tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1624935877140344952024-03-13T00:53:49.963-04:00Shock Cinema MagazineYour Guide to Cult Movies, Arthouse Oddities, Grindhouse Swill, and Underground Obscurities!Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.comBlogger64125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-48542931284059568412019-09-14T16:59:00.000-04:002019-09-14T16:59:09.104-04:00Film Review: FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBS & SHAW by Mike Sullivan<div class="MsoNormal">
I won’t dispute that TANGO & CASH is a laughingstock.
It’s an action movie that waddles towards the direction of parody but falls
face first into a puddle of homoeroticism, prefers the puddle and lays there
burbling out catty, tough guy one-liners while showing its finely toned ass to
anyone willing to step over it. But is that really a bad thing? I ask because
when the trailer for HOBBS & SHAW was released, many people compared it to TANGO
& CASH, as if that was a terrible thing to equate it to. TANGO & CASH
is basically an unconscious version of that live-action Troy McClure movie THE
SIMPSONS’ writers wanted to make. There’s a car chase involving a dune buggy
with monster truck wheels, a stripper who stops stripping in the middle of her
act in order to perform a drum solo, a grenade is duct taped into someone’s
mouth as a joke and Michael J. Pollard plays a crazy inventor! It’s excessive
and stupid and probably one of the most entertaining action movies made in the
past 40 years. Comparing HOBBS & SHAW to TANGO & CASH will have the
opposite effect its naysayers intended. If you’re like me, you’ll walk into HOBBS
& SHAW with such insanely high expectations you’ll only be able to walk
away disappointed. So here’s a more accurate comparison, you know how McDonalds
French fries are just appetizing enough to mitigate how disgusting they
actually are? TANGO & CASH are McDonalds’ French Fries. HOBBS & SHAW
are closer to the French fries at Burger King. You’ll eat it and it’s fine, you
guess. But maybe the disgusting qualities slightly outweigh the appetizing
ones? Maybe while you’re eating them you’re readily aware of how much better
and different the onion rings with the zesty dipping sauce are -- which, in
this tortured analogy, represent the FAST AND THE FURIOUS series. Basically
what I’m trying to say is that I will eat my way through the kitchen of a
Burger King until my heart explodes, coating everyone near me with the
insouciant zing of Buffalo dipping sauce (the best dipping sauce at Burger
King)! <o:p></o:p></div>
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In the same way that FRASIER was a spin-off of CHEERS, HOBBS
& SHAW is a spin-off of the FAST & FURIOUS series. And much like FRASIER,
the only time I’ll watch HOBBS & SHAW again is when I’m paralyzed by
depression and trapped in a couch-based-fart prison of my own making. Now,
before I go any further, I should point out that cyborgs and faceless, Dr.
Klaw-like supervillains now exist within the universe of the FAST & FURIOUS
series. Wasn’t this a movie about Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez stealing
DVD players at one point? How is it possible that movies about really fast cars
and “hot” outmoded home media players could comfortably fit within the Marvel
Cinematic Universe if, for whatever reason, Disney acquired this franchise
tomorrow? Imagine if RIVER’S EDGE turned into a franchise. Now imagine that
what started as a film about troubled teens and the murder that affects their
already fractured social circle, eventually morphs into a movie in which
Crispin Glover, Dennis Hopper and Daniel Roebuck (as a ghost) travel around in
a big rig killing river witches and swamp things. As stupid and jarring as the
sight of a spectral Roebuck shooting lightning bolts at a witch in a paddleboat
may seem, it still isn’t as jarring or stupid as the idea that the antagonist
in HOBBS & SHAW is an evil cyborg (Idris Elba, who to be fair, is good in this)
that performs dainty trick-riding stunts on a self-driving motorcycle. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs and Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw
were the breakout characters of the FAST & FURIOUS series. People loved
their flirtatious tuff-talkin’ and sexually charged drop kicks to each other’s
masculine but inviting Double D’s. More accurately, unlike the other characters
in the series, Johnson’s And Statham’s on-screen presence couldn’t be summed up
as “a cement block with a frowny face sharpie-d on the front of it” or ”five
pork roasts and three frozen turkeys carefully balanced on top of each other in
the driver’s seat of a muscle car.” No, it was closer to a convulsing QUATERMASS
EXPERIMENT-style mutation of biceps, lats and smirks. It was terrifyingly
arousing. Yet as much fun as it is to watch immovable beef dunes make cruel
assumptions about the size of each other’s dicks, it’s hard to picture these
tendony, bipedal Clydesdales getting their own spin-off buddy comedy.
Especially when these hard-bosomed he-chunks are such thin wisps of characters.</div>
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As characters, Hobbs and Shaw are the Saturday morning
cartoon versions of both actors’ public personas. Everything about them is
broad, one-note and not well-defined. Even their jobs seem like vague
afterthoughts. Hobbs is an FBI-ish agent-like lawman? I guess? While Shaw is
Oscar the Grouch wrapped within Richard Kuklinski wrapped within a Calvin Klein
underwear model? I think? There really isn’t much to these characters beyond
the fact that one is very big and the other is comparatively less big. Pairing
up characters without a personality in a genre that demands big, clashing
personalities isn’t a great idea. A worse idea is pairing up characters without
a personality and -- through a split screen montage -- declaring to your
audience that, in spite of the fact that they consume eggs differently, there
aren’t any noticeable differences between these quivering ab golems. In
essence, they remade THE ODD COUPLE with two underwritten Oscars who take turns
jabbing each other in the balls and asking if they enjoyed their “maple nut
taps” for two hours and fifteen minutes.</div>
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But what this film lacks in compelling, realistic
characters, it makes up in scenes where swollen, puffy men poke each other in
the chest and verbally assault each other with random entries from <i>1001 Zany Insults</i> and <i>Silly Slams for Little Stinkers</i>. Look, I
may not be the best judge of action movie one-liners. To me, they don’t need to
be clever, just memorable. The bar for good action movie zingers stands about
as tall as Sylvester Stallone calling Rambo a “pussy” in TANGO & CASH. So,
realistically, you’d have to dig four feet underground just to shimmy under
this bar. HOBBS & SHAW effortlessly shimmies under that bar with its
assortment of clichéd, public domain put-downs. At one point, a craggy living
monument to the glory of Muscle Milk threatens to shove his boot so far up the
ass of Statham that he’ll be “coughing up laces for a month.” We’re nearing the
end of the second decade of the 21st century, don’t we deserve fresher,
livelier tuff-talk? Why couldn’t their insults escalate until they reached a
fever pitch of unchained homoeroticism? Why couldn’t Statham grab Johnson by
his shirt, lean in closely and hiss, “Call me the cow because your ass is grass
and I’m ready to graze?” Because, as it stands, the homoeroticism in HOBBS
& SHAW could be far more homoerotic. Sure, Statham and Johnson flash flirty
‘fuck me’ eyes at each other while they punch through the faces of an endless
succession of stuntmen. But we’re far from the sight of a nude Stallone
peacocking his way through a prison for beefy, flagrantly glistening men in TANGO
& CASH. I keep hearing complaints about how millennials are ruining
everything with their SJW, gender-neutral sensitivity tendrils but if that’s
the case, why are action movies less gay nowadays?</div>
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Yet, even as I was disappointed by the film’s resistance to
basic characterization; tepid, barely there homoeroticism and the fact that Johnson
and Statham make a pretty dire comedy team (It’s not Johnson’s fault, Statham
can’t sell stupid dialogue the way his co-star can), I was impressed that HOBBS
& SHAW managed to not just retain the stupidity of the FAST & FURIOUS
franchise but take it into new thunderously dumb directions. For example, the
plot revolves around Shaw’s sister (Vanessa Kirby, who like a cameoing Helen
Mirren, is a bit too overqualified for this), injecting herself with an
ill-defined nano-virus that liquefies organs. Eventually. Not right away. It
takes several days and one exciting globetrotting adventure before your organs
even start to soften, apparently. At any rate, Kirby does this in order to keep
the virus out of the hands of a cybernetically enhanced Elba who, like the bad
guys in ANGRY BIRDS 2, mostly exists in order to teach its protagonists the
importance of cooperation. Of course, this barely there, afterthought of a plot
exists only as a rickety framework to hang ridiculous stunts on such as a
surreal FURY ROAD inspired sequence involving a helicopter and the tow truck
equivalent to a Russian nesting doll. Let’s not forget the bizarre lengths the
filmmakers go in order to justify the low-tech finale in which large Samoans
beat Stormtroopers to death with wooden clubs. Evidently, Elba’s henchmen have
guns that will not shoot without a decent wifi connection. It’s all very, goofy
and absurdly unhinged. Yet, it’s never as much fun as it sounds.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Part of the reason why the FAST & FURIOUS franchise
works is because as crazy as the films get, the tone is consistent. It’s not
trying to laugh at itself, it doesn’t indulge in grating SHARKNADO levels of
self-parody and its expansive almost Robert Altman-esque cast of characters
insures we won’t hanging around any of these one-dimensional characters for
very long. HOBBS & SHAW is tonally inconsistent. There’s something
inharmonious about following up scenes of large men pointing at each other’s
dicks and laughing as all the elephants at the San Diego Zoo are electrocuted
(not actually a scene, but I’m hoping it appears in the sequel) with the cheesy
earnestness of the FAST & FURIOUS’ “When You’re Here You’re Family”
platitudes. The smaller cast also means we’re spending more time with the
characters which seems like fun at first, but after twenty minutes you realize
you would get a similar but more enjoyable experience by listening to "Shut
Up, Little Man" over a loop of the Hindenburg exploding. I wouldn’t say
that watching a movie like HOBBS & SHAW is like eating icing straight from
the tube, mainly because it’s more like eating icing straight off the fist of
someone who’s repeatedly punching you in the mouth. Which is to say it’s
punishing, but not completely terrible.</div>
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Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-62711779811692316492019-05-07T01:27:00.000-04:002019-05-07T01:27:22.272-04:00Film review: DUMBO by Mike Sullivan<div class="p1">
Did Tim Burton’s films always look like a leather jacket with a rockabilly Snow White airbrushed on the back? No, right? Yes? I don’t know anymore. Watching DUMBO makes you question everything about the director. Is he a talented visual artist with nothing left to say but isn’t above taking an easy paycheck? Did the oversaturation of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS dilute his stylistic choices to such an overwhelming degree that now everything he does looks like off-brand Edward Gorey clip art? Were we so blinded by those once refreshing stylistic choices we never realized that the themes and messages of his films were never deeper than, “They laugh at me because I’m different. I laugh at them because they’re all the same?” Again, I don’t know because I’m afraid to know the real answer. Considering he now has a decade’s worth of loud, disposable, eye-searing, CGI-heavy Hollywood blockbusters to his name, I’m afraid the answer is that Burton has morphed into Michael Bay. Granted it’s a sexless, explosion-averse Michael Bay in a Robert Smith fright wig, but Burton’s films are no less headache-inducing or superficial. </div>
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Even worse, because we now live in a world in which satire and its dumb, farting cousin parody are dead, Burton’s movies are now indistinguishable from a Funny or Die video mocking a Tim Burton movie. Tim Heidecker joked on twitter that he was cast as Ronald McDonald in Tim Burton’s -- for the time being <span class="s1">--</span> fake McDonald’s movie, but the idea of Burton directing a Ronald McDonald movie is just as likely as him directing a DUMBO movie and maybe a little less ridiculous. Parody is useless in the face of DUMBO because nothing could be said about the film that the film doesn’t say about itself. At least unintentionally. After all, the McDonaldland gang seems a little more conducive to Burton’s ‘pale outsider’ trope and general mall-goth sensibilities than DUMBO does. Grimace even looks like a Burton drawing. Yet, with the possible exception of his unmade SUPERMAN LIVES, I can’t think of a concept more resistant to that Burton touch than DUMBO. But that doesn’t stop Burton from making yet another movie about an outsider who finds an unlikely family in an unexpected place while surrounded by sets that are the Disney Store equivalent to German Expressionism. Burton’s tics loudly clang against the simple, pastel storybook whimsies of the project and the end result is a MR. SHOW sketch that doesn’t realize it’s a MR. SHOW sketch. </div>
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Burton has noted, “[he] wouldn’t know a good script if it bit [him] in the face” which explains a lot, but still, you would think, surely by chance, something would have bit him in the face at some point during the last twenty years. Did SLEEPY HOLLOW give him rabies and all of the good scripts were humanely put down after 1997? But with that said, there’s a big difference between recognizing a bad script and recognizing one that was written by Ehren Kruger. By that I mean there’s a difference between accidentally stepping in dog shit and willfully falling face first into a pile of elephant shit. Kruger was not only the screenwriter behind SCREAM 3, REINDEER GAMES and THE BROTHERS GRIMM, he was also responsible for three TRANSFORMERS sequels. For Burton to attach himself to a Kruger script after a long string of professional and creative disappointments seems to imply he didn’t care or couldn’t read. The script for DUMBO is bad, worse than ARLINGTON ROAD or THE SKELETON KEY or any of the $3 Walmart DVD bin titles Kruger’s name is typically associated with. Basically, it’s the story of a flying elephant told from the perspective of people who take in the majesty of a flying elephant with the tight smiles of actors on their twelfth take who can no longer pretend that a tennis ball on the handle of a Swiffer Wet Jet is a flying elephant. But where the original DUMBO ended at 64 minutes, the live-action DUMBO meanders onward for another 48 minutes with a takedown of Disney’s soulless commercialism that’s about as brave as telling your boss to fuck-off in a whisper while driving home from your job after you were fired. It doesn’t even feel like Kruger wrote a screenplay, it seems like he tried to wrangle an endless series of studio notes into a cohesive narrative. And most of those notes seem to be just the words “woker” written in blood across 120 pages. I understand Disney’s position in trying to distance themselves from all of the problematic parts of the 1941 version of DUMBO, but the updated elements carry the disingenuous and patronizing quality of Bradley Whitford expressing his questionable love for Obama in GET OUT. If Disney wanted to address the animal cruelty found in the animated original they just could have ended the remake with the titular pachyderm and his mother frolicking in the wild. It would be a perfectly fine, fitfully restrained conclusion. But we also get an epilogue in which the owner of Dumbo’s circus (Danny DeVito playing a sort of Disneyfied Frank Reynolds) announces he’s setting all the animals free and apparently replacing them with a zoetrope. If you can overlook the fact that this takes place in 1919 and just a few scenes earlier DeVito was keeping a monkey locked in his desk as a joke, it still feels like empty lip-service. It’s so perfunctory you wonder if the first draft of the scene was just “Note: DeVito died releasing all the circus elephants on the way back to his home planet” and Burton had to flesh that out as much as he possibly could. I appreciate what they’re trying to do but it isn’t subtle and this isn’t BLACKFISH<span class="s1">.</span></div>
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Another idea that feels like a studio mandate: none of the animals talk. For me, if you have a flying elephant in your movie, you shouldn’t just have talking animals you should have three mops that sound like Jimmy Cagney and a farting Model-T that communicates through the snippets of Eddie Cantor and Rudy Vallee songs that play on its radio (like a turn-of-the-century BUMBLEBEE). Why are we trying to add realism to a movie where the first shot depicts a smiling, possibly sentient choo-choo train? Case in point, early in the film when Dumbo is revealed to have enormous ears during a circus performance, the audience – bizarrely – is so appalled by this, they start rioting. While this riot is going on, Dumbo’s mother is approached backstage by one of her handlers who <i>starts taunting her!</i> How is the idea of a talking mouse in a ringmaster outfit dumber than a carny berating an elephant by telling her “they’re all laughing at your baby boy” as if he was yelling at Carrie White about her dirty pillows? </div>
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Of course<span class="s1">,</span> there’s the ideas that are specifically Kruger’s own. Ideas that reek of his unique dumb guy pretention. Colin Farrell plays a once popular trick horse rider who comes back from WWI as an amputee and is demoted to being Dumbo’s handler. Kruger desperately attempts to draw parallels between Farrell and Dumbo without realizing how insulting it is to compare someone with an actual disability to a fucking cartoon elephant in a clown hat performing loop de loops. At least Kruger’s trying to give Farrell a semblance of a personality. Everyone else is horribly underwritten, particularly Michael Keaton’s vague shrug of a villain and Nico Parker as Farrell’s daughter whose entire personality could be described as “likes saying the word science”. Parker’s character is so boring and underdeveloped her big dramatic moment revolves around her staring blankly at a Marie Curie mannequin. And then there’s the clunky references which are there to ensure that nobody’s ribs in the audience goes unnudged. Timothy the Mouse is given a superfluous cameo, cartoon Dumbo’s drunk visions of pink elephants is recreated with large soap bubbles in a sequence that furthers grinds this overlong movie to a screeching halt, Michael Buffer performs a cleaned-up, spoken word rendition of “When I See an Elephant Fly” before exclaiming, “Let’s get ready to Dumbo!” There’s other stuff, smaller stupider stuff, like the fact that Farrell suddenly has a steampunk robot arm at the end without explanation or the dog dressed up as a werewolf or that Dumbo can only fly when he inhales a feather through his trunk for. If all of this sounds like a so-bad-its-good-you-need-to-see-it-to-believe-it masterpiece, understand that all of this kitschy nonsense is not only couched within the horrible pacing of a late period Burton film it’s also represented by the hideous visuals of a late period Burton film.</div>
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How do you describe the production design of DUMBO? The closest I can get is a Thomas Kinkade mural based around the hallucinations of noted serial killer Joe Kallinger but somehow more chilling and mawkish. Instead of the floating, mouthless head of a child named Charlie, we get a CGI elephant that looks like somebody put googly eyes on your grandfather’s withered testicles. And sometimes those elderly, googly-eyed balls are in clown makeup. Dumbo is a concept that can only work in animated form because the sight of a wrinkly, hyper-real elephant with enormous Walter Keane-style baby blue eyes flying around a circus tent with Eva Green on its back is unnerving and unnatural. That scene in THE FLY where a panicked Jeff Goldblum carefully pulls out his fingernails is less intense than any flying scene in Dumbo. And like the Brundle-Fly, vomiting acid on his pint-sized tormentors looks more natural for this Dumbo than a playful squirt of water from his trunk. Of course, the uncanny valley quality of its titular character isn’t helped by the fact the sets in Burton’s DUMBO suggests what HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES would look like filtered through the pages of A Little Golden Book. Burton’s DUMBO either needed to carry the gentle, water-colored hues of a Mary Blair painting or just be a full-on gothic reimagining of the concept; a circus FRANKENWEENIE, if you will. Unfortunately, it’s sort of a half-baked fusion of the two extremes and it never stops being ugly.</div>
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I can could go on, but you get the idea. DUMBO is terrible and that’s not surprising. What is surprising is when you consider there was a time when a Tim Burton movie wasn’t an F.W. Murnau film recreated with Precious Moments figurines. Didn’t he make one of Disney’s most iconic animated films of the 90s? Wasn’t he capable of making a quirky family film that wasn’t dull or alienating? No. That was Henry Selick. Burton’s the guy who’d probably make a feature-length version of Kevin Spacey’s Let Me Be Frank video if you sold Spacey to Burton as, “the ultimate outsider” and ensured him that Spacey is in no position to refuse to wear a Bride of Frankenstein wig and whatever hybrid Victorian straitjacket/striped ringmaster’s suit Burton has picked out for him.</div>
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Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-69639606748437885752019-01-21T16:28:00.000-05:002019-01-21T16:28:29.172-05:00Film Review: AQUAMAN by Mike Sullivan<div class="p1">
The weekend after AQUAMAN was released I overheard someone note in the magazine section of a Books-A-Million that “AQUAMAN was fun! Like the Brendan Fraser MUMMY movies!” I laughed when I heard this because comparing AQUAMAN to the MUMMY series seems like the faintest praise you could damn a movie with. Those movies aren’t fun as much as they’re ‘something not unpleasant to half-watch on the TV at the Pizza Wheel if you went there too early for your take-out order and your phone just died<span class="s1">.</span>’ </div>
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But then I realized that the steadfast, admirable mediocrity of THE MUMMY series seems almost too high of praise for a film concept that for several years existed only as cultural shorthand for the creative bankruptcy of Hollywood and its willingness to adapt any recognizable IP into a multi-million dollar franchise. For decades whenever there was an announcement that some obscure or seemingly lame comic book property was being adapted into a movie, the clicketty-clacketty sound of a million hilarious and very original dudes typing the words, “What’s next? AQUAMAN: THE MOTION PICTURE?” on the AICN comments section immediately followed. The idea of a movie revolving around Aquaman was such a lazy, comic conceit that one of the laziest shows on television <span class="s1">--</span> ENTOURAGE -<span class="s1">-</span> took this rejected ROBOT CHICKEN gag and mashed whatever gristle remained on this long-dead, beyond decayed horse into the be-Kangoled foreheads of its undiscerning audience for an entire season. As a film concept, AQUAMAN wasn’t just a joke, it was one of the oldest, unfunniest jokes you could ever tell. And yet, if a concept as unwanted and failure bound as AQUAMAN managed to be as pleasant and watchable as THE MUMMY, wouldn’t that make it kind of successful? If taken within those meager terms, AQUAMAN is kind of successful.</div>
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AQUAMAN isn’t a terrible movie, but the filmmakers -- much like the editors at DC <span class="s1">--</span> are clearly overcompensating for what they perceive to be the character’s wimpy past. Aquaman is a badass! A FUCKING BADASS! Do you hear me? And orange chainmail and wavy blonde locks are fine for King Arthur and his knights of the fish fuckers, but not for this ain’t yo daddy’s Aquaman! Aquaman needs to look like a divorced dad’s panicked mid-life crisis fueled makeover if he thought Criss Angel was still relevant. Aquaman needs to be Renegade-era Lorenzo Lamas, a Capri Sun commercial from the mid-90s and the intro to Viva La Bam after it all of it was consumed and pissed into a bottle of Venom Energy Drink. Greasy, grisly guitar riffs need to punctuate his every move when he’s murdering a black guy on a submarine. He needs to be an awesome party dude who speaks frankly about urinating in, on and around ancient cylinders. Yet, even though director James Wan leans into the idea of an Aquaman who looks like he could be that guy in a Denny’s and ragweed scented SONS OF ANARCHY jacket hanging around the parking lot of a Five Fingered Death Punch concert hassling people for tickets, the film clearly seems more at ease with the idea of a perma-grinned Aryan Aquaman; the kind that never stops waving at an unseen audience as he rides around on a giant seahorse. Seemingly inspired by THOR: RAGNAROK, AQUAMAN doesn’t take itself too seriously. But whereas the third Thor movie was helmed by a comparatively more artful director with a strong grasp of what does and doesn’t work in a comedic sense, AQUAMAN seems to be helmed by the same 35 writers behind THE FLINTSTONES movie. At one point an octopus is seen playing the drums, at another Amber Heard is seen wearing a prom dress made out of a squid and several jellyfish, a character calls another character a, “slack-bellied slug<span class="s1">.</span>” Hell, there’s even a bit involving the reverse scuba suits worn by Atlantean soldiers (why some Atlanteans can breathe on land unassisted while others can’t isn’t explained) and the desperate lengths these soldiers will go if their suits are compromised on land -<span class="s1">-</span> they’ll stick their head in a toilet. If RAGNAROK was a live action Jack Kirby comic, AQUAMAN is a nearly three hour episode of JABBERJAW. This is a cartoon. A dumb cartoon that’s dumb cartooniness is reflected in Heard’s cheap-looking, four-color getup as Mera. Heard doesn’t look like she’s playing a character as much as she looks like she’s cosplaying as a character from the AQUAMAN movie.</div>
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Yet as dumb and as cartoony as AQUAMAN is, the film is needlessly convoluted and bloated. A superhero movie with a message about the importance of believing in yourself shouldn’t be the exposition equivalent to THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT. Characters explain things within explanations within exposition-laden flashbacks of a Poseidon hologram made of water reciting exposition. Like too many superhero movies, AQUAMAN is mostly a bunch of actors in front of a green screen taking turns reading a Wikipedia entry about the property the movie is based on. But apart from the exposition, AQUAMAN is way too long. Roll your eyes as much as you want when discussing Tim Burton’s BATMAN, but it’s a leaner and a far better paced film. BATMAN didn’t need a twenty minute prologue revolving around the courtship of Batman’s dad and a freegan with white girl Trustafarian dreadlocks that lives in the ocean (Nicole Kidman). BATMAN didn’t take a break from its storyline so that its titular character could go on a treasure hunt in a sequence that plays like an unwanted mash-up of SAHARA, SPLASH and UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN. BATMAN didn’t need to nudge its audience in the ribs about past events while simultaneously setting up future events as if it was the fifth episode of an AMC series in its third season because it was a movie with a beginning, a middle and an end. Not a cog in the wheel of a bigger franchise that’s cycling through an endless second act.</div>
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But, again, like the Brendan Fraser MUMMY movies, AQUAMAN isn’t terrible. In fact, there’s quite a few things I liked. To start with, everyone is floating in this. Dolph Lundgren, Willem Dafoe, Graham McTavish and the rest are all bobbing unnaturally along in the ocean while standing bolt upright, arms crossed, their hair flailing wildly. Untold millions spent on CGI and everybody is stuck in an eerie tableau as if they were discarded JC Penney mannequins that were chucked into the river. And speaking of off-putting CGI, I loved the goofy touch of having Oceanmaster’s metallic helmet mirror the facial expressions of its wearer: the deeply unappealing Patrick Wilson. Watching a helmet cry out in anguish was nearly as sweet as seeing Wilson <span class="s1">--</span> an actor who in a just world would play nothing but a string of pissy, insecure high school math teachers in either Alexander Payne or Todd Solondz movies <span class="s1">--</span> accept the role he should have played far sooner: an unctuous racist with gills. On a less backhanded note, I genuinely liked Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Manta and the relationship he shares with his Somali pirate father (Michael Beach) and wished the movie could have instead been about these two robbing atomic submarines or stealing inexplicably advanced Atlantean technology. Unfortunately, we didn’t get that film. What we got was Brendan Fraser’s THE MUMMY: a movie you watched over a holiday weekend and instantly forgot about. But unlike THE MUMMY, memories of this movie will only come to mind when you stumble upon a Jesus Pez dispenser at a flea market a decade from now and realize that’s supposed to be that Khal Drago guy as Aquaman.</div>
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Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-62840893666494366712018-09-06T21:00:00.000-04:002018-09-06T21:00:44.845-04:00Film Review: THE MEG by Mike Sullivan<div class="p1">
There’s a right way and a wrong way to make a Jason Statham movie. The right way is to ensure that his character is a beautiful man that kills beautifully. Statham’s characters should and always be Richard Kuklinski if he had the world’s most perfect, most glittering v-line abs. Nothing more, nothing less. You should also ensure that the movie is just that man-on-man wrestling scene from WOMEN IN LOVE expanded to 90 minutes after the homoeroticism was ratcheted up about twenty percent (two motor oil rubdown montages will bookend the feature). It should then be capped off by a scene in which Statham climbs inside a wheelbarrow, pushes himself off of the top of a skyscraper that’s under construction, removes his pants and uses it to strangle the neck of any surviving worker dumb enough to lean forward to watch as he falls to his seeming death. The wrong way would be to place him in an environment <span class="s1">--</span> say, the bottom of the ocean <span class="s1">--</span> where he can’t tough talk other Cronenbergian flesh-pillars in tank-tops and punch them in the throat once their anger-engorged rage-boners brush against his. The wrong way would be to make him play a character that might feel remorse if he shot someone in the forehead with a crossbow on a whim or put his character in a situation where there isn’t much to do beyond getting dragged by a towline in the ocean or getting violently jostled every so often. The wrong way would be to make him face off against one giant shark instead of several regular sized sharks he can fight throughout the movie. Basically, the wrong way to make a Jason Statham movie is to produce something along the lines of THE MEG<span class="s1">.</span></div>
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The glib way to describe THE MEG is to say that it’s an expensive SYFY original movie but it’s not an accurate comparison. As obnoxious as SHARKNADO and its ilk can be, they understand why their audience is there and waste no time giving them what they want. THE MEG, on the other hand, wastes everybody’s time because it’s not really sure as to who its audience is or why it’s watching. Case in point, the first 50 minutes of THE MEG’s nearly two-hour running time revolves around the crew aboard a futuristic undersea research facility that looks like a ride queue at Epcot. But that particular aesthetic is fitting because the film itself looks like one of those pre-show videos you watch in said ride queues before an attendant shoves a pair of 3-D glasses into your hands and shuffles you into a violently twitching epilepsy simulator. At any rate, the purpose of this research facility is to finally reveal, once and for all, just how deep the Mariana Trench really is. A truly groundbreaking and important discovery. Especially if you’re the editor of <i>Ranger Rick</i> and the well for fun facts ran dry five issues ago.<br />
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A three person crew (Jessica McNamee, Masi Oka and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) from the facility is sent down to investigate the trench and quickly finds their submersible incapacitated by the titular megalodon. In any other shark attack movie, this would be the point where the momentum picks up and the fun would begin. In THE MEG’s case<span class="s1">,</span> the film takes an extended intermission as we’re introduced to this crew, their bizarre relationships <span class="s1">--</span> in spite of the fact that Oka’s character is just a year younger than Ólafsson, Ólafsson treats him as if he’s his nine-year-old son. Maybe it’s just me, but as a man in my 40s, I wouldn’t have a secret octopus themed handshake I would share with my other 40-something year old friends. Even if I did, I wouldn’t force them to go through the motions of this cutesy bullshit while they were lying on their death bed much like Ólafsson does to Oka here -<span class="s1">-</span> and the reluctant rescue diver (Statham) who will eventually save them. Everything introduced in these moments, from revelations about Statham’s spotty past as a rescue diver, to the presence of Statham’s ex-wife aboard the submersible, to the doctor (Robert Taylor) who thinks Statham is just an unbalanced liar, has no bearing on the rest of the film. All of this aggravating, time-consuming minutia exists just to get Statham to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, because once he does, he bursts the bubble/unlocks the force field of some kind of oceanic-doggy-door-thing that allows the Meg to escape the trench and follow him into the ocean above? I guess? I don’t understand the science behind it. More importantly, I don’t understand why the film couldn’t have just started with the prologue where the Meg botches Statham’s last rescue mission, dropped the majority of the research facility plotline and picked the story up several years after the prologue with Statham (who, it should be noted, is dressed during this sequence like something in between a scarecrow and Brando at the height of his muu-muu years) being called out of his retirement in Thailand because, yes, there is a megalodon and only he can stop it. Sure, that version of THE MEG is just RAMBO III with more sharks and less of the brave freedom fighters of the Mujahideen, but then it’s not like the current version of the movie is some Alain Robbe-Grillet-esque experiment in genre defiance. The only thing these scenes add to THE MEG is a longer, more punishing running time.<br />
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But, ok. Once the giant shark is introduced the fun can finally begin, right? Statham’s shirt will finally come off, he’ll crawl into the giant shark’s roaring mouth and kick his way out of its eye socket right before it swims head first into a large patch of that electrified seaweed from the first Ninja Turtles game? Something like that has to happen, right? Oh, fuck no. In fact, the shark doesn’t even growl (but it does hide under a whale to avoid getting hit by a missile, so there’s that). There is one scene that lives up to the lofty expectations of Statham’s fans. In it, the guns on Statham’s personal sub fail, so he’s forced to use the sub as a giant knife to repeatedly hack and slash the Meg to death. It’s an amazing moment, but you have to sit through most of the film to see it. The other shark attacks aren’t nearly as crazy and are mired in weak PG-13-level bloodlessness. But what the film lacks in breathless, entertaining gore, it more than makes up with genuine, four-on-the-floor, hardcore chuckles! Do you know there’s a Roomba WITH A SHARK FIN in this movie? Do you like when characters in movies remember that FINDING DORY is a movie that exists outside of their movie? Statham plays one of those characters! How about Rainn Wilson? Did you like when he played Dwight on THE OFFICE? Well, good news, he plays a dull-witted billionaire who is nothing at all like that character but he does overestimate his ability to speak Chinese and looks for wifi in unusual places. And for those who might find all of those gags a bit too challenging<span class="s1">,</span> there’s also a sassy black guy who can’t swim and plenty of misplaced sentiment following any scene where fat Swedes stumble off a boat and goofily land in the mouth of a giant shark. THE MEG wants to be DEEP BLUE SEA, but it’s mired in director Jon Turtletaub’s signature touches like clumsy character development and tons of laff-track ready zingers. It’s like one of his bad Disney movies was unconvincingly dolled up in grindhouse drag.<br />
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Reportedly<span class="s1">,</span> Eli Roth was originally set to direct the Meg but left due to creative differences with the Warner Bros. In spite of the fact that Roth has devolved into a lazy provocateur who adapts locked Reddit threads into movies, Roth would have had a better grasp on the material and, at the very least, made THE MEG memorable. Unfortunately, we got Turtletaub<span class="s1">,</span> a blandly competent studio hack whose entire filmography can be found collecting dust in the DVD section of a truck stop. But then, what was I expecting? THE MEG was based on a series of novels that could be charitably described as airport fiction. The fact that it wasn’t adapted into an USA Original Movie 20 some years ago is the only remarkable element about THE MEG. Yet, this generic summer product has been number two at the box office for nearly a month. If anything, that proves how dire our entertainment options were this summer.<br />
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Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-18097944622328423372018-07-16T02:47:00.000-04:002018-07-16T15:10:56.053-04:00Film Review: JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM by Mike Sullivan<div class="p1">
JURASSIC WORLD was the consummate summer movie and by that I mean it was disposable in just the right way. I saw the film three years ago, enjoyed it and never bothered to sit through it again. I wasn’t even sure why I liked it in the first place. I know B.D. Wong is in it and -- because LAW AND ORDER: SVU loudly blares throughout my house with an alarming frequency that suggests to anyone passing by that I’m a 78 year old shut-in whose pets scavenged the last bit of soft tissue off my body three weeks ago -- the idea of Wong talking about something that isn’t a rape kit to someone who isn’t Diane Neal or Richard Belzer was so exhilarating to me. And considering that Wong escapes via helicopter at the end of JURASSIC WORLD, it’s heavily implied that his character Dr. Wu will return in FALLEN KINGDOM. Which means more of the pained hesitancy of Wong and his talent for reciting all of his dialogue as if he’s forced to tell you he only pretended to wear a condom that night.</div>
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But even though the promise of Wong is what got my ass in the seat, the immediate stupidity of FALLEN KINGDOM not only got me to stay, it’s what reminded me of why I liked JURASSIC WORLD in the first place. FALLEN KINGDOM is JURASSIC WORLD remade by a twelve-year-old who never saw the movie but pieced together the film’s storyline from a series of collectible JURASSIC WORLD tumblers his aunt bought him at McDonald’s. It’s disjointed and dumb. So fucking dumb. At one point Ted Levine -- playing a mercenary -- stumbles across an unknown species of dinosaur in a cage. In spite of the fact that Levine is aware that his boss is an evil industrialist whose business model is based around taking dangerous genetically modified monsters and turning them into even more dangerous genetically modified super-monsters, Levine shoots two tranquilizer darts into its neck, enters its cage and tries to yank out its teeth. Dumber still, as Levine struggles with the extraction, the dinosaur <i>turns to the camera</i>. Yes. That’s right, it turns to the fucking camera and reacts as if Dwight Schrute wandered into the filming of its confessional interview and started talking about black bears. And yet this is far from the dumbest moment in something that plays like it’s just two fart jokes and a Lindsay Lohan reference away from becoming a full blown parody movie.</div>
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Taking place three years after the events of JURASSIC WORLD, FALLEN KINGDOM opens with a reveal that a volcano is about to erupt on Isla Nubar effectively wiping out any remaining dinosaurs living amongst the ruins of the Jurassic World theme park. This is great news and instead of treating this strange twist of fate with a sense of relief, the world loses its mind. Apparently it’s inhumane to allow these dinosaurs to die, but why? Why is it a bad thing that Mother Nature is cornering these monsters at the nearest windmill and then setting it on fire? These are dangerous genetic mutations that were created in a lab and have killed countless people. If that bald, Laura San Giacomo-looking-thing from Vincenzo Natali’s SPLICE escaped from its barn and somehow got itself trapped down a well, would we fill the well with concrete or spend 58 man-hours attempting to free this thing just so it can forcefully inseminate Canadian treasure Sarah Polley? Also, why is it a big deal if these things die? Again, they were all created in a lab. Countless scientists have the genetic codes to replace any brontosaurus, t-rex or raptor that may be destroyed in the incident. Killing these things is about as a pointless as asking someone on the internet to take down that embarrassing photo of you after it was turned into a meme that went viral. Luckily, Jeff Goldblum -- returning as Dr. Ian Malcolm in a role that seemed far more substantial in the trailer -- has convinced a senate subcommittee to just allow nature to take its course by looking into the camera and making a clumsy reference to the original JURASSIC PARK in that trademarked Jeff Goldblum way; which is to say a stoned Humanities professor’s digression filled reaction to the existence of hot yoga. As a side note, does Jeff Goldblum understand why people are laughing or does he watch his appearances on talk shows or on Tim and Eric produced programs with a sense of bemused incomprehension? He reminds me of Christopher Walken in that his public persona is now reduced to a sarcastic impression of other people’s sarcastic impressions of him (By the way, welcome to your future, Christoph Waltz). </div>
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At any rate, just as science’s greatest mistakes are about to be erased from existence once again, we’re reintroduced to the main characters from JURASSIC WORLD. Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt reprise their roles as “Basically Olive Oyl, if Olive Oyl was dumber, whinier and far more dependent on Popeye” and “Han Solo, if he was played by John Ritter,” respectively, but the characters have changed. I don’t mean they’ve grown over the previous movie, I’m saying they seem like totally different characters. As if the producers were certain Howard and Pratt weren’t coming back, told the screenwriters to create new characters in their stead and never bothered to change anything once the actors returned to the project. For example, considering that Howard’s character was responsible for creating the Indominus Rex -- a whirling dervish of genetically enhanced evil -- and witnessed firsthand the death and destruction these monsters can wreak, why is she now an activist for dinosaur rights? Meanwhile, Pratt’s already thin character is reduced to a Henley shirt draped around a smirk. Yet, as different as the characters may be, they’re still incredibly stupid. Both Pratt and Howard are easily conned into thinking they’ll be helping to relocate Blue -- Pratt’s favorite trained raptor -- and the rest of the endangered creatures to a nearby island. Even though the person feeding them this honeyed lie is an oily millionaire (Rafe Spall) who looks like he just finished breaking a golf club over his knee when that cad Rodney Dangerfield wouldn’t stop asking the people around him if they stepped on a duck. Of course this scenario ends exactly where you expect with Spall and his band of mercenaries (led by Levine) betraying Pratt and Howard and leaving them for dead on an island that’s gradually becoming volcanic ash. Even less surprising is that Blue is about to become an unwilling participant a sort of advanced raptor genome project. What is unexpected is where FALLEN KINGDOM goes after this. </div>
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To start with, there’s an unsubtle animal rights message interwoven into this sequence with slo-mo shots of CGI dinos overwhelmed in lakes of magma. The film is trying to make a point about animal cruelty but it’s like trying to make a point about our broken penal system by showing closed circuit camera footage of the prison-shanking of Jeffrey Dahmer set to the strains of an acoustic cover of "Easy to be Hard." Technically, in both cases we’re presented with something that’s terrible, but this terrible thing is happening to something that knows what human brains taste like, so whatever point you were trying to make is lost. This moment also marks a turning point for FALLEN KINGDOM in that it’s the first time the film sheepishly reboots itself and turns into a transparent discourse against animal poaching. If things weren’t duh-inducing before, they are during this stretch of the film as we’re introduced to Toby Jones, slurring his dialogue through enormous Chiclet sized caps looking like a broken-down middle-aged version of Bob’s Big Boy and basically playing a broader version of a Captain Planet villain. The film also reintroduces one of the most moronic plot threads found in JURASSIC WORLD: the weaponization of raptors. It’s not clear why any of the characters think this is a good idea. Apart from some of the smaller details like, the fact that dinosaurs aren’t bullet proof or the question of how these things are getting corralled back into their cages after they rip apart their target, why are they so confident these things aren’t going to turn on their human masters yet again? It’s happened four times already in this film universe. Even in a world without dinosaurs, animals regularly attack and kill their trainers and these are animals that are just being trained to stand on their hind legs or wear a hat without batting it off in disgust. Still, these fucking dum-dums want a drone they have to feed and clean up after, which is why we get the Indoraptor -- a super-intelligent, genetically enhanced version of a raptor that reminded me of the pipe-smoking, British accented raptors that appeared in a JURASSIC PARK parody on an episode of THE CRITIC. This thing understands locks, quietly opens windows and even understands pranks. And with the introduction of the Indoraptor, FALLEN KINGDOM reboots itself a second time by not only becoming a dinosaur themed slasher movie featuring the Indoraptor, it’s also a secret, DIE HARD sequel starring Blue. Watch as Blue reluctantly crawls around in confined spaces, runs away from an explosion in slow motion and defeats the Indoraptor by picking him up over his head and impaling the creature on the horns of a stuffed and mounted dinosaur. It’s kind of amazing the film didn’t cut back to Blue making some kind of quip like, “Hope you got my point” in dinosaur gibberish.</div>
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Amazingly, I haven’t even scratched the surface of how idiotic this is. I haven’t mentioned James Cromwell’s character -- a wheelchair bound partner of Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond -- a character the franchise never mentioned until this movie. Or Isabella Sermon, whose character isn’t just unnecessary, she’s also wrapped up in one of the most superfluous plot twists in film history. Nor have I mentioned how the movie can’t make up its mind whether we should pity, fear or laugh at dinosaurs. FALLEN KINGDOM is a tonally awkward mess that feels like three separate sequels were edited together into one ridiculous movie but goddamn if it isn’t entertaining. Partly it’s because the film is top-heavy with character actors. Apart from Levine, Jones, Wong and Cromwell, we also get Geraldine Chaplin in an admittedly thankless role as Sermon’s doomed nanny. But mostly it’s because director J.A. Bayona (also responsible for 2007’s THE ORPHANAGE) keeps things moving and even manages to wring some surprisingly tense moments from a movie that grows increasingly goofier as it barrels along. Bayona also mercifully forgoes the dimwitted meta-bullshittery that plagued JURASSIC WORLD, which is strange considering that Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connelly returned to script FALLEN KINGDOM. Like watching a drunk friend headbutt a steel-bladed fan for reasons that will always remain lost to the alcohol, this movie is stupid and it will probably make you cringe, but you’ll enjoy yourself watching it more than you’d ever care to admit. Besides, Wong survives to see another sequel yet again. So, guess what JURASSIC WORLD 3: A MAMMOTH CHRISTMAS? You’ve already got my money. </div>
Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-369036617769761002018-05-03T04:53:00.000-04:002018-05-03T04:53:16.748-04:00Film Review: RAMPAGE by Mike Sullivan<div class="p1">
Criticizing a film by Brad Peyton is like criticizing a meal at The Cracker Barrel. You knew how bland and regrettable the experience was going to be before you walked through the door, so why complain? Like his peers, Jonathan Liebesman and Paul W.S. Anderson, Peyton makes movies that are, in essence, too expensive to be released directly to Redbox, but not good enough to be released in theaters outside of entertainment dead zones like January, April and September. He makes filler, basically. Cinematic placeholders with decent trailers that get a biggish opening weekend before they’re quickly undone by negative word of mouth. In short, Peyton is a man whose legacy lies within the dust covered DVD section at any given interstate truck stop. But here’s the thing, in spite of the fact that his filmography consists of seemingly anything playing on a Sunday afternoon on TNT, he’s done something that both Gareth Edwards and Peter Jackson were unable to do. Brad Peyton -- the artist behind a forgotten CATS & DOGS sequel and INCARNATE, a movie in which a gravel-voiced, wheelchair bound Aaron Eckhart described human souls as “wifi that attracts demons” -- has given us a giant monster movie that is non-pretentious and -- god help us all -- legitimately entertaining.</div>
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RAMPAGE opens in a space research facility that is being torn apart by a giant rat. The only surviving astronaut on this mission is tasked with retrieving the purpose of this research: vials that are filled with a substance that can perform “genetic editing”. What genetic editing does, how it makes living things bigger and why it can give a wolf bat wings but not a gorilla is never explained properly. RAMPAGE just wants you to know that an evil corporation called Energyne has subverted genetic editing beyond its original, also vaguely defined, intent. What is important is that Marley Shelton is playing the astronaut! And it’s good to see her on the big screen again. I can’t be the only one who thought GRINDHOUSE was going to be a career breakthrough for her. But then, I’m sure I’m not the only one who had inflated expectations about GRINDHOUSE and what it was going to do to the pop-cultural landscape. I want to say that Bella Heathcote made her irrelevant what with her similar haunted, but sexy, thousand yard stare, but Heathcote is just as underutilized as Shelton. At any rate, Shelton dies in an escape pod explosion as she makes her way back to earth causing the trio of vials to land in various locations throughout the USA. </div>
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We then cut to a primatologist played by a sinewy beef hill (Dwayne Johnson) who is taking care of an albino gorilla named George. To sort of explain why a primatologist is as insanely jacked as the one played here by an affable pork boulder, RAMPAGE tells us that the chilling site of an upset gorilla caused the shambling man-brisket to shed his special forces fatigues in favor of a primatologist’s safari jacket. This is not an origin story befitting a veiny, glistening rump roast. It should revolve around the Cronenbergian wall of pecs and flesh’s attempt to take out Ugandan dictator Milton Obote, his friendly fire that caused the death of Dian Fossey and the pec wall taking her place as a kind of penance, even though he would have to be 13 for this to make any kind of sense. As it turns out, George is intelligent, but not only that, understands pranks and several filthy hand gestures such as the fuck you finger and that thing you do when you roll your left hand into a fist so that your right index finger can have sex with it. I should mention that every scene from this movie looks like something the characters in a Coen Brothers movie would watch or be in the process of making. RAMPAGE is dumb but dumb in a way that makes it an accidental commentary on the shallow qualities of Hollywood blockbusters. And yet it keeps getting dumber.</div>
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But the dumber it gets the more fun RAMPAGE becomes. Especially once the vials start infecting its unwilling participants -- a wolf, a crocodile and George. Obviously, half the fun is in watching sequences where a wolf with porcupine quills and bat wings brutally massacres Joe Manganiello and his fellow soldiers of fortune or the goofy finale that finds the trio of monsters clashing in downtown Chicago, but most of what makes RAMPAGE enjoyable is that it’s structured like a bad Saturday Morning Cartoon. Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy (better remembered for playing “New Jim” during the last sad gasps of the US iteration of THE OFFICE) play the CEOs of Energyne as CAPTAIN PLANET villains. Not just because they’re one-dimensional, mustache-twirlers but because their plan makes so little sense. They’re developing genetic editing as a weapon of war but it’s not clear how. Are they planning on using it on animals or people? If so, how are they rounding up these monsters once the mission is accomplished? Granted, there’s a beacon that’s supposed to draw these things to their target but it doesn’t really calm them down or deprogram them once they finish their objective. The monsters just punch the device until the building they’re on collapses. Also, why did Akerman and Lacey insist on placing this beacon in the middle of downtown Chicago at the top of their corporate headquarters? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to put this beacon in the Nevada desert or a sparsely populated area in Alaska? If that isn’t cartoonish enough, Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s government spook character is a Tommy Lee Jones impression wrapped up in an oversized belt buckle, nickel-plated revolver and unwavering shit-eating grin. His character feels like an unproduced GI Joe action figure called Rhinestone. Additionally there’s a ton of weird inconsistencies such as the fact that bullets are useless against the genetically enhanced animals but tranquilizer guns aren’t and really dopey attempts at Marvel Studios-style easter eggs. As you may have already known, RAMPAGE is based on a video game. Peyton’s idea of an in-joke is to place a RAMPAGE arcade cabinet in Akerman and Lacy’s sprawling office but never allude to or even mention its existence, which is very weird because the events in this movie mirror what happens in the video game. Right down to the fact that the wolf, gorilla and alligator that punch buildings in this are named after the wolf, gorilla and alligator that punch buildings from the game. Was the video game the inspiration behind the idea of genetic editing? Why the fuck is this in here! It’s like having a scene in LITTLE WOMEN where all the characters are reading a copy of <i>Little Women</i> but never acknowledges just how strange that is. </div>
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RAMPAGE is a stupid film. It’s loud, empty and will drown in INFINITY WAR’s wake. But none of that matters because RAMPAGE is such an enjoyable experience. It’s not only what video game adaptations should be, it should be what giant monster movies should model themselves on in a post Godzilla/Skull Island America. RAMPAGE does what it needs to do and does it decently. Plus, it’s nice to see a throwback to '50s sci-fi like THE CREATURE OF THE BLACK LAGOON in which a scientist -- or in RAMPAGE’s case, a primatologist – somehow manages to order generals around and is able to declare martial law. You finally did it, Brad Peyton, you made an entertaining movie. Now do the world a favor and retire.</div>
Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-64043235531423585612018-04-15T03:51:00.000-04:002018-04-15T03:52:37.193-04:00Film Review: READY PLAYER ONE by Mike Sullivan<div class="p1">
<i>“...Shawn Brown’s classic hit "The Rappin’ Duke is Back" blared in the distance as I crashed through the side entrance of the vintage Hickory Farms. The customers, gawped in Reagan-era amazement at my '80s centric vehicle and all of its period specific finery. My car was the same car from GHOSTBUSTERS. Not the Ecto-1, but that Model-T buggy thing from that off-brand GHOSTBUSTERS cartoon. Y’know, the one with the Gorilla in the Panama hat? That one. I’d swapped out the wheels with the larcenous ferrets from the first BEASTMASTER movie and replaced the doors with the title sequence from YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON TELEVISION to remind everyone that I was very young during the '80s but now I am not. Finally, a hologram of Robert Guillaume’s BENSON character was my silent co-pilot. I programmed it to nod in solemn agreement at everything I said to show I was cool with black people. Especially when they didn’t challenge me. Excitement filled the air until I stepped out of my gnarly, radicle (rad-vehicle) and started waving around an exact replica of the gun Peter Weller waved around in ROBOCOP. Before this day is through, I vowed, everybody inside of this goddamn Hickory Farms will be able to recite every last word from THE BREAKFAST CLUB. Backwards and forwards. And that’s a final truth...”</i></div>
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<b>- An excerpt from Ernest Cline’s upcoming novel, “Hey Dudes, Thanks for Rescuing Me. Let’s Go for a Burger... Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”</b></div>
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If you managed to get through the paragraph above, you’re probably a fan of Ernest Cline. For everyone else, it was probably like a boot stamping on a human face forever, except the boot is an elbow attached to a 40-something man in a Rush baseball jersey and it’s not stamping your face as much as it’s nudging your ribs. Forever. And that is the READY PLAYER ONE experience in a nutshell. It was a novel that seemed to ask the question, “What if we made a book out of all of those passages from <i>American Psycho</i> in which Patrick Bateman described the things he owns in clinical detail but swapped all the references to Rolex watches and Brooks Brothers suits with anything fetishized by that guy who works at Gamestop who just wants you to know that Cuphead isn’t some Candy Crush thing. It’s actually very hard. Is it for your boyfriend?” To be fair, READY PLAYER ONE was exactly the kind of novel I would expect from an author whose photo on the dustjacket is of himself leaning on the DeLorean from BACK TO THE FUTURE. By which I mean insufferable. But even though I didn’t expect it to be good, I still expected it to be a novel and not an episode of VH1’s "I Love the 80s" after a vague narrative structure was imposed upon it. And call me crazy, but I really can’t stand when even my disposable airport fiction is constantly bogged down with the literary equivalent to Mo Rocca riffing on the underrated qualities of the keytar to an off-screen researcher. Yet as bad as READY PLAYER ONE was as a novel, it still had potential as a movie. It needed creative collaborators to recognize that Cline’s obsessive, pop-cultural monologuing should be dialed back to a point where it didn’t remind the audience of all the times in high school when an acquaintance would pelt their face with half-chewed Bugles as he shouted MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL quotes during study hall. Maybe Paul Verhoeven or Terry Gilliam or his less grope-y alternative Jean Pierre Jeunet would offer a satirical, darkly silly approach to a book whose basic message is, “I can name all of the Swordquests, so I deserve things!” Unfortunately, Steven Spielberg was the director we got and instead of the funny, thoughtful approach, we got the Iron Giant recreating the tearful T-800 thumbs up scene from TERMINATOR 2. This isn’t a love letter to geek culture, it’s an unsolicited dick pic.</div>
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To its credit, READY PLAYER ONE the movie isn’t quite faithful to <i>Ready Player One</i> the novel. Sure, it’s still about a virtual reality scavenger hunt set in the far off year of 2044 and a kid named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) who knows so much about The Mighty Orbots and Cassingles that he’s a much better person than you. But a lot has changed because a truly faithful adaptation would mostly amount to Wil Wheaton reading a listicle of 90 Things Only '80s Kids Remember over YouTube footage of a Robotron 2048 walkthrough. Clearly, some liberties were taken with this adaptation and, at least initially, it’s the right kind of liberties. At first glance, Spielberg appears to be mocking Cline’s (who, sadly co-wrote the screenplay) pathological need to lionize anything and everything he consumed as a child. Within the first twenty minutes, characters get caught in the middle of a race across an elegant, Manhattan hellscape to capture one of the film’s trio of Macguffins. What makes this sequence so exhilarating is the fact that it involves the destruction of iconic vehicles from movies and television. The 1966 Batmobile, The Mach 5, Akira’s motorcycle and others are crushed, stomped by the T-Rex from JURASSIC PARK and even eaten by King Kong. There’s a sense of joy in the way Spielberg reduces iconography to rubble. “Here’s this stupid thing you love”, he’s saying. “Now watch me burn it to the ground.” Unfortunately, this gentle, Cineplex nihilism is unintentional and you suddenly remember that READY PLAYER ONE opens with the overplayed strains of Van Halen’s "Jump", which is the '80s nostalgia equivalent to opening your Vietnam movie with "Fortunate Son". If "Jump"’s inclusion was to get me misty-eyed over ads for Time Life CD comps, well, mission accomplished. READY PLAYER ONE the movie is every bit as empty and shallow as the book because Spielberg doesn’t have anything to say about fan culture beyond, “Isn’t it great!?!” Jeepers, I remember Wacky Wallcrawlers too, guys!!!” Spielberg is striving for the epic crossover spectacle of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? and misses. Hard. When Daffy Duck interacted with Donald Duck in ROGER RABBIT, you were seeing full-fledged characters with personalities bounce off of each other in a way a classic comedy team would. In READY PLAYER ONE<span class="s1">,</span> when a Xenomorph pops out of the chest of Goro from Mortal Kombat it feels lifeless and rote. Partly because they’re reduced to props in a not very funny sight gag but mostly because we’ve seen this kind of pop-cultural mash-up a million times before on the laziest tumblr posts imaginable. Usually in between the pictures of Obama riding a unicorn and Spock carrying a lightsaber. The cameos in ROGER RABBIT added something to the story around them. Here the cameos are never anything more than a cynical showreel for corporate IP, dead-eyed action figures lined up along the desk of the “quirkiest” guy at your office. All of this might be irrelevant if the central characters didn’t carry all of the depth of the teens who passed over the purple stuff in old Sunny D ads. This is a problem, especially in scenes like the extended SHINING riff where the characters’ distinct relationships and personalities are supposed to serve as an amusing counterpoint to the familiar goings-on at the Overlook hotel. But being that the characters in the film have neither, the whole sequence plays out exactly as it appears: a bunch of visually unappealing avatars playing through a customized mission on a modded Grand Theft Auto rom. </div>
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In his novel, Cline managed to flesh out the characters and their dystopian world to a point where they were at least a little more than faceless, audience surrogates. Spielberg reduces them to faceless, audience surrogates. Presumably to make more time for exploding Madballs and walk-on appearances from Michael Bay’s iteration of the Ninja Turtles. At best, Wade Watts and his gamer buddies are vessels for fun facts and embarrassingly geeky wish fulfillment. At worst <span class="s1">--</span> well, let me tell you a story: When I saw READY PLAYER ONE in the theater, there was a kid in the back row who made a stereotypical karate guy noise when Win Morisaki -<span class="s1">-</span> a fellow member of Wade’s scavenger hunting crew -<span class="s1">-</span> appears on screen. It’s a dumb teen thing a dumb teen would do during a movie that’s probably boring the living shit out of them. It’s something that would be offensive if it wasn’t so inane. Yet shortly after that, READY PLAYER ONE reinforces this kid’s narrowminded observation by showing Morisaki karate kicking bad guys in the back of a van. So, really, who’s the bigger asshole here? A shitty teen in the back of an Ohio theater trying to piss off an audience who have mostly checked out at this point? Or a director and two screenwriters who pay lip service to not judging a book by its cover throughout their terrible movie but, in their own way, still manage to yell “Hwhaaaaaaa!” the moment one of the film’s few Asian actors stands in front of the camera? I won’t answer for you, but I’ll give you a hint, the kid in the theater had nothing to do with THE COLOR PURPLE or even MUNICH.</div>
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Aside from being vapid, READY PLAYER ONE is riddled with plot holes. The biggest one being, why are so many kids in 2044 obsessing over things that were created about 60 years ago? I mean are kids today totally into all the great pop-culture from 1958? Are 15-year-olds cosplaying as Richard Boone from I BURY THE LIVING? Re-listening to all the songs on the KING CREOLE soundtrack? Streaming episodes of SUGARFOOT on their Ipads? I’m not saying as others have weirdly suggested that there should be some pop-cultural representation from 2044, because why would you want to feature made-up iconography that doesn’t exist yet? Besides, its inclusion would mean even more exposition and the last thing this film needs to do is to take an even bigger info-dump on its audience’s laps. But shouldn’t there at least be some Caveman SpongeBob, Walter White or Demogorgon avatars wandering around? Why would teenagers in 2044 be intimately familiar with BUCKAROO BANZAI when teenagers in 2018 aren’t even aware of its existence? Still, I can understand why these kids are latching onto the iconography of the past. The non-branded elements of the Oasis <span class="s1">--</span> the virtual reality world the characters inhabit <span class="s1">--</span> are surprisingly generic. The avatars Wade and the other gamers embody look like they were designed by your elderly mother at gunpoint as she struggled to remember that cartoon from Japan you liked so much. Ike Hearya? A-KerKoo? They had those, y’know (opens hands) <i>eyes</i>. What isn’t generic looks oddly familiar. Parts of Oasis eerily resemble that Grand Central Station Purgatory the cast from WRECK-IT RALPH hung around in during breaks from their video games while more than a few set-pieces mirror those from the 2017 box office smash THE EMOJI MOVIE. Both films include a pivotal moment revolving around a mid-air dance off, both allow TJ Miller to just totally riff and, most importantly, both rely heavily on their audience’s knowledge of branded products. Too bad THE EMOJI MOVIE wasn’t smart enough to make sure its product placement was at least 30 some years old. Otherwise, THE EMOJI MOVIE might be at 74% instead of 8%.</div>
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Yet, the absolute worst thing about READY PLAYER ONE is that it fails to address just how nightmarish the future featured in this movie really is. Now, I’m not talking about the severe economic inequality of this world or the “wifi famine riots” or whatever that inexplicable, unfunny laugh line was about, I’m talking about the fact that, in READY PLAYER ONE, true human worth is determined by how much junk culture you’ve absorbed. Spielberg reinforces Cline’s message that unless you’ve spent a majority of your life re-watching KRULL in between your marathon attempts to reach the kill-screen in Super Pac-Man, you’re probably some evil, dumb, corporate Chad who will steal the internet while they dump the world’s Magic Cards down the toilet. You get the sense in READY PLAYER ONE that the bad guy’s (Australian Ben Mendelsohn<span class="s1">,</span> speaking in one of those flattened out “I’m American from America-town” accents usually favored by Rachel Weisz) plan to essentially end net neutrality within the Oasis stems from the fact that he never understood how to enjoy a John Hughes movie. Yet, as much as this film evangelizes over studying and retaining useless knowledge, it still has the nerve to tell you to, “Put your phone down and just live life, man” even though the star of the film just saved the world by knowing an obscure fact about an old Atari game that he spent countless hours playing on his future, virtua-phone-treadmill-helmet. Obviously, it’s ok to like this film, but understand, by liking this film (and book) you’ve forfeited any right to make fun of TWILIGHT or FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. Sure, they’re all wish fulfillment at their most dreary and pathetic, yet for all of their faults, TWILIGHT and FIFTY SHADES allowed its viewers and readers to step into exotic worlds involving vampires and mysterious, possibly dangerous millionaires, READY PLAYER ONE allows its readers to step into a world where they live in a trailer with their aunt, hang out in an abandoned car yard where they play D&D in total isolation and are aware there was a live-action Japanese Spiderman series. That’s so much better than mom porn or some dumb vampire thing for girls, right?</div>
Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-5360263476058029882018-01-13T16:22:00.000-05:002018-01-13T16:22:12.263-05:00Film Review: STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI by Mike Sullivan<div class="p1">
There were two movies America couldn’t get enough of in 1977. The first, STAR WARS, went on to envelope pop-culture in such a suffocating, ever-present degree that the only possible way to escape it is death. The second was SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, a film in which the late Jackie Gleason briefly made racist, southern sheriffs not just lovable, but nearly cuddly. In short, STAR WARS stuck around while SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT didn’t. But I wish it was the other way around. I wish I could walk into any one of three remaining FYE’s on the earth and see too many Sheriff Buford T. Justice dolls on the shelf instead of too many Darth Vader dolls. I wish I could go to any Halloween party and see the uncertain faces of women as they have second thoughts about being coerced by their soon to be ex-boyfriends into dressing as Paul Williams in Little Enos drag instead of Princess Leia in her ‘slave’ get-up. I wish I lived in that alternate universe where SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT: THE FINAL JUSTICE is playing in theaters instead of STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI.</div>
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I don’t like STAR WARS. I never did. When I saw RETURN OF THE JEDI as a child I got so bored, I tried talking to the kid sitting next to me. When he ignored me, I started kicking him. I’m not proud of that moment but there it is. I’m a petty, violent asshole who is easily exhausted by space dogfights. Now, with that said, the obvious question is, “If you hate STAR WARS so much, why did you sit through THE LAST JEDI?” Well, three reasons: Like mostly everyone else on earth, I already sat through the previous chapters in the STAR WARS saga -- for various reasons -- and figured one more couldn’t hurt. It wasn’t genuine interest as much as it was the same kind of misplaced completism that led to me owning a full set of McDonalds BATMAN FOREVER tumblers. Secondly, I had to witness the PINK FLAMINGOS-esque sight of Mark Hamill jerking off the nipple-y, boob-penis of a Muppet before glumly drinking its green milk-cum. Finally, I kept hearing how different THE LAST JEDI was from the other STAR WARS movies. How it was more SPACEBALLS than A NEW HOPE, that it destroyed the legacy of Luke Skywalker and how it allowed black men, Asian women and Laura Dern in a purple Supermarionation wig to tread on the bland, E.E. “Doc” Smith-like space mediocrities that comprise STAR WARS’ inescapable legacy. The mashing of a thousand caps buttons whittled down the pudgy, brittle fingers of various Redditors into Cheeto-stained nubs so that the world would understand that STAR WARS had ceased to be STAR WARS, and became SCARY MOVIE rewritten by Andrea Dworkin. Manic, over-the-top criticisms of THE LAST JEDI caused me to believe it was a Porg-filled fartstravaganza where Dern pulls down Oscar Isaac’s spacepants to dismissively flick his penis and ends with Mark Hamill looking into the camera to say, “Menstruation is not a crime” as John Williams’ iconic theme swells in the background. It seemed heady and exhilarating. But much like the Magic Cards that were stolen out of the backpacks of THE LAST JEDI’s most scathing critics back in high school, my high hopes were flushed down the toilet and laughed at. Contrary to whatever unsolicited opinions are being screamed at to disinterested clerks at your local comic shop, THE LAST JEDI is not a STAR WARS movie for people that hate STAR WARS, this is a STAR WARS movie for people that love STAR WARS so much they have to pretend to hate it in order to impress STAR WARS fans who are pretending to really hate it for reasons -- that as a non-fan of STAR WARS -- I’ll never fully grasp. In spite of the fact that THE LAST JEDI has minor progressive touches and even slighter attempts at genre subversion, this is a STAR WARS movie right down to the cardboard characterizations, bad pacing, clunky dialogue, and the kind of comedy that suggests the only thing every STAR WARS creative team can agree on is that nothing will be funnier than the sight of those rats running the diner in THE MUPPETS TAKE MANHATTAN.</div>
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Still, as much as I disliked THE LAST JEDI, it has something I never experienced in any other STAR WARS movie, moments that not only stayed with me by the time I left the theater, but also caused my cold, STAR WARS-hating heart to unthaw but in that ineffective way a bottle of soda that gets pushed to the back of a fridge unthaws. It’s still a lot of ice. Although the sense of humor in this series still errs on the side of sub-Muppety, baby whimsies; genuinely amusing moments are almost hidden amongst gags involving terrified quivering robots and screeching CGI bird-things that look like Danny DeVito reinterpreted by a Sanrio artist. The film opens with a solid laugh as Isaacs’ Poe Dameron taunts Domhnall Gleeson’s fey authoritarian General Hux by pretending to have trouble with his communication device which causes Gleeson’s standard, bad-guy monologue to be repeatedly undercut by Isaac’s requests to, “hold please”. It’s funny simply because of how unexpected it is. The STAR WARS film universe is earnest to a deadening degree and to see something this sarcastic and self-parodic is refreshing. Unlike THE FORCE AWAKENS, which couldn’t stop reminding you of the past and felt like one of those cast reunion sketches Jimmy Fallon used to smirk through on THE TONIGHT SHOW, THE LAST JEDI isn’t as beholden to the original films. C-3PO is finally presented as the grating irritant he’s always been, one that’s openly ignored and mocked by the characters. Luke Skywalker isn’t just an embittered hermit but almost an attempted child murderer (more importantly he drank the green milk-cum that came out of a Muppet’s nipple-y-boob-penis). The darker, more adult streak Gareth Edwards was trying (and failing) to bring to the franchise with ROGUE ONE is better realized in THE LAST JEDI as it addresses class issues and politics with a degree of nuance the series is usually unwilling to explore (and by explore I mean the film addresses the fact that classism and war profiteering exists. Not exactly groundbreaking points, but a big step for STAR WARS). Yet as the film gently deconstructs its own tropes, it’s also tweaking expectations in surprising ways. Particularly in the way it depicts Isaac’s brash, hotheaded flyboy archetype. Initially, THE LAST JEDI appears to side with Poe because he gets results, man, and Princess Buzzkill (Carrie Fisher) and Admiral Holdo and her stupid Dame Edna wig won’t allow him to just go out there and fuck shit up, y’know? But then the film reminds us that he managed to get a number of his own men killed with an impulsive, half-hearted attempt to take out one measly spaceship, nearly gets John Boyega and Rose Marie Tran’s characters killed in an ill-considered secret mission that backfires and kills several more resistance fighters and commits mutiny simply because Dern wouldn’t let him in on her secret plans even though she was under no obligation to do so. After decades of Hollywood deifying the image of the loose cannon, THE LAST JEDI has the courage to finally explain why the police commissioner is grinding the captain’s ass: Harry Callahan, Marion Cobretti and anyone who insists on playing by their own rules are glib, harmful lunatics who would blow up your house if it meant they would get to say, “there goes the neighborhood” to your smoldering corpse. The only thing separating Martin Riggs from Jason Voorhees is a hockey mask.</div>
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Yet as great and as promising as all of those above moments are, they’re still just moments. Blips in a nearly three hour movie. It’s amazing all of the uproar these things have caused because they’re almost negligible. Splotches of gray have entered the film universe but the characters’ motivations are still decidedly black and white. In spite of all the ways Rian Johnson has attempted to revise, update and otherwise shake-up the franchise, he’s still leaving basic characterization to the people who write the extended universe. As in THE FORCE AWAKENS, the characters -- with the exception of Luke and Benicio Del Toro’s stuttering code master -- are devoid of personality. Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (Boyega), Kylo Ren, and even Andy Serkis’ Snoke are bland sci-fi ciphers, the kind of uninteresting clichés people would be ridiculing if these movies weren’t released under the STAR WARS banner. When Driver murders Serkis’ twisted Emperor Palpatine simulacrum towards the beginning of the third act, the moment carries no impact because we don’t know who this character is. He’s just a John Merrick looking motherfucker that likes to yell and wear gold lamé. Who cares? Additionally, Johnson undoes the goodwill generated by one of his gutsiest and most unexpected twists by having Dern note dreamily that she “likes Poe” after he held a gun to her head, called her a traitor and proceeded to kill several more resistance fighters. Sweet, sweating, ab-crunching Christ! Have the dudes who called this movie a SJW atrocity even bothered to watch it? Poe’s sociopathic actions not only carry zero consequences, they’re making everybody on screen dangerously horny and, realistically, nobody should want or need Llewyn Davis inside them after all of the selfish bullshit he pulls. Even worse, THE LAST JEDI is at least a half hour too long, which means we get much more dialogue like “Get your head out of your cockpit”, “Let’s go Chrome Dome” and “We're going to win this war not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love!” which is so cloying your aunt should stencil it underneath “Live, Laugh, Love” on the walls of her dining room. Oh, and if you seriously think that Rey’s parents are exactly as Kylo Ren describes (scummy, faceless drunks buried in a pauper’s grave), you’ve either never seen a STAR WARS movie or you suffered severe head trauma before you entered the theater. I guarantee that in the next sequel her parents will be revealed as some kind of Jedi royalty or an already established character like Sy Snootles, Lobot or Loki (Disney owns both properties. Why not?).</div>
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Obviously, I’m not the audience for THE LAST JEDI, but even though I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t exactly hate the experience either. Johnson is bucking against the constraints of audience expectations and that’s a good thing because this franchise has been coasting on nostalgia for close to twenty years. There’s a sense that the creative team wants to stop massaging every inch of its fanbase’s brain with rose-colored, STRANGER THINGS-esque memories of Gatorade Gum, Big Wheels and puppet Yodas and finally move forward. Who knows? I might actually like the next chapter in this unending saga, but I kind of doubt it. Unless it involves an unsettling, CGI Burt Reynolds causing a Southern accented Josh Gad to angrily throw his cowboy hat on the ground, I’ll probably avoid it.</div>
Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-75368827993913389932017-12-15T11:32:00.000-05:002017-12-15T11:34:01.497-05:00Film Review: JUSTICE LEAGUE by Mike Sullivan<div class="p1">
Zack Snyder strikes me as a man who would corner you at a party and evangelize over <i>Atlas Shrugged</i>. He also strikes me as someone who not only thinks <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> was written by John Galt, he also keeps referring to the Ayn Rand character as ‘Don Gall’. Joss Whedon, on the other hand, reminds me of every loud, industry wannabe who’s constantly holding court at your local comic shop. Someone whose idea of a joke is saying anything with a sarcastic lilt or whose conception of female empowerment is I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE if it was watered down with Scooby Doo references. Together the pair has reaffirmed the public-at-large’s most unfair, clichéd perceptions of nerd culture. It’s also why I treated their unintentional collaboration on JUSTICE LEAGUE with the same degree of apprehension you give to a blood test you know will come back positive. You just sit there trying to keep the inevitable at bay with happy but empty thoughts like “Maybe it’s going to be OK” or “Maybe it burns because I’ve been drinking too much coffee? That’s a side effect from drinking too much coffee, right?” but, no. Eventually reality proves your instincts were correct and not only was JUSTICE LEAGUE terrible but you’re kind of justifying the pain and disappointment by telling people things like, “Well, Robin Williams had it too.” Basically, what I’m trying to say is that I hated JUSTICE LEAGUE and I have herpes. Also, I have been told by a reliable source that <span class="s1">--</span> legally <span class="s1">--</span> this counts as a phone call.</div>
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Like Universal’s failed Dark Universe franchise, JUSTICE LEAGUE is the by-product of a rushed, knee jerk reaction to Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. Whereas the original AVENGERS was seen as a fun possibility if the other franchises did well enough, JUSTICE LEAGUE was going to happen whether or not MAN OF STEEL was a hit. Basing a billion dollar franchise around something so forced and inorganic isn’t quite ‘starting off on the wrong foot’ as much as it’s ‘getting pushed out of a wheelchair and landing on your stump’. In addition to the film’s cynical origins, JUSTICE LEAGUE also suffered from severe retooling after audiences and critics alike recoiled from the adolescent nihilism of Snyder’s BATMAN V. SUPERMAN. Snyder also had to leave the project halfway through its production due to tragic family issues. Whedon was then called in to finish the film in a directorial style similar to Snyder’s, something he was either unable or unwilling to achieve. With odds that overwhelming, it’s surprising that JUSTICE LEAGUE didn’t share the same fate as Tim Burton’s SUPERMAN LIVES. </div>
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It’s also disappointing. </div>
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JUSTICE LEAGUE is the kind of film that could have benefitted from a cancellation or a shelving or even a man to stand behind you covering your eyes with his hands. Anything that would have prevented anyone from gazing towards its direction and frowning. Although many will disagree, JUSTICE LEAGUE is worse than BATMAN V. SUPERMAN because the whiff of compromise is so incredibly strong. BATMAN V. SUPERMAN may have been the cinematic equivalent to a 35-year-old man storming off to his bedroom screaming, "They’re not called funny books, <i>Mother</i>," but at least it was tonally consistent. In JUSTICE LEAGUE all of that grim-dark, ‘please-take-superheroes-seriously’ bullshit awkwardly clangs against Whedon’s desperate attempts to Marvel-up the proceedings in a way that only Whedon can. Which is basically what Aaron Sorkin would do if Aaron Sorkin punctuated his quips by flicking Cheeto dust in your eyes. It’s all cutesy, joke-like dialogue combined with nerdiness so cringe-inducing it’s practically weaponized.</div>
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If JUSTICE LEAGUE is a movie, then one of those ‘This Season on GAME OF THRONES’ promos that run at the end of a season-opening episode is a movie. It’s just a feature length highlight reel of disconnected scenes that won’t make dramatic sense until the entire series unfolds <span class="s1">--</span> and that seems about as unlikely as seeing a second Dark Universe movie. Of course, the confusion begins in the most obnoxious way possible: a slo-mo title sequence that looks like the dumbest guy in your high school stopped making YouTube videos of himself headbutting steel blade fans to make socially relevant videos for Staind. It’s Snyder at his most self-important and obvious, clumsily dragging real world issues into a movie where The Flash (Ezra Miller) faceplants into Wonder Woman’s (Gal Gadot) cleavage. In the intro, a skinhead wearing a black hoodie with the word MAGA silk-screened on it in the death metal font is shown kicking over a fruit cart owned by a woman in a hijab. Presumably, a scene following that in which a cackling man dressed as the Monopoly guy strangling a woman with the words ‘a living wage’ written on her chest as a teary-eyed Uncle Sam looks on was cut for time. If obvious editorial cartoons adapted and re-contextualized by whatever editing software Snyder uses to make all of his films look a photocopy of a photocopy of '300' aren’t your thing, know that he’s doing something similar with <i>New Yorker </i>cartoons. At the end of the sequence, a homeless man carries a sign reading “I Tried” and, although intended to be poignant, it feels like a laziest gag Roz Chast never drew. At any rate, what this overwrought sequence is trying to convey is that the world isn’t the same since Superman died in BATMAN V. SUPERMAN, even though the world was still pretty terrible when he was alive, what with all the rogue Michael Shannons flying around and the Senate exploding and people pissing into mason jars. Yet, regardless of how the world feels about the loss of Superman, the film more or less forgets about him and starts performing random chores until about halfway through the running time when the film suddenly stops bopping along to that Rebel Just for Kicks song playing at Target while it shops for detergent to remember, “Oh, shit! Superman is supposed to be in this!” At which point, Henry Cavill’s smug, Ted Bundy-like take on the Last Son of Krypton is hastily resurrected. And what an abrupt, anticlimactic resurrection. Imagine if Dr. Frankenstein brought his creation to life by throwing a toaster into a bathtub. That’s basically the extent of what happens here. Members of the Justice League dig up Superman’s corpse and dump his body into that Kryptonian amniotic chamber from BATMAN V. SUPERMAN that transformed a rubbery Michael Shannon dummy into a shambling wad of CGI animated dough that was probably more expensive than the Shannon dummy but looks far cheaper. As stupid as the “healing coma” was that brought Superman back to life in the infamous Death of Superman comic story, at least that didn’t involve Flash and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) heading into the moors with wooden spades like Burke and fucking Hare.</div>
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In any other movie, the resurrection of an iconic figure like Superman would be, if not the point of the movie, then at least a strong B-story. In this film it’s treated as an afterthought because JUSTICE LEAGUE is attempting to do in one movie what Marvel Studios did in six two-hour movies. Not only is it dealing with the rebirth of a major character, there’s also a plot involving something that looks like somebody’s ill-considered World of Warcraft avatar (the voice of Ciaran Hinds) stealing several “motherboxes” to annoy a wacky Siberian family? I guess? To those who have seen the film, what was the point of repeatedly cutting back to that family? To get hilarious gags where the daughter jokingly attempts to defend herself with bug spray? Because it’s not enough that two very different movies with ever changing, inconsistent tones that are not so quietly at war with each other, we also get fragments from the solo Aquaman, Cyborg and Flash movies -<span class="s1">-</span> that should’ve happened prior to JUSTICE LEAGUE <span class="s1">--</span> wedged awkwardly into this mess. Out of the three, the Cyborg mini-movie is the default winner mainly for the presence of Joe Morton and relative newcomer Fisher. Aquaman (Jason Momoa), on the other hand, feels like RENEGADE-era Lorenzo Lamas, a Capri Sun commercial from the mid-90s and the intro to VIVA LA BAM were consumed and pissed into a bottle of Venom Energy Drink. He’s everything you thought was totally bad-ass when you were twelve and it’s embarrassing. But not nearly as embarrassing as The Flash. Ezra Miller <span class="s1">-</span>- usually good as creeps and weirdoes <span class="s1">--</span> has a lot to say in this movie and it’s almost all in the form of precious zingers! Did you know he’s a black hole of snacking? You might say he’s a snack hole! Oh, that’s not his superhero suit, Batman. He’s a COMPETITIVE ICE DANCER!!! You can’t sit there, Penny! That’s Sheldon’s chair! Bazimples! He’s so adorably awkward it’s like seeing Zoey Deschanel play The Flash but without the thrill of her playing the SUPERFRIENDS theme on a ukulele really fast. A character who reeks of Whedon’s most grating tics, The Flash is clearly intended to be an audience surrogate even though he’s an obnoxious coward too afraid to do anything and never stops flapping his unfunny jaws. So, there you go DC movie fans, Whedon thinks you’re The Flash.</div>
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And that’s not all, we also get an amazing number of scenes where a dead-eyed, emotionally drained Ben Affleck trundles around in his bat suit without the cowl looking like a mopier version of Ralphie’s snowsuit bound little brother in A CHRISTMAS STORY, a cringe-inducing moment where Diane Lane and Amy Adams joke about “being thirsty<span class="s1">,</span>” J.K. Simmons standing around and not doing anything that would require him to get as buff as he was in the pre-production photos, Cavill’s distracting CGI upper lip and constant reminders that only Patty Jenkins seems to know what to do with Wonder Woman. In Snyder and Whedon’s JUSTICE LEAGUE, Wonder Woman is reduced to a den mother/fuck object whose superpowers seem to be looking stoic and reminding you she has an ass. Basically, she’s become the DC Universe’s equivalent to Black Widow. But as dumb and as ill-conceived as all of that may be, JUSTICE LEAGUE fails because it’s boring. For a film with so much story and characters, it’s surprising how slowly JUSTICE LEAGUE moves. It lacks the pacing of even a bad Marvel Studios movie, which is why I’m shocked that some people find this movie fun. Is it just for the thrill of seeing deep cut characters like Steppenwolf, the Parademons, Aquaman and the Green Lantern Corp. interact on the Silver Screen? Because I felt the same way after seeing Killer Croc and Captain Boomerang in SUICIDE SQUAD. Eventually the thrill goes away and all you’re left with is severe discomfort and a prescription for Valtrex. Seriously Janet, I’m not fooling around. Call a doctor immediately because you might have it too.</div>
Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-87094235642201435702017-10-18T02:48:00.000-04:002017-10-18T02:48:01.824-04:00Film Review: BLADE RUNNER 2049 by Mike Sullivan<div class="p1">
A friend of mine who likes to point out how often critics get it wrong will note the chilly reception THE THING and BLADE RUNNER received during their inaugural releases. In the case of THE THING -- a film Rex Reed called “a truly inhuman attack on human decency” not once, but twice in his hysterical review -- critics seemed to be a bit too distracted by Rob Bottin’s gooey creature effects to notice there was a film happening around them. Critics were also beholden to the inert Christian Nyby (but, c’mon we all know it was really Howard Hawks) helmed original and punished John Carpenter for tearing the rose colored glasses off of their nostalgic heads. There’s a sense of anger and confusion to these critiques, as if they were all still processing what they had just seen. That inevitably turned out to be the case when just a few years later THE THING was finally recognized for what it had always been: a modern horror classic.</div>
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On the other hand, those same people who missed the point of THE THING really understood what a vapid, self-important slog BLADE RUNNER was. Their negative reviews are as relevant today as they were in 1982.</div>
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A majority of BLADE RUNNER fans will tell you the main reason they love the movie is because of how it looks and sounds. But mostly its because of how it looks. It’s telling when art direction is the sole contribution a film can bring to its medium and art direction will always be BLADE RUNNER’s true legacy. The work of production designer Lawrence G. Paull and art director David L. Snyder defined the term dystopian future and was copied so frequently -- especially throughout the 90s -- the idea of a cramped, neon-infused megalopolis became an art department cliché. But without Paull, Snyder, DP Jordan Cronenweth or even Vangelis’ haunting soundtrack, BLADE RUNNER would be emptier than it already is. The story, characterization and “heavy thematic elements” are underdeveloped, shallow and so cursory they don’t seem inspired by the writings of Philip K. Dick as much as the hacked out ad copy on the back of a Philip K. Dick novel. Additionally, Ridley Scott’s George Lucas-ian compulsion to tinker with and otherwise revise BLADE RUNNER every few years has stepped on the obvious point the film was trying to make. Batty isn’t “more human than human” if he spares the life of a Deckard replicant. He’s just a killbot protecting another killbot. For those who whine about Greedo firing first, at least Lucas didn’t throw in an additional twist that not only revealed Greedo didn’t actually shoot first but was actually Princess Leia in an alien mask. Lucas’ stupid creative decisions may slightly effect characterization but they don’t negate the film’s reason for existing. I won’t say that BLADE RUNNER is all style and no substance, but I will note that it’s a Patrick Nagel print in a trench coat. It’s that bad Nighthawk Diner homage in which Elvis is serving Bogart a frosty vanilla milkshake once a green LED strip was artlessly placed in the middle of it. It’s rag-weed and condescending guys with chain wallets who carefully explain to me why I’m stupid for disliking GHOST IN THE SHELL. In essence, BLADE RUNNER encapsulates everything regretful and embarrassing about my early twenties.</div>
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BLADE RUNNER 2049 is more of the same.</div>
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Now before I continue to rub my hate into the open wounds of its fanbase, I want to point out what I did like about BLADE RUNNER 2049. To start with, Ryan Gosling is good in it. An air of defeat hangs around his replicant character and Gosling plays him like a man whose reasons for living dwindle every day. Unlike Harrison Ford whose acting choices always seemed to be dictated around how much diarrhea he currently has and whatever gets him back to the hotel room quick enough to glumly stare into the darkness until he falls asleep on the toilet, Gosling brings depth to his android detective; not a sense of annoyed distraction. Incredible set-pieces emerge from the film. A sequence where Ford and Gosling fight each other in an abandoned Vegas lounge as malfunctioning holograms of Elvis and Liberace eerily blink in and out of existence around them is both otherworldly and knowingly silly. There’s also a surreal moment in which a replicant sex worker (HALT AND CATCH FIRE’s Mackenzie Davis) is hired to join Gosling and his girlfriend -- a sentient hologram named Joi (Ana de Armas) that is programmed to unconditionally love its owner. To BLADE RUNNER 2049’s credit, there’s a subtle emptiness in the way this relationship is depicted -- in a trippy, awkward threeway. And, of course, there’s Roger Deakins’ stunning cinematography which manages to outdo Cronenweth’s work in the original, not just in the way he photographs sweeping irradiated Vegas desert vistas but the way he depicts people slowly walking through ultra-modern office buildings or talking to receptionists in orange-hued waiting rooms. Which is great, because there’s much more footage of people slowly walking through office buildings than there are of the sweeping desert vistas. But take away Deakins’ lyrical photography and you’re left with a half-finished film noir padded out with surveillance footage of people dejectedly wandering around a parkade. Speaking of dejected people, Gosling’s performance, as good as it is, is somewhat muted by the fact that his depressed character is adrift in a sea of the saddest faces imaginable. Everybody’s sad even though they managed to live through a famine. Even Dave Bautista is sad and this is a man who should always be photographed laughing his head off as he tries to eat a melting ice cream cone. If you cut out every scene where sad faces stare purposefully out a window or at their feet, BLADE RUNNER 2049 would barely be feature length. If Scott’s BLADE RUNNER was the video for Murray Head’s "One Night in Bangkok" if it was filled with flying cars, BLADE RUNNER 2049 is R.E.M.’s "Everybody Hurts" video recast with Neuromancer cosplayers.</div>
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Like every movie Denis Villeneuve has directed, BLADE RUNNER 2049 is hauntingly beautiful but that’s it. The experience of watching this movie in theaters could be replicated by having a friend hold an "Art of BLADE RUNNER 2049" coffee table book in front of you, have them turn the page once every twenty minutes and, every so often tell them to make dumb-guy profundities about how technology is dehumanizing us and how people stare at their phones even when nothing is on the screen and, “Hey! Who’s the real phone here? You or your phone? Think about it, bro!” Villeneuve was the perfect choice to pick up Scott’s directorial reins because, much like Scott, Villeneuve’s films imply depth without actually having any. SICARIO was alternately naive and obvious, ARRIVAL was cloying and derivative, and his breakthrough film PRISONERS was an affecting film about loss until it suddenly morphed into something resembling a Riddler origin movie. BLADE RUNNER 2049 is Villeneuve’s most bloated and facile movie to date. Like its predecessor, BLADE RUNNER 2049 feints towards a deeper meaning without bothering to develop or even dwell upon its themes. Fans will tell you that Scott was asking his audience what makes us human but it’s a question he neither adequately addressed nor seemed to have much interest in answering. Especially after watching his various director’s cuts. Villeneuve seems to be saying even less as he halfheartedly rehashes Scott’s freshman dorm deep thoughts but with the addition of pseudo-intellectual red herrings, like a character waving around a copy of Nabokov’s <i>Pale Fire</i>. It’s JOHNNY MNEMONIC after it got kicked in the head by a mule and thought it was a Tarkovsky movie because it didn’t move as fast as it used to. But still, it’s a genre movie with the appearance of meaning so people will continue to dissect it much in the way people dissect THE SHINING even though Kubrick’s message was never deeper than, “I needed a fucking hit after BARRY LYNDON ate shit at the box office!”</div>
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Yet, in addition to regurgitating Scott’s vague themes, BLADE RUNNER 2049 perpetuates the dimwitted sexism of the original (every female character in this is never anything more than a bitch, a killer, a prostitute, a victim or arm candy) as well as its tone deaf racial politics (why are the WASPiest individuals outside of a Coachella concert portraying an oppressed minority?). The film also gives us a Sean Young cartoon from an unmade SHREK sequel to unnaturally shamble through the uncanniest valley and take up a permanent residence in our nightmares (although, I’m hoping the CGI Sean Young can eventually team-up with the creepy plasticine Peter Cushing from ROGUE ONE for a romantic comedy). And if all of that still wasn’t enough, Jared Leto is here to remind us how truly awful he is. In spite of his method actor bullshittery the guy still plays every one of his roles like that hyper dude at the Halloween party who is dressed as the Joker and, goddammit, will BE the fucking Joker until that clock strikes midnight! Sweet Christ, only Eddie Redmayne is worse.</div>
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I realize I’m in the minority with this. Disliking BLADE RUNNER is as loaded as disliking CITIZEN KANE or The Beatles in that people see it as trolling. Nobody has to agree with my thoughts about BLADE RUNNER nor do I expect anyone to agree with me. All I ask is for people to give BLADE RUNNER 2049 a little more time before they start calling it a masterpiece or even the best film of the year. I can only assume that seeing a big budget sequel to a movie everybody thought would never have a sequel created a kind of false positive in its viewer’s brains preventing them from seeing just how thin and portentous BLADE RUNNER 2049 is. Even compared to its predecessor.</div>
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Maybe you genuinely believe BLADE RUNNER 2049 is masterpiece. If so, I hope you realize how much you sound like every STAR WARS fan in 1999 who insisted that THE PHANTOM MENACE was every bit as good as THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. Critics aren’t the only ones that can get it wrong.</div>
Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-51442229002602481132017-10-11T02:46:00.000-04:002017-10-11T02:46:29.936-04:00Film Review: Darren Aronofsky's MOTHER! by Mike Sullivan<div class="p1">
When people say the metaphor is obvious in MOTHER!, did they mean to say it was obvious there was a metaphor in MOTHER!? Because I can definitely agree with the latter observation. MOTHER! is definitely making a point about something but what that point may be, I’m going to leave to our nation’s greatest minds to decipher. Like the guy in ROOM 237 who insisted Barry Nelson has a boner when he shakes Jack Nicholson’s hand in THE SHINING or that dude who just wanted to make sure I’ve earned the right to wear a RICK & MORTY t-shirt and that I’m not wearing it for the wrong purposes (it turns out that I didn’t). There is a message in MOTHER! but that message is conveyed with all the grace of someone whose idea of charades is to give you the finger with one hand while making that “c’mon, c’mon” gesture with the other. Interpretations as varied as nuclear catastrophe, a stealth biblical history and even the perils of fame were used by various critics and observers to explain away the strange nuances of MOTHER!. But much like the films of David Lynch or even Louis Malle’s BLACK MOON, MOTHER! is far more enjoyable if its surreal structure and imagery is taken at face value. Granted, this can be difficult considering that unlike Lynch or Malle, Darren Aronofsky’s dreamy, pointed images drip with so much purpose you can’t sit back and enjoy the sight of an angry mob accidentally breaking the neck of the dancing, Ooga-Chocka baby from ALLY McBEAL (was the CGI purposefully that bad in order to neuter the queasy impact of that scene?) without thinking it has something to do with the goddamned Giving Tree or something. In fact, you’ll never be able to separate the images from their perceived meaning because<i> </i>MOTHER! is nothing more than an object lesson. Luckily, it’s also an object lesson whose point is so muddled and opaque you’ll never really be certain what any of it means (unless you listen to Aronofsky’s interpretation, which, we will get to in a moment). Sure, you’ll have a theory of what the moral of the story may be, but then Kristen Wiig will suddenly appear on screen, shoot several prone bodies in the head before succumbing to an explosion and you’ll start to wonder if you should even care.</div>
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Speaking of Kirsten Wiig, is MOTHER! supposed to be a comedy? Because I was laughing pretty consistently throughout its two hour running time. To start with, an exclamation point is present in the title. That’s usually a film’s way of letting you know that a romp is waiting just ahead so you better fasten your laughing belts because this is going to be one hilarious ride (Notice to any publicist or P.R. person who may be reading this review: Please make this the pull quote)! Additionally, MOTHER! feels like a gritty, almost pretentious reboot of WHAT ABOUT BOB?, MADHOUSE and other basic cable mainstays from the '90s about unwanted houseguests. Basically, Jennifer Lawrence’s unnamed character is the Dr. Leo Marvin of the film. An uptight voice of reason whose frequent pleas to be left alone are ignored by her oblivious, unnamed spouse -- Javier Bardem -- who functions as this film’s equivalent to Fay Marvin. The Bob Wiley in MOTHER! is everybody who strolls into and quickly plants their ass in the sprawling Lawrence/Bardem estate. There’s Ed Harris as a strange old man who carries around a black-and-white snap-shot of Bardem (whose character is apparently a popular, high-profile poet. Which is probably the most unbelievable element found in MOTHER!) that looks like some highly goofy amalgam of an author’s photo, a high school yearbook portrait and a novelty Olde Tyme photograph from an amusement park. There’s Harris’ wife Michelle Pfeiffer, who drunkenly insults Lawrence, throws Lawrence’s wet laundry on the ground of her cellar for no explained reason and casually fucks an enfeebled, dying Harris in the middle of the day in the couple’s living room. There’s even Harris and Pfeiffer’s horrible sons who show up to the house uninvited just to beat each other to death over the contents of their dying father’s will in front of everybody. These guests, as well as the many guests that show up throughout MOTHER!, are all depicted as unstable, self-centered monsters and yet they all manage to delight Bardem even though many of them wander into their house and piss on the floor shortly before sitting on the couple’s kitchen sink until it comes crashing to the ground. Further strengthening the WHAT ABOUT BOB? connection is the fact that both films are about high-strung rich people learning about the joys/horrors of life through free-spirited poor people, both delight in putting its tightly wound leads through a series of unending humiliations and both end with the destruction of an ornate summer home. The only real difference is that MOTHER! is far more nihilistic and absurd. The reassuring face of Bill Murray is not on hand to remind us that everything is going to be ok. Instead, people are going to come into your house, kill your baby and then paint the walls of your living room in a misguided attempt at repentance. Sure it’s dark, but if you’re not laughing at that, you’re just not laughing.</div>
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Apart from being funny there is, as I noted earlier, a message. As indecipherable as the movie can be, it’s still hard not to draw your own conclusions. Maybe you were like me and assumed that MOTHER! was a feminist treatise. Maybe you thought Lawrence’s cipher-like performance and her frequent claustrophobic close-ups were Aronofsky’s way of uncomfortably placing the viewer in Lawrence’s shoes, a means to experience the constant aggravations, threats and indignities she faces on an hourly basis. Perhaps because Lawrence can’t have a single interaction without another character ignoring or treating her with a combination of hostility and condescension, you assumed MOTHER! was addressing the difficulties women face in the workplace or the world at large. Conceivably, you may have gathered that the third act about the warring cult-like factions that take over Bardem and Lawrence’s home is noting how organized religion alternately demonizes and marginalizes women. Mayhap you were struck by Bardem’s character, an unctuous cad who is never impressed by her accomplishments, finds himself marrying increasingly younger women, is described by Lawrence as someone who only “loves the way [Lawrence] loves him” and most tellingly, rips Lawrence’s heart out in the finale. And I mean that literally. If that was your interpretation, let me be the first to give you enthusiastic thumbs up, kiss you gently on the forehead and then whisper softly in your ear, “’Try again, you dunce. You fucking dunce.” Surprise! MOTHER! has nothing to do with anything I mentioned above. According to Aronofsky, MOTHER! is actually about climate change. Lawrence is an embattled Mother Earth protecting her home from careless outsiders, Bardem is a vain, self-involved God, while Harris, Pfeiffer, Wiig and the rest are supposed to be you and me: petty, self-destructive idiots stomping around on our giant carbon footprints, stinking everything up with our Burger King farts. Knowing this particular factoid ruins MOTHER!. Significantly. It not only removes the mystery behind the film, the clumsy allegory cheapens MOTHER! and places it alongside the same shame-based, hard sell approach to environmentalism as CAPTAIN PLANET and films like THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. Realizing this is akin to the realization that every movie Brad Bird directed at Pixar was actually the same “Highlights for Children” spin on <i>The Fountainhead</i>. It’s so disappointing. Additionally, the environmental theme doesn’t clear up many of the film’s elements. It doesn’t explain what that yellow Alka-Seltzer-like substance is that Lawrence keeps taking every time she gets stressed out. It never really makes it clear what earth is supposed to represent (Is earth supposed to be Lawrence’s house? Or her baby? Both? Lawrence herself?). Nor does it explain what that third act hot take on religious fanaticism has to do with climate change or why religion has to play a role in this. If Aronofsky is going to wallow in loaded GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER level preachiness, why couldn’t Bardem’s character symbolize corporate greed or political non-action? Why is God getting dragged into this? I wish I could go back to those heady moments when I thought Aronofsky was telling me to stop being mean to ladies and that terrorism is bad.</div>
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And yet, even though Aronofsky ruined the experience of his own movie for me, I still can’t hate something this strange and upsetting. The kind of strange and upsetting you could only get on a twelfth generation VHS bootleg of an unsubtitled print of some Japanese movie from the '70s where yakuza members are murdering each other in a Technicolor chicken coop (more people need to see Hideo Gosha’s VIOLENT STREETS). MOTHER! somehow manages to out-weird Aronofsky’s NOAH and that had a rock monster with the voice of Nick Nolte and Ray Winstone as a guy who bit the heads off of lizards and carried a flaming sword. It’s also, thanks to DP Matthew Libatique, a beautifully shot movie with affecting performances. And considering the Rorschach Test qualities of MOTHER!, nobody will experience the film in the same way. You might be amused, enraged or horrified, but you’ll never be bored. MOTHER! is a flawed film. It’s a self-indulgent film. More to the point, it’s probably not a good film. It is however, the most unforgettable film you will ever experience and isn’t that what really matters?</div>
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Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-41443062689553024952017-08-14T03:33:00.000-04:002017-08-14T03:33:32.985-04:00Film Review: VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS by Mike Sullivan<div class="p1">
I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong about this. Not just because I sense this theory doesn’t apply to Europe, but also because I could be misreading his reception in the U.S. Is it no longer cool to like Luc Besson? I ask because I’m pretty sure it’s no longer cool to like Luc Besson. Again, I could be wrong but I get the feeling that general audiences and even the more serious film-goers who would read this blog kind of just roll their eyes and yawn at the thought of a Besson movie. Why wasn’t the crazed, genre-defying LUCY a bigger hit or, at the very least, a cult hit? Two years after it was released, the film waivers somewhere in-between forgotten and loathed, overshadowed by the similarly crazed but inferior JOHN WICK. With every passing moment hits like LA FEMME NIKITA, THE FIFTH ELEMENT and the achingly French LEON: THE PROFESSIONAL slowly loosen whatever grip they had on the pop-cultural zeitgeist. Ridley Scott -- another purely visual filmmaker -- carries more weight than Besson does these days and that’s unfair. Unlike Scott, there’s no pretense to what Besson does. More importantly, Besson has never made a boring movie. He’s made bad movies. Several of them. Who remembers ANGEL-A? Or ARTHUR AND THE INVISIBLES? Or that Joan of Arc movie where Dustin Hoffman plays the voice of god? But as bad as these movies were, they were never boring. VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS is the closest Besson has come to making a film that is both bad and boring. Mind you, it never quite gets there but, fuckitty fuck, does it come close.</div>
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The film opens on an appropriately bewildering note as we’re thrown into an alien landscape without a pre-credits scroll or a voiceover to hold our tiny hands and reassure us that everything is OK. Blue, sylph-like aliens with tall willowy bodies happily go through their inexplicable daily routines as they wander in and out of seashell houses. Throughout this sequence, these otherworldly creatures rub luminescent pearls into their faces and feed those same pearls to friendly, Muppet-y, aardvark beasts that puff up and shit crystal-like objects into a well. Like the Pierre Christin/Jean-Claude Mézières comic on which this movie is based, it’s all very appealing in its Euro, Jean Girard (Moebius) inspired visuals. VALERIAN also has confidence that you’ll either figure out what’s happening on screen or simply adjust to the alien goings-on. Admittedly, the look of the aliens seems to be cribbed from those from AVATAR. But unlike James Cameron’s shrug-inducing creations, there’s a dreamy, almost creepy quality to these aliens. Like a Pixar project filtered through the surreal sensibilities of Alejandro Jodorowsky, it’s hard not to get your hopes up throughout these gently crazy moments. Of course, it’s only moments later when those hopes come crashing to the ground. As it turns out, these aliens appear to exist only in the dreams of Valerian (Dane DeHaan), a mopey secret agent/astronaut.</div>
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There’s a lot of odd casting decisions in VALERIAN: Herbie Hancock shows up in a surprisingly large role as earth’s defense minister, Rutger Hauer is cast as the president of earth, Ethan Hawke appears in a glorified cameo as Rihanna’s oily pimp, Olivier Megaton plays the sci-fi equivalent to a Wal-Mart greeter. Like Richard Kelly’s SOUTHLAND TALES, Besson peppers Valerian with non-actors and intentionally casts performers in roles they’re ill-suited to play. It’s an interesting experiment but like the casting in SOUTHLAND TALES, it’s an experiment that always doesn’t work. And the reason it doesn’t always work is because the camera is almost always focused on DeHaan and Cara Delevingne -- as Valerian and Laureline, respectively. Individually, they’re terrible, but together they suggest what would happen if texter/murderer Michelle Carter had been cast in dual roles in some kind of sci-fi infused Klumps tour de force. When we first see the duo they’re trading flirty exposition in a bored, disaffected way. DeHaan and Delevingne’s performance is reminiscent of Monica Vitti’s decision to play her titular character as a drunk, faintly annoyed socialite in Joseph Losey’s underrated MODESTY BLAISE. Unfortunately, in DeHaan and Delevingne’s hands, disaffected and bored reads as wooden and blank. They also look so much alike, I thought Valerian and Laureline were supposed to be incestuous fraternal twins, which is, ironically, a plot development that would have made Valerian a lot more interesting.</div>
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Still, Besson manages to briefly distract attention away from DeHaan and Delevingne’s deadening performances by introducing a set-piece so insane and so knowingly, beautifully convoluted that you’ll nearly forgive the film for the many flaws that will be forthcoming in the next two-and-a-half hours. For muddled reasons that will be kind of explained later, DeHaan and Delevingne pose as tourists in order to retrieve one of the Muppet-y aardvark beasts from the prologue at something resembling a decaying flea-market/refugee-camp on a very Tattooine-ish planet. What makes this sequence incredible is the fact that the flea-market exists in another dimension and all of its customers are required to wear a special VR Helmet in order to visit it. Throughout these moments Besson juxtaposes footage of DeHaan and Delevingne attempting to navigate through a separate dimension, in which everything seems to exist within one giant alien bazaar, while they clumsily stumble into various unseen obstacles in their own dimension. Although, flashy and CGI driven, there’s a sense of playful invention throughout this sequence the rest of the movie mostly lacks. Once they acquire the aardvark thing and escort it back to the titular City of a Thousand Planets (a/k/a Space Station Alpha), Valerian morphs into something inert and conventional.</div>
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It’s strange that Valerian falls apart the moment they arrive aboard Alpha, especially considering this is the exact moment when the film should be gaining even more momentum. If Alpha is the home to thousands of different alien species, why does this film world suddenly seem so narrow? Probably because this is the exact moment when Valerian drops its surreal set pieces and the plot kicks in. Valerian and Laureline are tasked with protecting Clive Owen as a space commander and not-so-secret badguy whose evil intentions Besson telegraphs almost immediately. If it isn’t obvious when Owen is rude to Herbie Hancock for no particular reason, it will be when it’s revealed he has a private army of killer robots that only listen to him. At any rate, the aardvark thing that Valerian and Laureline retrieved from the Phantom Zone garage sale holds the key to destroying a perceived threat that’s hiding in the center of Alpha. However considering just how transparently oily Owen’s character is, it’s easy to figure out that not everything is as it seems. As the story becomes more mechanical and the weirdness goes on an extended intermission, everything bad about Valerian is magnified. Dialogue, never Besson’s strong suit, is atrocious. The phrase, “We’ve got company”, may or may not have been uttered in this movie but it feels like that was the only thing the characters ever said. The dialogue carries the generic, unmemorable, fuck-it-there’s-going-to-be-a-laser-here-so who-really-gives-a-shit qualities of STAR WARS knock-offs and, let’s face it, STAR WARS itself. Making matters more unbearable is the fact that this bad dialogue is mumbled out indifferently by DeHaan and Delevingne who, again, are so sorely miscast in this movie. In a just world, they would have been models who made one ironic cameo appearance in a Larry Clark movie as junkies ten years ago before being mostly remembered for a mildly controversial VMA Awards scuffle in 2002. Maybe Marilyn Manson threw a phone at one of them or something. My point is, they both have the generic qualities of someone a decade ago whose fame was defined by the fact that they were hot enough for Wilmer Valderama to fuck and discard. Even worse, the film’s points about multi-culturism and the environment are heavy-handed but also unfocused and secondary. It’s like being lectured by someone about global warming who keeps forgetting what their point was and, instead, starts talking about their favorite episodes of FARSCAPE.</div>
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But sandwiched between these elements and way too many “funny” bits in which a trio of sleazy, alien informants speak in that sing-songy way Huey, Dewey and Louie completed each other’s sentences are genuinely amazing moments. At the end of the second act, the film diverges briefly from its storyline as Valerian and Laureline separate briefly. Laureline finds herself held captive by Ogres after she was snagged by fishing lure made specifically for tricking humans. Valerian is forced into enlisting the help of shape-shifting stripper (Rihanna) in order to rescue Laureline. For just a brief moment the anything goes craziness of THE FIFTH ELEMENT returns with a slapstick fight scene, Delevingne decked out in a strange ceremonial outfit that at first glance seems gratuitous but reveals a more practical, sinister purpose and a show-stopping music number in which Rihanna (who is fun, charming and underused) morphs into every possible stripper persona in a manner of seconds. But once this tangent ends, VALERIAN goes back to trying the audience’s patience for the remainder of its overlong running time. </div>
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VALERIAN is not a successful movie. It’s uneven and, at times, surprisingly predictable. But, it’s not the trainwreck Rotten Tomatoes would lead you to believe. With that said, VALERIAN is still a disappointment. It’s probably one of the rare films that’s improved if you go to the bathroom a lot in movie theatres because you’ll miss a big chunk of the dialogue.</div>
Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-36836158171833790762017-07-16T02:13:00.000-04:002017-07-16T02:13:16.750-04:00Film Review: TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT by Mike Sullivan<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If Megan Fox is remembered nowadays, it’s less for her star-making role in the first TRANSFORMERS movie and more for what caused her to lose that star-making role. In a 2011 issue of the UK fashion magazine <i>Wonderland</i>, Fox compared Michael Bay to Hitler and the response was immediate. Fox was let go from the franchise and in her stead, a random Victoria’s Secret model was tasked with bending over in front of a green screen until the batteries in the digital camera died or she got too old. Fox was roundly mocked and criticized for the Hitler comparison, but maybe her comment was taken too literally. Maybe she was comparing Bay to Hitler in the sense that both men are really terrible artists? Maybe she caught a glimpse of the harrowing schizophrenia simulator that was TRANSFORMERS and maybe its incomprehensible parade of crumpled, shattered metal crumpling and shattering other shattered and crumpled metal reminded Fox of Hitler’s -<span class="s1">-</span> as one German art critic noted <span class="s1">-</span>- “profound uninterest in people?” But whereas Hitler’s landscapes could be considered “good” if your definition of good is “that print of Humphrey Bogart playing poker with Marilyn Monroe will really class up my 1996 cigar bar<span class="s1">,</span>” any given TRANSFORMERS movie could be replaced with three hours’ worth of Go Army commercials edited around still shots of random human asses and footage of that dancing NFL robot and barely anyone would notice or care. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, if taken within this specific criterion, Fox’s comparison doesn’t work. Hitler’s blandly competent craftsmanship recedes from your memory seconds after you’ve seen it. Memories of Bay’s movies remain in the way an ACL injury never really goes away. The pain can only flatten out until day to day life is somewhat manageable. No, Bay isn’t as bad as Hitler. He’s worse. And while we’re on the subject, he’s no Charles Manson either ("Garbage Dump" is a great song!)<span class="s1">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It would be easy to say that the prologue to TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT is the worst moment you’ll find in the film’s nearly three hour running time. But it would also be untrue. After all, how do you qualify the worst moment in something that’s like a three hour ice cream headache crossed with a seizure? It’s unbearable until it ends. Opening with a sequence resembling the panicked, oxygen starved final thoughts of a Warhammer fanatic the moment before it sinks in that this is the way his family will find his body when they open the hallway closet, TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT takes the Arthurian mythos to a place that only Bay can take them. By which I mean it resembles a Superbowl ad for pewter dragons and sweat. Knights are fighting big screaming guys in bondage gear who could be anything from Vikings to those guys that got high off of silver chrome spray paint in FURY ROAD. It’s up to Stanley Tucci to hide behind a pile of dog hair and spirit gum as Merlin and attempt to convince a medieval transformer to save the knights by transforming into, I don’t know, a cathedral? DaVinci’s helicopter? What does a medieval transformer transmorph into anyway? The door Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to? Plague Boils? At any rate, whatever it was that Tucci was trying to do involves a two-headed robot dragon and an ornate staff that either holds the key to saving earth and destroying the Transformers' home planet or holds the key to destroying earth and saving the Transformers' home planet. It’s one of those or possibly something entirely different. It’s just that hard to tell because the story and plot are sloppy even for a Bay movie. Unlike the previous scripts which seem to have been dictated by a screaming seven-year-old as he repeatedly steps on the clumps of plastic that used to be his action figures, the series has matured and now seems to be written by that guy on COPS who doesn’t know how the angel dust got on his lap because he was sleeping at the time and someone must have dropped it on his lap and that isn’t angel dust anyway. TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT still seems to be making it up as it goes along but the childlike innocence has been replaced with the surreal, ‘Am-I-being-detained’-style yarn-spinning of a drunk idiot that has priors and can’t go to jail again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After the prologue we’re introduced to group of modern day Little Rascals, each with a single defining personality trait. For the amount of time Bay spends on developing these characters and their adventures in the ruins of Chicago, you would think these deeply unappealing pre-teens will play a major role in the movie. But, no, they don’t. But neither does the scrappy orphan (Isabela Moner) they meet and her friend -<span class="s1">-</span> a giant robot yurt she apparently lives in. No, in spite of the fact that all of these characters had prominent roles in all of the promotional material, the real star is just moments away from claiming the movie as his own. Suddenly and without warning Mark Wahlberg will arrive, tearing ass in in his post-apocalyptic muscle car! Yeaaah! And so does Bumble-Bee (a yellow Transformer that speaks entirely in Wacky Morning DJ soundboard clips) who blows and up and dies but then doesn’t! Also, there’s a Anti-Transformers task force that never really does anything and suddenly Mark Wahlberg is in the desert! A Chicago desert? A Chicago desert junk yard? Yes! Guess what? Wahlberg, Moner, several baby robot dinosaurs live there! Steve Buscemi is the voice of a traveling robot scrap salesman who visits the junkyard and sells robots the severed heads of other robots. The earth is growing horns! Uh-Oh! Optimus Prime is in outer space and a little fairy (that is bad but floats) robot hypnotizes him into coming to earth to destroy it. Because of horns. Many film hours later Optimus finally visits earth to destroy it but Bumblebee falls down and talks words that aren’t film clips and hyptotism stops. Seconds after he arrives. A CLOCK KLLED HITLER!!!! Mark Wahlberg’s name is Cade and medallion with spider legs has dubbed him Sir Cade! Sir Cade also doesn’t like a tight dress professor (Laura Haddock) but then he rides around in a submarine until he does. The tight dress professor doesn’t believe in King Arthur but believes Mark Wahlberg is chesty and pretty without shirt. But only on submarine! Movey ends at Stone Henge were bang bnag plane happens outer space robort daeth. All over! Tony, Tony, Tony. Hale! He aslo in movie!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Being that THE LAST KNIGHT is "Metal Machine Music" adapted into a movie made specifically for babies born wearing a neon green trucker hat with the word Rage silk-screened across it, the preceding paragraph can only hint at how incoherent, headache inducing and so very fucking stupid the film is. Stupid enough to defy a simple plot synopsis. Stupider than even the stupid previous TRANSFORMERS movie and that had a scene where a furious man pointed to his face and called it “a warrant<span class="s1">.</span>” So stupid it can’t even tell its stupid story about an average, blue collar pork roast that sounds like it’s perpetually winded (Wahlberg) and its attempts to stop an armada of giant robots from destroying the earth in a simple manner. Yet, as stupid as this film is, it’s not fun. And believe me, these films should be fun. At one point, Transformers are shown fighting Nazis, at another a robot robbed a bank and went to robot jail! Anthony Hopkins says the word bitchin’ to his crazed robot butler that strangles people for no reason as they drive recklessly through the streets of London. For fuck’s sake, most of the original cast from BARTON FINK either appears as robots or men who play volleyball with robots (a returning John Turturro plays volleyball with a robot. Off-screen, unfortunately). Why isn’t this fun? Mainly because this fun is filtered through something that looks like an air horn, a strobe light and a half-empty can of Monster finally decided to undertake that creative collaboration they always talked about. It’s not just the cheap looking but undoubtedly price-y explosion of ones and zeros that surround the film like the dust cloud around Pig Pen nor is it the interchangeable selection of oversized metal shard things that either sound like the most regressive “that’s what I’m talkin’ about”, Budweiser commercial from 2001-ready, dated black stereotype or John Goodman that make this movie so unbearable. It’s not even the frenetic editing that practically renders everything into monochromatic blur of shouts and clanks or even fact that the ending looks like a soft reboot of last year’s equally excruciating INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE. It’s the fact that it thinks it’s a comedy that makes it so punishing. With a cast larger than three Robert Altman movies combined, THE LAST KNIGHT allows every actor in the film to just riff or workshop their tight five. Which, granted, is not explicitly terrible when someone like Stanley Tucci is doing it but nearly unwatchable when Wahlberg is ‘yes and-ing’ in his pissy, out of breath, ‘why-did-you-punch-me-in-the-stomach-and-then-yell-action’ cadence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like anything that’s terrible but inescapable, over the next several years the TRANSFORMERS series will go on to attract ironic, nostalgic appreciation, only to eventually give way to misguided critical reassessments. Shake your head all you want and mouth the word no, but the Chuck Klostermans of the future are coming and they’re bringing their think pieces with him. In fact, it’s already happening. The New Yorker qualified their negative review of THE LAST KNIGHT by dubbing Bay an, “experimental filmmaker of pure sensation</span><span class="s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">” I could see the discursive, excessive to the point of parody level of commercialism and generally incompetent qualities of Bay’s movies being mistaken for artfulness much in the same way that the unintentionally campy, melodramatic qualities of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray’s films were misconstrued as sly meta-commentary. Never forget Bay is not an experimental filmmaker. Michael Bay isn’t Man Ray. He’s not Kenneth Anger. He’s your Five Finger Death Punch loving neighbor who paralyzed himself by diving head first into a Slip ‘N Slide and spends most of his time editing supercuts of boobs jiggling in slow motion for his YouTube channel.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div>
Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-54528564194676061792017-06-27T02:53:00.000-04:002017-06-27T02:53:39.569-04:00Film Review: THE MUMMY by Mike SullivanMaybe 30 years from now people will stumble upon this review and laugh. Not because they happen to love hacky, easy jabs at Tom Cruise but because it got everything wrong. “Pfft! What a fuggshettity ghost-brain,” some man will cuss in future-speak while wearing his ‘I’m Thinking’ t-shirt memorializing one of the most iconic Cruise lines from THE MUMMY. “I guess people back then couldn’t comprehend the beauty of an Alex Kurtzman film,” the man will mutter as he places a porcelain maquette recreating that memorable scene of Cruise being forced against his will by Universal Executives into pretending to enjoy being in the same room with co-star Annabelle Wallis in his display case of Dark Universe memorabilia. Maybe this could be like a Coen Brothers movie and we won’t ‘get it’ until five years from now. Maybe I’m wrong and Universal Studios’ misguided attempt to beat Marvel Studios at their own game won’t end prematurely and remembered only by people who write listicles about failed movie franchises. But there’s just something doomed about that Dark Universe logo. The fact that it’s incorporated into the Universal Studios logo with the kind of overblown pageantry that’s reserved for something established, familiar and well-liked places it somewhere in the realm of off-putting and unearned. It’s saying, “Hey, here’s that thing you love” with the misplaced confidence of your Mom’s dorky boyfriend who keeps buying you puzzles of Pink Floyd album covers because the only thing he remembers about you is that you ‘like music’. Even if it preceded a good or simply solid movie, the prematurity of the Dark Universe logo would smack of unchecked hubris and understand, THE MUMMY is neither good nor simply solid. In fact it looks unusual playing inside an actual theatre and not within its natural habitat: following a marathon of FRANKLIN & BASH episodes in the wee hours of the morning on TNT. THE MUMMY isn’t the cornerstone on which cinematic universes are based. It’s the cornerstone on which an ironic GAME OF THRONES throne entirely constructed out of flea-market VHS tapes is based.<br />
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Deceptively, THE MUMMY starts out well enough with an origin of its titular character Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella). The backstory about an Egyptian Princess whose thirst for power leads her into making a pact with Set -- the god of storms and squalls -- only to find herself buried alive in a sarcophagus filled with mercury, is basically <i>de rigueur</i> for modern Mummy movies. But what separates this from the pack is its visceral qualities. The throat of an infant is slashed early on and even though we don’t actually see it, we do get a queasy sound effect of the newborn’s death rattle. Additionally, Boutella’s eerie, feral presence in these scenes is just fun to watch. In fact, every scene she’s in is entertaining. Whether manipulating those her around her in order to escape from Dr. Jekyll (Russell Crowe)’s secret lab or straddling Cruise at knifepoint on top of a mausoleum tomb, Boutella is the one reason you may want to half-watch this as you perform household chores when it finally arrives on basic cable a few years from now. But Boutella’s presence raises expectations in a way the filmmakers can’t help but betray. Even though Boutella’s Mummy is the most interesting character on screen, she is, for whatever reason, not the focus of THE MUMMY. That honor instead goes to Cruise.<br />
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Rumor has it that the original script for THE MUMMY gave equal screentime to Cruise and Boutella’s characters. It also revolved around a far more interesting idea involving a team of Navy SEALS fighting mummies in Iraq. But when Cruise came on board, he commissioned his screenwriting cronies Dylan Kussman and Christopher Quarrie to beef up his part and add a subplot about his character becoming possessed by Set. Reportedly, Cruise also oversaw the editing and, more or less, co-directed the film with Kurtzman. If true, this explains why THE MUMMY is a failure but it doesn’t explain why Cruise looks so disengaged from the material. It’s not a performance as much as it is a begrudging favor and this is strange because it’s nothing more than a vanity project thinly disguised as a franchise tentpole. Not only does Cruise receive God-like powers at one point, he’s so funny and sexy that corpses spring to life just to make out with him. But apart from Cruise’s clear yet befuddling indifference, he’s terrible at playing any character that isn’t a muted, less terrifying version of himself. Ethan Hunt is Cruise minus the perceived skeletons. You don’t watch MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE and wonder if Hunt laughed when someone sort of like David Miscavige (but for legal purposes, isn’t) told him an embarrassing anecdote about the time he accidentally farted in front of that woman he handcuffed to the hotel sink and eventually starved to death for being a “suppressive person.” You don’t assume that when Jack Reacher is alone he screams into a pillow until thoughts of that swarthy key grip on the set of EDGE OF TOMORROW step outside of his poor ungay penis and leave it alone for the moment. Cruise’s Nick Morton is not a typical heroic Cruise surrogate, he’s a scumbag with a heart of gold. If the film were made a few decades earlier, the character would have been played by Bill Murray or Harrison Ford in full-on ‘can-we-get-the-fucking-shot-already-I-have-diarrhea-and-I-just-want-to-sit-in-the-dark-in-my-fucking-hotel-room’ angry grandpa mode. But considering that Tom Cruise can’t play anything besides a grim-dark variation on Tony Robbins, he has no idea what to do with this character. Cruise’s performance doesn’t suggest someone who won a Burger King sweepstakes to play a role in an upcoming Dark Universe movie because it suggests someone who won a Burger King sweepstakes to play a role in an upcoming Dark Universe movie but, through some scheduling mishap, could only shoot their scenes minutes after surgery when the anesthesia still hasn’t worn off. Disoriented and annoyed, Cruise’s Nick Morton is an indifferent shrug of a character who has zero chemistry with everyone on screen. Particularly Wallis, with whom he’s supposed to share a will they/won’t they vibe with even though everything about their forced coupling screams “please don’t.” He’s dead-eyed and oily, she’s a lifeless, immovable object and whenever they’re together it’s like watching a burnt-out Amway salesman make half-hearted love to a mid-century boat figurehead.<br />
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To be fair, Cruise isn’t entirely to blame for THE MUMMY. Tonally awkward, the film can’t make-up its mind about whether it wants to be a horror movie or a light and breezy, tongue-in-cheek action movie. Premature ejaculation jokes happen right in the middle of scenes where a zombified Jake Johnson starts stabbing everything in sight, including Courtney B. Vance in a thankless glorified cameo -- incidentally, while we’re on the subject of Jake Johnson’s pointless character: He gets possessed, murders a few people, dies and then his ghost strong-arms Cruise into being sacrificed by Ahmanet? Why exactly does Cruise utilize his newly acquired God-like abilities to bring this weasel-y asshole back to life at the film’s end? Did test audiences respond to Johnson’s comedy-like, quasi-quips that much? Additionally, it’s anti-climactic. The final showdown between Cruise and Boutella ends with a fight that feels like the cinematic equivalent to getting dumped via text. Even worse, THE MUMMY is a convoluted mess simply because of all of the spur of the moment world-building it’s forced to perform. Never mind that the Marvel movies didn’t get mired in their Moebius strip, every-movie-feels-like-the-second-part-of-a trilogy-that-will-never-end story structure until THE AVENGERS, yet in THE MUMMY what little momentum this film has built up grinds to a halt the moment we take a detour into Dr. Jekyll’s lab. Serving as this cinematic universe’s Nick Fury, Crowe’s Dr. Jekyll is a walking info dump whose only purpose is exposition. Not just for this shitty movie but for movies that haven’t even happened yet. Specifically that nebulous Monstervengers film where Cruise, Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem and The Rock team up to fight -- I don’t know -- The Phantom of the Opera, Fu Manchu and Sara Karloff? I guess? I miss the days when potential franchises weren’t really expensive TV pilots.<br />
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Considering the pathological need studios have for extended cinematic universes, I suppose the idea of a Universal Horror-verse isn’t a bad idea if we must have one, I guess. It’s just a bad idea to follow the Marvel Studios model this closely. A horror concept doesn’t work if it’s forced to conform to the mechanics of a superhero movie. Even still, THE MUMMY wants to be a Marvel Studios movie in the worst way but the differences between these franchises are glaringly obvious, right down to the in-jokes and Easter eggs. But whereas the sight of Klaw or Howard the Duck will cause a theater to echo with the dull, nerdy thud of ribs getting elbowed, THE MUMMY’s in-jokes err on the side of duh. Hey, there’s the severed hand of the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Dracula’s skull and that golden book thing from the Brendan Fraser Mummy. What’s that? You didn’t even notice it? Yeah, nobody did. Most likely because nobody really wanted to see this movie. I feel like the only people who sat through this were those who couldn’t get into that sold out screening of WONDER WOMAN or families who got the times wrong for CARS 3 and didn’t want to wait an hour. Seeing this is about as good as not seeing it because you won’t remember a single moment from THE MUMMY. Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-24743910628877895962017-06-09T03:49:00.000-04:002017-06-09T03:49:27.467-04:00Film Review: PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES by Mike SullivanWhat happened to Johnny Depp? Wasn’t there a time when he was more than a steampunk scarecrow made out of black eyeliner and whatever was found in the dumpster behind Urban Outfitters? Didn’t he used to be cool? In spite of the fact that Johnny Depp’s public image has morphed into that of a petty, vain, abusive asshole who allegedly keeps a sound engineer on retainer because he’s too lazy to memorize his dialogue (reportedly, Depp’s dialogue is fed to him via an earpiece he wears on set), prevailing logic would dictate that he was cool at one time. Very cool. In fact, as late as THE LONE RANGER, I was still insisting he was cool. It wasn’t until his bizarre portrayal of Whitey Bulger as Nosferatu in Fonzie drag in BLACK MASS that I finally realized that Depp isn’t just currently uncool, he was always uncool.<br />
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In retrospect, the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN series was one of the worst things that could have ever happened to Depp in that it raised his profile, revealed his one-note tics and made them so goddamned inescapable. Even before PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, Depp played almost every role like a precocious theater kid who wings you with his bamboo cane in the halls of The San Diego Comic Con because he got way too into his Charlie Chaplin cosplay. The main difference is that he was doing it in disposable, quietly-released-in-February fluff like DON JUAN DeMARCO, CHOCOLAT and BENNY & JOON. Critically acclaimed films like ED WOOD, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and EDWARD SCISSORHANDS obfuscated his more commercial endeavors and helped maintain his cred as a cultish, arthouse fixture. Even if one or two of those cultish, arthouse fixtures carried the sort of safe, mall-punk qualities of a Hot Topic hoodie. Depp was a B-list leading man but an A-list character actor, he was Crispin Glover minus all of that Andy Kaufman-esque face kickery: quirky, but not too weird for your mother. Depp carried the vibe of an indie minded Hollywood outsider but only because we were getting him in measured doses. Of course, after the first PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN film, the world started mainlining him and it wasn’t long before all of us were hunched over, grinding our teeth and left with the bitter realization that we all got burned on this deal.<br />
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Yet, in spite of the fact that I carry almost no respect for the infinity scarf wrapped mummy formally known as Johnny Depp, I can’t help but keep up with his career. A misplaced sense of nostalgia for films like DEAD MAN have left me dopesick waiting for the next fresh hit of buzzy, warm, mannered quirkiness. Who knows, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES could be the right kind of summer garbage that could help us all relive that massive, toe-curling high? Right? Well, no. I should have known from the trailers that DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES was a waste of time. Seeing a 54-year-old Depp pretend to be drunk in a Rasta wig yet again is like watching a 53-year-old Bob Denver slip back into his red polo shirt just to make an ironic appearance on an episode of ALF. There’s a sense of overwhelming sadness behind it. Imagine someone begrudgingly repeating that scene from STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. where the house falls around Buster Keaton for fourteen years. Now imagine someone doing it because they need the money to buy 70 custom Les Paul guitars and a giant red, white and blue cannon to fire the ashes of every dead writer that appeared in Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism. It ceases to be sad and morphs into infuriating. And understand, DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES is infuriating. Like an estranged, unloved family member who shows up uninvited at your birthday party but still manages to look bored and annoyed, DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES feels like it’s doing you a favor simply by being there even though you haven’t really thought about the franchise since 2007. Yet in addition to DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES’ clear disinterest and misplaced sense of obligation to exist, it’s also impossible to follow. Granted, this isn’t exactly a new observation. This complaint has plagued the franchise since the beginning. However, I’m not sure if these movies are hard to follow because they’re convoluted or if it’s because PIRATES is so boring it’s difficult to pay attention to whatever bullshit is unfurling on screen. Either way, I have no clue what’s happening in DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES.<br />
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One of the first few images we see is Orlando Bloom and he has barnacles all over his face. He is a ghost? I think? It’s up to his sylph-like, blank slate, walking Bop Magazine pin-up of a son (GODS OF EGYPT non-entity Brenton Thwaites) to reverse his ghostiness with a trident that doesn’t exist but does? I guess? I don’t know. From there Jack Sparrow trades his magic compass for rum and this somehow allows an undead Javier Bardem to leave the confines of a Bermuda Triangle-like purgatory to kill Jack Sparrow and also track down the trident that doesn’t exist but does. For some kind of a reason. I’m assuming. Nothing is clear nor does it matter. Oh, and in case you had a burning desire to understand Jack Sparrow’s relationship with a character we’ve never met before, we get an overlong origin sequence needlessly explaining the rivalry between himself and Bardem. Long ago when Jack was just a hastily generated CGI bobblehead with lopsided, weirdly proportioned facial features, he tricked Bardem into steering his pirate ship into a bunch of rocks, causing him and his crew to explode into a series of poorly rendered ones and zeros. Other things happen too. For example, a sassy, cleavage lady (Kaya Scodelario) is nearly executed for loving science but learns her father (Geoffrey Rush) has an ornate peg-leg, Paul McCartney appears in a fleeting cameo but isn’t recognizable or funny, penises are alluded to as a reminder that some of us have handled them and it is hilarious. Eventually it all ends with confusingly written sequence that appears to be the end result of an extensive reshoot (Bardem’s character suddenly has the ability to possess the living? Why is this the first time he’s taking advantage of this power?) on a set that looks like a churro stand, Snow White’s Scary Adventure and somebody’s angry, red-faced mother nearly slapping a crying nine-year-old are in danger of sneaking into frame. In other words, it’s a mess filled with way too many characters, a surfeit of meandering action sequences and far too many undeveloped storylines that trail off into nothing. DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES is essentially just out of sequence footage of two different, late period Robert Altman movies edited into stock footage of exploding pirate ships. Why is something that’s based on a dark ride where things are never more complicated than the sight of pirates getting outsmarted by a dog insist on only the most impenetrable, befuddling world-building and plotting?<br />
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When Depp has finally shuffled off this mortal coil (presumably with his personal sound engineer in tow, who will be buried alive right next to him in his spirally, Tim Burton designed tomb in order to accommodate an eternity of all of those ALICE IN WONDERLAND and PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN sequels he’ll be making in hell), it’s clear what series of films Depp will be remembered by. PIRATES and Depp are so closely intertwined, that you can’t describe one without inadvertently describing the other. Both arrived at just the right time, both seemed fresh and interesting at first and both eventually became tiresome, self-important tchotchkes collecting dust on the bureau of the apartment of that friendless Wiccan woman whose body was found in front of her TV as it blared the DVD menu of THE CORPSE BRIDE for nearly six days straight. It would be nice to say that DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES has effectively stalled Depp’s career but considering that he will be appearing in seven upcoming films, including a pair of wannabe franchise tent-poles, it’s safe to say we’ll probably never escape this much-loathed-but-still-inexplicably-bankable leading man who reminds you of that slimy dude at a party who makes fun of your taste in music while he tries a little too hard to sell you on the virtues of polyamory. <br /> Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-68635159110431636482017-05-30T02:02:00.000-04:002017-05-30T02:22:58.839-04:00Film Review: ALIEN: COVENANT by Mike Sullivan<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Mentioning you dislike PROMETHEUS is a lot like mentioning how much you hate the noodling, dimwitted pretention rock of Tool: the damned souls of one thousand Redditors will suddenly blink into existence and moan “you just didn’t get it” as they shake their ghostly nerd shackles in your face. But the thing is, I did get PROMETHEUS. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single person on earth who didn’t get PROMETHEUS. Who didn’t understand that PROMETHEUS was about faith and the origins of creation? The point of PROMETHEUS was clear; everything else wasn’t. Damon Lindelof’s plot-hole riddled screenplay (which, to his credit, wasn’t nearly as big of a mess as his screenplay for TOMORROWLAND) was filled with so many vague plot-points and unexamined character motivations that it played like a strangely solemn book of unfinished Mad Libs. It was beautifully photographed, meaningless but posturing and covered in a preponderance of black alien jizz. In other words, PROMETHEUS was a Matthew Barney movie for people who believe that crisis actors actually exist (not all PROMETHEUS fans are Truthers but, I guarantee, every Truther is a PROMETHEUS fan). Yet, as much as I hated PROMETHEUS, I’ll still take it over ALIEN: COVENANT. Because as affected as PROMETHEUS was, it was still its own thing. ALIEN: COVENANT simultaneously feels like a weird apology for PROMETHEUS while also sort of functioning as an EVIL DEAD 2-style remake of PROMETHEUS. It commits a sin even its predecessor didn’t commit: it’s shrug inducing and forgettable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">On the plus side, COVENANT opens with a prologue that’s probably a bit more bizarre than the one found in PROMETHEUS. Mainly because it gives us the daring return of Guy Pearce as old man Weyland, one of the more ‘who-cares’, tertiary characters found in PROMETHEUS. It should also be noted that Pearce’s elderly make-up this time around has improved. It now looks like a rubber Nixon mask instead of resembling the end result of having someone hurl small pieces of wet toilet paper at Pearce’s face from across the room. In this scene Weyland has just added the finishing touches to android David (Michael Fassbender) and literally after seconds into his creation’s birth, Weyland is passive-aggressively picking apart the way David plays Wagner on the piano. If COVENANT was just a fake old man belittling an android as if it was some kind of mannered, Merchant Ivory sci-fi spin on SHUT UP LITTLE MAN, I would have loved it, but almost immediately the pair discuss creation and creators and gods and monsters and ‘hey, man! What if Ferris Bueller was just a delusional manifestation of Cameron’s desire to be the coolest guy in Chicago?” As in PROMETHEUS, every time the film tries to get philosophical it just feels like getting stuck in a room with a really stoned friend of a friend who has a theory that “every time an angel is mentioned in the bible, it’s actually just a cyborg because the bible didn’t have a word for cyborg yet.” It’s the kind of freshman dorm ‘deep thoughts’ that made PROMETHEUS so goddamn insufferable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">From there, COVENANT flashes forward about 30 or 40 years. We’re now aboard the colonization ship the Covenant. In a development that unfortunately mirrors last year’s PASSENGERS, the Covenant receives a slight bit of damage causing the main crew to awaken from cryo-sleep several years before their arrival on some earth-like planet where everybody is totally pumped to build log cabins for some reason. As it turns out, the Covenant’s crew is comprised of bland or sorely miscast character actors. There’s Billy Crudup as an insecure second-in-command who, through awkward expository dialogue, alerts us to the fact that he is a man of faith who takes the funerals for his fellow crew members as a personal insult. Katherine Waterston plays her Ellen Ripley surrogate as if she was channeling Jane Adams, in that she’s just frayed nerves and dewy eyes. It makes you wonder if she is going to fight the aliens or is Jon Lovitz going to call her “shit” after he rips a gaudy Franklin Mint ashtray out of her hands? Danny McBride is here and he’s doing a toned down variation on his foul-mouthed Apatow-ian redneck character (at one point he calls a character sweet tits). Seeing him in this is about as distracting as it would be to see Buddy Hackett play a wise-cracking purser in the original ALIEN. Yet it’s still not nearly as distracting as the fact that James Franco briefly appears as the ill-fated captain of the Covenant and Waterston’s husband. Like McBride, it’s not clear why he’s in it. Especially considering that he’s doing that weird thing where he seems to be appearing in this because he thinks it’s ironic or funny or whatever. Fassbender is on hand as well as another android called Walter who speaks with an American accent so atrocious you think it’s going to be part of a big reveal; sort of how Ben Kingsley’s bad American accent was part of the twist in IRON MAN 3. But no, it’s just bad.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As Walter and the main crew attempt to repair the Covenant, they stumble upon a distress signal from a nearby planet. Since nobody wants to return to their cryo-chambers because -- well, the film doesn’t really explain why they don’t want to return to their cryo-chambers. Which is weird because it doesn’t look that bad. There’s no catheters you have to get hooked up to or anything. I guess everybody just wanted to stay up, drink Dr. Pepper and play Super Mario Party for the next 45 or so years. Nonetheless, Crudup proposes instead to colonize this nearby planet. Of course, this is the same planet from PROMETHEUS where David was infecting his fellow crew-members with an alien virus. And, hey, wouldn’t you know it? It turns out that David has been living here in what appears to be a genuine, motherfucking Dracula castle, growing out his robot hair (Why would Weyland program this option into David? In addition to repairs and average ordinary upkeep, why would you want the extra hassle of a giant goddamned Dolly Surprise who requires a fresh Richard Spencer haircut every two weeks?) and waiting for more humans to infect. Why? Again, I don’t know. You’re going to have to visit Ridley Scott at his H.R. Giger designed spinal-phallus stronghold and ask. Because even though he’ll happily explain to you why in interviews, he’s unwilling to put that same information in his movies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The smartest thing Ridley Scott ever did with the Alien franchise was in handing over the directorial reigns to people like James Cameron, David Fincher and, yes, even Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Because even if most of those particular films were flawed, they still had their own distinctive identities and managed to take the franchise in slightly different directions. They weren’t simply one man going, “Ugh. What? Oh, Xenomorphs, right? That’s the thing you like, right? Whatever. I need my tumbler of black alien jizz. Needy pricks.” Apart from some moments of Cronebergian body horror that take the facehugger concept and make it far more terrifying, ALIEN: COVENANT feels like it was made by someone who made too many compromises and doesn’t care anymore. Someone who’s blindly going through the motions just to get it done. It’s less a creative act and more of a contractual obligation. ALIEN: COVENANT is lifeless and rote. Even worse, COVENANT manages to retain everything bad about PROMETHEUS. Character development is clunky, subplots are introduced and suddenly dropped and it’s still very, very stupid. Do the space helmets in the Ridleyverse constantly smell like a combination of hot dog burps and that farty smell Campbell’s soup makes when you open the can? Is this why characters are constantly compelled to take them off on weird alien landscapes? If an effete android with implacably sinister intentions asks you to follow him to his castle basement and tells you to stick your head in a vaginal Venus flytrap thing, would you do it if he asked nicely and just had a temper tantrum because you killed his pink alien buddy that slaughtered your fellow crewmates? What was up with that slapsticky sequence where two different people slipped on blood? Wouldn’t it have made more sense in the Friedberg & Seltzer parody movie version of COVENANT? If that wasn’t enough, it also retains all of PROMETHEUS’ pretention. A low point occurs when Walter and David argue over who wrote <i>Ozymandias</i> and it’s like watching a knock-down-drag-out-fight between the guy who has a bumper sticker that reads, “My Other Car is a Pynchon Novel” and the dude who goes to the bar alone to pretend to read <i>Infinite Jest</i>. It’s “smart” in that empty, showboating way that blowhards in their early twenties consider to be smart.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ALIEN: COVENANT could be summed up by the scene in which two Michael Fassbender’s make out: It looks really good but it doesn’t go where you want it to go and, most importantly, there’s a lot of build up for such a small disappointing payoff. In short, if you’re bold enough to include hot, steamy Fassbender on Fassbender action, you better follow through to its bitterly erotic end.</span><br />
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Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-59196190816046131092017-04-20T07:20:00.003-04:002017-04-20T07:36:42.811-04:00Film Review: THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS by Mike Sullivan<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Who wrote THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS series? Whoever it is,
please don’t tell me. Never reveal to me the identity of the writer or writers
behind this franchise. In my mind the true author of these screenplays is a
dimwitted man-child in an engineer’s cap who recently realized that cars aren’t
those things with the sails that float. I want to believe that before his
screenplay was given a slightly different rewrite, it was just 200 pages of the
words ‘family’, ‘vroom’, ‘that’s what I’m talkin’ about’ and pictures the
screenwriter traced out of the most recent issue of <i>CARtoons</i>. I don’t want to think that an adult in their right mind
who doesn’t constantly wear an engineer’s cap sat down in some place that
wasn’t the top bunkbed in a halfway house and decided that a computer is
somehow powerful enough to hack a reflection in a car window. Because this is
the adult equivalent to a picture of ‘army guys doing war and stuff’ that a
ten-year-old doodled in their notebook during math class.<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But whether the FAST AND THE FURIOUS franchise is written by
a 48-year-old man named Jimmy who grabs gas station hot dogs off the rollers,
shoves them in his mouth and wanders off without </span>paying or a slumming Kenneth
Lonergan under a pseudonym who is secretly making fun of the people that
ignored MANCHESTER BY THE SEA (I was one of those people. Also, if true, fuck
you Kenneth Lonergan), the series is still dumb. Granted, I’m not exactly
breaking new ground by saying that, but the films are dumb in a way that never
stops being entertaining. Somehow THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS sequels always
manage to be dumb without teetering into the two hour, ice cream headache
inducing abyss of stupidity that is any given Michael Bay movie. And though
slightly aware, they never sink to the insufferable level of
I’m-not-nearly-as-clever-as-I-think-I’m-being’ self-parody of the SHARKNADO
series. It’s a very difficult balancing act and at any moment the series could
easily stumble and fall into either extreme but with THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS,
the series still manages to prove that a dumb movie is sometimes better than a
legitimately good movie. At least in terms of entertainment value.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS opens in Cuba. Why it opens in Cuba,
I’m not sure. I’m also not sure why the series insists on making Michelle
Rodriguez and Vin Diesel a couple. Watching these two kiss or share pillowtalk
is like watching an Arby’s Meat Mountain sandwich wrapped in a black tank top
get dropped on top of a concrete slab that someone sharpied a frowny face upon.
I think this why the characters are rarely seen together throughout the film’s
two-hour-plus running time. At any rate, they’re in Cuba and they’re using
their very shaky grasp of car-mechanics to settle a score with a smug repo man.
Basically, the pair challenge him to a street race in a CHITTY, CHITTY BANG,
BANG whimsy-jalopy that’s rigged with a soft can pull tab that makes the car
drive backwards really fast. They manage to somehow win the race but being that
Diesel’s character is nothing short of a Christ-y, Oprah-like figure, he gives
the repo man a car just for trying. In fact, he basically gives everyone a car
within earshot because even though Diesel looks like the Thing from the
Fantastic Four after somebody buffed his cracks out with Bondo, he’s a good
dude. From there, THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS awkwardly reminds you once again that
this series stopped being about illegal street racing several sequels ago and
is now -- quite inexplicably -- about illegal street racers who secretly drive
really fast for the government to stop bad guys. Charlize Theron, looking like
she just shot a sketch about freegans for PORTLANDIA, blackmails Diesel into
helping her commit crimes for reasons I could never fully grasp. Something about
a nuclear powered submarine that can destroy all of the Wi-Fi? I don’t know.
Nonetheless, we don’t immediately find out what she has on Diesel. She just
shows him something on her phone. Personally, I was hoping it was that picture
of Diesel looking dopey and bloated without his shirt on that took the internet
by storm a few years back.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">At this point, I lost whatever narrative thread was driving
THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS. But that’s ok, because plot is disposable and only
presented in the five minute increments that exist between the film’s various
automotive pop-shots. Which is just as it should be because if this film was
nothing but automotive pop-shots, you’d never be able to go to the bathroom and
the world of THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS needs to be entered on a bladder that is
as empty and voided as humanly possible. This is a world where oily pork mounds
like The Rock and Jason Statham wear provocative muscle shirts, kick each other
in the chest and inanely tough talk each other in locations that simultaneously
function as highway underpasses and abandoned factories. This is a world where
one woman -- apparently cosplaying as 4 Non Blondes’ Linda Perry -- can hack
into and somehow control every car in Manhattan. This is world where -- Holy
Fuck! Is that fucking Helen Mirren?!? What the fuck!?! Helen “Fucking” Mirren
is in this fucking film! In short, it’s a flashy, shallow world but in a way it
needs to be because it doesn’t understand what character development or even
dialogue is. Theron’s character isn’t a character as much as she’s the stiff
semi-human equivalent to that scene from THE DARK KNIGHT where the Joker wires
the two ferries to explode. The word family is said so much THE FATE OF THE
FURIOUS eventually becomes a feature length Olive Garden commercial with
shrinkage jokes. By the time Jason Statham is running around on a plane
murdering Theron’s henchman as he carries around Diesel’s character’s son (we
know it’s his son because the kid looks like he’s trying to figure out who
farted in an elevator after he was hit in the face with a frying pan) it’s such
a relief because nobody really needs to say anything. Least of all Diesel, who
at this point in his career sounds like an unfair SNL sketch character version
of Vin Diesel.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">If it sounds like I’m being way too hard on THE FATE OF THE
FURIOUS, I kind of am. Not just because it’s a very stupid movie that just
wants to give the world a scene where The Rock leans out of an SUV and casually
guides a missile away from scratching his vehicle but also because I genuinely
loved this movie. It’s THE AVENGERS if it wasn’t so up its own ass about its
convoluted mythos. It’s what happens when 11 TANGO AND CASH's makes love to 12 DEMOLITION
MAN's. It’s the sweatiest, gayest porno movie ever made after it was re-contextualized
into something a J.G. Ballard character would masturbate to on YouTube. Much
like my love for The Grand Mac at McDonald’s, I realize that championing this
movie makes me part of the problem but on the other hand, my love for The Grand
Mac means I won’t be around much longer. So relax and enjoy TONI ERDMANN or
whatever.</span></span></span></div>
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</span></span></span>Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-76731588963096840022017-02-02T02:44:00.000-05:002017-02-02T02:53:50.204-05:00Film Review: TERKEL IN TROUBLE (2004) by Mike Sullivan <span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
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</style><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
worst part about the success of SOUTH PARK isn’t that it was the show that
launched a million bad Eric Cartman impressions. Nor is it that, for a few
years, it emboldened Trey Parker and Matt Stone to use their series as a cudgel
to beat their contrarian, lib-bro-tarian values into the skulls of their fan
base, it’s that the show’s perceived simplicity made hacky individuals think to
themselves, “Pfft. I could do that”. If SOUTH PARK never existed, Seth
MacFarlane would have remained an obscure storyboard artist known only by the
hardest of hardcore animation nerds. Even better, the Danish radio serial
TERKEL IN TROUBLE would have never been adapted into a poorly animated but
still popular movie. In some ways this would have been a slightly less awful
world. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Written by stand-up comedian Anders Matthesen (who supplies most of the
characters’ similar sounding voices in the original Danish version), TERKEL IN
TROUBLE is basically how most critics perceived SOUTH PARK to be in the
late-'90s, in that the film really is just pre-teens swearing, farting and
killing each other. Bullied at school, ignored at home and currently receiving
death threats for accidentally sitting on a spider, Terkel is a mopey,
adenoidal lump who, like every other character in the film, looks like a
flayed, plasticine mole and never stops being the personal doormat to the
world. Along with his best friend Jason (who carries around a lead pipe simply
for the purposes of foreshadowing), Terkel drives a classmate to commit
suicide, numbly watches as his little sister blinds herself with forks and
slips in a big puddle of piss because piss is the ultimate utmost in red-raw
edginess, dude (as is Hitler cameos! And child-molestation sight gags! Somebody
stop this envelope before it gets pushed too far!) There’s nothing inherently
wrong with filling your comedy with unlikable characters but shouldn’t those
unlikable characters be funny in some way? Because apart from the clever
opening that satirizes those wannabe SE7EN-style credits sequences that were so
ubiquitous in the early aughts and a song (yes, this is a musical. Thanks
again, SOUTH PARK), from a criminally negligent children’s help line operator,
there’s nothing particularly funny about TERKEL IN TROUBLE. The film lacks a
motivating factor and specializes in the kind of bland nihilism preferred by
14-year-olds who think they’re blowing your mind that their Facebook profile
picture is of themselves flipping off the camera. Very much a product of its
time, TERKEL IN TROUBLE boasts a pair of rap rock numbers, gratuitous
references to THE MATRIX and the kind of jittery, unappealing computer
animation that wouldn’t make the grade as a video game cut-scene nowadays. In
short, TERKEL IN TROUBLE isn’t the kind of movie you watch, it’s the kind of
movie you grow out of.</span></span></span></div>
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Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-31014228372110964732016-07-05T06:00:00.002-04:002016-07-05T06:05:50.100-04:00Film Review: INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE by Mike Sullivan<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">From the moment it was released, INDEPENDENCE DAY was
already a yellowing Taco Bell Collector’s cup of a movie, awaiting the day when
people at a flea market would absently pick it up, snicker and then put it back
where they found it. A film so disposable and so of its time, it should have
bypassed theaters completely and simply released in pog form. Like AVATAR, INDEPENDENCE
DAY was an enormous success that somehow managed to leave almost no impact on
the pop-cultural landscape. Apart from that exploding White House scene used in
the trailer (but not the movie, for some reason) and Will Smith’s hotly
contested pronunciation of earth, does anyone have memories of any other scenes
or moments? Not even fond memories, just memories? As much as I dislike STAR
WARS and the attendant fuzzie wuzzies brought on by the release of THE FORCE
AWAKENS, I understand why people would be getting their nostalgic panties in a
misty-eyed bunch. Getting nostalgic over INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE is like
getting wistful over a discarded Big Mac wrapper.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xIRBXYHLtD4/V3uGFJYQdQI/AAAAAAAAASw/IENPiftECAENLgjteMcF46-wcLGxeP5HQCK4B/s1600/ID4-2d.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="177" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xIRBXYHLtD4/V3uGFJYQdQI/AAAAAAAAASw/IENPiftECAENLgjteMcF46-wcLGxeP5HQCK4B/s320/ID4-2d.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Taking place twenty years after the events of the first
movie, RESURGENCE exists within a film world in which the characters reverse
engineered alien technology for the benefit of humanity, although apart from
propeller-less helicopters, moon bases with the structural integrity of a Jenga
tower and the existence of slightly more monorails, it doesn’t look that much
different from our world. Also, why? If the aliens’ technology was so advanced,
why the hell did they use our primitive satellites to communicate with each
other in the first movie? At any rate, like a lot of elements in this movie,
the advanced technology doesn’t amount to much because the aliens are very big.
So big, that characters are compelled to remind us about this at least twice.
But instead of throwing down their puny weapons in the face of such towering
bigness, the world (but mostly just America) stands tall by pissing on the
floor of this stupid alien threat’s spaceship and gives it a good ol’ fashioned
American middle finger! Yee-Haw! Listen up you Extra Terristicles, when
all-star-Mr.-USA-American Liam Hemsworth (who is actually Australian and
boring) finally puts his penis away, he’s going to jump into one of your
spaceships (which he inexplicably knows how to operate) and piss on your
squishy heads with your own space-bullets! HA, HA! That’s what you get for
messing with “erf” (but mostly just America)! However, pissing space-bullets
and murder isn’t enough. Once we kill off the alien queen, an elderly lesbian
named Cheyenne who works at a vegan coffee shop (Brent Spiner. Didn’t he play a
scientist who died in the first film?) brusquely shoos us out of the theater
with a promise/warning that they’re going to piss earth-bullets on the aliens’
home planet in the next movie!<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If that sounds clichéd and a bit on the thin side,
understand that RESURGENCE isn’t just two hours of people trying to kill
aliens, failing, trying again and then urinating on the floors of whom or
whatever is frustrating them. It also has too many characters. Of course, that
surfeit of characters is there mostly just to accommodate the giant Will Smith
shaped hole that sits in the center of this movie. One of those square pegs RESURGENCE
repeatedly tries to cram into the Smith-hole, is Hemsworth, and, for Christ’s
sake, could we please leave all of the Hemsworthing to brother Chris from now
on? Liam is like a Ken doll that somehow memorized a year’s worth of Garfield
punchlines. I don’t want to watch him in a movie even if he’s pissing on the
floor of a spaceship. But still, he’s here playing a test pilot or a moon miner
or something and he’s also interacting with Jessie T. Usher and IT FOLLOWS'
Maika Monroe as other test pilot-y, moon miner-ish characters who shoot things
and say generic things like “Did you miss me?” and “We’ve got company!” But who
cares about them? All of your favorite characters that weren’t Will Smith or
Randy Quaid are back! Such as Vivica A. Fox who the film can’t kill off quickly
enough. There’s also a logy Jeff Goldblum who appears to be losing a personal
battle against the bottle of Nyquil he chugged shortly before director Roland
Emmerich shouted “action”, Bill Pullman playing President Whitmore in such an
inexplicably enfeebled way it’s like the screenwriters were challenged by
Emmerich to turn the phrase, “get off of my lawn” into a character and Judd
Hirsch whose role isn’t just unnecessary but so stereotypically, offensively
Jewish. Imagine if Garry Marshall was called in to punch up THE ETERNAL JEW
with a kvetching grandpa who just wants a nosh and you’ll understand just how
awful Hirsch’s character is here. About the only element that works in RESURGENCE
is Deobia Oparei as an African warlord who, for ten years, had to hunt down and
kill the aliens from the first film after they crashed landed in his small village.
Why the fuck couldn’t RESURGENCE have been about this instead?<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If there’s a plus side to INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE,
it’s the fact that after 19 movies, the world is finally realizing that Roland
Emmerich is Steven Spielberg with severe head trauma. Neither fun nor fun-bad, RESURGENCE
is a slog and somehow manages to be dumber and emptier than its predecessor. INDEPENDENCE
DAY: RESURGENCE rips the rose colored glasses off of our heads and reminds us
once again that nostalgia is a virus that will never, ever leave us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-23340459523636197762014-05-14T01:36:00.000-04:002014-05-29T02:57:47.513-04:00It takes two to SKIDOO...<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>1968 newspaper ad for the Harry Nilsson soundtrack album </b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b><b>to Otto Preminger's SKIDOO ("the year's grooviest film").</b></span></div>
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<br />Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-21597511119904489842014-01-16T01:17:00.000-05:002014-01-16T01:29:51.786-05:00IN DEFENSE OF THE LONE RANGER by Mike Sullivan<style>
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</style> <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">This
summer, THE LONE RANGER became the designated punchline of 2013. It was the
movie you weren’t just expected to hate but encouraged. Like most people that
are occasionally paid to complain about things, I wanted to hate it too. I
wanted people at parties to ask me about THE LONE RANGER just so I could slowly
give it a thumbs down as I made a loud, prolonged fart noise. And then, as
everyone laughed heartily, I would dance an improvised, free-style jig as they
clapped and cheered me on. But I never got around to seeing it and I don’t know
anyone who would invite me to a party or even talk to me. It was not to be. I
had to just wait for the thing to come out on DVD and then, THEN, I could I
jump on top of the hate pile with Owen Gleiberman and Peter Travers where we
would wiggle our fannies to and fro and collectively despise a common enemy like
a big bunch of cool dudes extraordinaire!</span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-N9n0t_5vNQ0/Utd3hYMjieI/AAAAAAAAALk/nav723-h2Y4/s1600/loneranger5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-N9n0t_5vNQ0/Utd3hYMjieI/AAAAAAAAALk/nav723-h2Y4/s1600/loneranger5.jpg" height="183" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But
as I watched THE LONE RANGER, a funny thing happened, I liked it. Not “liked it,”
but actually, legitimately liked it. To me, THE LONE RANGER was one of the best
films released this summer. A frequently subversive and incredibly entertaining
action comedy whose only true crime is that it’s a little overlong. Here now
are some reasons why you should open up your heart and let the Lone Ranger in.</span><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></b></span><br />
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Gore Verbinski Is a Better
Director Than You Think:</span></b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> I don’t know what the common consensus is that surrounds Verbinski,
but I have a feeling it isn’t too positive. After all, the guy is responsible
for giving us the Budweiser frogs and those unnecessary, painfully convoluted PIRATES
OF THE CARIBBEAN sequels. But for a mainstream director who ostensibly makes “family”
films in the frequently obnoxious Bruckheimer mold, Verbinski is shockingly
good. Unlike his peers, Verbinski’s films aren’t just a disconnected collection
of loud, shiny objects punching louder, shinier objects -- as THE LONE RANGER
beautifully demonstrates -- his films are scummy and surreal yet playful and
silly. He’s also one of the few directors in Hollywood who can seamlessly
integrate slapstick comedy into action sequences. His films have personality, a
distinct identity. Additionally, THE LONE RANGER is the closest any film under
the Walt Disney banner has ever come to being a Grindhouse movie. Not only do
the characters spend time hanging around whorehouses and Victorian era freak
shows, but it’s also pretty violent. How violent? In the film, William Fichtner
plays a cannibalistic outlaw who, one point, tears the heart out of a
character’s chest and eats it in front of stunned, vomiting onlookers (sure,
it’s off-screen but still, this is happening in a Disney film!)</span><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></b></span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It’s Weird: </span></b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Some critics have actually
compared THE LONE RANGER to DEAD MAN and it’s a comparison that isn’t nearly as
strange as it sounds. After all, THE LONE RANGER contains a fair amount of nods
to DEAD MAN and in some ways kind of functions as a dumbed down reinterpretation
of the Jim Jarmusch film. But to me THE LONE RANGER has a little more in common
with EL TOPO and the films of Terry Gilliam. Sure, it’s a very watered down
Terry Gilliam film and an extremely Disney-fied EL TOPO, but the vibe is still
there.</span></span><br />
<br />
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">THE
LONE RANGER starts fucking with its audience right away with a ballsy opening
sequence. While visiting a Wild West museum a small child in a Lone Ranger
costume comes across an exhibit depicting a very elderly American Indian
insensitively dubbed “The Noble Savage” by a nearby plaque. After a beat, the
exhibit comes to life and reveals itself as Tonto who proceeds to tell the
oddly disinterested child the secret origins of The Lone Ranger. Admirably, the
film never explains what’s happening here. Is the child imagining this? Is
Tonto still alive even though this part is set in 1933 and Tonto is well over
110 years old? If he’s still alive, why is he wasting his golden years standing
very still in a traveling carnival sideshow? Is he a wax statue that somehow
gained sentience? Or a stuffed, mounted and undead conversation piece? Who
knows? The movie may never let us in on its little secret, but this scene also
sets the appropriate tone. Right from the start, THE LONE RANGER is announcing
that anything can happen. Throughout the film carnivorous jack-rabbits feast on
scorpions, members of an old brass band perform while confined to full body
casts and Helena Bonham Carter plays the whorehouse madam whose prosthetic
ivory leg (that everyone is hypnotically compelled to grope) doubles as a shot
gun. Verbinski truly delights in subverting the expectations of mainstream
audiences and it’s fun just trying to figure out what weird little path the
film will tread down next (will it involve a vicious wall-eyed outlaw in a
bonnet? I’ll never tell!) It’s a shame this movie basically destroyed Verbinski’s
career because it would be interesting to see just how surreal his next film
could get.</span><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></b></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nDOVmgz58lg/Utd3gpkQ4XI/AAAAAAAAALU/BYowCbsmgPg/s1600/loneranger1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nDOVmgz58lg/Utd3gpkQ4XI/AAAAAAAAALU/BYowCbsmgPg/s1600/loneranger1.jpg" height="183" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It Reinvents The Lone Ranger and
Tonto in an Interesting Way: </span></b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Look, I understand why the original Lone Ranger was
popular during the '30s. The world of entertainment was still relatively new
and the idea of a man in a mask and another man in braids teaming up to sternly
lecture cattle rustlers seemed groundbreaking back then. But times change,
entertainment evolves and The Lone Ranger now seems boring and joyless. Which
is probably why most audiences avoided the film in the first place. But much in
the same way Joseph Losey brilliantly upended audience expectations with MODESTY
BLAISE, Verbinski and his writers take The Lone Ranger and Tonto in a fresh new
direction. While never outwardly treating the characters as jokes, Verbinski
clearly isn’t taking The Lone Ranger or Tonto seriously either. Which is why The
Lone Ranger is reimagined as an inflexible dork who can’t even manage to
playfully toss a three-year-old child a toy without it being sucked out the
window of a moving train and Tonto is depicted as a delusional outcast whose
shamanistic wisdom is eventually revealed to be psychotic gibberish. Even
better, The Lone Ranger and Tonto barely tolerate each other and everyone
around them treats them with undisguised contempt (mostly because they assume
The Lone Ranger’s mask is some weird sex thing). Even though the characters
manage to do heroic things, they’re neurotic and deeply flawed but far more
human than most characters in comic book movies.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></b></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It’s Funny: </span></b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Obviously this one is a little
more subjective than the rest and if I haven’t lost any of you yet, I’ll
probably lose you now. I realize we’re currently in the middle of Johnny Depp
backlash and, yes I’ve read all of the hit pieces on the internet that reveal
he owns a lot of hats and I should hate him because only shitty, ass-barrels
own a lot of hats, but I just can’t hate the guy. Even worse, I still find the
guy charming. Worser still, I really enjoyed his dry interpretation of Tonto.
Nothing he did managed to irritate me. Not even the near-constant mugging or
the scene where he put a bird cage on his head to avoid a cat. Nonetheless, I
make no apology for my taste. Except for the implicit one throughout this
paragraph and this very explicit one that states, “I’m sorry for liking Johnny
Depp. Please don’t hate me.”</span></span><br />
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But
still, Depp isn’t The Lone Ranger’s only focus. Armie Hammer, who previously
came off as almost criminally bland in THE SOCIAL NETWORK and MIRROR, MIRROR, really
proves himself as a strong comedic actor here, effortlessly holding his own
against Depp’s quirkiness. And apart from the (apparently now required)
collection of meta-humor and surprisingly adult gross-out gags (who would have
ever guessed there would be an anal rape gag in a Disney movie?), I really
enjoyed the little nods to the films of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton even
though I usually can’t stand slavish recreations of creaky, silent-era comedy.
Of course, I should stress that most of this is more amusing than laugh out
funny. However, the most important thing is that you won’t be cringing through
this (unless you can’t stand Depp anymore, in which case, you should probably
avoid this).</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Granted,
I might be overrating THE LONE RANGER just a bit. It may not be as great as I’m
making it out to be. I really don’t know. I’m just one person and my brain is
telling the rest of my body that it really enjoyed the film. I don’t know who
you are and I probably wouldn’t like you if I did but that doesn’t matter. All
I’m asking is that you don’t automatically jump on top of the hate pile and
wiggle your fanny just yet. Watch the movie and draw your own conclusions.
Besides, I really think it’s worth your precious time. Just make sure you have
a lot of it (This film is very, VERY fucking long. We’re talking longer than BERLIN
ALEXANDERPLATZ long. Oof, it’s loooong!).</span></span>
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Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-84026534319791121312013-10-29T20:51:00.000-04:002013-10-29T21:06:49.795-04:00Review: A GLIMPSE INSIDE THE MIND OF CHARLES SWAN III (2013) by Mike Sullivan<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Is
it me or was Charlie Sheen an actor at one point? Because as far back as I can
remember, Sheen has always been a guy who punched hookers and then appeared on
a sitcom or in a bad parody movie to make fun of the fact that he punched
hookers. 98% of this guy’s career has been one prolonged wink and it has never
been funny or charming. He’s not an incorrigible rascal, he’s the kind of guy
whose death will be ruled an apparent suicide because coke-fueled, auto-erotic
asphyxiation is far too long to fit on a death certificate.</span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gfaUyz0HmeI/UnBVZvnn1XI/AAAAAAAAAJM/ykaIVnIV18E/s1600/swan4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gfaUyz0HmeI/UnBVZvnn1XI/AAAAAAAAAJM/ykaIVnIV18E/s320/swan4.jpg" width="256" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">However,
there was one slightly redeeming factor behind Sheen’s, ‘ain’t I a stinker’
routine and it’s the fact that he never tried to convince us that he was
anything more than an enormous garbage idiot. He wasn’t a beautiful sensitive man
who deserved love, he was a guy who joylessly mumbled out the word boner on TWO
AND A HALF MEN. Unfortunately, A GLIMPSE INSIDE THE MIND OF CHARLES SWAN III
changed all that because now we’re supposed to give a damn about the man behind
the STDs and, unlike Emilio Estevez, that’s not a step I’m willing to take.</span></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Loosely
based around the graphic art of Charles White III, SWAN tells the story of a
dying blood hound in sunglasses (it could be a hard-partyin’ graphic artist
named Charles Swan III. With Sheen in the role it’s really difficult to say)
whose girlfriend (Katheryn Winnick) breaks up with him and makes him very sad.
So sad that he drives his vintage Cadillac into a pool, spends way too much
money on caviar and throws a garbage can at a tall building. Eventually Sheen
confronts Winnick about the break-up and tells her that he doesn’t want to
never not love her (or something). Winnick then thanks him for all the
experiences he gave her. Even the ones where he fucked other women behind her
back. As they part ways, Sheen imagines himself singing an acoustic cover of "Aguas
De Marco" with Winnick because stilted quirkiness equals genuine comedy.
Sheen then goes to a party and feels better when he watches a marionette
version of himself look up a woman’s dress. The End.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I
know I’m in the minority here, but I find those elaborate, aggressively quirky,
Etsy-ready products Wes Anderson calls movies completely insufferable.
Additionally, I’ve always thought his comedies were for people who felt that
laughter is something those grimy, dirt people do at Jeff Dunham concerts. But
as much as I dislike Anderson, at least I can say that his movies are actually
movies. At least they have a beginning, a middle and an end. At least his
characters aren’t a series of vaguely defined traits awkwardly stuffed into a
series of silly '70s inspired wigs. And that’s more than I can say about Roman
Coppola who is basically everyone’s most negative opinions about Wes Anderson realized
in one person.</span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dQFj2E5WUYY/UnBVcEjWa3I/AAAAAAAAAJU/x68cnpbVrso/s1600/swan2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dQFj2E5WUYY/UnBVcEjWa3I/AAAAAAAAAJU/x68cnpbVrso/s400/swan2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Apart
from the one-dimensional characters and the thin, practically non-existent
storyline, CHARLES SWAN III fails because it’s trying to shoehorn Sheen’s
eternally sleazy tabloid persona into the twee, artisanal sensibilities of a
Wes Anderson film and it’s a combination that not only doesn’t work, it’s
actually punishing to watch. It’s kind of like an issue of Maxim that’s been
edited by Chris Ware or a movie based on the art of Henry Darger directed by
Russ Meyer. Throughout the film there are numerous fantasy sequences where
Sheen is murdered by shrewish women in stereotypical Native American drag or
nearly murdered by the vindictive agents of the Secret Society of Ballbusters
who are such totally, on the rag bitches they get all upset when their
boyfriends try to pick up women behind their backs. Look, females! Understand
that our penises just end up inside of things. Sometimes it’s a strange lady
other times it’s a tepid bowl of Spaghetti-Os. Our penises are not a crime! Now
get off the rag, get on the treadmill and go back to your stronghold on Bitch Mountain!
Playful misogyny aside, CHARLES SWAN III makes no attempt to challenge or
comment ironically on Swan’s sexist point of view. The film just shrugs its
shoulders and happily agrees with him. CHARLES SWAN III is basically just a
series of whimsical interpretations of a sexual predator’s self-loathing filled
daydreams. Oh, and there’s also a scene with a hot dog couch, so look out for
that.</span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Shockingly,
apart from Sheen’s stuntcasting, CHARLES SWAN III boasts (and wastes) an
amazing cast that includes Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwartzman, Mary Elizabeth
Winstead, Colleen Camp and Bill Murray. Yes, that Bill Murray. The same Bill
Murray who’s extremely selective about everything he does and refuses to appear
in things like COMMUNITY and PARKS AND RECREATION. What happened here? Was it a
personal favor to Anderson? Did he pull another Garfield and wrongly assume
this movie was directed by Francis Ford Coppola? Whatever the reason, he’s in
it and he doesn’t look too happy about it. He just looks logy and beaten down.
Maybe he pissed off Anderson and this was some kind of penance he had to
perform before he could appear in MOONRISE KINGDOM.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Still,
if I have to say something nice, I will say I enjoyed the Liam Hayes
soundtrack. Everything else about this DVD can decay on the floor of that
abandoned strip mall where Blockbuster Video used to be.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><b>-- Mike Sullivan </b></span></span></div>
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Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-85790491934922463542013-09-15T17:23:00.001-04:002013-09-15T18:20:40.682-04:00Review: INVISIBLE WAVES (2006; available on Netflix Streaming)Have you seen LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE? Or 69 (A FUNNY STORY ABOUT 6 AND 9)? Why not? There is a lot more to Thai Cinema than ONG-BAK, people. Director Pen-ek Ratanaruang has a devastating visual style, even on his lower budget productions. Star Tadanobu Asano has a long history of choosing crazy art-house directors to work with (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideaki Sato and Sogo Ishii, for example; and yes, I would even include Kenneth Branagh, despite the film being THOR). He also makes an effort to work with filmmakers outside of Japan -- appearing in Korean, Kazakh, Thai, and English language productions (yes, like BATTLESHIP).<br />
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<span class="s1">Asano plays Kyoji, a Japanese expat living in Macau. He's having an affair with his gangland boss' wife -- or at least that's what it seems, before he poisons her and disposes of the body (the macabre composting equipment outside his apartment should have been a hint that this wasn't going to be a rom-com). The boss owns a restaurant in Hong Kong and Kyoji is a chef, though upon returning to work he is informed that he must leave via cruise ship from Hong Kong to Phuket Thailand for an unspecified length vacation. A suspiciously unholy “monk” gives him forged travel documents and a contact number for a person named “Lizard.” Much of the story takes place on the ship, a surreal environment that seems to have been created just to make Kyoji uncomfortable. A sort of floating purgatory. Nothing works, few of the people he encounters seem to understand him. His stateroom has a vent that fills with exhaust from the engine, his only “window” is a serene painting of a ship's deck that resembles nothing he's likely to encounter, the bathroom has a mind of its own, and a frivolous Korean woman named Noi (Hye-jeong Kang, OLDBOY) repeatedly saddles him with her infant daughter. He also appears to have a tail -- a man in a panama hat who is clearly not on the ship for leisure. On top of everything else, he's not coping with his new identity as a murderer well -- suddenly vomiting when triggered by seemingly random events. Even off ship he is perpetually lost, but the quiet is shattered as Kyoji's bad fortune closes in. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Christopher Doyle's cinematography is exquisite, as always. No one photographs haunting, atmospheric stories the way he does. He shot LAST LIFE, too. And if INVISIBLE WAVES feels familiar beyond the look, it was written by the LAST LIFE's Prabda Yoon too. Much of INVISIBLE WAVES feel almost Lynch-ian, and so much more than a fish-out-of-water scenario. Asano has a sort of bemused yet dangerous demeanor that suits these types of characters well -- something of a Japanese Jean Reno. He swings from beaten-down teddy bear to black-hearted killer with barely a beat between, leaving the viewer feeling both sympathetic and uneasy. The supporting casts includes Eric Tsang of the INFERNAL AFFAIRS films (Gangster Monk); local-Macau celebrity Maria Cordero (Kyoji's maternal neighbor); Ken Mitsuishi, who appeared in Peter Greenaway's THE PILLOW BOOK (Lizard); and Thai celebrity Toon Hiranyasap (Restaurant Owner and Gangster Wiwat). The soundtrack features delicate ambient music that adds a hypnotic quality to the story without ever allowing one to get comfortable. There may well be Japanese hit men, murder and dismemberment in INVISIBLE WAVES, but make no mistake -- this is an art film -- a slow burn plot with a vague philosophical bend and a wrap-around frame that is hardly stereotypical.</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16255047206423837588noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-51400948809721288332013-08-06T04:32:00.000-04:002013-08-06T04:32:58.143-04:00NEW REVIEWS
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<span style="font-size: small;">Every so often, I run out of space in an issue of
SHOCK CINEMA and wind up with a leftover film review. I just added a few of
these stragglers to the SC website. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.shockcinemamagazine.com/failing.html" target="_blank">THE FAILING OF RAYMOND (1971):</a> TV-movie starring
Dean Stockwell as a nutjob with a grudge. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.shockcinemamagazine.com/nomore.html" target="_blank">NO MORE EXCUSES (1968):</a> Director
Robert Downey Sr.'s loopy underground oddity. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Jqgv6xcRKik/UgCl6oM0yvI/AAAAAAAAAIY/GtNmxzgeoDs/s1600/nomore.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Jqgv6xcRKik/UgCl6oM0yvI/AAAAAAAAAIY/GtNmxzgeoDs/s400/nomore.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.shockcinemamagazine.com/flareup.html" target="_blank">FLAREUP (1969):</a> Exotic dancer
Raquel Welch is stalked by murderous Luke Askew. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.shockcinemamagazine.com/kona.html" target="_blank">KONA COAST (1968):</a> Grizzled Richard
Boone searches for a psycho in Hawaii.</span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QhTY2ooZhpY/UgCm2ThwenI/AAAAAAAAAIo/aVQDMjlYCss/s1600/kona.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="252" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QhTY2ooZhpY/UgCm2ThwenI/AAAAAAAAAIo/aVQDMjlYCss/s320/kona.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.shockcinemamagazine.com/cyborg.html" target="_blank">CYBORG 2087 (1966):</a> Michael Rennie stars
in a cut-rate time-travel adventure.</span></div>
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Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-162493587714034495.post-81065353374754177712013-07-30T04:30:00.000-04:002013-07-30T04:30:00.814-04:00Review: DUTCHMAN (1967).<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-c1AZwZDNj8E/Ufd1imiqWrI/AAAAAAAAAHg/ICK1Oun6JSE/s1600/dutchman1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="318" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-c1AZwZDNj8E/Ufd1imiqWrI/AAAAAAAAAHg/ICK1Oun6JSE/s400/dutchman1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The racial allegory runs deep when a seductive white woman targets a black man in this edgy adaptation of the groundbreaking Obie-winning play by Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones] -- a two-character confrontation which provides an acting tour de force for Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr., and was also the first film by director Anthony Harvey (THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS, THE LION IN WINTER). Only 55-minutes long, this often eschews reality in favor of two-ton metaphor, but that doesn't blunt its provocative (and often downright fucking angry) agenda. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It's a steamy evening in the New York City subway, and a suit-'n'-tie-attired black man named Clay locks eyes with a tempting young woman -- blonde, white, wearing a striped mini-skirt -- on the platform. She enters the same empty car, introduces herself as Lula, sits beside him, and begins to flirt so aggressively that it's a little creepy. No surprise, Clay is turned on by this unpredictable beauty, who keeps chowing down on apples that she pulls from her purse, but he's also confounded by her abrupt mood shifts. One moment she's sensually draping her bare legs over his lap, the next this Manic Pixie Nightmare is shouting, crying and eventually even calling him an "escaped nigger" and "Uncle Tom." For the film's first 25 minutes, it's just the two in the car alone -- though it eventually fills up with background commuters who pay little attention to them -- and despite all of her eccentric behavior antics, Lula keeps Clay's from simply bolting from this nutjob with promises of them doing "the nasty."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Steeped in Baraka's almost poetic dialogue, Knight has a field day with this batshit-crazy role -- flinging fruit about, climbing all over Clay, dancing around the car, berating the other passengers, until (like the legendary Flying Dutchman that its title evokes) Lula shifts her attention to fresh prey on this perpetually-moving subway car -- and it's like nothing the two-time Oscar nominee had done before. But while Knight has the showier role, it's only when Freeman's initially passive character finally unleashes his own personal rage that this long-simmering film comes to a full boil. Freeman is so incredible during his blistering diatribe that you wonder how he never became a bigger name in the biz. Meanwhile, its black-and-white cinematography by Gerry Turpin (THE WRONG BOX, OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR) blends authentic, eerily empty shots of NYC subway platforms with its train car set. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sure, DUTCHMAN seems a bit heavyhanded nowadays -- what with Lula as a metaphor for America's treatment of the black man -- but when the play premiered in 1964, it was controversial stuff, with its shocking conclusion gaining additional potency following the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and its interracial tensions still resonating 50 years after it was written.</span></span><br />
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Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)http://www.blogger.com/profile/14287469799823368413noreply@blogger.com0