And the Academy Award Joke Is...

I can't pinpoint the exact moment when I realized that the main two contenders in the battle for the Oscars were going to be 'Avatar' and 'The Hurt Locker'. I definitely remember the sensation though. It was like seeing a Volkswagen Beetle among the shiny futuristic bolides at the start of a car race; on a pole position no less. At this point you already know the race is so rigged it's not even funny, and definitely not worth watching. And while I intensely disliked 'Avatar' for its ridiculous story, I can't deny it is a groundbreaking piece. At least technologically. Anyway, 'Avatar' already had its Oscar back in 1991, starring Kevin Costner, and that should be enough. But 'The Hurt Locker' even making it to the nominations was a fucking joke. 

There is only one reason 'The Hurt Locker' got all its undeserved hype. It's set in Iraq. Iraq, gay people, or anti-racism - any of these is bound to grant anything a "holy cow" status and virtual immunity to criticism. Well, we already had the anti-racism theme in the shallow beyond belief 'Crash' and the gay theme in the mediocre 'Milk', so Ms. Bigelow's decision to make an Iraq movie turned out to be a lucky break. No one dared to bash it, because that would be unpatriotic, and we have to show the troops our support and whatnot. Next thing you know, every critic and their mother are yapping about the approach, the cinematography, the tension, the portrayal, the character development (all those were notably absent, by the fucking way), the snowball is set in motion, and the proverbial bandwagon is so full it's about to burst.

After that it's pretty much obvious, "You know what, maybe we should give a Best Director Oscar to a woman this time, show off we're not some stuck sexist bunch, it's long overdue, got any nominees?", et voila - Ms. Bigelow is the first woman to be awarded for being in the right place at the right time, nevermind that 'Strange Days', her only good movie so far, was completely overlooked in its time or that anything done by, say, Catherine Hardwicke (bar 'Twilight', of course, but that's Stephanie Meyer's fault) is far better and more powerful. The Academy just couldn't resist and this, still, can be understood to a certain degree. However, this is hardly doing her a favour. Now everyone would remember her as the lady who got the Oscar for being a lady, not for her achievements. This is the trick with special treatment, no matter positive or negative. Give it to someone and you are denying them the recognition they deserve or the equal rights they are fighting for.

Even so, I could live with the Director award. But the only explanation for awarding the Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound, and Best Editing awards is some kind of conspiracy. How is the Locker's screenplay better (or more original) than the one of 'District 9'? Or the screenplay of 'Inglourious Barsterds'? As far as editing goes, I would expect the one of 'Avatar' to be head and shoulders above everyone else's; apparently, I was wrong. With all my hatred for the second 'Transformers', I thought its sound was fabulous (well, it was mostly explosions, but then again, the same holds true for 'The Hurt Locker'). So what the fuck?

Well, fuck the Academy and their awards and fuck the pseudo critics that mistake incoherent and confused for deep and dramatic. I might be the only one yelling "But the Emperor isn't wearing anything at all", but I doubt it - it is still a major failure at the box office, so at least someone agrees with me.

2012 - Wee! let`s zap lil` old Earth... again.

Every once in a while, Roland Emmerich comes out and blows shit up. And no small shit, either; he just loves to zap lil' old Earth with some spectacular natural or extraterrestrial disaster. Ehh... A grudge there, I guess.

Anyway, visually, there is nothing bad to say about his movies. They are beautiful, and the Earth is, time and again, destroyed with an unprecedented grace. The guy gets better at it every time, I swear. Me likes them pretty color pictures, uh-huh 1!:P~@. 2012 is no exception and looks like a million bucks. In fact, it looks like many millions of bucks undoubtedly spent on all the eye-candy that's so abundant in this movie; the visual effects are just stunning, and it really is worth going to the theater just to watch the gorgeous raging imagery pound the shit out of everything and everyone on a big-ass screen. This in IMAX would be insane, but hell.

The thing is, 2012, like Emmerich's other "wee!-lets-just-nuke-Earth" movies, has a single tiny little bit of a flaw that just spoils it for me, shiny pictures and everything. Movie makers tend to regularly overlook this little detail; for some reason, they think that it's inconsequential and that people who watch the movie don't care about it, really, and that all they want to see is the action, as if said movie makers were just shooting a cheap porn flick for a bunch of non-discriminating jerk-offs.

I'm talking about the plot.

Why, oh why, can't we, just for once, for a change and for the record, have a movie that is at least partially credible? At least the first half? Or the second? I mean, there's only so much of my brain I can suspend for the duration of a movie... I'm not going to bash the blatantly ridiculous neutrino theory, or talk about the giraffe (don't ask about the elephant shit either). The neutrino bullshit sounds plausible enough if you don't listen too carefully. In fact, don't even think about it, just trust the guy, and you'll be fine. He's trying so hard to bullshit you, give him a chance.

But even if, for a moment, we shoved physics down the drain and flushed it with the rest of the shit we don't need, like the plot, why does every movie with a huge natural disaster in it have to be cheesier than a cheesecake cheeseburger? Can't we just kill everybody already? And, please, without a brand new love story sparkling up in the background amidst disaster, without another love story being warmed up by the microwaving neutrinos from the ashes of a relationship long destroyed, and without a bunch of tiny little barely hinted about love stories just effervescing around and about with no point or purpose other than to fill the gaps between CGI effects.

Speaking of effects, people are made mostly of lukewarm water, so instead of going all soft and cuddly over one another at all the important moments that they should have spent working their asses off on surviving, their bodies should have just melted and their heads exploded. Damn, that would rule so hard!!! Melting bodies and exploding heads were notably absent from the movie, unfortunately, along with any plausibility of plot, characters, or their actions.

G.I. Joe - The Tale of Plastic Toys and Sinking Ice

By now it should be obvious to anyone that Hollywood is scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas. The same plots are being chewed over and over, sequels are abundant (mildly put), remakes are being made a couple of years after the original, all Japanese/Korean/French/insert-any-country-here movies worth seeing are instantly rendered for the English speaking market, comic books are on the verge of exhaustion (heh, they're instant movies - screenplay and storyboard ready, just pour some sugar and stir)... The reasonable question "what have we missed to turn into a soap opera spanning 30 years" sadly got quite an unreasonable answer - toys. Yeah, the Transformers™ until recently only had an animated feature, so there's a lot of ground to break. Gotta love the studios' assumption that we're all just retards who are dying to see their favorite childhood toy in reeeeeal action. The result? PG-13 starts to seem like an overkill, we need PG-3 - not as a precaution against those toddlers sneaking into the theater and watching some PG-7 movie, but as a warning to those of us who have come of age and who are probably stuffing the most money in tickets, effectively encouraging the shit-regurgitating industry to throw at us Transformers and whatnot... "Whatnot" here being (hold still!) the announced "Monopoly" project to be directed by Ridley Scott (sic!) and what will probably serve as the perfect "I told you so!" target for decades, "Naval battle". Although that pales in comparison to the chilling thought that someone may think of making a full feature out of a naughts-and-crosses game. If that happens, however, I want my share of the income!

Anyway, "Naval battle" may end up in some capable hands and actually turn up at least bearable. This isn't the case with "G.I. Joe", which probably is the punishment for some bad thing I must have done in a previous life. To whatever higher power there is - I got it, I repent, you can safely stop now with the torture. Seriously, it was THAT bad. The PG-13 rating is a fucking joke - do not, I repeat, DO NOT take your kids to watch G.I. Joe, unless you don't care about their mental development and health. The "script", for lack of a better word, was ridiculous, nothing, and I mean literary nothing makes any sense - not one single line. The only enjoyable moments were the inevitable reminiscences to "Team America", which caused several outbursts of inappropriate to the gravity of the respective moment homeric laughter on my part. Not that there was anything original, mind you - for example, you could find a scene quite similar to the exoskeleton chasing sequence in the Japanese anime "Vexille". The acting... well, let's put it that way - Marlon Wayans (of all people) put up the best performance, how's that? As to the "Firefox"-inspired scene with the voice commands on that plane - luckily for everyone it wasn't programmed to take commands in Swahili or Sanskrit, Celtic is common knowledge, you know. Facepalm moments are abundant; the sinking ice is just one of them. There are also plenty of opinions that the movie isn't consistent with the mythos, but I couldn't care less about toys and the marketing stories behind them.

Of course, measures had been taken to keep the interest of the already mentioned in previous reviews wet-palm teenage crowd, these including impressive looking breast-plate armor suits (with accent on breast) - if you stare at them long enough, you may even notice other body parts - and tight latex-looking outfits for the girls. Yawn. And that's bad judgment on the part of the movie makers too - if they are grown enough to develop interest in ladies, they have probably also outgrown the action figures. This is actually good news, as they will be spared this and all future profound movies about the fights and struggles of plastic toys.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the fallen

After watching this, I'm deeply convinced there is only one possible reason why the previous Michael Bay pictures were successful (or at least successfulish, G-d forgive me for coining this word). The way I see it - the amounts of explosives ordered would violate some conventional weapon treaty, so he had to stick at least something else (chase scenes, dialog, whatever) in these never-under-three-hours bloated action flicks. Seriously, the guy's a obviously a pyromaniac and needs to be treated, not encouraged to indulge his passion for all things KABOOM.

Sadly, the Transformers 2 movie somehow slipped under the UN armaments control authorities radar and delivered on-screen the equivalent of what seems like 30 megatons of TNT. There was nothing else in the movie, just explosions, things blowing up, things blowing other things up, detonations, bursts and blasts. That and abundant shots of Megan Fox' bouncing anatomy in slow motion (hey, the movie's PG-13, let's give them teen wankers some jerk off material).

Ok, I got carried away a little (but then again, who wouldn't?), there were also a couple of transformations, but these were impossible to watch without ending motion-sick - too many too colorful parts moving too fast in too many directions, so I had to take my eyes off the screen and breathe deep to avoid adding my own colors to this kaleidoscopic vertigo. Umm, I seem to remember a couple of attempts at humor - not very funny, I mean, the uber-robot got a pair of huge brass cojones and I'm supposed to laugh? The laughs came from other places - like seeing Jordanian territory from the site of the great pyramids at Giza. Now that's what I call good eyesight, last time I saw a map, there was still a Sinai Peninsula in the way (and several smaller obstacles like the city of Cairo and the whole Israel state). Never mind that the three stars in the Orion belt could just as easily point at sun dawn to Libya, depending on the day and the month. Nice to revisit the site of Petra, though, it's been some time since Indiana Jones dropped by.

The Transformers 2 definitely has the best bang-for-the-buck ratio, the downside is you only get bang, nothing else – not even some mindless pop-corn and soda summer fun. Unless you're obsessed with Megan the abovementioned Fox cleavage, but in this case you wouldn't mind some twitching spare parts in the background anyway.

The Thin Red Line. Ten years later it still brings tears to my eyes

With 'Crank 2' still on my to-go-and-watch list and with the 'Watchmen' review postponed indefinitely - at least until the moment I go through the comic book to decide whose fault was the abundance of hanging and dangling blue penii - I started worrying I'm running out of targets for my regular exercise in shit slinging. Then it dawned on me that I still haven't fulfilled my long treasured dream - to rip apart the 'Worst Movie I Have Ever Seen' into millions of little pieces, fuck each one piece separately, "make 'em eat our shit, then shit out our shit, then eat their shit which is made up of our shit that we made 'em eat" etc. © 2001 JSBSB, you get the picture. This is the movie whose mere mentioning always inexplicably summons the phrase 'Explosive defecation' in my mind, the most over praised, tedious, boring, pretentious heap of stinking crap ever, period - 'The Thin Red Line'. Did I mention also it was fucking long?

A little flashback... So ten years ago (give or take) there I was, clutching an invitation to a premiere and finding a way to my seat in the theater. The only thing I knew about 'The Thin Red Line' back then was that it featured literally several hundreds of stars and that it had been hailed as the long awaited come back of some obscure recluse director who had done something supposedly great a couple of centuries ago and then disappeared out of the spotlight. Being still a naive youngster, I immediately compared that to Salinger's voluntary withdrawal from the public attention. From the current perspective, the main reason Terence Malick kept himself away from directing must have been the fact he knew better than anyone else how limited his abilities were. Even a blind squirrel can find a nut every now and then, but making more movies would be pressing his luck. So he kept his past glory and shroud of mysterious charm and the audience kept their sanity until (obviously, some guesswork on my part is involved) some executive asshole decided to lure him out with a large lump of freshly printed in green portraits of assorted POTUSes. Artsy halo in one hand, the wad in the other - the result is quite predictable, artsy shit gets flushed down and twenty years of peaceful (for the rest of the world, that is) existence are over.

So... the movie started. Sort of. Twenty minutes into it I was still waiting for something to happen or some of the big stars to wander into the frame. Another twenty minutes later - still waiting. An hour deep into it I was starting to wonder whether there would be enough time for some events at all with only half an hour left (yeah, right... blessed are the believers). For a movie depicting the events of Battle of Guadalcanal this one was surprisingly uneventful, most of the three hours were spent on a bunch of soldiers walking aimlessly through some jungle. One of them (and to this day I can't tell exactly who) was having some weird flashbacks of kids playing in the water and diving somewhere - no hint where, just someplace else. Another (also unidentified) was writing a letter to his wife/fiancee/whatever in his mind and for some time I hated him with passion because of the molten cheese dripping from the mind-raping pseudo-poetic phrases that I could attribute only to a dog, if it learned some human language. The camera wanders around in random directions, sometimes taking clues from the retarded voice-over (I bet by now you can tell how much I love voice-overs) - like the voice-over going 'Is there a God in Heaven?' and the camera turning up to show us the sky, then the voice-over, faltering, 'How can He bear this on the Earth?', camera obediently turning down. Beuark! But as much as I hated the voice-over and the suffering anonymous emo poetic motherfucker, there was a recurring (recurring - like twenty fucking times) scene that drove me totally berserk - and I mean axe-wielding eyes popping out with red hot rage berserk. The scene in question was of a crocodile (caiman, alligator, whatever fucking reptile) slowly submerging into some murky water. Slowly - much more slowly than, say, speedy objects like the minute hand of a watch. I guess I'm too dumb and I can't appreciate the symbolic meaning the Great Maestro™ put in this, but if its twenty something instances had been cut off, the movie would fall into the short category. And I wish it did, because watching the same caiman or whatever dive for the umpteen fucking time, when you just want to go out and take a leak (three hours, remember), makes even the most peaceful person want to grab that crocodile and beat the director with it to first death (his or the crocodile's).

What about all the stars? Well, it turned out all the big names appeared for mere seconds in some small cameos, most of them appropriately retarded to match the level of the movie - Woody Harrelson threw the pin and kept the grenade (yep, the drill sergeant’s equivalent of urban legends), Nick Nolte gave the dumbest orders of any fictional military, 'Catch 22' included, pseudo pep speech by Travolta and pretty much that's it. 

Later I read somewhere that the original cut had been in the nine hours range... I shiver at the thought how many more times that crocodile would reappear in that version, the fucking animal would have more time on screen than Jack Nicholson in his entire career. If someday that director's cut sees the light of the day (on 48 Blu-ray disks, I bet), I'm buying a set to decorate my privy's walls, its effect on bowel movement can not be understated.

Mesrine: L'instinct de mort/L'ennemi public n°1. - One man show - guess whose?

Every now and then the French film makers manage to push an impressive and often a remarkably original movie through the thick barrage of low-brow Hollywood pieces of go-se. It is hardly a coincidence that quite a few of those – ‘La haine’, ‘Dobermann’, ‘Les rivières pourpres’, to name but a few - are with the participation of Vincent Cassel, an incredibly talented and versatile actor, equally able to perform in action and in dramatic roles. He is being held in high demand and regularly cast on both sides of the ocean. 

However, the downside of his popularity among movie makers and audience alike is the inevitable starring in trivial pictures as the tedious life story of Jacques Mesrine, a gangster that had been labeled Public Enemy #1 by the French press in the late 60s. That leaves us with the wrong impression that he must had been some criminal mastermind, but as presented in the movie, it’s been quite the opposite – the guy was a small fry who had just been dumb enough to keep too high of a profile with most of his attempts to commit a crime being borderline idiotic and inevitably resulting in full-out shootouts. With a story that is probably already well known to most French and therefore hard to change, the director didn’t have much of a choice and the movie in its turn didn’t have much to offer (although it also didn’t irk me) except for the acting of Monsieur Cassel, who took full advantage of the extended screen time (two full features, almost four hours in total) in a ostentatious show-off of his abilities to transform and act. From that point of view, the movie is probably something he’d like to have under his belt. However for the rest of us this long promo tape doesn't hold enough value to sit through.

The Spirit ...pointless exercise in self-indulgence

Sometimes, when I bash the consecutive movie, it crosses my mind that there is a constant threat I'll be labeled 'cry-wolf'. True, not all movies are bad or equally bad, for that matter. And it is only natural that the most recent insult feels like the worst, gets all the accumulated bile and that doesn't allow for nuances.

Luckily for me, there are movies so undisputedly bad and so deserving all the punishment one can impose on them, that this thought starts to feel largely irrelevant. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome 'The Spirit', the bastard child of Frank Miller's newly acquired confidence in his directing abilities. I don't know about you, but I intend to hold Robert Rodriguez personally responsible for the ego boost he gave Frank Miller by crediting him as a co-director on 'Sin City'. Next thing you know, the guy takes the courtesy literally, actually believes he's a full-fledged director and (oh, the horrors) starts directing. Wait! Do you hear that? This is what a jet of vomit sounds like.

Don't get me wrong, it's beyond doubt Miller is talented. A lot of the impression made by 'Sin City' was because of his signature black-white-red inking, white blood and negative cutout scenes. 'The Spirit' has this unmistakable made-by-Miller look and every frame is beautiful. The problem is that being a great artist isn't the same as being a great director and when put together these frames don't make a movie. He knows the tools and applies them, he just doesn't know where and why to use them, so he applies them randomly (like inverting to negative cutout used to show the cat walking - whoa, what a highlight) or because he has seen how Rodriguez did.

That alone was not so bad and 'The Spirit' might get away with it, if it wasn't for the unfuckingbelievably bad script and acting. I don't think Samuel L. Jackson has a lower point in his career (I for instance definitely never saw him act worse before), but the other actors too have nothing to be proud of. Every single line they seemed to spew with disgust had 'phoney' all over it. The only performer who wasn't fake or strained like dog balls mid-January was Arthur the cat. The worst of the cast was the lead Gabriel Macht. His long 'Under the bridge'-like effusions addressed to the city achieved only one effect worth mentioning - eye-rolling, but his (and Jackson's) attempts at slapstick comedy were even worse.

Along with all this, the movie is rated PG-13 as opposed to 'Sin City' being R. Now imagine how noir can be a movie that has no violence worth mentioning, blood - once or twice, cartoonish, and no nudity whatsoever. Neither of these makes a good movie, true, but if someone intends to make a movie that is 'dark', 'noir' and whatnot, he shouldn't be that concerned about the teenagers' buck... Now, if you specifically go for that audience, that's a whole different story. A stupid one.