species with no compassion to spare — but by explicitly stating it was Nigerian gangs running the show in District 9, that bleak message of living creatures as selfish and brutal became unpleasantly specific.

That said, despite those flaws, both movies were terrific, and I would never argue that those flaws overshadowed the things Jones and Blomkamp got right. Moon was a lot of fun even just to look at, with those Gerry-Anderson-esque production designs and lo-tech FX. It also featured possibly the best performance of the year, with Hott Sam Rockwell giving what might be his best work ever. For that alone, I’ll be eternally grateful Jones took us on his genial ride. District 9 risked more, caused me more agita over its racial politics, but in the end thrilled me far more. With all of humanity — and Prawndom — portrayed as singularly awful, the whole movie boils down to a single act of sacrifice. The final action scene of District 9 was powerful enough to overshadow my concerns over Blomkamp’s tone-deaf error, and even managed to make me cry, completely catching me by surprise. All of that despite sitting next to the most inconsiderate woman in film-going history, who spent the entire movie narrating the onscreen events to her annoyed boyfriend, and then got pissy with me when I asked her to be quiet an hour in. The kind of behaviour that makes me wonder why I bother going to the cinema.

The other three movies gaining votes were Up (a movie I didn’t care for on first viewing due to terrible projection in a crappy NJ cinema, but loved when seen in IMAX), Drag Me To Hell (Sam Raimi’s delirious instant horror classic), and G.I. Joe: Road To Nowhere. Seeing that get a vote made my soul cry. Still, it got another vote, in the Worst Summer Movie List, as seen below:

  • Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy – 7 (30%)
  • X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine – 6 (26%)
  • The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming – 4 (17%)
  • When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican – 2 (9%)
  • G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES! – 1 (4% )
  • Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision) - 1 (4%)
  • Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience) - 1 (4%)
  • Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan! – 1 (4%)

The rest of the movies on the list got no votes, so let’s just move on. It doesn’t surprise me that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen topped this list. It had been treated like a soiled nappy long before it was even released, and though I wasn’t crazy about it, I certainly didn’t hate it either. If people really hate it that much, more power to them (and certainly whenever I think about those fucking racial-stereotype-bots I feel like putting it at the top of this list as well), but I suspect a lot of Internet commenters who rail against it just haven’t seen enough bad movies this year. Of course, if that’s the case, they’re lucky. We’ve seen so many shitty movies this year that T:ROTF doesn’t even get on our bottom twenty list, let alone bottom ten.

It certainly doesn’t beat out X-Men Origins: Wolverine as worst movie of the summer. Who’s to blame for that farrago? I’m willing to let director Gavin Hood off the hook, as his work was so often compromised by Fox executive Tom “Nerd-Sauron” Rothman. He has long interfered in the making of Fox’s slate of superhero movies and been rewarded with high box office grosses despite the shitty quality of those films. X-Men Origins was the worst yet. David Benioff and Skip Woods’ script was impossibly bad. Could there be a draft of it that wasn’t a morass of cliches and tired jokes? Did there ever exist a single line given to Sabretooth that wouldn’t make me risk breaking bones through convulsive super-cringing? Compared to this disaster, T:ROTF was a source of almost endless delight. I truly wish it killed off the X-Men movie franchise, because now it has made money we’re looking at yet more soulless, brainless movies soiling our memories of those fantastic original stories.

I also have no problem with the simply appalling Ugly Truth getting some votes, and would like to think that my renaming of it helped. Gerard Butler is not very good in that film, but he’s Rudolph Valentino compared to Katherine Heigl. Her appeal is completely alien to me. Spiky, charmless, and unable to sell even the most basic of jokes, her continued success is a mystery. I know Grey’s Anatomy is very popular, but even if every fan of that show traipsed out to the cinema to catch the latest Heigl movie, would that account for the high box office The Ugly Truth managed? (We’re talking a worldwide gross of $203m on a budget of $38m.) Rail against the success of T:ROTF all you like, but that did everything it could to attract and entertain a certain sub-section of the audience (i.e. fans of BIG). The Ugly Truth did the bare minimum to get the job done and is technically far more profitable. Yay for cheaper movies, but boo for movies that are crafted with such lazy indifference towards their audiences, that said nothing about gender politics, that think a lumbering joke about vibrating panties was classifiable as entertainment.

What else got votes? Two for Angels and Demons, which was a passable enough thriller, and was certainly more entertaining than the flat-as-Holland Da Vinci Code. I can’t get angry with it, even when it was being very silly (i.e. for much of its length). A vote for The Hangover, which ranks alongside Up In The Air as most overrated movie of the year. The one thing I liked about it — that it is a comedy with a well-developed script and fascinating initial premise — meant nothing when the jokes were so lazy and the characters so unappealing (other than Zach Galafianakis’ Alan Garner, who was a delight). Watching Graham Linehan rail against it on Twitter during the summer made me feel a lot less alone. After that we get a vote for G.I. Joe, a movie I did not like at all, and single votes for Public Enemies and G-Force, both of which I liked to varying degrees.

Thanks to everyone who voted. What now? No poll for a bit (I usually add polls after the Oscar nominations are announced), but more lists. Been working on the damn things all year.

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (30-16)

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As I approach the end of this project that was meant to be over in a day (it kinda ran out of control), I find that more and more of my choices are populist crowdpleasers, mostly because I’ve watched them with greater frequency and taken them into my heart. Nevertheless, even though they’re frowned upon, I don’t think they should be missed off lists like this. It’s no easy feat to create movies that can entertain large groups of people without heading for the bottom of the barrel, and in fact, I’d argue that aiming for the lowest common denominator fails to please crowds any way. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was meant to be a big dumb action flick for big crowds of hooting boys of all ages, but it didn’t set the world alight. I’d like to think it was because people have more discerning tastes than they’re credited with. And now, someone somewhere is thinking, “But what about the success of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen?” I got nothing. [/sheepish]

And now, the movies I missed off part of this list business. Yes, I didn’t put Pan’s Labyrinth in the list. It honestly left me cold first time I saw it, though I did like it a lot, and thought Ivana Baquero and Sergi López were excellent. For the record, Daisyhellcakes loved it enough for both of us. My reservations were the same as I always have for Guillermo Del Toro’s movies, that for all his incredible flights of fantasy and attention to detail, they often feel like the work of a very talented adolescent who has not quite reached maturity. Pan’s Labyrinth is the closest he has come to this, but still it struck me that maybe Del Toro had bitten off more than he could chew. He also has terrible problems with pacing, choosing slow and steady but occasionally shooting off on tangents that make his movies grind to a frustrating halt.

That said, his eye is incredible, and all of the movies he has made this decade are staggeringly beautiful. For that alone I should give him some list props, but if I was honest, the movie I would choose would either be Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (which I praised here), or Blade 2. Both of them were more fun and filled with memorable images, but lacking the critical cachet that his homage to Spirit of the Beehive did. No matter. They both rocked my socks off. Consider them honorary mentions. And if I get to see Pan’s Labyrinth again, there’s always the chance that it will win me over. I hope so.

That brings me to the penultimate part of this list. Hopefully I can finish it all off today just so I can chill out over the weekend.

30. The Bourne Ultimatum

There is no slack in the rousing conclusion to the Bourne trilogy. Has there ever been a movie this propulsive, this energetic, this exhausting? Paul Greengrass strips every shot down to its essence, his camera focusing on every salient detail like a laser. Even better, he brings Bourne’s story to a satisfying close, turning the deadly assassin into a Spy Jesus who “dies” for the sins of his brothers. Arguably the best action movie since Die Hard.

29. The Insider

Featuring Russell Crowe’s first great US performance and Al Pacino’s last, Michael Mann’s 21st Century masterpiece pitches two men on the side of truth against the unfeeling machine of modern capitalism. As thrilling as the most hectic action movie you can imagine, and beautifully shot by Dante Spinotti, it’s also the best corporate thriller of recent times.

28. Unbreakable

M. Night Shyamalan’s best movie was treated like a failure upon release, but as his work becomes more erratic with every year, we can now look back on this love letter to comics with clearer eyes. His stately aesthetic was never used better than in telling the tale of a reluctant superhero and his hidden nemesis, and he deserves praise for extracting such a sensitive and quiet performance from Bruce Willis.

27. Magnolia

Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling patchwork might be self-indulgent, but it was also playful, emotional, and performed to perfection by a magnificent cast. Anderson has always been confident, but here he found a vehicle for his storytelling ideas that matched that ambition, something loose enough to allow for all the meta-narrative trickery. It also featured this jarring but unforgettable moment:

26. The Fountain

On first viewing, Darren Aronofsky’s meditation on life and death seems like an over-ambitious but impressive failure. Repeated viewings reveal its depth, its thematic strength, its perfect fusion of sound and image, building to a finale of terrifying and humbling power. In decades to come, it will be rightly hailed as a masterpiece.

25. Kung Fu Panda

An exhilarating rush of lovable enthusiasm from a company who had previously made nothing but forgettable chaff. Dreamworks Animation paid homage to Chinese culture with respect and style, aided by a never-better Jack Black playing a fanboy given a chance to live his dream. It’s pure escapist joy from start to finish.

24. Rushmore

Wes Anderson’s second movie was the one that turned his name into a adjective used to describe whimsical, cutesy indie nonsense. Thankfully his movies are cleverer than most, plus he has a weapon that many critics ignore in favour of whining about his formalism: crackerjack comic timing. Though I love all of Anderson’s movies, this was my introduction to that skewed universe, delivering the Shock of the New with a smirk and discerning use of Who songs.

23. Three Kings

David O. Russell manages to capture some of the genius of Catch-22 in his tale of soldiers hustling to steal Saddam’s gold as the first Gulf War winds down. It’s also a work of almost avant-garde oddness that bends cinema convention while providing laughs, pathos and action. A near-miraculous mixture of genres and tones.

22. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

Ignored on first release, Shane Black’s hard-boiled detective homage is slowly gathering a following of fans in love with its word games and playful distortion of genre expectations. It’s also a perfect showcase for the talents of Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer, who prove to be one of the great movie double-acts.

21. Galaxy Quest

Half satire of genre convention, half love letter to the genre and its fanbase, Dean Parisot, David Howard, and Robert Gordon’s hybrid of Star Trek and The Magnificent Seven is quite possibly a perfect movie, and qualifies as the best work many of its cast has ever done. For example, is this moment Alan Rickman’s finest?

20. X2: X-Men United

Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie was good enough to kickstart the superhero genre’s domination of the decade’s box office, but his sequel was on a whole new level. The satisfyingly complex narrative is a great starting point, but Singer then adds a series of bravura action setpieces that would only fail to melt the heart of the most obstinate and aggrieved fanboy. I may have yelped like a joyful puppy more than once during my first viewing.

19. Rachel Getting Married

The triumphant return of Jonathan Demme to filmmaking greatness. Even though he had not used it in a mainstream movie for a while, his loose aesthetic proved to be a perfect fit for Jenny Lumet’s piercing script about a family trying to enjoy a wedding while Anne Hathaway’s Kym — the living reminder of an awful tragedy — shows up and tries to bring everyone down.

18. Zodiac

David Fincher’s movie about the San Francisco Zodiac killings pretty much ate itself here, as he turned his obsession with the case into an exploration of how it possessed all those who tried to solve it. Is this as close as we’ll get to a personal movie from this impersonal perfectionist? No matter. What counts is his total mastery of mood and mise en scene, and his ability to make crowd-pleasing entertainment out of such dark material.

17. Memento

This mindbending crime thriller had a brilliant conceit that attracted all of the attention. The tale of vengeance-seeking Leonard (Guy Pierce) cleverly mimics his neurological disorder, and is told backwards and forwards simultaneously, meeting in the middle. Nevertheless, as with Christopher Nolan’s Prestige, it’s really a tragic story of how a man’s dark heart will bring him to destroy himself and others for the stupidest reasons.

16. Elephant

The award-winning centrepiece of Gus Van Sant’s Béla-Tarr-period is a hypnotic and gut-wrenching cinematic experience, and the best depiction of youthful nihilism since Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge. Harnessing long tracking shots, a fractured narrative, and the amazing soundwork of Leslie Shatz to discombobulate the viewer, Van Sant’s movie captures only a fraction of the horror of the Columbine school shootings, but that fraction is enough to chill the blood.

And now I embark on the final leg of this journey, with exhaustion gripping my branes. Wish me luck.

More Stuff That I Did At The London Film Festival

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The 2009 London Film Festival is still going, though it’s over for me. I’ll admit to feeling pretty burnt out. Illness has made my voice as deep as Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, and my brain as mushy as overcooked Maris Piper potatoes. How I managed to make it through three films on Monday is beyond me, with an imminent coughing fit scratching away at my uvula for most of the day. I trust that every festival-goer in those three rooms will be glad to know I didn’t ruin their entertainment, even the latecomers who kept swapping seats throughout, driving me into an almost murderous rage.

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It took until last Friday to realise that the latecomers who had plagued me throughout the festival were return-ticket-holders who were being allowed in at the last minute — a theory postulated by fellow festival-attendee and friend of the blog Mr. Millan. He’s a more understanding person than I am, but even so, when people were still stepping over us twenty minutes after the lights had dimmed, all sympathy vanished. While the audiences at the festival were generally wonderful, attentive and respectful, this late attendance and the inability of some patrons to sit in their allocated seats really ruined some movies. It’s hard to concentrate on the really rather important opening scenes of movies when people on either side of you are arguing over who gets what seat.

One selfish person who seemed affronted by the suggestion they get the hell out of someone else’s seat managed to completely distract me during the opening moments of Nicholas Winding Refn’s gruelling Viking Grrrr-a-thon Valhalla Rising. A title card flashed up with something on it about clans going to the ends of the Earth and killing each other with a variety of gruesome implements. I think it did, anyway. For all I know it could have been talking about Viking couture and ancient Scandinavian infrastructure investment, so annoying were the lady’s adamant pronouncements that she was not going to move. She did, though. And then sat in someone else’s chair, meaning she put up the same struggle three minutes later. This second disturbance was during a series of moody shots of some gruff looking gents huddling on the side of a hill, so it wasn’t so bad.

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If there was any image that summed up Valhalla Rising, it would be of gruff looking gents huddling on the side of a hill. There was a lot of it. The thin story follows the final journey of mute Viking warrior One Eye, played with silent intensity and motherfucking epic badassery by Mads Mikkelsen. Disclosure: he only gets to dole out a bit of ultraviolence here and there as Winding Refn’s carefully paced movie grinds toward its inevitable conclusion. The movie has been marketed as a Viking combat actioner like The 13th Warrior or the deeply tedious and offensively stupid Pathfinder, but it’s much more meditative than that. Audiences may not be prepared for the funereal pace of the actual film. That said, when it kicks off between our taciturn anti-hero and some gruff gent who had just been huddling on the side of a hill, One-Eye is a riveting protagonist, effortlessly and brutally destroying all foes. He’s the Viking Brock Samson, and very fetching he looks in his leather jacket and trews.

After escaping from capture by some folk whose identity might have been revealed in that title card I didn’t get to read thanks to the annoying lady, One-Eye and a tag-along boy (Are, played with mischievous charm by Maarten Steven) come across a band of idiot Christian Vikings, who think they can reach the Holy Land — from Scotland, mind — via teeny boat, in order to crush the infidels in the name of Christ. This does not go well. A long stretch of the movie shows the band of zealots — plus One Eye and his adopted companion — sitting in a boat surrounded by thick fog, desperate for water. When they eventually land it seems they are in Hell, but in fact they have found the endpoint that One Eye — who appears to be psychic, considering his rather accurate visions of doom and misery — has been heading towards all along. Does his journey doom them, or do they accidentally doom themselves? One-Eye appears to be the only person who has any idea of what is going on. He is yer actual one-eyed man who is king in the land of the blind.

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As with Von Trier’s Antichrist, nature is the enemy here, even more so than the various warriors dispatched by One-Eye. Though our hero and the annoying band of treacherous Christian Viking jerk-offs come up against a very real antagonist in their final destination, the thing that finishes them off is their inability to comprehend and adapt to their surroundings, or to move past their ignorant superstitions and suspicions. Though One Eye’s feelings are unclear, it’s likely he does think he has reached the afterlife, which is a forest where only predators lurk. The Christians, on the other hand, bicker about whether it’s the Holy Land or Hell, and their foolishness and fear of the landscape is the end of them. One Eye is lucky. He soon realises what his visions have been showing him: the moment of his death, which he embraces gladly. I didn’t get to see John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road at the festival, but I’ve heard troubling rumours that the final act is more reassuring than the one in the book. Funnily enough Valhalla Rising has an even darker final act than McCarthy’s book. In this world there is only madness, loneliness, and death. It’s worse than having your movie-going experience disrupted by thoughtless Londoners.

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It’s not all death and misery. Valhalla Rising is staggeringly beautiful, with Refn and cinematographer Morten Søborg filling the screen with terrifying close-ups of rugged tough guys contrasted with imposing hillsides, dark forests, overwhelming mists and breathtaking skies, almost exclusively depicted in murky greens, blues and shocking reds. Along with Enter The Void, it’s the film festival choice I’m most pleased with getting to see on the big screen: both movies would be greatly damaged by being seen first on a small screen. Though much of the movie is taken up with aimless wandering and muttered conversations, the atmospherics are perfectly handled by Refn. The imagery looms down at you, as if choking you. At times I felt like I had a mute Viking badass standing on my chest, it was so oppressive. If the narrative leaves you unimpressed, I can’t imagine the grimy precision of the mood mechanics won’t make an impression. I left the room annoyed by the longueurs but unable to shake the memory of the experience. It’s possibly the best deeply flawed movie I’ve seen in a while, something I can’t in good conscience rave about but want to recommend to everyone.

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Unlike Metropia, which is just deeply flawed. As with Gerald McMorrow’s Franklyn, I would love to be able to praise Metropia unreservedly for being so defiantly odd and ambitious, but the unsatisfying narrative, murky visuals, and deathly pace are hurdles too big to jump. As far as I could tell it was set in the future, in a Europe suffering from oil shortages. That’s what it says on the film’s Wikipedia page, so I’m going with that. The title cards that set up the background were obscured by — yes — several people coming in late. Seriously! You thought I was over-reacting in the first half of this post? No! We’re talking about a screening that was delayed by about twenty minutes so the director could introduce it! This was going on all the time, and I seemed to be the douchebag-magnet. God!

Roger — The protagonist of Metropia –  is a paranoid loser who resists using the underground rail system run by yer bog-standard sinister post-dystopic corporation Trexx (not named after the brand of vegetable fat). This same corporation — which, wouldn’t you know it, is totes ev0l — is using a microchip-laden shampoo called Dangst to monitor and control the minds of those who use the product. Well, I say control, but in fact Roger just seems to be plagued with chatter from Trexx worker Stefan — voiced by Alexander Skarsgård — who gives him vague suggestions and listens in on Roger’s dreary thoughts, which revolve around his fear of the underground trains, his potentially adulterous girlfriend Anna, and the woman featured on the side of the mind-controlling shampoo bottle. And I thought I’d had shitty jobs in the past.

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As with much post-PKD SF, the potentially schizophrenic protagonist is manipulated by forces greater than him to do something something [vagueness supplied by movie, not by blogger]. In fact, Roger’s complicity in some kind of shareholder battle between Trexx CEO Ivan Bahn and his daughter Nina (voiced, respectively by Udo Kier and Juliette Lewis) seems more accidental than anything, and has barely any effect on him. At the start of the film he’s cowardly and having relationship troubles, and in the final scene he doesn’t seem any less plagued by his nervousness, and his relationship has been saved by events outside his control. I’m not saying a movie has to follow rules of narrative, but if you’re going to try something different, make sure it’s worth doing that. Bring something new to the narrative melange. I couldn’t care less about Roger at the start of the film, and that opinion didn’t change one jot by the end. Plus he looked like a creepy-ass bobble-head and he freaked me out.

I’m a sucker for visually innovative movies, so none of that would matter if the film looked great, but even though Metropia is certainly distinctive the animation is an additional turn-off. As the Wikipedia page details, the bizarre characters are actually photos of random people manipulated using Photoshop and Adobe After Effects, then animated in front of photos of European locations. I doff my cap to director Tarik Saleh, lead animator Isak Gjertsen and art director Sesse Lind for creating something this distinctive, but the murky visuals have the unintended consequence of being soporific. Saleh talked about the movie, and his charming anecdotes about the movie energised the room, but by the mid-point it felt like the audience was flagging. The biggest obstacle is the inexpressive facial animation. Vincent Gallo and Juliette Lewis’ dialogue is already mumbled (as per), making comprehension an issue, and with the fleshy bobble-head faces being animated as minimally as they are it’s all but impossible to become emotionally invested in what’s going on. The cluttered absurdist plot doesn’t help.

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Responding in such a negative way to a movie when the director is in the room is something I never thought would happen to me. Throughout Metropia I was annoyed and frustrated, but a little voice was telling me, “Dude, the guy that made this is behind you. Have some respect.” And I should, really. Unlike the really unforgivably dreadful movies I’ve seen this year — such as Lesbian Vampire Killers, The Proposal, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li — this was made with passion and love by a group of individuals who obviously believed in what they were doing. It’s not a lazy cash-in or tacky exploitation flick, but sadly it’s also a rote SF movie with a unique aesthetic that gets in the way of telling the story. Nevertheless, as with Franklyn, I wish all those who worked on the movie the best of luck in the future.

Nope, saying that doesn’t make me feel any better about criticising the film. ::sigh::

Summer Movie Poll Madness

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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.

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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

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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.

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  • 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.

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  • Sienna Miller has never been used well in a popular movie until now. She’s oddly endearing as the tortured villain The Baroness.

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  • 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.

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  • 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!”

These Weeks In TV Year II (Weeks 4-5) Part 2

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Much as I don’t want to derail this post with talk about a quality movie (i.e. Hairspray), I suppose I can make it more TV related by carping about Sky. Hairspray was as entertaining as expected (and ten million times the movie Dreamgirls was), though it was hard to tell thanks to the botched broadcast on both Sky Movies and Sky Anytime, which filled the film with so many glitches and bloops that it sounded as if it had been remixed by Aphex Twin. It was taken down from Anytime last night, as was Breach (which comes highly recommended solely on the basis of Chris Cooper’s awe-inspiring performance). If Sky’s technology is getting hinky, it’s a bad sign. I’ve already had trouble with their Box Office downloads disappearing, and our Sky+ box has taken to crashing every Sunday morning. Is it our machine, or is there trouble at their end?

That’s neither here nor there, especially as I’m here to make fun of Heroes and say good things about Mad Men.

Most Boring Side-Plot of the Week(s):

Is it Hilda Suarez’s adulterous love affair with Eddie Cibrian?


Or Taub’s mysterious relationship problems with his wife?


Or Daniel Meade’s battle to keep his hideous son in America?


Or Matt Saracen and Julie Taylor possibly getting back together?


At least Daniel’s son turned out not to be his son (a real shock), and Hilda’s relationship meant we got to see Marc and Amanda losing their composure.


The other plots are just mogadon.

Biggest Badass of the Week(s) Century:

Check out The German. Last week on Heroes he totally staked his claim to being the most awesome villain since Kang the Conqueror, who, never forget, once destroyed Washington DC, an act so heinous it actually made Thor cry! First The German used his magnetic powers to draw some blinds. Just moments later, while we were still catching our breath, he cracked a safe, using those same magnetic powers to turn the dial instead of using his hands!


Ho. Lee. SHIT! Fuck you, Polaris! Eat donkey shit, Magneto. What have you ever done besides reversing the poles and other miscellaneous acts of supervillainy?


Even better, a little while later he totally neglected to use his powers to protect himself against a deadly superpowered punch!


Just amazing. I hope current X-Men writers Mike Carey, Chris Yost, Warren Ellis, and Ed Brubaker are taking notes.

Thematic Coherence of the Week(s):

The tenth episode of Mad Men, while maybe not as entertaining as the previous one, was still excellent, mostly because of the beautifully sustained theme of lost or recaptured youth and adolescence. Early on we see Betty’s father recovering from a stroke, seemingly senile and prone to confusion. He mistakes Betty for his first wife, which upsets her enough to drive her into Don’s arms, as she humps him on the floor like teenagers trying to elude their parents.


Her father, now trapped in his own adolescent state, threatens Don and makes a pass at his own daughter, which is surely the most shocking moment of the episode, if not the season, and beautifully played by everyone. This distresses Betty further, and she seeks solace in the arms of her old nanny.


Upon returning home she kicks Don out again, and then hangs out with that creepy-ass kid from the first season. Using his presence as an excuse to regress even further, she chills out with some Bob Kanigher madness…


…and watches cartoons while sipping on soda like a kid.


Of course, her new friend might only be a kid, but he thinks he’s an adult, visually represented by the t-shirt he wears, covered with Don Draper pheromones (which overpower every woman in the room, obviously). His creepy-ass desire for Betty shocks her back to herself, and she snitches on him to his mother, filled with regret at the loss of her fantasy. It could be worse, of course. She could be made to wear a bonnet.


Good stuff. It also made me realise that the theme of the entire season was youth (and young manhood) all along, with the odd dabble in cultural awakenings, which is what the 60s are remembered for. Perhaps there will be more of that in later seasons (I look forward to Don hearing Are You Experienced? for the first time). This year, though, we’ve already seen the introduction of Sterling Cooper’s first youth consultants, Roger trying to recapture his youth by running off with Jane the Scheming Secretary, Freddy peeing his pants, Pete hiding from his adult responsibilities, and Jimmy Barrett being an impulsive brat (though that hides a calculating mind). Though we’re not yet sure what a toll this disconnect will take on any of them, it’s fair to say that it’s not just Don’s infidelity that has made the normally pristine Betty end up looking like this.


All of this childishness throws Don’s behaviour into stark relief. Along with Peggy, he is more responsible and “adult” than almost everyone else on the show; they all think they’re mature but they act like kids. Don is the alpha male (and alpha character) because he observes everyone else in the playpen from a position of behavioral superiority and relentless Draper-esque fury. The irony, of course, is that he never got to have a childhood, and is either angry at those who surround him because he is jealous of them for having that, or because their behaviour is totally alien to him, creating a confusion that fuels his rage. All this time Don is searching for who he really is, but maybe there’s nothing to find.

Mysterious Theme of the Week(s):

While Mad Men brilliantly visualised the infantilisation theme in The Inheritance, Six Month Leave featured a curious motif that I really didn’t get. Many of the main characters started their scenes lying down.


There’s a possibility this had something to do with Marilyn Monroe’s death, referenced at the start to the show…


…which would suggest that the characters are, thematically, being killed by the times they are living in (certainly Joan’s repose is deathly, turning Roger’s office into a tomb).


Also, there was a blood drive subplot, which could be a hint that all of the characters shown lying down are bleeding out, that their souls are grievously wounded.


Or they’re just lazy.


Best of them was Betty’s faceplant.


Oh Betty, if only I could send some Prozac back in time for you!

TV Return of the Week:

So great to see Francis Capra on TV again, after illness made his appearances on Veronica Mars sporadic.


He did a great job on that show, mixing youthful cockiness, insecurity, and machismo. Hopefully he’ll get a chance to do the same on Heroes.



::sigh:: Never mind.

TV Return of the Week(s) That Didn’t Involve Getting Killed Like A Totally Lame Punkass Bitch:

Xander Berkeley, a character actor I’m immensely fond of, appeared in The Mentalist as a folksy cop who helps our team track down the Redhead Killer, as well as becoming a suspect towards the end. Here he is being a big red herring while talking to Amanda Righetti, formerly Hailey Nichol on The O.C.


If this had been CSI, the killer would have been Berkeley, as the guest star is always the killer. CSI might be the superior show, but it does keep making that mistake. Ten points to The Mentalist, but if it really wants to totally win me over, it can come up with some complicated way to make Berkeley a regular. Automatic 10,000-point George Mason bonus.

Runner-Up:

Look! It’s Sara Sidle, come back to Las Vegas to attend Warrick’s funeral!


I see Jorja Fox is rocking the late-80s Ally Sheedy look. Shame it doesn’t suit her, because otherwise my late-80s smitten-adolescent self would heartily approve.

Beautiful Visual of the Week(s):

Ned bringing hundreds of bees back to life with the help of Chuck was the most memorable visual of the last couple of weeks.


I can imagine that the ladies who love Lee Pace (LL Lee P) would also agree.

Clever Visual of the Week(s):

House guest star Breckin Meyer, playing a crappy artist, is exhibiting symptoms of visual agnosia, which means his perception is distorted though he doesn’t realize it, leading to a clever cold open featuring a hideous portrait that he sees as normal. Later in the episode he is visited by two strange doctors…


…but they are actually Taub and Thirteen, their identities obscured by his ailment.


It’s not much to rave about, but in a mostly underwhelming episode, I was taking what I could get.

Ridiculous Visual of the Week(s):

Was it the sight of supervillain Knox activating his super strength by sniffing very hard?


Or unpowered Daphne being revealed to have a flappy-arms dash that does not scream Wally West so much as Dean and Hank Venture’s various “Super Run Away!” moments?


Maybe it was the moment it was revealed she was running at superspeed in high heels.


Could it be the pirouetting Wall Street traders flying off in a scene that would otherwise have been supercool (a New York populated by flying people and speedsters)?


Or the ludicrous Men in Black stylings of Agent Glasses and Agent Sylar?


How about Suresh the Super Hoodie scuttling around his future lab like a verbose Phantom of the Opera?


Or maybe it was domesticated Sylar (sorry, Gabriel) hanging out with some kid named Noah and Mr. Fucking Muggles, who is apparently immortal?


Perhaps it’s the future of fashion, which, to the horror of designers everywhere, appears to be lots of black…


…with black dyed hair a la Al Pacino…


…or,if that’s not an option, the Young Republican look (thanks to Heroes semi-fan Diane Court for that observation).


Surely the strongest contender has to be Matt following his animal totem, a turtle (which seems to at least be intentionally funny, and an obvious way to keep him out of the way for a week or so).


I think by now you get my point.

Psyche-Tearing Visual of the Week(s):

It’s either the removal of a drug-filled bezoar from Breckin Meyer’s stomach…


…Meyer’s grotesque swelling caused by anaphylactic shock…


…or this nightmarish image from Pushing Daisies, as a bee-coated assassin menaces Chuck.


A nice reverse of the final scenes of The Wicker Man, where, as everyone knows, bees will go for THE EYES! NO, NOT THE BEES! MY EYES!!!

And yes, there is still more to come (and I will happily admit I’m milking this to make it look like I’m posting more).

I Swear, I’ll Shut Up About This Soon…

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…But this was too weird not to share. Last week I tore into Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky as it had made me so very very angry midway across the Atlantic, and after kicking it around a bit, I mentioned one of my favourite movies, Theodore Flicker’s The President’s Analyst, a demented and joyous satirical classic from the 60s. I had no idea at the time why I did that; the combination of movies just seemed to make sense somehow. Anyway, after mentioning it, I was gripped with the desire to get a copy, having found out during my trawl for images that it had been released on DVD a few years back. It’s a barebones release, sadly, but it needed to be bought.


So tonight I went to HMV Oxford Circus on my way back from work, and thankfully they had a copy left. As I was leaving, I noticed the shop had been partially closed off. And which cinematic titan had caused this?


Yes! There he is, signing copies of Happy-Go-Lucky for his adoring fans! I obviously made that connection last week using some primitive and confusing form of precognition. It’s not a very good picture, as I had a feeling I would be mobbed by those fans if they thought I was disrespecting him, so I was kind of rushed. Also, I got very self-conscious. This also explains why I didn’t run past him clutching copies of Con-Air and X-Men 2: X-Men United, screaming, “Balls to your movie! This is art!” Plus, you know, rude.

I will say this, though. He looked miserable. Leigh fans, if you stumble across this, feel free to disabuse me of this notion.