Drive Angry 3D

Okay, I’ve got 15 minutes until Chuck starts. Let’s see if I can pinch this out in time to watch more dumb.

Nicholas Cage is a desperate, erratic man. He’s made a ton of movies, some of which are good, and lots are really bad. I haven’t actually seen many of the latter category, fortunately. Unfortunately, however, although this film appeared to be one of those movies that would transcend badness into insanity and therefore some kind of quality, it was largely Nic’s restrained performance that kept the movie from becoming actually entertaining.

It’s not all bad; Amber Heard is really hot, and William Fichtner once again proves that character actors are totally badass, completely upstaging Cage in pretty much every scene they shared. I’m not a very big car nut but I guess the whole classic muscle-car thing was pretty cool. There was a small bit where satanic cultists were put in their pathetic place which I enjoyed, and the action tended to be okay.

All that aside, it was a dumb movie that appeared to know it in most of the scenes, but unlike Piranha 3D, made several futile efforts to be serious. This was most evident in Cage’s performance. His lines were delivered in his most boring voice, often quite badly. Not once did the fantastically insane Cage of Bad Lieutenant ever surface; it was always a sad sort of “I’m totally more badass than everybody here” kind of demeanor, which is just lame. I don’t give a crap that he escaped hell to avenge his brutally murdered daughter’s death, he’s goddamned Nic Cage. To make matters worse, the 3D in the title means that everything looked like crap, because live-action 3D almost never works, and the CGI bits didn’t mesh well at all.

It’s a bad movie. William Fichtner was really the only quality in the whole thing, but he wasn’t enough. It’s just bad.

The Room

Tommy Wiseau is an idiot. He got all of his writing and directorial ideas from softcore pornography, and though it was a good idea to make a movie about this one time his girlfriend ditched him. At least that’s what I got out of this horrendous piece of unintentionally hilarious pig vomit.

I’m not alone in my opinion; along with Troll 2 and a few others, this is held pretty much universally as one of the worst movies ever made. I had to watch it though because it’s also hailed as being funny in its ineptitude, especially in the performance of the mastermind Tommy Wiseau himself. Tommy wrote, directed, and produced the feature, and I think he would have been fine with playing every part but had to settle with the protagonist because he doesn’t have boobs.

So the story, as far as I could tell, is about Jonny (Tommy), the perfect man. Jonny has no faults aside from being overly trusting and a little too philanthropic. No way is he a total douche. His girlfriend is a two-faced witch who lovingly fondles him in the two-hundred twenty-seven awkward sex scenes while repeatedly claiming to be bored and out of love with him in conversations with pretty much everyone else, such as her bitchy mother and Jonny’s best friend Mark, who she manages to seduce somehow. There’s also the very weird man-child Denny who is apparently a drug user and is in love with Jonny’s girl, Jonny himself, and some other girl who we never see. Anyway it can all be reduced to this: nobody appreciates Jonny and he kills himself because they all betray him.

If you’re not cracking up already I’ll explain why this is funny. Tommy Wiseau is a terrible actor with an accent that would put the Governator to shame. He forces his awkwardly constructed dialogue on his terrible cast in what I think is an attempt to make his own acting look better, but it fails. Tommy thinks the only way to introduce a character into a scene is by greeting them with a “Oh hi [name]!,” no matter what the situation. His emotional breakdowns consist of languidly pulling drawers out of dressers and haphazardly knocking pictures off of shelves. His best insult is badly imitating a chicken, and everyone else seems to think this is genius. His classic line “You are tearing me apart Lisa!” pretty much makes the movie.

I had some friends come over last night while I was watching it, and one of them kept referring to it as a “show,” because it really looks like a bad soap opera instead of a professionally filmed feature. Everything is bad; the sets, the cinematography, the editing, the acting, the dialogue, the music, and even the length of 100 minutes is too much. It’s kind of amazing that Tommy needed four million dollars to make this thing.

I need to watch a good movie now.

Lost Highway

I saw two movies today. One was good and one was terrible. I’m going to write about the latter first because it’s more fun.

I’ve seen a number of films by David Lynch, as well as the TV show Twin Peaks. Everything except the pile of excrement known as Dune was either tolerable or enjoyable, and always disturbing; It has been a while since the last time I watched one though, so I decided to give one of the few remaining on my list a go. I didn’t really know anything about it, and I think I know why now. Nobody wants to watch this movie.

It seems to be about some jazz musician guy with wife-problems that don’t make any sense. He starts getting video tapes in his mail containing evidence of some weirdo spying on him, and then he apparently meets the guy who seems to have the power of multi-presence and white face-makeup. Then he somehow gets framed for killing his wife, goes to jail, has his face melted, and turns into some biker kid who ends up having sex with a mob-girl who looks a lot like the first guy’s wife. She of course is using him for something that’s never really explained, and then weird shit happens and the first guy’s back and his wife was actually a pornographic actress and he kills the mob boss. Creepy guy comes back and says weird things too, and the jazz musician drives off while trailed by cop cars and melts his face again.

What the hell Lynch? Was this supposed to make any sense at all? And seriously man, was the Marilyn Manson cameo necessary? Why the hell was Rammstein included in the soundtrack? I DON’T UNDERSTAND. To top off all this tomfoolery, it’s also one the most boring movies I’ve ever seen. Every scene is slow and often seemingly pointless. The only thing that kept me from turning it off was the helpful presence of a couple of friends who joined me in mocking it throughout the two-hour fifteen-minute run.

I remember Mulholland Drive being weird and confusing too, but I also remember liking it. I wonder if I watched it again whether I would think the same of it. I think I’m better off not finding out.

The Expendables

Somebody already wrote a plot summary.

But seriously folks, if you want to see a bunch of old guys (and Jason Statham) reliving their glory years in the most unoriginal, tired action movie trope fest this year, then The Expendables is the movie for you. You also get treated to a hollow and small performance by the beautiful Charisma Carpenter, and if you’re a Dexter fan then you’ll recognize David Zayas who also doesn’t get to really shine.

I guess some people enjoyed it though. Every time somebody’s torso got torn in half there was a row of guys in front of me who would all yell out a synchronized “OOOOHHHHHHHHH!!!," and sometimes they would jump out of their seats. Fun enough I guess.

FlashForward

This show tried really really hard to be Lost. I think a lot of shows will be doing that for a while now. They even brought in one of the main Losties, a hobbit known as Meriadoc Brandybuck. Too bad they didn’t get the writers. I guess that might be a bad assumption, I’m not sure whether they got any of them or not. I think it would have been a better show if they did though, since it wouldn’t be that big of a feat to make it more entertaining.

The premise kind of kills the show in the first episode. You pretty much know how the series is going to end, because every person on the planet (almost everyone that is) gets to see about 2 minutes of their lives a few months in their futures. These futures are revisited seemingly ad infinitum throughout the 22 episode run, so we don’t even have the chance to forget what’s going to happen and be all surprised. Of course, one question the show asks repeatedly is whether this future can be changed, and it seems it can. However, the stuff at the end changes very little and thus makes for a pretty dull finale.

The future gimmick isn’t really the reason the show fails though; In and of itself it’s a pretty interesting trope. The real failure is the characters. Much like the other ABC POS, V, there isn’t a single really likeable character in the whole thing. The main guy, seen lovingly manhandling the asian dude in the picture I chose, is a highly annoying, serious, stupid, and repetitive pile of emotional trainwrecks. His angry buddy there is equally stupid if a little less annoying. The rest of the cast varies in its blandness but never gets anywhere near its target of say Hurley or Sawyer. Even Jack is better than these cutouts.

The setting is often boring too. It’s a big ol’ sterile FBI center for the most part. I will admit it was all miles better than V’s pathetic CGI sets though. There were even a few kinda nifty sets once in a while, like some weird place in the middle-east and stuff. Meh.

Anyway the show got cancelled. The end of the finale seemed to be setting up for another season, but now those threads will never be woven. I’m okay with that, really, because I almost give a small crap about where it could go, and would therefore probably have to watch season 2 if it had been approved. Thanks TV studio executives, you finally did something right.

V

It’s going to be hard to write this without using lots of nasty words, but I’ll try.

I’m not sure exactly why I watched the whole season. It must be some kind of self-hate. It started out boring went downhill from there; the characters are flat, the story is uninteresting, the visuals are 4th-rate, and they made Morena Baccarin look ugly. It’s like they took notes on Heroes, except they ignored the first season.

The show is about some nazi-lizard race from space that want to take over Earth covertly for some reason. They do this by donning artificial human skin, hair and other visible thingies, and acting like humans in all sorts of places. Then once they’re sufficiently entwined in human politics and whatnot the mother-ships swoop in and act all benevolent-like. This of course would work great because humans are idiots. Oddly though, some of the aliens on Earth have absorbed human emotions (aliens can’t have those normally, they’re aliens!) and therefore must rebel against their mother race by being idiots like humans. Thankfully the normal aliens are kinda stupid too.

So then we have a human resistance that teams up with the alien converts and decide the best way to combat political invasion covering up a few murders here and there is to not try to expose them at all, but instead use use half-wit military/guerilla tactics to make themselves look like terrorists. Good job!

I never saw the original series but I bet it’s miles better than this junk. Not even one Lost and two Firefly alumni could save it. Even a pair of cylons showed up once and failed. Even with the boring characters though, I think the part that made me hate it the most was the absolutely dismal CGI. Every single scene in the V spacecraft was blisteringly obvious. The compositing was always blurry as a censored Japanese film, the shadows were all wrong, and the movement/perspective just brought it all together like a dang puppet show. I think the reason it’s getting renewed is because they spent a whopping $20 on virtual sets.

I must be spoiled by sci-fi shows like Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, and even Stargate SG-1. The latter two had humor going for them, which was partly what made them enjoyable. BSG was just excellent through and through while keeping the humor mostly low; V had basically none at all and not much else. It tried to be a serious series. For that to happen I have to care about the outcome. I just hope it all stops.

I think this “review” is about as coherent as the show. I can’t be bothered to write quality for something this bad, I just wanted to say it sucked. So there you go.

Ninja Assassin

SPLAT SPATTER SPLATTABLOP SPLAT SPLATTERR SPLAT THUD SPLAT CRUNCH SPLAT SPLATTERYSPLAT

This movie is stupid.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

This movie won three Oscars the other night: Visual Effects, Makeup, and Art Direction. I don't think it deserved any of those, let alone the nominations. Of course it's obvious to pretty much everyone that the Academy doesn't award Oscars based on merit; it's all a political puddle of slime. Ben Button is a movie formulated to win an Oscar. It has all the marks of a winner; lots of heart-warming moments, little in the way of substance, and a bunch of pretty people engaging in wrenching romantic foibles.

As you probably know, the story revolves around Benjamin Button and his highly unlikely predicament of aging backwards. This of course brings all sorts of emotional stress to the table as most of his friends get older and die while he gets younger. Goody goody. Of course there's a girl who he's destined to love in a star-crossed sort of way. Blah blah, you get the picture. There have been comparisons made to the storyline of Forrest Gump, and I do not disagree with them in the slightest. It's actually pretty shameless how much of the formula they've lifted for this thing.

Thankfully it didn't win Best Picture, although it was nominated. Having just seen it today I am very very glad that it didn't win, and I'm actually a little appalled that it made it that far. I guess you could say that it deserved the awards it did win; however, it won Visual Effects for the CG head plastered on little old Ben in the early parts of the film, and I think it looked horrible. The baby looked like some sort of rubber Buddha doll or something, not believable in the slightest. Coupled with the crappy delivery of crappy lines in crappy fake accents, the CG head was laughable. Sure, I'm sure it took a lot of work to get it to look as real as it did, but I think it sucked.

Perhaps my biggest complaint with the film was the voice acting. The only believable voice in the whole movie was Daisy's daughter, staying by her side as she belted her horrendous old-lady narration. The daughter sounded like a real person; I guess that's because she wasn't constrained by a fake accent. Everyone else looked like a bunch of floating heads with words floating through them to the listener.

I liked some of it, but every time a smile creeped onto my face it was dashed by the sheer fluff and fakeness of it all that would always rise up afterwards. It's overlong and pointless. Watch it if you want to waste two and a half hours.