MOVIEGRENADE!

Doomsday

2011-07-05T17:40:00.001-07:00

Watching this, I wished it was.

Play it to the bone

2011-06-25T14:26:00.001-07:00

Imagine White Men Can't Jump without the wit or chemistry. Then make it just shy of 100 times shitter, and make it about boxing. Ta-daaaa, you have this film.

How can Ron Shelton make Tin Cup, Bull Durham etc and yet... Well, his bad films are truly, truly dreadful. Polar opposites.

Knowing

2010-05-30T04:34:00.000-07:00

This movie is about a little girl whose scribblings turn out to be a foretelling of great disasters and losses of life. Her scribblings, sealed in a time capsule, end up in the hands of Nicolas Cage's son, and Cage - who believably plays a professor who teaches astrophysics at MIT. Really - deciphers the pattern.

The producers missed one major disaster off the list though – this fucking movie.

I've enjoyed Alex Proyas movies in the past, The Crow and Dark City spring lovingly to mind. But this? Utter gash. As we were watching, I said to my lovely wife, "I bet this was once a small indie script that Cage got involved in and then it became this bloated, nonsensical piece of shit." I romantically imagined it might be like The Man From Earth or something similar.

Aaaaaaanyway, Cage finds the little girl's daughter and granddaughter (the girl having grown up, bred and died), and tries to solve the riddles of the next disasters. He does end up Johnny-on-the-spot for two of them, big shaggy effects sequences that are noisy, daft and unnecessary, but then if they weren't there, what else could they have spent the budget on?

A decent script would have been great. Hell, a decent leading man would have been a start. There's a moment where - and there are spoilers ahead - Cage realises that not only is the world about to end, he is packing his son off to be with a race of aliens who will repopulate the earth after we're all ashes. His reaction? He falls to his knees with his mouth open a little bit, and says simply 'No'. Now, I'm not looking for over-reaction – just some recognisable emotion. Anything. A tremor in your face. A tear. Panic underneath, with strength on top to help your son be calm about his journey into the unknown... Anything but what I saw.

Hell, I could have made this much shorter by just giving you WonderWife's brilliant summary: "I'm looking forward to not remembering this film."

PS: The movie is worth watching for the aeroplane crash, which is ham-fisted at best, with Cage wandering around and trying to help people who are burning while wearing the same expression he has on for 7/8 of the movie. Then afterward when he's at home, he utters the wonderful line, "I keep seeing their faces… burning". Trust me, it's funnier than it sounds…

Mr Holland's Opus

2010-05-26T23:57:00.000-07:00

Mr Holland's Anus would be a much better title.

It's a long movie, and last night that was what I thought I needed. Something to get wrapped up in, and lose myself. And maybe even have a good cry with. And this movie... Well, it ticks all the right boxes. A teacher who doesn't want to be a teacher but ends up loving the job and pretty much living for it? Check. A difficult relationship with a deaf child - his own - which is complicated by his obsessive love of music? Check. Kids needing to be inspired by this man in the classroom? Check.

Lots of checks.

But it's just cold. There's no emotion at all in this film. It's too polished, it's too by the numbers, and there is just no heart here.

Oh, and it has a montage which got right on my tits. In the montage, to mark the passage of the late 60s and early 70s, there were clips of Hendrix playing, and of the Vietnam war.

Now, call me cold hearted, but Vietnam as a cultural reference is largely meaningless outside the US and yet somehow, all those worldly US writers and directors don't think so. As far as I am aware, the only thing that made the Vietnam war different to any preceding it, is the degree of and kind of reporting that came from the front lines. The access reporters had - and of course, television.

But outside America... It's just not important at all. Most people don't even really know when it was. And as movies are a global media, I think it's about time US filmmakers got off their lazy arses and started thinking a bit more. With the number of movies and type of movies there are about that war, you'd think millions of US troops died in a bloodbath rather than 58,000-ish. Don't get me wrong, that's bad enough, but in a sliding scale of war badness... It's just not on the list. So one brief mention, perhaps, then let's skip on to the clip of Nixon and be on our less-than-merry, let's-be-manipulated-clumsily-by-this-piece-of-shit-film way.

That's my rant over. Yopu want a decent weepie, avoid this movie and rent Fried Green Tomatoes or similar instead.

Year One

2010-03-03T19:29:00.000-08:00

Hey, this blog still exists?

It's been a long time, kiddies. And I honestly haven't seen a horrible movie in quite a long time. I guess because we have so many films available on Netflix to watch instantly that I tend to stay away from the ones that I know are gonna be terrible.

Then a friend whispers tales of guilty chuckles into your ear, and against your better judgment you find yourself watching something like Year One. And it is so awful, so mind-numbingly terrible that you can't even bring yourself to turn it off. You just sit there, mouth agape, drinking in every last putrid drop. As if a spell had been cast. And nothing will ever be the same again.

What happened to Jack Black? I remember he used to be funny, but when I try to recall it all I can really come up with is High Fidelity. Has he ever been funny outside of that film? And that was what...10 years ago? That's a long time to be a major comedic film star AND be incredibly unfunny. Well, at least this film had Michael Cera around, and he showed a much wider range of acting than in anything he has ever done previously. Just kidding...he played the same character he always plays. Just in a caveman outfit and a wig.

Honestly, the only reason I kept on watching this steaming turd of a film was the incredible number of supporting roles and cameos by folks whose work I usually enjoy. David Cross, Paul Rudd, Olivia Wilde (yum), Oliver Platt, Bill Hader, Hank Azaria, etc... I guess they all signed up because it was a Judd Apatow production and because director Harold Ramis once made Caddyshack. That's it. That's the only reason I can come up with.

Because this is clearly a film that should never have been made. It's an embarrassment to everyone involved including the viewer. It's like an unfunny History of the World: Part I. Or an unholy union between the Dudley Moore flop Wholly Moses! and the Ringo Starr flop Caveman. The bastard maniac child of two historic flops from the early 1980's, if you will.

Did I just show my age there? Crap.

Friday the 13th (2009)

2009-10-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

Is it really a surprise to discover that this movie blows donkeys? Probably not. But I watched it anyway, to save you some time which, come the end of your days, you will thank me for.

A few years ago, I was editing a DVD magazine, and my dep ed was a few years younger than me. The original Friday the 13th came in for review, and I asked if he'd seen it, and was surprised when he said no. I asked him to take it home and give it a try, and he did.

The next day, he came into the office and said he now disliked Scream instensely, as he could now see the virtues of good horror, and Scream had... Ruined the magic, I guess. Like the magician that explains his trick from start to finish to kill the illusion. He was impressed with the set-ups, the editing (which is positively spanking), everything about it. Let's face it, the first Friday the 13th is just a good movie.

Hell, even some of the later incarnations were fun. Remember Friday the 13th Part II, where Jason was actually flawed and made mistakes, and wasn't some stupid-arsed killing machine? That was a fun movie too. Part 3 in 3D, then let's skip a few... Oooh, Jason Takes Manhattan is absolutely fucking hilarious, and of course Jason X is pretty damn good fun too, if a bit too self-effacing to work as a genuine horror movie.

But this piece of shit? I can't even remember how it ended, two days later. I can't remember the story, I can't even remember what Jason looks like in it. I really can't think of why it even got made, because it's complete and utter bumholes from start to finish.

Hang on, let me think. Some kids go out to Camp Crystal Lake, and they get killed. That's the first five minutes. Then they're dead.

Some other kids go out to CCL, and they get offed one by one too. One of them meets a bloke who's looking for his missing sister, who was in the first lot that got killed. Oh, did I mention that for no good reason, she is still alive in Jason's fucking huge underground lair? She is.

Erm... They find her, someone escapes, Jason gets a bit beaten up and stuff, and then the credits came and I was much happier because the nightmare had ended.

Even the effects were shitty in this. I mean, a friend texted me the next day and said "What was the Jason make-up like?" I had to tell him I couldn't remember. The last movie I saw that was this forgettable was Sister Act; two days later, I cannot remember a single detail from this movie. I wish I could tell you more, but a big part of me is glad I can't.

Just fucking avoid it.

Eagle Eye

2009-10-27T04:37:00.001-07:00

I'm a fan of Shia La Beouf. I think that's how you spell it. I gather in America he's well known for some sitcom or other, but the first time I saw him in a movie it was the wonderful Holes. Since then, he can do almost no wrong.

Then I saw Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Ripped-Off Moviegoers. My mind started to change, but then I thought, no. If I were him, at his age, and I had the chance to be in an Indy film, I'd have done it too. Even if I might have ended up as the next Short Round.

Even my wife and stepdaughter like Shia. Last night, when debating what to watch on DVD, my wife said, 'I want to watch the one with the boy in!' That means Shia, Fact Fans.

So we watched Eagle Eye, which I had borrowed from my parents. That should have been the first alarm bell.

The movie is about a really clever dropout kind of person (Shia) – we know he's a clever drop-out because he has a conversation with his dad (the criminally under-used William Sadler) about dropping out of Stanford or somewhere. He's got a dead-end job in a copy shop (how do people who work in copy shops like these films? I wouldn't be that pleased if I'd seen this or, say, Never Been Kissed. Just saying).

One day, the day his identical twin brother is buried, he finds $700,000 in his bank account and a huge delivery of controlled materials in his apartment, like the kind of stuff you can make bombs with. His cell phone rings and a female voice (which sounded suspiciously like Julia Roberts) tells him the FBI are going to be there in 30 seconds and he needs to get out.

So far, so good. There's another character who is threatened with the loss of her child if she doesn't comply with what the mysterious caller wants, and they are thrown together for some reason or other that becomes clear later.

I was fine with most of this. I knew very early on that this was going to be a piece of shit because it looked a lot like another piece of shit, right down to the photography and dialogue – Tony Scott's cock-awful Enemy Of The State. But I hung in there, right up until the mysterious voice on the phone is telling Shia that if he doesn't get the man back who's come to collect him and woman-person in a van, that the man is going to die. Now, they're out in the middle of fucking nowhere, but for a load of really big electricity pylons which are right above them. How on earth is this man going to die? Hmmmm.

Death by fucking pylon.

After that, I was lost, and it's only maybe 30 minutes in to the movie. It really is downhill from there, and there's some ropy CG effects early on to boot (the train that whips past Shia as he's on the train line doesn't even ruffle his jacket, for fuck's sake. How lazy).

It turns out, the government – oh, SPOILERS, you hear me? If I haven't put you off yet, SPOILERS AHEAD! – has got this big old supercomputer that wants to kill the government for some stupid fucking reason, and Shia's dead twin brother put some sort of lock on it, so it needs Shia's face to unlock some shit or other, and it needs the woman to shoot him in the face once he's done it.

This film was so, so shit. I can't believe I stayed up late for it, especially when we could have watched more episodes of Friday Night Lights. Gah.

88 Minutes

2009-09-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

You know that when a film's release date is pushed back by two years (two fucking years!), that it's gonna be bad.

I just didn't expect 88 Minutes to be as mind-numbingly horrific as it turned out to be. The studio was right. Well, kinda right. They should have burned all the prints of this awful mess. Just nullified it's very existence.

The plot was silly. The direction was amateurish and campy. The premise that young women all over the Pacific Northwest are dying to sleep with Al Pacino when his is looking like a decripit ventriloquist dummy is just outright laughable. And the performances...well, the performances are mythically bad. Starting with Pacino and infecting everyone one around him.

And the super-secret plot twist? Yeah, we saw that coming from around the block, assholes! We just didn't know about the killer's motivation. But when we finally find that out, it's "whack yourself in the head" time. Really? THAT'S why the killer did this?

Holy shit, this is a bad film. From beginning to end. I'd trade those 88 minutes for a rectal exam any day.

Quantum of Solace

2009-08-25T18:54:00.000-07:00

For as much as I loved Casino Royale, I never expected to type these worlds here:

But Quantum of Solace sucked!

I mean, I get it. I get what the filmmakers were trying to do here. It was supposed to be a filler film. A direct sequel that wrapped up some of the loose ends from the previous film. Something to clear the dust for the next film. But it had no heart. No soul. No wit. All things that were plentiful in the first film.

And the standard contrived plot of the standard Bond film was even more contrived in this one. At times I barely knew what was going on. Why did he wind up in that hotel room where he killed that guy? Boy, it sure was lucky that he thought to ask the desk clerk for any messages so he could get that briefcase. And wow...look at that? He did it just at the exact moment that the dead dude's contact was gonna pick him up outside the hotel. That all worked out well.

It seemed like the entire film was an excuse to film a chase/fight scene every 15 minutes or so. Just a whole lot of nothing going on in between donnybrooks. Sure there was something about a secret organization that tried to kill M. That pissed Bond off. And it was all maybe kinda somehow connected to Vesper's death? I guess. I really don't know.

Worse. I just didn't care.

Stupid fucking title too!

Surfer, Dude

2009-05-15T19:34:00.001-07:00

I'll get to Wargames 2 later in the weekend. I had a big meal tonight and I didn't think I could stomach it. Strangely enough I did have the energy to watch Surfer, Dude. I can't even fathom why though.

Here it is in a nutshell:

Surfing.
Weed.
Topless women.
Weed.
More surfing.

Oh, and Matthew McConaughy plays a musical instrument while nekkid somwhere in there. But it's a didgeridoo, not a pair of bongos. Guess he didn't want to be typecast.

It sucks so much that it harshed my mellow. And I didn't even know I had a mellow. But it most certainly was harshed.

I think it does have possibilities as a drinking game of epic proportions though.

Drink every time you can see the ocean.
Drink every time you see McConaughy's bare chest.
Drink every time someone says "brah" or "bro" or "brother".
Drink every time McConaughy looks confused.
Drink every time someone smokes some weed.
Drink heavily every time you consider watching this piece of shit.

I honestly can't even begin to tell you what this film is about. It was as indecipherable as sanskrit to a normal human being. I'm not calling myself normal, you see. But I have known a few normal folks. And I just know they would have as tough a time as I did comprehending what was going on. Something about a reality surfing show, a video game, an ex-surfer turned into an asshole businessman, some kind of weed/surfing fast and Woody Harrelson's lawn mowing business. I think McConaughy falls in love somewhere in there as well. I don't really know.

See, I just typed that and it makes no sense.

Stay away from this one. Unless you are high. Or surfing. Or surfing while high. Or dead from the neck up.

That might work.

You make the call

2009-05-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've seen a bad film. I've even watched a couple that I thought were going to be bad, but wound up being pretty good.

So I put it in your hands, dear readers. I have a selection of potentially bad films ready to go on my Netflix Instant queue for this weekend. Which one should I watch?

88 Minutes - 88 Minutes of overacting by Al Pacino. Almost seems unfair to list any other films after that endorsement.
Traitor - I dig me some Don Cheadle, but I've read some pretty bad reviews about this one. Meaning the film was bad, not the review itself. One of these days I will learn to write, um, better.
Wargames 2: The Dead Code - Just kidding. I'm not watching Wargames 2. Ever! I don't care if you kids actually vote for it. I'm just amazed that someone made a sequel.
Surfer, Dude - Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson play surfers. Um, dude. Doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me.
Domino - The commercials for this one looked so annoying when it came out a couple of years ago. I can only imagine the film as equally annoying. But longer.

So there you have it. Vote in the comments section and I will watch whichever selection has the most votes by the time I get around to it (probably Friday around 11PM).

My fate is in your hands. Choose wisely.

UPDATE - OK, the masses (4 or 5 of you) have spoken. I'll watch Wargames 2. But first I'm gonna watch Surfer, Dude. Just because.

Wanted

2009-04-26T18:36:00.000-07:00

Generally, this is exactly the type of film that I want to see when I am home sick or I can't sleep for some reason. Dumb, silly action flick that allows me to check my intelligence at the door.

But this one was soooo over-the-top that it came round again and wound up on the bottom. Huh? Yeah, I don't know what that means either.

A fraternity of assassins formed by a group of weavers over a thousand years ago receive orders from a mysterious loom and follow out those orders with semi-magical abilities that include super-strength, super-speed and the ability to curve bullets from a gun around corners.

OK. It's a comic-book. A bad comic-book, but basically it's a comic-book. I get it. Highly stylized, deep in it's own mythology and ridiculous as all hell. It's escapist fantasy on par with The Matrix or Harry Potter or any other film where the main protagonist escapes his mundane, boring existence to live the exciting life of a super-hero.

Yawn.

I mean it was seriously boring. They couldn't jam enough ridiculous action into this one to hold my attention. I stopped watching it halfway thru to take a nap and when I woke up to watch the rest of it, I had kinda forgotten what had happened previously in the film. The cold medicine I am taking might have had something to do with that. I dunno.

All I can say is that I Wanted to like this film. I Wanted it to be as funny and as good as Nightwatch or Daywatch (same director). I Wanted to like James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie in their respective roles. I Wanted something to take my mind off my freakin' cold.

After it was over, all I really Wanted was an hour and forty minutes back.

Poolhall Junkies

2009-04-22T12:01:00.000-07:00

One of my strange movie fetishes (non-masturbatory) is with The Con. Anything to do with con-men. Loved The Sting, and Diggstown is a movie that I can watch over and over again. Just great.

So I bumped Poolhall Junkies into the top spot of my Netflix queue the other day and I watched it last night. I don't have a lot of tremendously negative things to say about it. It was extremely derivative of The Hustler and The Color of Money, but it would have to be given the subject matter. Of course. But it was even more derivative of Rounders, if you ask me.

Had all the same plot elements. The lawyer girlfriend who doesn't want him hustling and leaves him over it. The protagonist helping out one of his friends in trouble with a bad guy. The showdown at the end with his nemesis complete with smarmy "gotcha" dialogue. Now, I loved Rounders. Loved it. But if I wanted to see it again I would just see it again. Capisci?

So this one doesn't get a recommendation. I kinda liked it, but I can tell you that it wasn't good. It was what it was. The only reason I'm mentioning it here is because of one scene that cracked me up.

The main character had hair that can only be described as Christopher Walken hair. You've seen Christopher Walken, right? Well he had hair like that. Here is a picture of the great Walken:

That's the hair the main guy had. Anyway, I must not have been paying attention to the credits because Christopher Walken was actually in this movie. Seriously. And the first time he meets the guy, they have the following conversation:

Walken - "You know, I saw you when you first walked in. Nice hair!"
Other dude - "Thanks" (they both stroke their manes)
Walken - "Maybe we're related or something."

That right there? That alone made this film worth watching for me. My advice for you? Skip it. I already told you the best reason to watch it. Just go re-watch Rounders, okay?

You Don't Mess With the Zohan

2009-04-17T21:20:00.000-07:00

You know, I should have known better.

Every single commercial I saw for this film last year made me chuckle a little bit. I think I knew deep down inside that it was gonna suck big time, but I still wanted to see it. Adam Sandler as an Israeli super-here smacking around rude New Yorkers with his feet? Even thinking about it makes me smile.

What I should have remembered is that Adam Sandler hasn't been funny since, well...wait a minute. Has Adam Sandler ever been funny? I really can't recall. Remote Control on MTV was a little funny. Does that count?

Whenever an American comedian dons an silly accent for a role as a quirky foreigner, the film rapidly descends into a one-trick pony joke. See Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson or Eddie Murphy in Coming to America. Except those were, ya know, good. Imagine those two films and then imagine never laughing again. Ever. THAT is what this film is like.

Even John Turtorro can't save it. And John Turturro can save your soul. If only you would let him.

Don't mess with the Zohan. Don't even consider it.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

2009-04-12T19:03:00.000-07:00

I have to be honest here.

I had a lot of opportunities NOT to watch this film over the weekend. I could have watched something on my DVR recorded list. I could have watched something on my Netflix queue on our Roku player. I could have watched late night television infomercials. I could have read a book or a magazine. I could have surfed the Internets. I could have played with the cats. I could have played with Gia. I could have cut my toenails. I could have banged my head against the wall in a repeated manner until any thought of watching this film escaped my consciousness.

But I did none of those things. And I did it all for you, my dear readers and only friends.

Where to begin? How about with the obvious elephant in the room, Keanu Reeves. I have to admit that the idea of Keanu (Hawaiian for "He Who Cannot Emote") playing an emotionless alien life form is semi-amusing. Kind of like asking William Shatner to play a narcissist or Lindsay Lohan to play a slutty train wreck. Just so obvious that you would think a casting director wouldn't even consider it. But, according to IMDB, Keanu was the director's first and only choice to play Klaatu. And he didn't disappoint. Well, I mean of course he disappointed. The whole film did. But if want a guy to look like Keanu Reeves and sound like Keanu Reeves, then Keanu Reeves is definitely your go-to guy.

Jennifer Connelly continued to underwhelm as a microbiologist with a son (I think, I really don't care) played by Will Smiff's kid, Jaden. That kid annoyed the crap out of me in this film. I think I might actually hate him. Does that make me a bad person? Oh, and Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm and John Cleese rounded out the cast that was clearly sleepwalking through the production of this film in anticipation of a fat paycheck at the end of the shoot. Job well done!

If you hate spoilers then go away quickly, because I am going to spoil the mother-fucker out of this bad boy right now.

The human race survives.

I know. I was disappointed as well.

Ah...nevermind. You have all have some form of rudimentary intellect. You can figure out all on your own why you shouldn't watch this film. But I admit that I did love how this film ended. Well, not HOW it ended. Just that it actually ended. You know. The credits rolled and I was suddenly aware that the film was over.

That was awesome.

Contributors wanted - read on...

2009-04-09T16:03:00.000-07:00

This isn't for the 'grenade, folks - it's for a UK-based web site reviewing movies. So if you think you've got the chops to push the envelope to the redline maxx, as Jerry Bruckheimer would have the rest of the world believe the US talks, drop Tim an email. His details, and the site's details, are below. He's a great guy, I used to work with him and this is something he's starting up all on his lonesome, after the DVD magazine we used to work on folded recently.
With a bit of luck and hard work from Tim, US contributors might get in to screenings etc which would be very useful for a UK-based web site, as the UK gets films kind of late sometimes... But Tim has a great reputation with UK-based distributors etc, and has edited a European DVD review magazine for the last five years or so. he knows what he's doing, and this is more than a flight of fancy or a hobby – it might just go somewhere.

Here's the spiel...

New Movie Website Looking For Reviewers  
Sent at: 9th Apr, 14:23
 

Launching in May, the new cinema, DVD and Blu-ray website,
Movie Muser, is looking for freelancers to create content
for the site, mainly providing reviews of cinema and
home entertainment, although if you have ideas for
other content, such as features, please get in touch.

This work will be unpaid, however those commissioned
will get access to early screenings of new films, as
well as preview copies of upcoming DVD and Blu-ray
releases. Plus your work will be featured on what is
sure to become a very popular website.

Anyone interested should forward their CV and
examples of their work (preferably film related,
although this isn't essential) to Tim Isaac
(timisaac@moviemuser.co.uk).

Many thanks and I do look forward to hearing from you.

Tim

timisaac@moviemuser.co.uk

--

Deadline: 30th Apr, 18:00

Contact Name: Tim Isaac

Title: Editor

Publication: Muser Media

Email: timisaac@moviemuser.co.uk

Never Back Down

2009-04-08T20:22:00.000-07:00

The first rule of High School Fight Club is never talk about High School Fight Club.

The second rule of of High School Fight Club is....ah fuck it. Let's talk about High School Fight Club.

I was given a recommendation for this film by a dude I know who smells like a wet dog. He knows that I like "bad" films. Like we all know Road House is a shitty film, but it's an awesome way to spend an hour and a half. Same thing with cinematic pieces of crap like Best of the Best. It won't win any awards...well, maybe a Razzie. But it'll sure be a fun ride. I was told that this film was in that vein.

It's about a hot-headed kid who moves to that tough town called Orlando (seriously?) and winds up embroiled in an underground fight club with just about the douchiest kid you ever did see. It was like a sequel to Troy with a young Eric Bana fighting a young Brad Pitt. But, ya know...without even the lame charisma that those two stars brought to the screen in that flop-o-rama.

Seems that boring Eric Bana lookalike guy has a bit of a temper. He is like Marty McFly in the sequels to Back to the Future. Except instead of going nuts when someone calls him yellow (really?), his trigger is any knock against his drunk and dead father. I understand that last item was a bit vague. I guess he was drunk before he was dead, but you get the picture.

And he's got a crush against the crushiest girl in school. She looks way hotter than Brooke Hogan. I only mention Brooke Hogan because I think the Hogans are from Orlando. Or somewhere in Florida. I really don't know. Florida, besides the Keys, is a mystery to me. It looks like it is warm down there, but so is Hell. And I don't want to go to Hell. Well, not yet.

So this Brad Pitt dude kicks his ass in a backyard brawl. And young Eric Bana wants to pay him back in spades, so he starts taking lessons with a Mixed Martial Arts teacher. And he looks surprisingly like Djimon Hounsou. Hey wait...it is Djimon Hounsou! Guess he needed some money to buy Kimora Lee some new makeup. We are all whores, aren't we Djimon?

The rest of the film plays out like the classic kung fu flicks of yore. Which is why it is awesome, with a capital A! Douchey good guy gets his ass kicked by douchey bad guy then he picks up a spunky (and douchey) sidekick and trains with a martial arts GOD so that he can return the ass kicking to the douchey guy. It all has to lead up to that. But he has to learn a lesson in there somewhere, right?

Well, not from what I could see. Apparently if you train for a few weeks with an annoying ginger kid and roll around the floor with Djimon Hounsou for a while then you can beat the douchiest kid in school in a backyard brawl. There is even one silly scene when the race like Rocky and Apollo from Rocky III. That surely helped.

So do I recommend this film? Not really. I don't know. Was Karate Kid worth it? Was any of it's imitators? I mean, I enjoyed it. Much like I enjoy softcore porn or low-proof beer. It will get you where you are going, but it's gonna take you a long time getting there. Unless you are generally into that kinda thing. Which I am. Mostly*.

*Not the low-proof beer. That shit is a waste of time.

Seven Pounds... of Boring

2009-04-05T16:52:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I watched Seven Pounds.

I thought I’d start with an impromptu review of the movie in real time.

Ready? Here we go:

00:00:15
They just started the movie by telling me what happens at the end. Hate that.

00:02:07
OK. Will Smith. Dripping wet. Shirt. Is. Off. This film has promise.

00:02:09
Annd he put his shirt back on. Crushing disappointment ensues.

00:07:23
Is that Woody Harrelson? I don’t remember him having bad teeth.

00:13:31
Hey! That’s the cute thug guy from Barbershop. I hope they show more of him.

00:19:45
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? I'm officially interested in this movie.

00:22:52
The first and only time Will Smith smiles in this movie.

00:35:50
A jellyfish? WTF?

00:44:50
Quote, “You’re a good man even when you don’t know people are watching you.”

00:53:19
Dying or not, I would never call a guy first. Just saying.

1:20:00
OK. Now I know what he’s up to. But, why, man, why?!!

1:32:03
So bored. Where is that hottie from Barbershop?

1:45:30
Could have done without the last 30 minutes of this movie. I'm officially uninterested.

1:46:00
I will never, ever text message while driving. Ever. Ever. Again.

1:57:02
Too hormonal ... Oh my God, he hugged her. [Indistinct pregnant woman blubber].

2:02:52
TWO HOURS?! Bastards. I feel violated.

...

I know, right? It was like being there. Now, get your feet off of my coffee table.

By the way, did I mention that I’m a member of a small group of women known as the Society of Women Who Are Completely Annoyed By Sappy Love Story Movies (you may know us as SWWACABSLSM)?

While we’re not known for our talent for coming up with short names for societies, we are global.

Seven Pounds is about the internal struggle of a man attempting to fulfill a self imposed need for redemption. The tension, then, rests not on events that are happening in the film, but upon the emotional tension created within the film’s main character.

In other words, this movie could not have been any slower unless it had been a two hour shot of a Will Smith drinking a cup of decaf coffee at Starbucks.

Even the brilliant, talented and exceedingly hot Will Smith could not erase the feeling that the studio that made this movie has unfairly sucked two precious hours out of my life that I will never get back.

The Seven Pounds DVD has a ton of special features, including a director’s commentary, “Seven Views on Seven Pounds” (where everyone but the caterers discuss the making of the movie), “Creating the Perfect Ensemble” (narrated by the casting director) and some deleted scenes.

I didn’t bother to watch any of these because, frankly, I found the movie boring and slightly irritating.

And the last thing I want to do is watch a feature on the making of boring and slightly irritating.

And, finally, out of respect for those who hate spoilers, I'll be brief and cryptic.

With respect to the overall plot, I'm not a big fan of guilt or self flagellation. No matter how awful the consequences of your actions might be, a simple and sincere "sorry" on the part of the main character might have sufficed. There's no reason to go overboard.

:: Now waiting for Will Smith's apology... or, at the very least, a showing of guilt ::

So, I won't hold my breath.

10,000 B.C.

2009-04-01T13:34:00.000-07:00

Hi guys! It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. Have you all missed me?

Of course you have.

Why haven’t I posted? Well, the main reason is simply that I haven’t seen too many awful movies lately. Really. I was just on a really good run there for a bit. I even watched some movies that OTHER people said sucked eggs, and I ended up thinking they were ok. Maybe not masterpieces, but not “Grenade”-able either.

And then last night I watched 10,000 B.C.

Holy mother of all things Good! How can a major movie studio make a movie this bad?

I honestly don’t even know where to begin.

I CAN tell you that if you were hoping to learn ANY kind of history from this movie, you can just stop hoping right now. This movie is SO historically inaccurate that it’s laughable.

Where to start?

10,000 B.C. tells the story of a supposed prehistoric tribe, living in what looks to be the Ice Age. The earth must have evolved pretty damn fast for the ice age to have been only 12,000 years ago! And we’ve also apparently gotten a HELL of a lot uglier since our caveman days….. every single person in this tribe has perfect Bob-Marley dreadlocks and super-model good looks and physiques. It must be our diet.

Anyway, while the tribe is out hunting Wooly Mammoths (really), they get attacked by dinosaur birds (fucking really), while another tribe attacks them and enslaves most of their people.

So, the few free cavemen left band together to free their people. During their trek, they encounter a Sabertooth Tiger (really), cross a desert (really), where they find the people who attacked them are Egyptians building a pyramid (can I just stop with the “really”s now?). The Egyptians have sailboats, maps, astronomy tools, winches for building, and more wooly mammoths. That’s right… mammoths….in the desert.

It seemed like this movie was written by a 10 year old, who wanted to just throw everything he thought would look cool, into one movie. At any moment I was expecting to see a Sherman Tank roll by, or Will Smith in a black suit shooting down a spaceship. At that point, why the Hell not?

There’s nothing more I can say about this hot mess of a film.

Don’t make the same mistake I did and waste 2 hours of your life on it.

Twilight

2009-03-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

Ever gone to a high end restaurant, had a lovely meal and decide to order the $25 cheesecake?

OK, good, so we’re all on the same page about this.

The $25 cheesecake gets to your table, you take a bite and, suddenly, you realize that you’ve been had. Because the $25 cheesecake? Tastes like frozen Sara Lee nastiness.

You keep eating, hoping, praying that somewhere, somehow, you’re going to hit that $25 bite.

No way, though. It’s over. The cheesecake sucked.

You’re thinking, I cannot believe I spent this much on something so unbelievably average, so incredibly uneventful.

And this describes my feelings about the Stephanie Meyer Twilight series.

I know I’m possibly subjecting myself to the rage of thousands of Cullen worshiping teenagers, and I’ll fully be expecting their version of a fatwa anytime now.

Like, totally, you’re, like, going to die. And, like, it’s going to be, like, by stoning. In. The. Gap.

Before I die, stoned and in the Gap, I’d like to say I did read all of the books. Like the metaphorical cheesecake, I took every bite, hoping and praying that it would get better.

Four million pages later, I sat there mired (or is it meyered? heh) in disappointment.

OK, so, fast forward to last weekend, when I finally watched Twilight on DVD. Why DVD and not the theater? After letting that series suck up to twenty hours out of my life (that’s four months in “I don’t have kids” years), there was no way I was hiring a sitter so I could see it.

This movie marked the first time in my life that I found the movie to be far, far better than the book.

Like the book, teenager Bella Swans finds herself awkwardly trying to navigate high school and connect with a generally estranged father with whose home she’s just moved in to at the po’dunk town of Forks. It rains about 355 days of the year in the Forks, there’s very little sunshine, and the nearest mall is about an hour away.

Already a teenage horror story.

Lucky for Bella, high school isn’t going to be a total drag because the guy who sits next to her in Biology is not only mysterious and handsome, but is also a vampire.

Like, oh my God, that is so hot.

The movie is visually beautiful, with lots of (wait for it, this is going to be where I get technical) blueish hues tinting up the screen. Everything is dark, melancholy and sad, as it should be when a brooding vampire is involved with a morose teenager.

The chemistry between Robert Pattison and Kristen Stewart plays nicely and accurately reflects that fine balance between the awkwardness and intensity of adolescent romance. And, really, this relationship and its tension is the heart of what drives the movie forward. (Read "chick flick").

Of course, the description of Pattison’s character, Edward Cullen, in the novel suggests that he possesses a beauty that is stunningly surreal. While I would have drooled over Robert Pattison every single day of my teenage existence, he’s a far cry from surreal or even beautiful.

Aside from this minor casting issue, the movie was well acted, well cast and each character more than adequately reflected the pictures of them I had formed in my mind while being subjected to, er, uh, reading the novel.

So, the movie? I would watch it again, but, mostly, because I love vampires.

Especially the kind that brood about women they can never, ever actually have.

And, now, off to the Gap for my stoning.

** The author of this post wishes to acknowledge that her analysis of any male vampire is irrevocably skewed by her deep and eternal love for Angel of the Joss Whedon series. Because I love him. Forever. And Edward Cullen? Is. No. Angel.

*** So, I know in nerd world, I'm supposed to talk about all the "features" on the DVD, but I didn't watch the DVD with the purposes of reviewing it. So, just deal. Next time, my nerdy friends, next time.

Prom Night (2008)

2009-03-19T19:31:00.001-07:00

No shock here, eh?

There are remakes that I can understand and then there are remakes that I cannot wrap my itty-bitty primordial brain around. This remake of Prom Night (1980) falls in the latter category. Falls into it? Hell, it belly-flops into it. Never the high-water mark of early 80's slasher flicks, the original at least had Jamie Lee Curtis running around and screaming. Check that. At MOST it had Jamie Lee Curtis running around and screaming.

So instead of a remake of a classic in the genre like Black Christmas, Halloween, When a Stranger Calls or Friday the 13th, we are now blessed with remakes of second and third tier slasher outings. Thanks Hollywood. It's not like any of those previous remakes improved upon the original.

Hey, wait. Maybe the remake geeks are onto something. Instead of remaking a classic and failing miserably, maybe they can truly improve on one of these lesser features with a new cast and a fresh look.

Nah! Nice thought, though.

The only improvement I noticed was the music. And the hip-hop/shitty pop in the new version is barely better than the crappy disco-era shit from the original. Barely. Certainly not enough to warrant anyone's precious movie watching time. I mean, I watched it. But that's only because I really, really, really love you guys and I would hate to see any of you actually watch this turd without warning you about it first.

Here's a brief summary of the film. Cute blond girl with weirdly attractive scar on her forehead comes home to find her family is being attacked by a madman. Turns out she is relaying a dream to a therapist. A dream rooted in reality as she was the witness to a heinous crime three years earlier and helped put away said madman.

Now the bad man has escaped and he has shaved and he is looking for revenge on cute scar girl. On her prom night of all days. Proms have sure changed since my time. The party is in a fancy hotel and all the kids have rooms or suites or penthouses to stay in for the night. That's basically a free banging pass that these kids parents are giving them. I think I hate these pretty, young, rich people. I think I would like to cut them up with a shiny knife.

I instantly regret that last line. Must have gotten caught up in the moment. I am watching a slasher film after all. Let's slow dance it down a notch, shall we?

One by one, cute scar girl's bubble-headed friends and some unlucky hotel staff (should have taken the night off) are picked off by the least scary looking killer I have seen in a tremendously long time. Check this guy out. Oh sure, he looks like a Grade A douche, but a maniac slasher? C'mon. More likely to hit on your boyfriend at the gym if you ask me. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I'm just sayin'.

Bottom line: Not scary. Not well-made. Not campy. I like my slasher flicks to have at least one of those characteristics. This one fails on all counts.

Except for the scar. I really thought that scar was kinda cute.

Zatoichi

2009-03-15T05:04:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've turned a movie off after just a few minutes.

I did it yesterday, with Zatoichi. I was so, so disappointed. Why? Well, the reason is simple. The 'special' effects.

I was so looking forward to this. I even explained to the wife why Takeshi Kitano is so fucking cool. I explained the premise of the movie, and why it would rock when made by him.

Then, not 30 seconds in, we have the first deaths, and some of the shittest CG effects I have ever seen. Blood spurting and not actually landing on anyone nearby, even when it apparently spurts in their faces. It just looks cheap, and as I haven't watched or absorbed any of the rest of the movie, I don't know if Kitano might have been making some stylistic point with this. It just looked too shit for words, so the movie remains unqatched and, for me, unwatchable.

Poor effects in themselves are not a problem – I love trashy horror, for example, and bad effects there are forgivable if they have ambition and imagination fuelling them. But there was no excuse for this, it's not a cheap production, and we're talking about relatively basic effects even if they were produced physically rather than with computers. Just a bad, bad idea.

* According to Wikipedia, this 'stylising' was intentional. Well, it was fucking shit, Mr Kitano. Don't do it again or I'll have to go Zatoichi on your ass.

Black Christmas (2006)

2009-03-13T20:48:00.000-07:00

Conducted an interesting experiment tonight. Well, interesting if you are a freaky-deak for slasher films like I am. I watched the original Black Christmas from 1974 for the first time, and I watched the remake immediately afterwards. For purely scientific reasons, of course.

The original film is often lauded as a classic by fans of the genre. A pre-cursor to films like Halloween and Friday the 13th. And I can't believe it took me this long to finally sit down and watch it. Hell, we even had it for about 3 weeks siting by the television. Just waiting for us to watch it. Maybe it, the DVD, even watched us like the eyeball of a maniac peering at us through the crack between the door and the door frame. Wait, what?

Anyway, I really enjoyed the original film. It was fun seeing John Saxon, Andrea Martin, Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder doing it like it was a crazy episode of Love American Style. Man, I used to love that show. If you haven't seen it yet, well...I won't spoil it for you. But it was pretty unique for a slasher flick, even by today's standards. And, like I said before, it was highly influential for pretty much every slasher film made after it.

The remake, however, sucked huge smelly gorilla balls!

Not that it was the necessarily the fault of the film-makers. Okay, it was mostly their fault. What I meant to say was that the mere act of remaking a seminal film in a given genre is that, almost by default, the film has to bring something new to the table. Gus Van Sant did a shot-by-shot remake of Psycho and while it was technically decent, it bored us to tears. So that ain't gonna work here. And you have to stay true enough to the source material or you might as well make a totally new movie with an original plot. Yeah, right!

So what does the earnest film-maker decide to do? Generally speaking, for the slasher genre at least, they decide to give the audience a more detailed back story so that we know why the killer is fond of sticking sharp objects into random or not-so-random sorority girls/babysitters.

And that is a bad idea.

What made the original Black Christmas so effective was what we didn't know about the killer. We don't know his/her motivation. We don't know what childhood events shaped their psyche. We are given snippets of information that really don't make any sense, and we really couldn't be expected to piece it all together. There is a big bad man with a knife or a machete or an ice-pick and he wants to do things with it. We don't know why, and that makes it scary. Simple, right?

But the makers of this remake went for the back-story route and they told us everything about the killer. EVERYTHING! Hey, he was born yellow. Huh? Hey, his mom locked him in the attic when he was 5. Yeah. Oh, and she banged him when he was 12. Wait, what? And he had a sister/daughter from that humpty dance. Sure, why not. And blah, blah, blah fucking blah. Who cares? You were scarier when you were just a pair of hands and a voice on the other end of the phone line. Rob Zombie made the same freakin' mistake when he remade Halloween. I'm sorry...when he re-imagined Halloween. Whatever.

Another thing that infuriated me? They took one, semi-inventive death scene from the original movie and made it into the killer's modus operandi for the remake. Plastic bag over the head followed by stabby stabby in the head with something pointy. Yawn!

So if you are in the mood for a fun and/or scary slasher flick I would recommend that you stay far away from this hunk o' junk. But check out the original, if you haven't already. That one was loads of scary fun.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

2009-03-01T19:41:00.000-08:00

My God, Kevin Smith is a hack.

Don't get me wrong. I've been a big fan of the guy in the past. Some of his films are classics. But, unfortunately, it's been a while. I could go on about my love/hate relationship with Kevin Smith, but I would just be re-hashing what I wrote about it on my other blog. Go here to read it, if you are interested. I know you are.

Anywho...this one could have been decent. He basically watched every Judd Apatow film from the past few years and hired those actors. Nice start. The plot about a couple of friends who decide to make a low-budget porno with some folks in the neighborhood guaranteed an ample supply of dick and fart jokes. A Kevin Smith staple.

So what went wrong?

Just about everything went wrong.

It just wasn't funny enough. And the stuff that was sorta funny was telegraphed from a mile away. Brandon Routh's character was gay? Who saw that coming? Jeff Anderson getting shit on? Wow...that really took me for a loop. I mean the actress said she was constipated and how that was good for anal sex because it relaxes her. And then Anderson sets himself up directly under the couple while they are doing the chocolate deed. Even warns them to watch it when they pull out. But I just had no idea that Kevin Smith was gonna go there! Genius! And please, please, please show us Jason Mewes dick. Please Kevin?

That being said, I still laughed a few times during the first half of the film. Mostly at/with Craig Robinson who is the absolute shit in everything he does. But the second half of the film felt like waiting for the paint to dry. It. Was. Awful. As much as I loved most of Chasing Amy, I just don't think that Kevin Smith has it in him to write a decent romance.

Feh.

Don't waste your time on this lame-ass waste of talent.

Go rent The Moguls instead. Basically the same without the "it's been done a million times before" romance between the two leads in this one. And pray that Kevin Smith either starts making movies like he used to or that he retires. I think I would be fine with either outcome.

Southland Tales

2009-02-06T18:36:00.000-08:00

I think I found it. The worst film ever made.

That might be a bit harsh. I'm sure there is some Grade D porn out there that is probably worse. And yet those films might fill the need of sorts for some desperate soul who really needs it. And I've got a soft spot in my heart for bad porn just as I have a soft spot in my heart for bad mainstream films. Everyone has their fetishes, ya know.

But this shit was awful, yo!

Now, I've never seen Donnie Darko. I've heard wonderful things about it and it is highly recommended by a few friends of mine whose opinions I trust. It's on my Netflix queue. And this piece of shit was the followup by writer and director Richard Kelly. So one would think that it would have some redeeming qualities. One would think, but one would be sadly mistaken.

And before any fans of it out there start with me, I get it. I get it. Really, I get it. I FUCKING GET IT!!!

I get the "statement" he is making about the media, the far right, the government machine and everything else he references and their roles in the eventual breakdown of our society. I get it. Religion, the environment, the trauma of war...I FUCKING GET IT!!! The film spends 2 and 1/2 hours beating us over the head with it. Only a freakin' moron wouldn't get it. But is so un-interesting and bland that it compares badly with watching paint dry.

Lemme throw some random plot points and characters out at ya. The Rock plays an action movie hero who disappears and then reappears with amnesia. But he actually is a time traveler and his own future self. Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy!!!) plays an ex-porn star who is working with the neo-Marxist underground a bit unwittingly and planning her new reality series. Sean William Scott is a neo-Marxist posing as his twin brother, a cop. Or is he? Remember...there is time travel and inter-dimensional stuff going on. Justin Timberlake is a damaged Iraqi war vet who acts as narrator and chronicler of the whole mess. He makes no sense at all. Meanwhile Miranda Richardson is the behind-the-scenes focus of the whole film as the head of the fascist government agency that the neo-Marxists are targeting.

That last paragraph was the most boring and exhausting thing that I've ever written. Holy crap!

And I didn't even mention the most creepy role that Wallace Shawn has ever played or the bad cop that John Lovitz played or the paraplegic war vet with a ZZ Top beard that Kevin Smith played. All of these were done with tongue firmly placed in cheek. I hope. Dear God, I hope.

But it was all so freakin' boring and useless. Littered with silly pop culture references and bad special effects and goofy media hyperbole.

Ugh! I hated this fucking movie.

Stay away. Stay far away. You will thank me for this. I promise.

UPDATE:

This is the only 3 minutes of the movie that I liked. Justin Timberlake lip syncing to The Killers in a weird Lebowski-esque dream/fantasy sequence. The song kinda got stuck in my head.

The Strangers

2009-01-28T20:06:00.000-08:00

I don't know how they did it.

They, the powers that be, somehow made a horror movie that was incredibly short and yet incredibly slow at the same time. It literally crawled along the floor and limped up to the oh-so stupid ending. Quite a feat, if you ask me.

I liked the idea behind it. A couple of young lover spending a night in an isolated country home. Masked strangers torment them for unknown reasons. Yeah...that sounds pretty good. Except it wasn't.

It reminded me of two different and much better films. The first, for obvious reasons if you have seen it, is a French film calls Ils (Them, in English). That one was about, you guessed it, a young couple spending a night in an isolated country home who are tormented by mysterious strangers. That one had a decent twist at the end though. This one didn't. It just laid there, floundering instead. The second was John Carpenter's original Assault on Precinct 13. And only because of the unknown surrounding the assailants. To be honest, I haven't seen Assault on Precinct 13 in a long time so I don't remember if Carpenter actually showed why they were attacking the Precinct. I like to remember that there was no reason. It was the unknown that made it powerful.

The unknown in this film was just plain boring.

And the entire film was shot with hand-held cameras. So even calm scenes of the two protagonists sitting at a table are shaky as hell. What the fuck? There is no reason for that.

I will say one thing. Liv Tyler can freakin' scream! I'm not a huge fan of her acting but the woman has some pipes. That doesn't mean you should go out and rent it. No, no, no, no, no.

Rent Empire Records instead. She screams nicely in that one too.

1408

2009-01-27T22:04:00.000-08:00

Dear God, what hath John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson wrought?

The formerly reliable Cusack plays a paranormal travel writer who specializes in debunking ghostly occurrences at hotels, motels and creepy country inns. He used to be a "real writer", but he has become kinda stuck in this rut of being a professional ghost hunter. He's also a cynical bastard, you betcha. Until he encounters real terror in room 1408 at the legendary Dolphin Hotel in New York City. Those numbers add up to 13, by the way. Isn't that clever?

Excuse me while I yawn.

Aaaaarrrrgggghhhhh-owwwaaaahhhhhhrooohhhwrrr!!!

Sorry about that. Couldn't help myself. Besides, that yawn is probably as good of a review as you are gonna find for this, um, er...yawner. See what I did there?

You know there was a time and a place when I would watch pretty much any piece of crap that John Cusack or Sam Jackson produced. I probably would even watch them produce an actual piece of crap, but we aren't talking about my bathroom fetishes here. No, we are talking about bad cinema. And this, my friends, is truly bad cinema.

I still had high hopes, though. I love these two actors and I love ghost stories. I even kinda love Stephen King who wrote the story that the movie is based upon. Or at least I used to. Back in the day. And he had done "bad hotels" before, and done it well. Like I said, I had high hopes.

So what went wrong? Was it the faux yellow and red hued atmosphere? Was it the kitschy inclusion of every ghostly trick in the book? Radios turning on by themselves, candies appearing on the pillows, toilet paper re-folding itself, pictures dislodging themselves from the wall, a sudden bout of deafness followed by painful encounters with a window pane and some scalding hot water. It all feels like it has been done before. Better, I might add.

Nah. You know what I really think it was? It was John Cusack.

I just don't think he was the right guy for this role. I kept imagining someone who I believed was more cynical, more beat down by life in the role. Clive Owen in the beginning of Children of Men, maybe. He also become too manic too quickly, I thought. And then he started accepting it. And then manic again. There was no slow dissolve into madness like there was with "The Shining". He just sank right into it. That might be the fault of the screenwriter and the director more than the star, but Cusack certainly bought into it.

And I couldn't help but feel that it would have been better if it downplayed the SFX and maybe was in black in white. Or in French. I dunno, but it could have used something.

Another thing. It wasn't scary. Or at least it didn't scare me. Lord knows I wanted it to. I love a good scary flick. All cheap special effects with no payoff. Why did some of the ghosts look like bad movie projections on the wall? Was that supposed to be scary? Was the excessive heat or the chilling cold? Any of it?

Turns out he was more haunted by his own personal ghosts than the not-so-scary ones in Room 1408.

Or was he?

Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha...um, er Aaaaarrrrgggghhhhh-owwwaaaahhhhhhrooohhhwrrr!!!

Sorry. Yawned again.

Vantage Point

2009-01-26T12:14:00.000-08:00

I seem to be watching a lot of movies lately that beg/borrow/steal from Akira Kurasawa. This time it was Vantage Point that gets the Rashomon treatment. Badly.

It's actually not a awful movie. Some A-list or former A-list actors are littered through the film. Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Sigourney Weaver (in an extraordinarily useless role...must have needed a new bathroom in her house or something), Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, etc... All big shots trying to make it work in this ensemble piece. Yet the only character I seemed to care about was Whitaker's eyewitness to the tragic events portrayed in the film.

You know what I hate? I hate when I can spot the actor playing the bad guy right away and it turns out that I am right. Took me all of 3 minutes to figure this movie out. That is either a new personal record for me or it is damned close. The obvious choice had me doubting myself all through the picture until...duh! There it is! Holy fuck is that awful!

Like I said, the Forest Whitaker sub-plot was interesting to watch, but the rest of it? Feh. Watch the first five minutes and see if you can guess who the bad guy is. Then watch the last five minutes of it to see if you are right. I bet you will be. And I saved you an hour and half of viewing.

You are most welcome!

Doomsday

2009-01-04T16:14:00.001-08:00

I had high hopes for this one for a number of reasons. First off, it was written and directed by Neil Marshall. The man responsible for Dog Soldiers and The Descent, two terrific films. Secondly, it is Marshall's homage to films like Escape From New York and the Mad Max trilogy. Films I love! Genres I love!

But this one disappointed.

It started off great. A killer plague wipes out most of the residents of Scotland forcing the U.K. to totally isolate the region by wall to the South and by a sea blockade of mines around the rest of the nation. After close to 30 years it is discovered that the plague still exists and that there are survivors living in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

A girl who escaped (sans one eye) from Scotland before it was sealed off is now a grown up special forces hottie. She is chosen to lead a team into Scotland to finds some survivors to halt the spread of the plague in London. Since there are survivors there must be a cure, right?

First she encounters a group living a very Mad Max-ish existence in Glasgow. Why is it that as soon as a bunch of people die in a Nuclear War or a monstrous plague, the survivors begin piercing things and shaving their heads into Mohawks? Anyway, these guys are bad. And they are cannibals. Which makes no sense since there appears to be plenty of cows running around the countryside. But I've never tried human flesh, so I could be talking out of my ass.

The team later encounters a second group of survivors led by Malcolm MacDowell, and this is where the film lost me. This group of survivors, in under 30 years, have reverted to living in the Middle Ages. Castles, swords, armor, horses and bad personal hygiene. You get the picture.

Not sure where Marshall was going with this particular homage. I get the Mad Max references and the Escape From New York references, but this one escapes me. Knightriders by George Romero, maybe? I dunno.

I do know that I was thoroughly enjoying the film until it went there. REALLY enjoying it. But as soon as that happened I was really let down. And even though it went back to the Mad Max theme fairly quickly, it was too late. For me.

I get that it was supposed to be just a little bit o' brain candy for those that love these kind of films. And lord knows, I'm one of them. But the Medieval shit just was a bit too much for me. Shame.

I Know Who Killed Me

2008-12-12T20:56:00.000-08:00

You've heard the stories.

A movie so bad that it almost makes you cry. A movie so bad that it defies all logical reasoning. A movie so bad that you almost can't believe your senses. A movie so bad that you wonder if you actually died and went to Hell and Satan himself made you watch while his minions skinned you alive.

This is that movie.

Lindsay Lohan, channeling Elizabeth Berkeley from Showgirls, plays a young woman who dreams of herself or someone who looks exactly like her who is being tortured at the hands of a madman. But everything that happens to her double also happens to her. Including the radical removal of her right hand and her right leg below the knee. It's okay though. She gets some really badass bionic prosthetics to make up for the loss. Seriously.

She winds up in the hospital where her parents come to claim her. But she has never seen them before. They think she is their suburban perfect teen aged daughter. An aspiring writer. She thinks she's the stripper daughter of a heroin addict who died years ago. Oh, sweet agony...which one is right?

So is she crazy? Is she making it all up? Has her traumatic torture forced her to create an alter-ego to deal with the pain? Or does she have a stigmatic twin? A twin sister who experiences all the same pain and feelings that she does, and vice versa. The mind boggles.

While the mind is, um, boggling, the film is degenerating into an absolute fucking mess. The editing, the soundtrack, the unintentionally hilarious tension. I particularly liked how stripper Lindsay takes writer Lindsay's boyfriend up to her room right in front of her "mother" for a bout of kinky double amputee sex. Just to prove she's not who he thinks she is. Huh?

Oh, and they used the clever "try to borrow a condom from the FBI" ploy to sneak her out of the house. That one never gets old.

The only way I made it through this pile of crap was utter laziness and a bout of stomach flu/head cold. Maybe I was having fever related delusions. That would be a rational explanation.

I mean, they couldn't have made a movie this freaking bad. Or could they have? Hmm.

Harsh Times

2008-12-04T08:33:00.000-08:00

Hard to include a film in this blog that features two of my favorite current actors. Christian Bale and Freddy Rodriguez. But I gotta do it. This film was truly disappointing.

OK, picture this. Bale and Rodriguez are native Los Angelenos. You can buy that for Rodriguez even though he is of Puerto Rican descent and from Chicago. Bale, even though he is a great actor, is a bit harder to buy. Whenever he slips into the old "homey" and "esse" crap...nah, I don't get it. I mean, I guess that's how the white boys from the 'hood in LA talk. I wouldn't know. It just sounded weird to me.

Bale is veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He's been a part of some fucked up shit over there, and it seems he was a part of some fucked up shit over here even before he went. Everyone they run into during the film refers to him as the craziest mother-fucker that ever went down. He is trying to become a cop with the LAPD, but they are stringing him along because of his psych profile. The exact reason that the LAPD don't want him is the reason that the Feds (Homeland Security) do want him. Because he follows orders and doesn't care about the body count.

But before he can start his new job, he hangs out on the streets of LA with his buddy Rodriguez who is looking for work. They drink all day, riding around in Bale's faux police cruiser. They even roll some drug dealers and some hardened criminals while they are at it. As if there were no repercussions to worry about at all. Of course, they wind up being terribly wrong about that.

Good acting, even if Bale may have been miscast, decent storyline, hard as nails life on the streets of LA. So what went wrong with this flick?

I dunno, but something did. The characters weren't very likable. Bale was a psycho and a bully. Rodriguez was a little crazy himself, and he was weak-willed to the point of following Bale into just about any nutso situation. But I've watched plenty of films where I haven't liked the main characters and I have still enjoyed them. So it wasn't that.

The writer and director is the same guy that did Training Day, and this film had a lot of that same atmosphere. Just not as well done. Maybe because Ethan Hawke's character in that film was actually someone you could root for. Maybe.

Maybe it was just the sheer hopelessness of the situations that these characters kept getting themselves into. Maybe it was just LA. I've never been, and I've never really had an urge to go. It just seems so grimy and violent as it is portrayed on film. And I grew up a stone's throw from NYC, so I know a little about grimy and violent. I definitely do have an East Coast bias. I tend to prefer films that take place in NYC or Boston or even Chicago. Once you get past the Mississippi River, all bets are off.

But I watched this film and I kept waiting for it to deliver. I kept waiting for something that would make me go "Wow". But it never did. It wasn't an awful film. It was merely average. And sometimes a mediocre film that could have been great is worse than a bad film that never aspired to be anything other than what it is. At least you can have a good time making fun of those bad films.

This one just disappointed. And that's a shame given the pedigree of the participants.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls

2008-11-09T14:53:00.000-08:00

Um.

Well, you see...

..there was, um.

Well...the refrigerator. Yeah...um, and then the, um...

...my God! WTF with this Mutt kid?

Um, and the...

...Holy crap! What happened to Karen Allen?

Um, well...it looks...wait, what is that?

Monkeys and aliens and a wedding!!!!

What the fuck!

(PS - Honestly, I kinda didn't mind this one as much as most. It sucked, but it was better than the average episode of Heroes. But when they encountered the giant ants or Siafu in South America...well, the geek in me knew better. These ants are only found in Africa. Even the name Indy used, Siafu, was given by the Maasai. This is just plain unforgivable. - Earl)

Vacancy

2008-11-03T03:40:00.000-08:00

After watching this, I honestly didn't expect to find myself on here blogging about it. I enjoyed it, y'see. It's simple, short, very direct and quite amusing. Its stars are sufficiently no-faced (Luke 'Everyman' Wilson and Kate Beckinsale) that it doesn't matter who they are; I suspect I would have loved this if it had had two no-names in it, but that's by the by - it doesn't, so let's look at what it is.

Oh, spoilers ahead.

A couple's car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. They end up at a nearby motel, where strange things start happening; banging on the door adjoining the next room, on the front door, some other weirdness. They complain to the manager, he says he's sort it, blokey goes back to their room and puts a videotape on, is shocked to see it's a rather crude film of people getting the shit kicked out of them and killed, then realises the films were all shot in the very room he's sitting in.

Then he starts to get worried. Fair enough.

What follows is the ideal introduction to the horror thriller for pre-teens – pretty Hollywood faces in a film short enough for any attention span (80 minutes including credits!), no major on-screen violence at all, and everyone good survives (except the panicky policeman, who you knew would die as soon as he appeared). It's reasonably imaginative, has a few jumps in it that are telegraphed from far away, and there's very, very little on-screen blood. It has a small cast too, which makes movies like this much more effective.

So why is it on here? Because Luke Wilson's character fucking lives, that's why. He's stabbed in the stomach, I'd say right around the liver; that's fatal pretty quickly without major surgery and hospitalisation. But no. It's very dark when he's stabbed, and yet Beckinsale, when she comes out of her hiding place after a good kip and kills all the bad men, finds him weak but alive right where he collapsed and crawled to after being stabbed.

The movie lost me right there. Stabbings are more often fatal than gunshot wounds; one in the stomach with a reasonable-sized knife, left for a few hours on the ground… Deader than shit, Luke. I suspect there's a version of this script out there where he dies, when the budget was probably $15million lower, but that's long gone. I bought into this movie, and it sold me out, and for that, dear friends, it's a MOVIEGRENADE!

Oh, kudos to Frank Whaley though - he did just fine with a very limited and concise script. Yay Frank!

Day of the Dead (2008)

2008-10-05T19:46:00.000-07:00

I like zombie movies.

Big fan. Especially the great George Romero zombie movies, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. I'll leave out the original Day of the Dead (1985) and Land of the Dead because, well...they weren't very good you see.

I even liked the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. They made some changes to the formula, especially in how the zombies moved. In the past, all zombies in films were slow, lumbering creations. But they never stopped. That's what made them scary. Dawn of the Dead changed that by making the zombies fast. Now some will argue that 28 Days Later was the innovator here, but I'm gonna get to that film in a moment. So even though they made the zombies faster, they still made them scary. That's all that matters really.

You know, now would probably be a good time to re-visit the Zombie Rules. These are my rules for what makes a good zombie flick:

The Zombie Rules

Zombies are the Undead. They are animated corpses who hunger for human flesh. What animates them? Pure evil? A virus? Electro-magnetic impulses? Who knows. But that is what a zombie is. The living dead. 28 Days Later, while a fantastic film at times, is NOT a zombie film. Those people are still alive. The virus makes them crazy and blood-thirsty, but it doesn't kill them. Eventually they die of starvation when they don't get enough to eat, but that's it. They aren't zombies.
To kill a zombie you have to destroy their brain. Whatever it is that is animating these corpses is controlled in the brain somehow. You can chop off their arms, shoot them in the chest, or piss in their face. That's ain't gonna stop them. The only thing that is gonna stop them is a well placed bullet, arrow, crowbar or knitting needle to the brain. That's it! If they can be killed (?!?) any other way, then they ain't zombies.
A zombie can be slow and lumbering or it can be just as fast as the body of it's previous owner. I really don't care. Just as long as they are scary and they crave human flesh. What a zombie CANNOT have is super-human strength or speed. Why would a zombie be super-strong? I've seen some zombie films in which the zombies can easily rip the head off of a human. Do you know how hard it is to rip somebody's head off? I've had some experience with this and it ain't easy. If your zombie is super-strong or super-fast, then it probably ain't a zombie.

There are others, but those are the main rules. I watched the remake, and I hesitate to call it a remake, of Day of the Dead over the weekend and it clearly broke rule #3 and came real close to breaking rule #1. I can't be sure because the film was so poorly made that it was hard to determine if the people died prior to becoming zombies. They certainly were infected with the virus while they were still alive and that is a first as far as I know in a zombie flick. And I didn't like it. No sir, not one bit.

But the film broke the shit out of rule #3. The zombies were incredibly fast and strong. One zombie was even able to crawl along the walls and the ceiling for a while. I didn't realize that gravity could be nullified with a small dose of zombie virus.

What does this all have to do with this movie? Not a lot, to be truthful. The film only barely honored the original film. There was a military conspiracy, an underground bunker and a "friendly" zombie, but that's about it. Well there was also the bad acting, bad editing and bad direction that was common to both films. That's something, I guess.

And you know, even with the bad acting and the breaking of the Zombie Rules, I could have had a lot of fun with this film. But it was just so lifeless (get it?) and non-scary that instead it was just an incredible waste of time. They could have easily made this film either fun or scary, but they just didn't bring it.

Stay away from this piece of junk. It rots. Get it?

Death Sentence

2008-09-17T19:28:00.000-07:00

A friend who smells like a wet dog recommended this one to us the other day. He didn't recommend it as in "It's so awesome, you are going to love it!" No. As in "It's so awful, you are going to love it!"

I love those kind of recommendations.

Kevin Bacon plays a father with the perfect family. Beautiful wife, great job and two sons that would make any man proud. We, the viewers, are made aware of his perfect life right from the opening credits. A montage that would make Sylvester Stallone proud highlights the ups and ups of what a great life this dude has. Oh, and if you didn't catch that then there is the first scene of the movie at his office. He's a risk manager for an insurance firm and he is reassured to read that non-smoking married men with two kids get to live the longest. He actually reads that out loud to an associate of his and then gives us an aw-shucks tip of the head to confirm that he, indeed, is that guy.

Too bad its all gonna go to Hell when his eldest son, after scoring the winning goal in a high-school hockey game (natch), is killed in an initiation ritual by the big screen's first multi-racial gang since The Warriors. White, black, Latino. This gang will accept anyone. As long as they kill a random somebody to prove they are a man. Seriously, this gang's theme song must be "It's a Small World After All". Gotta love a street gang with Utopian ideals.

Cue the bad music, sibling rivalry (did Daddy love Brendan more than Luke? The answer is "yes", by the way) and the multi-layered revenge motifs. Daddy is out to bag the baddie that killed his darling boy and the gang bangers are out to get him once he caps the kid who got his son. Vicious circle, if you ask me.

This leads to some awesome hilarity. Like the gangs ill-fated first attempt on his life. A shootout. In broad daylight. In the middle of a busy city neighborhood. My favorite part of that sequence was Kevin Bacon running through a parking garage, throwing himself on car after car to set off their alarms. In an attempt to confuse his pursuers, you see. OK...written out like that it doesn't seem very funny. But trust me, if you saw his face while he was doing it you would be laughing too. And it only gets sillier from there.

Oooh. Oooh. You know what I love in a movie? I love when they use the title of the film somewhere in the film itself. You know, like Paul Newman saying "Somebody up there likes me!" at the end of Somebody Up There Likes Me. This one has the leader of the U.N. gang tell Kevin Bacon that he has given the rest of his family a death sentence, man! Chilling, right?

Now, I normally don't give away spoilers in these reviews. But I'm gonna go against my rule this one time only to talk about the most awesome scene ever included in a revenge film. The head detective assigned to his case, after finding out that he killed the first gang banger who killed his son, visits him in the hospital where he is recovering from gunshot wounds. Oh, and dealing with the death of his wife and his second son (who is actually still alive, but he doesn't know that) at the hands of the U.N. gang.

And she's pissed at him! Really! She tells him that it ends here, right now. No more. That he has been given a second chance and he should move on. She tells him that no one wins these wars, that she will haul his ass into jail if he even thinks about continuing with his vendetta. But the point is that she is super fucking pissed at him. The guy just lost his entire fucking family (he thinks), and she is pissed at him! Yeah, I get that vigilantes are bad, but feel a little sorry for the guy. C'mon!

Anyway, you pretty much get what you expect with this piece of trash. Bad acting, bad action sequences, bad music (I mentioned that already, right?) and bad character development. What does it add up to?

An hour and fifty minutes of pure heaven, my friends. That's what it adds up to.

PS - and I didn't even mention an awesomely awful cameo from John Goodman as an underworld type crime figure...with a twist. Oops I just did.

Munich

2008-08-28T02:53:00.000-07:00

Some years, I guess there aren't enough good movies around to fill all the Oscar categories. Why else would this rake up five nominations?

I, like Earl (and please, that comma is essential), have only been watching good movies of late. And some average. But no shite.

Until Sunday, when I watched Munich. Okay, it's not possible to dismiss a movie with such high production values as being out and out shite, but it is, for the bulk of its audience, a failure, I would say.

Munich follows the story – not a factual one, as such, but that's too complicated for a simple man like me to get into – of what happened after the Israeli athletes were butchered at the Olympics in 1972. Israel's famous secret service (that's not the oxymoron it seems…), Mossad, decides to do something about it and pursue those it apparently knows were responsible. Fighting fire with fire, you might say.

Eric Bana, he of the single expression (with the exception of Chopper, of course, in which he was wonderful and articulate), plays the lead, and there's a good supporting cast which includes Daniel Craig and Geoffrey Rush.

It's a lovely looking film (except, as with all period movies, all the cars are absolutely immaculate, which is kind of annoying), the acting – Bana aside – is pretty good, and the story follows an event that's always fascinated me.

So what's the problem? Well, it's not thrilling enough to be a thriller. It's not engaging enough to be an effective drama. So what the hell is it? The simple answer is, about 40 minutes too long. With a more brutal editor, you could comfortably hack at least 40 minutes from this movie which adds nothing to it; in fact, I would suggest that those 40 minutes are there to make this a 'worthy' movie, with 'depth' and 'characterisation'.

But I don't buy that. Not one bit. It's flabby; some great performances in there, sure, but flabby and there's at least one character too many involved. It's indulgent – of Spielberg.

I think it's about time someone admitted this... Spielberg's lost it. Whatever he had, it's gone. Indy 4? Munich? I rank them about the same, though Munich is 'worthy' and Indy is popcorn entertainment – they both failed equally to do the basics, and so they're both Grenades. War of the Worlds, The Terminal… It's not a great list, is it?

Which reminds me, I haven't done Indy 4 on here yet... And when is Eric Bana going to add the 'l' to his surname? No, smartarse, not Eric Blana. You know what I'm saying.

The Condemned

2008-08-25T12:48:00.000-07:00

Hey kids!

Long time, no see. And really for no other reason that I've gone through an extended period in which I have only seen good movies. Not a true turkey amongst them. Oh sure some have been so-so (The Brave One), some have been mildly disappointing (The Heartbreak Kid), but none have been truly terrible.

Then I saw The Condemned over the weekend. Oh, how things change. And yet I was still hesitant to post a review here on the Grenade trashing it. Why? Lemme 'splain.

There are definitely two different Earls battling it out for supremacy in my brain. The first one likes good movies. Great direction, beautiful cinematography, inspired acting and well-written scripts. That Earl, let's call him Alpha Earl, is a fan of Kurasawa and Kubrick and the Coen Brothers and Malick and, well...the list goes on.

But there is this second Earl, let's call him Omega Earl. He is a fan of B-movies and zombie flicks and the A-Team. All Omega Earl needs is some popcorn, a shoot 'em up and a really loud television set and he is okey-dokey. Omega Earl loves his porn as well, in case anyone was wondering. Too much information? Crap!

So while Alpha Earl can clearly see what a horrible film The Condemned is, Omega Earl is happier than a pig in shit to waste 90 minutes of his life glued to the tube feasting on its glory! Bunch of guys beating the crap out of each other - check! Bad acting from the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) - check! Even worse acting from the non-wrestlers in the film - check! Wildly derivative script - Hells yeah!!! I'm pretty sure I've seen this same film about a half a dozen times now, and I'm pretty sure Alpha and Omega Earl duked it out over each version.

Omega Earl usually wins.

So if you aren't into mindless violence and cringe-worthy dialogue, give this bad boy a pass. But if you want to feed your Omega twin...

Jumper

2008-06-24T09:09:00.001-07:00

Who wouldn't want the ability to teleport yourself anywhere in the world? Especially this summer as gas prices are moving up and up and up past the $4 a gallon mark. And if you knew what you were doing, you could take a friend along with you for the ride. That's like an HOV lane for the teleporting crowd. Awesome!

But the downside of it is that there are these pesky Paladins around to spoil your fun. And it seems like the only reason they are doing it IS to ruin your fun. Oh, they will try to evoke religion. Only God should be able to be everywhere at once. Blah blah blah. Go cry me a fucking river, Paladin! You are just jealous of the fact that I can go tanning on the top of the Sphinx and you can't. And by the way, your argument doesn't even make sense. Even by the loosest interpretation of your statement I can't be everywhere at once. I can only be in one place at any one given time. But that's besides the point.

What is the point? Oh yeah...this movie sucks!

The long-anticipated reunion of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader and Mace Windu. Right. Samuel L. Jackson is one of my favorite actors when he picks the right role. He's just laughable when he chooses shit like this. And Hayden Christensen keeps on keeping on with the dull, lifeless acting. And why wasn't his character fat? He never walked anywhere. He would even teleport from one spot on the couch to another just to get closer to the remote control. He should have been HUGE! The film would have been much better if his character were played by Hurley from Lost.

Did this film do well at the box office? I hope not. Because if it did then there would have to be an inevitable sequel. Especially with the way that they ended it. But they, and I mean the Jumpers, definitely missed an opportunity here.

If the real problem that the Paladins have with the Jumpers is that they will all eventually use their powers for evil, that they will all eventually turn bad, why not submit yourself to strict regulation? I would offer my services in the form of quick and easy transportation for powerful executives.

You and your wife/girlfriend wanna skip away to Fiji for a quick weekend? Why spend 12 hours each way on a plane? I'll transport you instantly for the cost-effective sum of $1,000. And the Paladins could be my travel agents. Ensuring that I am only using my powers for good, or at least as an alternative for private jets. And hey...it would be good for the environment. Win win.

And no one would really care if you transported yourself into the dressing room of a Victoria Secrets fashion show every once in a while. Would they?

Underneath

2008-06-13T13:18:00.000-07:00

This one is a semi-old offering from Steven Soderbergh. After Sex, Lies, etc... but before Out of Sight. Okay?

It's also a remake of the classic film noir Criss Cross that starred Burt Lancaster and Yvonne De Carlo. I only mentioned that because I love to bring up Lily Munster any chance that I get.

Isn't Soderbergh supposed to be some kind of talented writer/director amalgam thingie? I mean, I hear his name bandied about as an auteur, but as this is the guy that did three, count 'em, three Oceans's WhateverNumberHeIsUpToNo films. Oh, and this piece of crap.

The only reason I watched it is because I always enjoy William Fichtner's work. Even in bad movies. Did I mention this was one of them? But did you see him in The Amateurs? He was funny as hell in that one. This one? Eh...standard bad guy psychopath.

It's the classic story of a bad boy who's left town, only to return as a man who has mended his ways, only to run into his ex-girlfriend, only to return to his bad boy ways. Blah blah blah blah fucking blah. It looked like Soderbergh had watched a few too many John Frankenheimer films before making this one. Lots of long takes, focused cuts of characters in the background and foreground at the same time...it just felt like a Frankenheimer film. Just a bad one.

The ending is a classic noir depressing ending where no one is to be trusted. Not even the seeminly unimportant characters that you've already forgotten about.

Trust the man on this one. You would be better off napping than watching Underneath.

Michael Clayton

2008-05-28T06:18:00.000-07:00

First off, I have to say I really enjoyed this movie. It unfolded really nicely, it was engrossing and everyone in it was excellent.

So why's it on the old' GRENADE!!, I hear you ask?

Because of the fucking DVD sleeve, that's why. According to the sleeve – 20th Century Fox be damned for being so fucking lazy – it's a "heart-pounding, action-packed thriller that cuts a vicious path to the darkest heart of New York City."

If you've seen the movie, you will know that is one of the worst descriptions you could possibly apply to this movie. I would even be cautious describing it as a thriller; it's more of a drama, in my opinion. Heart pounding? Well, I didn't die because my heart stopped during the movie, so I guess that's partly correct. Heart beating would have been better. And action packed... Just plain 'no'. When I pointed this out to my lovely wife, she said "They must have used the bit where the car explodes about eight times during the trailer then".

It's just plain not.

So 20th Century Fox, and specifically whoever passed that copy for this DVD sleeve – stop being so fucking lazy, you bunch of tools.

Death Proof

2008-05-19T03:46:00.000-07:00

Ah, Quentin, Quentin. Quenty. Where did it all go wrong?

I think I have the answer.

See, Tarantino has done some good stuff. Reservoir Dogs had great dialogue, even if the story was ripped off wholesale from City On Fire. Pulp Fiction was just 20 minutes away from being possibly the greatest movie of modern times; flabby editing (which should have served as a warning) stops it just short of being perfect.

Jackie Brown was a huge surprise; smart, simple, beautifully acted and low-key. Kill Bill was creative, absurdly so, and largely quite good fun.

I'll always think of From Dusk Till Dawn as being partly a Tarantino movie, largely because of the writing credit, and FDTD has exactly the same problem as Death Proof: indulgence. FDTD sets up perfectly with the robbery of the store, the entrance of the policeman... We understand the brothers, their roles, what they do, one is unhinged etc. So why spend another 50 minutes rehashing the same shite? We know they're bad. The references to sexual violence on their journey do nothing to expand the characters, and it's not even well written. It's just there for the sake of it, and so Tarantino can 'act' in the movie.

Something he is truly fucking crap at, btw.

Same problem in Death Proof; what could take 15 minutes in the hands of a decent editor and a non-indulgent dirtector takes 45 minutes. It's dull. Really, really dull. Meaningless conversations that go nowhere might be just like real life, but this isn't real life. It's a fucking movie. If I want real life dull conversations that go nowhere, I'll go to the fucking pub myself, thanks.

The movie is a supposed homage to 'Grindhouse'. I've spent my life watching movies, reading about them, and even spent a couple of years as editor of one of the biggest DVD magazines in Europe. I do know movies, honestly. But the term 'grindhouse' is a nonsense one. It means nothing, and until this movie and Planet Terror came out, I reckon no fucker on the planet outside Chez Tarantino was using the expression (for the record, the term is used to describe the kind of cinemas these movies played in, apparently, rather than the film. Still sounds like a load of old bollocks to me).

The usual term for that type of movie is exploitation; sometimes people refer to them as 'B-movies' (not exactly accurately), but there are other names. But Grindhouse? Right out of Tarantino's arse, in my opinion. Maybe it's an American thing, but... I have my doubts. If someone out there wants to prove me wrong, fine. Maybe it's a cultural thing.

Aaaaaaanyway, it's not a good homage. It's cutesy, it's clever, but it's not accurate. The kind of movies we're talking about usually had a lot of filler in. And the filler most certainly was not meaningless, shite-boring conversations. Q, if you want to emulate the genre you claim to love so much, where were the pointless shower scenes that take up to seven minutes, where was the pointless softcore lesbianism? That's the filler these movies used, hacked in by producers to bump the running time up, or simply to titillate the drive-in crowd.

I'm just saying.

Okay, the movie concerns Stuntman Mike, some bloke who was a stuntman. He's played by Kurt Russell. He targets some women, and plans to do... something with his car. Something bad, we reckon.

Well, he does it, then his attentions switch to some other women, and he plans to do it again. Only this time, he's picked on the wrong group of women. Oh yes.

It's simple, it gleefully wastes your time with a lot of pointless crap, and honestly, the whole thing could have been perfectly served up in a one-hour movie. Now, a one-hour movie on a double bill actually makes a lot of sense – some 'B's used to be 65, 70 minutes, so it's not unusual. But no, he had to put himself in it, he had to pad it out with some real shite, and he had to make it oh-so-distinctly a Tarantino movie.

Sadly, much as I was looking forward to it, this movie sucked. Best things about it were A) the Planet Terror trailer at the start and B) the fact that, to rid our minds of the suckiness of this, we watched the brilliant This Is England later that night, and it really was superb.

Taxi

2008-05-15T02:09:00.001-07:00

Everyone I've mentioned this movie to says "Is that the one with Robert De Niro in?"

No, fuckbat – that's Taxi Driver.

Anyway, I put this on my LoveFilm list because I wanted my wife to enjoy it. Why? Because I thought I was adding the French original, not the flaccid US remake. Boy did I fuck up.

It's not that there's a lot wrong with it, it's more that even though it's a remake, it feels like it's been made completely by the numbers. It's no fun. It's got no heart. And while the original may not be the greatest movie ever, as a piece of escapism it's hard to beat; that and the fact that there's no CG special effects in it, too. All the driving stunts are real, unlike the US version.

Anyway, what's it all about? There's a police officer (Jimmy Fallon – never heard of him, and hopefully I won't be seeing him in anything again soon), and he's a shit driver. His driving gets him demoted, despite being the only witness to a robbery by some supposedly foxy chicks.

I say supposedly because personally, I've never found women built like Twiglets particularly attractive. But then load bearing is something I have to consider in potential partners.

I digress.

Anyway, these 'hotties' are robbing banks and getting away. Then Jimmy Fallon sees them, and he's in a taxi because he's lost his license, and Queen Latifah is the cab driver. She's the fastest cab driver in New York, too. Which if it's anything like driving in London, means she hits 10mph if she's lucky.

The two of them work together – begrudgingly on Latifah's side – and rumble the robbers, saving the day and boring the tits off audiences everywhere.

Don't rent it, watch the French one instead. At least that movie's fun.

In a side note, I remember seeing the publicity shots for a Queen Latifah film, something she did with Steve Martin – Bringing Down The House, that was it. And one picture of her showed a stunning set of legs. I can say now, with some authority, that I don't think they were hers.

Transformers

2008-05-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

I think that I have officially become my father.

There was a time that I could watch a crappy piece o' popcorn like Transformers, and I would be perfectly content. Not so anymore. I tried watching it 3 times over the weekend, but I kept falling asleep after 20 minutes or so. Then I was finally able to make it all the way through to the ending and I couldn't tell the good robots from the bad robots. I was so confused. Like my Dad.

Is there really anyone out there who was nostalgic for the Transformers? I mean is there some kind of not-so secret enclave of uber-geeks who truly missed their daily dose of Optimus Prime and Megatron from when they were 10? I don't get it.

I hope they were happy with it. I hope they were happy with a robot that looked and acted a bit like Number 5 from Short Circuit messing with Air Force One. Maybe somewhere George Lucas was pissed off because the robots in this movie were funnier than the robots in his movie. They were supposed to be funny, right?

Oh, when the one robot simulated peeing on John Turturro....that was a gas! Cripes!

Michael Bay rolled out every trick in his dirty little bag for this movie. Every trick he already used in Armageddon and many others, I mean. I was most disgusted by the Mickey Mouse score that practically used rimshots for every one of Shia LaBeefsteak's jokes. I died a little bit inside with each sad occurrence.

Maybe I've just been in a bad mood, but this movie really sucked. Everything about it. And I had heard a whole bunch of decent reviews from some people whose opinion I usually trust. Now I think they may have been dropped on their heads a few times when they were infants. It's the only explanation I have for actually liking this movie.

That and the nostalgia for 80's Japanese anime robots wailing on each other.

Now if they had done a live-action version of Star Blazers....well, that would be a different story.

Through all the fire and the smoke

We will never give up hope

If we can win the Earth will survive

We'll keep peace alive

With our Star Blazers

4: Rise of the Silver Surfer

2008-05-10T18:58:00.000-07:00

I know this one seems kinda obvious for inclusion on the ole' grenade. The first film in the series was generally panned by the critics and the public, yet it made a bundle in the theaters. So they made a sequel and the term "franchise" has been bandied about. It was also panned by critics and the public while making another great big bundle o' cash at the box office. Sometimes moviegoers just want some expensive popcorn and soda, I guess. The Junior Mints are good too.

I sat through this one, believe it or not, two different times. The first time I watched it I missed the first 20 minutes or so. I'm familiar with the story of the Surfer from the comic-books so I was able to jump right into the action. And I'm not retarded. I started watching it again tonight to catch the parts I missed and Gia was enduring it with me. Turned out that she was enjoying it so I watched the rest of it with her.

Something funny happened.

I didn't hate it as much as the first time I watched it a few days ago. I think it was because Gia is a comic-book novice and she kept on asking all kinds of really cute questions. "So, he's made entirely of rock? Geesh!" Stuff like that. And she fell in love with The Thing. She likes the big guys, if ya know what I mean. ::wink::

I think what really made change my tune on the film is looking at it through her eyes. I'm pretty jaded when it comes to movies in general. I expect a lot. It's even worse for movies made from comic-books. I expect the world. But Gia took the film at face value for what it was. Brain candy, and a welcome diversion in some fairly difficult times frankly.

So while I wouldn't call this film "high art" or quality film-making...by any definition...it works on one level that might be appealing to somebody out there. It doesn't make you think very hard.

Sometimes that's as glowing a review as you want for a film.

Lucky You

2008-04-25T06:50:00.000-07:00

Hollywood has been very good to the World Series of Poker (WSOP from now on). When Rounders came out back in 1998, the WSOP was still very much a fringe interest amongst the ESPN crowd. It actually continued to struggle for a while until 2003. Rounders, by then, had a cult following of poker wannabes and the WSOP had created the "hole cam" the prior year to make for better viewing for TV audiences. Oh, and an amateur with the unlikely handle of Chris Moneymaker wound up winning the Main Event.

The number of participants in the $10,000 buy-in Main Event went from 839 in 2003 to a whopping 8,773 in 2006. For a bunch of people I know, ESPN's coverage and Rounders had a lot to do with the added success. Too bad the WSOP hasn't been nearly as nice to Hollywood.

Lucky You has a lot of things going for it. It's directed and co-written by an award winning filmmaker in Curtis Hanson. It has an interesting cast with Eric Bana, Robert Duvall and Drew Barrymore. It has a ton of cameos by real poker professionals and a decent respect to the game.

What it doesn't have is an interesting story. The plot involves a young poker hotshot who is trying to raise capital for a buy-in to the Main Event at the 2003 WSOP. Along the way he has to deal with his daddy issues - his father is a 2-time champ at the Main Event - his own hubris and his failed attempts at a love life. All very Greek tragedy-ish, if you ask me.

It was just plain boring. And the message boards on the Internet are filled with poker players shouting their disdain at the film for it's portrayal of the game itself. I don't really care about that, since I don't know that much to begin with. I just want a movie that's exciting and fun filled with characters that I care about. Like Rounders.

Finally, is there a less engaging lead actor out there besides Eric Bana? I thought this guy was gonna be the shit after his big break-thru performance in Chopper. But it's been boring role after boring role after boring role for this guy since Hulk. He's better than a half-bottle of NyQuil for a good night's sleep. He needs to harden the fuck up!

Hitman

2008-04-19T18:09:00.000-07:00

"Based on the video game"

That phrase is just about the most surefire way to know that a movie is gonna be crap. "Directed by Uwe Boll" is another phrase that comes to mind. Strange that the two tag lines usually accompany the same film. Not this one. Only the former applies, not the latter. That doesn't mean it's not gonna be bad...just not Uwe Boll bad. I mean there is no online petition to stop the director of this film, Xavier Gens, from ever working again. Let's give him a few more tries before we put him in Boll's category.

I generally enjoy Timothy Olyphant's work in film. Well, not really. But I do love saying his name aloud. Olyphant. Try it with me. OH-LEE-FAHNT. Fun, right? He replaced Vin Diesel as the titular hitman from the time that the film was first announced. While Olyphant usually can act circles around him, it may have upped the camp value if Vinsanity was around. Too bad. Now we are stuck with an incredibly boring turn by a guy who is usually known for his manic portrayals of borderline psychotics. Here he gets to work the slow burn...not his best feature.

The silliest aspect of the film, and the video game series I guess, is the appearance of all the hitmen who work for the mysterious multi-national organization that controls the world from behind the scenes. Black suits, red ties, bald heads with a bar code tattooed at the base of the skull. You would think that Interpol or airport security would be able to spot these guys a mile away. Or maybe they should wear hats. I spent a lot of time thinking about that while watching this drek. Maybe they should wear hats.

There are all kinds of plot problems with the film, but you probably already knew that because it is "based on the video game" so why bother. It's supposed to be an hour and a half of people getting shot and shit getting blown up. In that sense, it could be deemed successful. In every other sense it can be deemed to be a steaming pile of dog shit.

I did learn one thing from the film, though. Apparently, the best way to stop a hot Ukrainian whore from seducing you is to jab her in the carotid artery with a hypodermic needle filled with some kind of drug or another. I've had some experience with this, and its not as easy as it might seem to stop those bitches. Trust me.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

2008-03-31T02:55:00.000-07:00

A load of old cock. A confused, writhing mess that could have been at least an hour shorter. And this fucker runs at 2:41, including the credits – it's not so much to be enjoyed, as endured.

I can't even explain the plot; it's ridiculously complicated and full of so much flab I sat open-mouthed as I watched my life being wasted in a mess of computer-generated effects and meaningless dialogue.

There are hallucinations that mean and do nothing for the plot; are they supposed to add charm and wit? They don't.

Even the great Chow Yun-Fat is wasted in this, and that's not a sentence I type easily. It's 2:41 of absolute nonsense, start to finish. If I had seen this at the cinema, I would have been incredibly unhappy.

The first POTC was fun, and had a certain charm. The second was a soulless, but vaguely amusing romp. The third manages to wipe out any of the good the first two created and comes out looking just like a moneymaking exercise… Funny, that.

Johnny Depp was his usual fine self, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley brought a touch of, erm, woodenness to things. Geoffrey Rush is excellent, and I can't help but think he's the unsung hero of these movies. Such a superb actor, his Barbossa stand right out in this dross. The supporting cast are uniformly very good, working with such limited material really does make it obvious who's got talent and who has a pretty face and fuck-all else.

The cameo by Keith Richards is amusing-ish – until he sits and starts playing guitar, which is a bit… Stupid, I think is the word I'm looking for.

This movie made nearly $1bn worldwide; the series has made more like $2.5bn. With DVD sales and rentals on top of that, it's obviously been pretty profitable. It was marketed aggressively, and we got suckered in. My stepdaughter loved it, and she's probably the target market more than I – but Disney, it's me that buys the tickets. You have been warned.

A genuine waste of time.

I Am Legend

2008-03-07T01:52:00.000-08:00

'I am a twat for forking out four-and-a-half quid to see this fucking movie', more like.

This movie is shite.

Shite.

First, let me say I went into it with a reasonably open mind. I am a huge fan of the book this is 'based' on, it's one of my favourites; I knew the movie had changed many, many things, so went into it thinking I would just look on it as a totally separate entity.

So I did, and it's still a load of shite. Warning – there are spoilers in this.

Even more annoyingly, the changes that were made contributed to its shiteness.

Okay, the book features one man, the last man on earth, who is surrounded by what are basically vampires. This was caused by a virus, and every night, his fortified home is plagued by his neighbours wanting a slice of Robert Neville pie. They call out to him, they play on his loneliness, they try to lure him out with sex. He's been alone for three years, and this drives him crazy night after night. The book was written in the 1950s, so no VCR or DVD for him; a record player is the best distraction he's got. That, killing vampires all day, and trying to find out why he is immune to the virus.

The movie still has a virus (though it bears more than a passing resemblance to 28 Days Later in its effects), and it still has creatures that want to feed on you. But they have no human qualities, which removes one of the most interesting dynamics out of the story. They're monsters, and poorly computer-generated ones at that. Oh, but one of them is cleverer than the rest, and tries to catch Neville in the movie. It makes for a reasonably interesting sequence, in which one of the strangest moves of the movie occurs; the dog dies.

In the book, he encounters the dog and spends a long time trying to win its trust. He never does, fully, and the dog disappears each night to sleep in its own hiding place. One day, the dog never returns. Neville is understandably heartbroken; this is the closest to a relationship he's come in the time since everyone died.

The movie sees the dog with Will Smith from the start, and he's had the dog since it's a pup. Yes, he's upset, but the work put into the relationship to earn the dog's trust is a wonderful part of the story.

I guess the dog relationship is not that important, but in the book it illustrated quite perfectly his loneliness. In the movie, he had had company since day one. Not so bad.

What else? Unforgivably, this movie – one of the most expensive ever made – is boring. It really is dull. In the hands of a better writer, this could have been great; with a better, more articulate actor in the lead role, it could have been really special. It's not. Smith does fine with what is a fucking awful script, but he's very limited as an actor in an action role. We know he can act – he was Ali, he had Happyness… but he was in Bad Boys and Bad Boys II, Wikky wikky Wild Wild West… and in the action roles, he's limited to put it politely. Some actors can do it, some can't – I'm thinking Matt Damon, Chow Yun Fat – but also, this is a movie with one man in it for almost its entirety. Not only do they have to carry the movie, they are the movie; so if the script is poor and the lead is hamstrung by that, how good can the movie be?

There are big fucking holes in it too. In the book, everyone except Neville is dead of one sort or other. In the movie, we learn that there is a one per cent survival rate – one per cent immunity. Two other people come and find Neville; one is a young boy, maybe eight years old. So if this has been kicking around for three years, how the fuck did a five-year-old kid survive something that's turned billions of people into flesh-eating monsters? Never explained.

With the island cut off – it's set in Noo Yoik – how did these folks reach it? Never explained.

My biggest gripe though, is the ending. The end of the book is… it's unique. It's where the name comes from. SPOILERS FOR THE BOOK AND MOVIE FOLLOW!

In the book, Neville has been killing vampires wherever he finds them, until one night, they overrun his house and capture him. Captured, he speaks with a sympathetic vamp (there's a good reason they get on – read the book!) and she slips him the means to kill himself, as the vampires plan a public execution of him.

Why? Well, he figures it out as he look out of his cell and sees thousands upon thousands of vampire-types waiting to see him come out and die. He's become something else; he's become the boogeyman, the name they say to their children-vampire things when they won't behave, Robert Nevill will come and take you in the night. Their roles have been reversed, he is the anomaly in this new world – and he paraphrases, "I am legend."

In the movie, cornered in his house, certain to die, Will Smith discovers he has cured the virus and can reverse everyone's sickness, and puts the girl and child into a safe in the wall where they can wait safely until morning and make their escape… with a vial of blood containing the cure. Then he chucks himself into the band of monsters with a hand grenade, killing himself and blowing the shit out of them.

Instead of the poignant "I am legend" ending, we have the two survivors in a car, reaching Vermont where they heard there was a colony of immune. They reach a walled area, the door opens, they're among humans again; and the voiceover says "blah blah blah, this is his legend."

I hated it. I tried and tried, but they lost me by boring the shit out of me, then really lost me with a character I couldn't care for, then really really lost me when the dog, one of the best canines I can remember seeing in a film, dies.

It's shite when your action sequences can only have one outcome; he's the last man alive, so he's got to survive or the film will only be 50 minutes long. Takes some of the suspense away, I can tell you.

Okay, maybe my mind was partially closed, but even so, I Am Legend is fucking shit.

Perfect Stranger

2008-03-06T20:54:00.001-08:00

What if Halle Berry and Bruce Willis made a movie together and no one cared?

It happened just last year. Never heard of it? Me neither. So when I saw it on cable tonight I just had to watch it, if only as fodder for a post on the ole' Grenade. Berry plays a reporter who goes undercover at an advertising executive's business. She's trying to find out what happened to a friend of hers who was killed while she was secretly seeing the ad exec (Willis) behind his wife's back.

He's a chat room guy. Likes to fool around with women online before meeting them in real life. So she creates a screen name on IOL (get it?), and she starts flirting with him in what must be the worst online user interface ever created for film. C'mon...seriously? A plot about a man cheating on his wife through AOL chat rooms?

1994 called and wants it's movie back.

But there is this one scene where Berry meets up with Giovanni "creepy guy pretending to be friend who is not-so secretly obsessed with her" Ribisi and some other dude at Chumley's in NYC. Chumley's is/was this great bar in the West Village on Bedford Street. 86 Bedford Street, to be exact. Kinda hard to find if you don't know what you are looking for. It used to be speakeasy back in Prohibition days, and legend has it that certain cops would warn the bar owner prior to a raid, so the owner would tell his customers to "86 it" out the exit with the 86 Bedford Street address. Hence the term that is used by restaurant owners and many, many other folks when they run out of something, or if they want something crossed out. I say "is/was" when talking about the place because the chimney fell into the bar about a year ago and I'm not sure if this historic site is back up and running yet. Heading into the city the next two weekends so maybe I will check it out.

What's that? You wanted to know about the movie? Don't bother. The above paragraph on Chumley's is much more interesting. Well, not much more interesting. I was half-asleep when I typed it, so it couldn't have been that great.

The Contract

2008-02-29T20:17:00.001-08:00

We've been watching some movies online with our NetFlix account, and tonight I found a film I had never heard of called The Contract starring Morgan Freeman and John Cusack. Didn't even read up on the film to find out what it was about. Morgan Freeman and John Cusack was good enough for me. Man, oh man, was I wrong!

Cusack plays an ex-cop out on a camping weekend with his teen aged son. Freeman plays a stupid hitman who gets caught after trying to kill some one with his Jeep. I say "stupid" because that seems like a really stupid way to kill some one. Especially for a world class assassin. He semi-escapes and gets caught by the father/son duo in the middle of the Washington wilderness. Oh, and not to nit pick, but Freeman gets pulled out of a raging river in a sports coat completely dry. Production value and continuity have a lot to do with the overall quality of a film, dontcha think?

The first real obstacle they face is a several hundred foot cliff that they have to descend in the middle of what must be the worst rain storm ever to hit the great North West. It's fucking pouring! They do this without any rope, climbing equipment or any possible chance...but they do it. In the dark. Don't they know that Morgan Freeman is like 70 years old or something?

Lots of Keystone Cops action abounds and the criminals aren't much smarter, but a bond begins to form between captor, son and captive. Seems to happen that way in the movies. A plot to assassinate the President, maybe, soon develops, but its kept behind the scenes so you wonder what really is the whole point of the film. I guess that John Cusack needed to pay off a huge credit card bill or something to take this role. It's the only reason I could think of.

It's also a little funny to hear John Cusack argue with someone about the morality of being a hitman, when John Cusack played the coolest hitman ever in, most likely, the coolest hitman movie of all time in Grosse Pointe Blank. Yeah, I like to take an actor's past screen roles and apply them to everything else that they do. Cusack will always be Martin Blank and Freeman will always be that guy from The Electric Company. Thats the way it goes.

Oh, and a ridiculous love interest appears in the 3rd act of the film. Every crappy movie cliche appears now to be in play. Bad acting, bad production value, bad fucking movie. All in a real "made for TV" kinda way. Stay away from this P.O.S. if at all possible.

I'm wanna go rent a good movie from a good video store - Randall

Pathfinder

2008-02-19T20:11:00.001-08:00

I really don't have any thing tremendously bad to say about this film. I know that is a bit out of the ordinary for a post on this blog, but there was not much to really hate about this film. It just wasn't very good and you probably would be better off taking a nap than sitting through this bad boy for an hour and 45 minutes.

I like a no-nonsense, no-brain action flick just as much as the next retarded guy. This one seemed to fit the mold, and it was about Native Americans fighting Vikings. What could be more fun than that? Well, a nap could have been more fun. One with a highly erotic dream, perhaps.

Historical inaccuracies? Sure thing. No one really knows what occurred when the Vikings came to Vinland back in the day. Maybe they were fairly peaceful. Trading for lumber to bring back to Greenland or something. Maybe they were brutal killers as portrayed in the film. No one can really know. And they probably didn't dress like rabid fans of the Oakland Raiders, but they sure looked mean.

The fact is that this is an action film and action films need two things. A bad guy and a good guy. The film-makers, having decided that the Native Americans were going to be the good guys, found that it was a necessity to make the sea-faring Vikings the bad guys. Mission accomplished.

The only real problem that I had with the film is that for something in the action genre it was kinda boring. I worked real hard not to fall asleep during some of the more important sections of the film. That, my friends, ain't good. It did, however, look pretty good while bringing the boredom.

So, if you are in the mood for a good-looking, boring action film...here you go!

One additional note: I enjoy Clancy Brown in just about everything he does. Lots of respect for a character actor that always seem to rise above his material. Not in this one. His portrayal was the definition of one-dimensional and he usually does much better than that. Shame on you, Kurgan! And this from a guy whose first screen role was Viking Lofgren in Bad Boys. You would have thought he would have used that as inspirition for the role or something. Uh, I really don't know what I'm trying to say there. I think it's because this review is more boring than the movie was. Sigh. Move along, people. Move along.

H.O.T.S.

2008-02-05T20:32:00.000-08:00

Here we go into the way-back machine.

I've got some fond memories of my youth. Seeing Star Wars for the first time. Fishing for bluefish with my Dad. Watching the Yankees win the World Series in 1977. H.O.T.S. used to be of those fond memories. I just watched it again tonight for the first time in about a million years and I'm here to tell you that I must have been fucking nuts!

First off, let me state that this film has some very real personal connections for me.

I'm fairly sure that one of the stars, Pamela Jean Bryant, was the first naked woman I ever saw. Not in person. That wouldn't happen for an excrutiatingly long time. No, I saw Ms. Bryant in all her naked glory in an issue of Playboy in early 1978. I know it is weird that I remember that naughty fact, but I remember it nonetheless. I was 11, and it was my brother's magazine. He kept them in his dresser drawer beneath some t-shirts or something. Yeah, like I wasn't going to find them.
Another one of the stars, Lisa London, is probably more responsible for me being a breast man (rather than an ass or leg or armpit man) than any other woman in the world. Her topless scene in this movie sealed the deal. She is ridiculously endowed. In a good way.
I actually met another one of the stars, Lindsay Bloom a few years ago. Besides being a former Miss USA and a regular on the Mike Hammer TV show, she was also the bitchy, stacked nemesis to the H.O.T.S. girls in this movie. She was hanging out at my favorite bar one Sunday afternoon getting soused. She was an obviously attractive older woman (I was about 35 at the time, so she was around 50 or so) and she was also obviously a little drunk and looking for some action. I, along with all the other horny guys at the bar, took my turn at chatting her up for a little while. She even gave me her business card. I forgot what she was doing with her life, but she was mostly done with acting. I recognized her, but I couldn't remember where I had seen her. She told me about her Mike Hammer gig, so I figured that must have been it. When I got home that evening, I checked out her IMDB page and saw she was in this. Not only in this, but naked in this. Fuck! I would have tried harder to get me some of that if I had known that she had contributed to the sick development of my puberty years. Double fuck!

So, as you can see, I've got a lot invested in this film. When we signed up to NetFlix last month, I thought it would be a good idea to rent it and watch it with Gia. You know, for a laugh.

I'm sorry to report that I may have been seriously retarded as a young teenager. Not only was the titty action not very, er, titillating, but it didn't even approach the "so bad it's actually kinda funny and good" barrier. It couldn't even see that barrier over the horizon. Or over Lisa London's Grand Titons, for that matter. It was so bad that it actually gives bad a bad name. It's that bad!

If you need any more reasons not to watch this movie, I give you Danny Bonaduce. He was around 19 at the time of filming, and he plays a smarmy, disco-loving, open-shirt wearing DJ who is just a wee bit short of being as big of a douchbag as Danny Bonaduce is in real life.

It's really a shame, because I used to love these late 70's/early 80's sex farces with a passion. Uncomplicated stories. Beautiful naked women. Dick and fart jokes. That's a recipe for success for just about any red-blooded straight male of the species that I know. But not only was this poorly written, poorly acted and poorly conceived...it just wasn't funny. Not even for a retarded 12 year-old boy. I'm sorry. I have no excuse.

So much for the fond memories of youth. I wonder if Star Wars was really any good?

Resident Evil: Extinction

2008-01-29T12:06:00.000-08:00

Trashing this film might not be as obvious as it seems. Sure, the third movie in a series based upon a video game has to suck. Doesn’t it? I guess so, but I still had high hopes for it. You see, I’m a pretty big fan of the first Resident Evil film. Milla Jovovich – yum! Zombies – excellent. Contorted plot involving an evil multi-national corporation, man-made bio-weapons and intricate underground bunkers with genetically engineered monsters – can’t get enough of that shit!

The second film was not nearly as good. And it seemed really, really short to me. Less than your standard 90 minutes, but still it had some creepy moments. And creepy moments are the reasons we watch zombie movies.

This last one, however, was truly awful in so many ways. Besides the fact that the filmmakers decided to rip-off one of the subplots right out of Day of the Dead (Romero’s worst Zombie film to date), they also decided to stray from the standard formula from the first film to make something else that made no sense whatsoever. At least to me it didn’t. Maybe they explained it better in the video game, but if they did then shame on the writers of this hunk o’ junk. No way a video game should make more sense than a film.

This one starts off some unknown period of time after the events of the second film. The virus has spread from Raccoon City to every corner of the Earth. Well, except maybe Alaska (unexplained ridiculous plot point Exhibit A). Not only has it decimated most of the human life on the planet, but it has also wreaked havoc on the rest of the animal and plant kingdoms (unexplained ridiculous plot point Exhibit B). The oceans have dried up and most of the world has become an arid wasteland of a desert (unexplained ridiculous plot point Exhibit C).

Alice in Zombieland is traveling on her own since escaping Raccoon City. She now has some kind of subconscious telekinetic abilities brought on by a mutation of the T-virus (unexplained ridiculous plot point Exhibit D). Oh yeah, and there are some cocky scientists in another Hive-like underground bunker who believe that Alice’s blood can be synthesized into a cure for the T-Virus. Or, it can at least it can be used to domesticate the zombies. Like pets, or slave labor. Not sure how they figured it out, but apparently Alice was genetically engineered with certain conditioning (unexplained ridiculous plot point Exhibit E), one of which is a resistance to the T-Virus. They lovingly refer to her as Project Alice. Sort of like Project Runway, but without the catty in-fighting.

Lot of other stuff goes on. There is a band of survivors traveling in a caravan across the Western States. Strictly fodder for the zombie machine. There is, yet another, mutation caused by overdosing on the antidote for the T-virus (unexplained ridiculous plot point Exhibit F). Alice’s psionic abilities become conscious to the point that she becomes like Jean Grey from the X-Men (unexplained ridiculous plot point Exhibit G). It’s all really just an excuse to have Alice act like the superhero and bust stuff up. Which is fine, but gimme a little something I can wrap my brain around. Anything. I’m easy.

You know, it's entirely possible that they really did explain all those silly plot points I so laboriously listed. Someplace in the second or third film. But is was all so vapid and boring that it could have slid right by me. Maybe I'm giving Paul (W.S.) Anderson too much credit. One of the things that I really loved and missed from the first movie were those “Through the Looking Glass” references that abounded. Maybe this one needed a little blue or red pill to make it digestible. I dunno.

“As your attorney, I advise you to take a hit out of the little brown bottle in my shaving kit. You won't need much, just a tiny taste.” – Dr. Gonzo. Truer words were never spoken, my friends.

The Fountain

2008-01-25T16:52:00.000-08:00

My God, I don't even know where to begin to trash this film. And this is the second film in a row that I've trashed that was fairly well reviewed. At least by the panderers on IMDB. Fuck them!

I can see what Darren Aronofsky was trying to do. I think I can. Okay...maybe not. Maybe I'm not that smart. I think he was specifically trying to keep the meaning behind the movie as ambiguous as possible. Or not. I'm confused. See what I mean?

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a doctor trying to cure his wife's cancer and save her life. But it's not that simple, because we also have the story of a Spanish conquistador trying to save the life of his queen. Oh, and a space traveler in the future heading to a dying star in an eco-bubble with the Tree of Life who is trying to come to terms with joining his dead wife in eternity. And all three stories have the same two main protagonists, played by Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz.

The story bops back and forth over the thousand years that span the three tales. Back and forth. For an eternity. At least it seemed that way.

Could it be the the story from the past about the conquistador is a fictional tale, written by the doctor's wife? Is the story from the future about the pod-man merely a dream that the doctor is having as he tries to cope with the death of his wife? Or are all three tales happening at separate times over the millennium, while also occurring concurrently? Time, space, life, death, loss, acceptance. All these themes are explored. Endlessly.

Wow. I think I just bored myself by typing all that.

That's mainly what the film was. An exercise in boredom. An exercise in boredom filmed inside a trippy, psychedelic petri dish.

I don't know how many times they showed the same scene of the doctor's wife asking him to come out and play in the first snow fall of the year. Each time it led someplace else, but damn did it become boring after the first 3 times. I'm finally agreeing with Slyde on this one. Time travel movies suck!

And I'm still not sold on the ending. All I know is that I was glad when the credits started.

One thing that made me happy was that Aronofsky dropped out of directing Watchmen, a movie that I am really excited about. I can't even begin to imagine where he would have taken us on that journey. At least Zack Snyder has shown an affinity for translating graphic novels to the big screen. I've only seen one Aronofsky film. This one. And it was an un-watchable piece of drek.

3:10 to Yuma

2008-01-23T21:08:00.000-08:00

My initial thought when Badgerdaddy contacted me to contribute to this blog was that he/we wanted to review movies that were bad and to save you, our loyal readers, from finding yourself in similar situations. Including 3:10 to Yuma with this lot is a bit unfair. It's not a terrible movie, but it disappoints terribly. At least it did for me.

I was truly looking forward to this one, even though it came and went in the theaters without me seeing it. That can be said for most films. But I love Westerns, and I'm a huge fan of Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. I think they are two of the most talented actors out there, and they rarely choose bad roles. I also enjoy the work of Ben Foster, a young but gifted actor whose range is pretty remarkable.

I finally had a chance to sit down and watch it the other night. I didn't hate it, but I can't say that I liked it very much either. And I'm not one of those movie geeks so in love with the original that they immediately dismiss the remake. The original was fine. Not a classic in my mind, but a good little movie based on a good little story by Elmore Leonard. One thing I particularly liked about the original is the performance of Glenn Ford in the outlaw role...the role played by Russel Crowe in the remake.

No, the original film and my feelings toward it had nothing to do with my reaction to the newer film. I have, however, been trying to figure out exactly why I didn't like it without very much success to be honest. Good story: check. Engaging performances: check. Men in chaps: woo-gah...check!

I just kinda bored me. I actually fell asleep sitting up during the second act of the film and that is never a good sign. I woke up after 15 minutes or so, cycled back to the spot where I fell asleep, got myself a soda and started up again. And I almost fell asleep again. Really not a good sign.

I never really started to care about the characters either. Bale plays a rancher injured in the Civil War who is struggling to keep his ranch and his family together. Crowe plays a charismatic leader of an outlaw gang whose enigmatic reasoning for most of his actions are hidden behind a sly smile. Neither character's actions were cookie-cutter Western stereotypes, but they weren't explained very well either. Both men are heroic in there own ways, so the traditional hero/villain dynamic is what the movie is trying to play with.

I'm guessing the real "villain" in the movie is supposed the Rail Road company. Big, bad industry moving in on the folks of a simpler place and time. Crowe and his gang are feeding off of payroll deliveries guarded by Pinkerton detectives, while Bale is trying to pay off loans on his land to avoid losing it to the same Rail Road company. Both men have issues with them, although its not quite clear what Crowe's issues are. And the Pinkerton detectives are portrayed as hard, calculating mercenaries. Killers just as soulless as Crowe and his gang, but they are on the "right side of the law" this time around. The businessman that owns the note on Bale's land and the men that work for him are also portrayed as callous men of violence. So its not quite clear who we are supposed to root for here. And Bale's actions seem completely out of character with his past, or at least that's the way that I saw it.

One small problem I had with the film is that it on the surface it seemed to be a throwback to the mythic-style of the Hollywood Western that was prevalent in John Ford's era. Except for the cussing and the violence. Ford would have had none of that. That's a pretty big change considering the way that Hollywood Westerns had been moving towards gritty realism in the wake of Unforgiven. And not a real welcome change, in my opinion. Iconic men like those portrayed by Crowe, Foster and Peter Fonda (as a Pinkerton detective) most likely never existed. I believe that iconic, mythic Westerns are fine, but don't we have enough of these already? It seems to me that true movie magic occurs when you de-construct those myths and explore a more realistic approach.

Ben Foster's character, in particular, really bothered me. He was a drop-dead shot who would kill a man just as easily as looking at him. Un-flinching loyalty to his boss was his strongest character trait. But what was the impetus behind his adoration? His "love" for Crowe has been discussed and dissected on the message boards quite enough. I, for one, didn't see anything besides platonic and/or paternal love, but some disagree. And he never missed. Except, um, when he was shooting at Christian Bale. Why the inconsistencies? Bad film-making or are we just supposed to suspend belief until the eventual cataclysmic showdown. I dunno, but it did bother me.

I guess I was most impressed with Crowe's enigmatic performance, but I can't really tell you why. It's hard to believe that a man who would willingly kill one of his own people, a friend, would leave witnesses to his atrocities or attempt to befriend those witnesses. He's definitely a complicated man, but without any explanations given I eventually found him to be even more distasteful than the men we are supposed to root against. Just what was it that he stoof for?

I'm sure some of you liked or even loved this movie. I can see why. But it just left me a little flat, and isn't that the worst feeling when you have been really looking forward to something?

Idiocracy

2008-01-19T21:10:00.000-08:00

Let me start off by saying that I used to like Mike Judge. Or to rephrase, I used to like Mike Judge's work. Never met the man. I was a fan of Beavis and Butthead (I admit that to you with no shame in my heart), Office Space is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I have even laughed at the odd episode of King of the Hill even though I don't watch it regularly. I used to like Mike Judge.

However, I will never, EVER forgive him for the brain cells that I lost while watching Idiocracy this afternoon. He can burn in Hell for all I care!

The plot, such as it is, is about an Army private and a prostitute who volunteer to be frozen in hibernation for a year to test the process for future use. The private was selected for this test because he is exceedingly average (is that possible?) in every way and because he has no family. The prostitute was chosen so they could make prostitute jokes.

Something goes wrong and they wind up being frozen for 500 years. In that time period, the world has become an increasingly dumb and dumber place. This is illustrated by the hamburger food chain FuddRuckers gradually being renamed to ButtFuckers after it is all said and done. See what they did there? They brought the funny. I laughed. I cried. I hit my head against a wall.

This future is so dumb that this extraordinarily average private (played by the extraordinarily average Luke Wilson) is now the smartest man in the world. His fortunes rise and fall and rise again until he winds up as the President of the United States. Imagine that. A future in which our President is a marginal idiot. Hmmm.

The acting, writing, direction and mere existence of this film is an insult to anyone who knows how to spell the world "film". This may be the worst movie I have ever seen in my life. And before we get comments from Mr. Judge (because he's a fan) about how it is a satire and that he was trying to comment on the current state of our country, it's stance on environmental issues, violence in media and corporate sponsorship, I would like to say...ppppthhhhbbblllttttt!!!!!! With extra spit, please.

That being said, if you were planning on spending an evening hammering a nail through your scrotum or female parts then this could be a pleasant diversion.

Or not. Depends on your tolerance for pain.

Bandidas

2008-01-17T12:47:00.001-08:00

Hi gang! Sorry for the lack of posting from yours truly, but I have truly been blessed of late with not having to endure even ONE grenade-worthy movie!

Until last week.

That, my friends, is when Bandidas crossed my path.

I remember hearing about when this movie was going into production, and I honestly was excited about it.

While not a huge fan of Penélope Cruz, I have been completely ga-ga over Salma Hayek since the early 90’s, back before pretty much anyone knew who the hell she was, when she was on the hit HBO show Dream On.

And of course, once she landed her role in Desperado…. RAAAAWR!

Plus, I generally get all tight in the pants over Latin girls in general, so keeping this movie on my radar was a no-brainer, especially after I had heard that it was being co-written by Luc Besson. Are you kidding me? I REALLY wanted to see this movie….

Then I had heard that Bandidas was NOT to get a U.S. theatrical release, and was to go right to video. The first inklings that this movie could be grenade-able started to go off in my head.

And God were my suspicions correct.

In short, this movie sucks.

Half of the problem is that this movie just doesn’t know what type of film it wants to be. Some of the film wants this to be a female-buddy action movie. In this regard, it fails pretty miserably. The action is clichéd, boring, and unbelievable. We get to be treated to many scenes of Cruz making her horse do all matters of un-horselike things (get your mind out of the gutter!), and women who have no fighting experience becoming trained killers in the matter of a few minutes.

The only props I WILL give this movie, is near the end, during the final gun battle. They do this little slow-motion, Matrix-y style fight, which was actually quite well done. More scenes like this would have elevated this film off the “shit” chart, but alas, only 2 minutes of goodness in this 2 hour turd were all that’s to be had.

The OTHER half of the movie tries to be a screwball comedy, and here again, it fails miserably. These women are not funny. They are not famous because of their perfect timing, or impeccable delivery. They are famous because they are both pieces of hot Latin eye candy, and their attempts to be comediennes fall about as flat as Paris Hilton’s chest. I would wager that the director hired comedian Steve Zahn to the film, specifically to attempt to buoy the laugh quotient of the movie, but here again, nothing works. Zahn, who plays a bumbling 1800’s-version CSI forensic specialist (and the 2 girls’ love interest, if you can believe that), mostly just stumbles thru scenes trying to not look stupid. Mission NOT accomplished.

I’d say more about this film, but anything else will just be giving it more attention than it deserves. While looking at Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek in Can-Can outfits is fun for a minute or two, it can’t come close to making this movie watchable.

Josie and the Pussycats

2008-01-14T22:48:00.000-08:00

Don't forget, Grenadiers, that this blog is also about movies you might pick up in the DVD store and think are going to be shite, but in fact they are not. But you never pick them up because they have been badly marketed, or just... Well, look shit.

JATP is a classic example. This movie is fucking hilarious, from the boyband pastiche that opens the film (which features Seth Green and some other very recognisable young actors really taking the piss) to a quite brilliant turn by Tara Reid (yes, you read that right – she's excellent, wanna make something of it?), this movie works on multiple layers and works on every one.

First, the boyband; the DVD features their full 'videos', and there's a complete version of the spit-your-food-out funny 'Backdooor Lover' on there (it's also on the soundtrack album, Fact Fans!). Really, it's worth it for them.

Second, the cast is excellent: the aforementioned Reid, Rachel Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson and the wonderful Alan Cummings. Oh, and of course… Parker Posey, who I would probably stalk if it were not for my Special Lady Wife distracting me. Pah.

The plot concerns an unscrupulous record company executive (Cummings) who is using boyband Du Jour to brainwash the masses into buying more and more consumer stuff with subliminal messages in their records that can only be heard by teens.

When Du Jour start asking questions, he disposes of them and finds the next big thing – signing Josie and her band, The Pussycats, without ever having heard their music. The girls eventually start to think something is very wrong – well, Josie (Cook) and bass player Valerie Brown (Dawson) do; Reid's drummer, Melody Valentine, has not got a clue about anything much, and should go down in history as one of the great cinematic airheads ("If I had a time machine, I'd want to go back and meet Snoopy").

What else is there? Cummings is wonderful, but then he usually is, and Posey is his even-more-nasty boss, but they both have agendas hidden from each other that come out in a bare-all ending.

It's a decent satire on modern marketing and consumerism, and it's genuinely well-made, sweet and every performance is above par. Oh, and even the music isn't bad – it is what it is, and it fits the movie perfectly. But get the DVD just for the first few minutes with Du Jour, and their video on the extras – it's worth the rental price just for that.

Mee-Shee: The Water Giant

2008-01-14T10:17:00.000-08:00

I think that I have mentioned this one before, either on my solo blog or in the comment section of someone else's site. Not gonna stop me from talking about it here, though. Because the title is too funny! I once knew a tranny prostitute from the Philippines named Mee-Shee, but that's a whole different blog entry.

Quick and easy plot description: It's about a NYC based oil company executive who has to back out of a trip to Disney World with his son to locate some missing equipment in a remote area of Canada. So he brings his some along with him, because if you can't go to Disney World you may as well opt for a remote area of Canada as a logical second choice. Kid is bored...blah blah blah...Dad ignores him...blah blah blah...kid discovers mythical Nessie-like creature living in lake...blah blah blah...father and son are reunited by their battle against the evil oil corporation, and...Oh God! Just kill me.

I can't even blame Canada for this one, even though it is supposed to be set there. I say "supposed to" because it was actually filmed in New Zealand. I don't know why I mention that fact, but it seems pertinent. Rena Owen was in it. She's a Kiwi. Maybe that's why. Not only did they change the location, but they changed the name of the creature from Ogopogo to Mee-Shee. More like Mee-Sheesh, if you ask me.

Listen, I've got nothing against "harmless mythical creature and annoying kid" films. I've got nothing for them either, but that's besides the point. I just find it hard to believe that there is an audience out there for this kind of crap. Judging by the box office and reviews for this one, most of you agree. Plus it was done better in 1995 in a film called Magic in the Water. And when I say "better", I mean not really better at all. But it had Mark Harmon, and Gia thinks I might be a little gay for him, so there.

Hey...looks like it's been remade again in The Water Horse. This time in Scotland and Loch Ness, but basically the same movie.

Did I ever tell you guys about the pond I used to live on and my magical carp friend named Wu-Tang who inspired a whole generation of rap music? Good times.

Ghost Rider

2008-01-04T13:33:00.000-08:00

Man, oh man, I love me some comic-book movies. Not this one, but man, oh man.

Ghost Rider hearkens back to those semi-innocent days of the early 1970's. A time when Marvel already had a character that rode a surfboard (the 60's were fun too!) and the madcap wackiness that is The Punisher was merely a gun-toting twinkle in the eyes of Gerry Conway. Ah, good times my friends. Good times, indeed!

Ghostie, for the awkwardly inbred among you who are not in the know, was a dude that kinda sold his soul to the devil...well, Marvel's version of him anyway. He and his girl Roxanne then tricked the devil into reneging on the deal, but not before the devil bonded his soul with that of the demon Zarathos. That's gotta suck! Now Johnny Blaze, a stunt-performing daredevil, is also the Ghost Rider at night. Or whenever he is around evil. I forget. Something about sending the evil back to Hell for the devil. I dunno...it was always kinda stupid to me. But motorcycles and motorcycle gangs were pretty hip in 1972, so there you go. Add a leather-clad skeleton with a flaming skull and some fire and brimstone...BAM! Comic-book goldmine!

I loved this shit. Back in 1972. When I was 6. It was awesome!

How, oh how could Hollywood possibly ruin such a wonderful childhood memory like this one for me?

Well, they could hire Nicolas Cage to star in it.

Yeah, that about did it. Fuck!

Note - If someone out there found this to be a viable film adaptation (and it made a shitload of money worldwide), then I wanna know where my Brother Power the Geek film is! Seriously, click on that link. I love the comic-books that came and went in the late 60's. Pure genius!

Balls of Fury

2007-12-26T00:44:00.000-08:00

Hot on the heels of Dodgeball, Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory and Gymkata comes the latest in the woefully long list of "comedies" about ridiculous "sports". Please enjoy my highly ironic use of "quotes" in that last sentence.

This time around, the sport in question (seriously in question) is table tennis or ping-pong. Replace Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrel, Will Ferrel or Kurt Thomas (the gymnast, not the NBA star) with some pudgy dude and there you go. Hey listen, I've got nothing against pudgy dudes. I am a pudgy dude. I'm just trying to make a point. Oh, you can add a little Christopher Walken as a race inappropriate semi-Asian bad guy and voila...this suckfest!

The plot is stolen directly from the Bruce Lee classic Enter the Dragon. Once again, substitute martial arts with ping-pong. Doesn't this seem highly creative to all of you? Me too. After I watched it the first time, I wanted to watch it again immediately. Wait...replace immediately with never again. There. That sounds better.

The comedy was ultra-high brow in this little gem. My favorite bit was when our hero had to smuggle a vibrator shaped transmitter into the bad guy's lair. I shouldn't have to tell you this and I'm sorry if I am ruining any future SPIKE-TV viewing of it, but he hid it up his butt. To illustrate how funny/painful this would be, the filmmakers had our hero walk funny...like he had something up his butt...into the lair. For about a minute. Through the gates. Into the courtyard. Up some stairs. I want that minute back in my life. That minute and all the minutes that I spent afterwards groaning at the utter lack of imagination that it took to write/direct these scenes. Now I have to add the minute or so that it took me to type those last few sentences. Vicious cycle. Let's move on.

Hmm...lets's move on to what? I think that pretty much illustrates what demographic the producers of this movie were aiming for. Functioning retards who have either $10 to spend or the ability to work a cable TV/DVD remote control. And I think they might have even groaned at the "transmitter up the ass" scene.

Great CGI, though. Christopher Walken looked almost human. Almost. Man, that guy creeps me out!

Survival Island

2007-12-06T21:22:00.000-08:00

Now I know that no one out there is gonna watch this turd. I just know it. I'm sure that no one has even heard of it, much less have it on their NetFlix queue. In case you are confused, it also goes by the name of Three. Did that help? Nah, I didn't think it would.

The only reason, ONLY REASON, I watched this horrible little film is that I couldn't sleep and it was the only movie on the nearly 100 movie channels that we have that I hadn't seen. And it starred Billy Zane, the obviously gay leading man type whose career has really gone nowhere. Beyond playing despicable types like he did in Titanic. Oh, and he got to play a despicable type right here in this one. But I enjoy me some camp every now and again, and when I want camp I go straight towards the gays. See what I did there? Straight...gay. Ah, good times.

So, Mr. Zane and his real-life beard and ridiculously proportioned (32E-24-35. Hey, it's right there on her IMDB page...back off) British actress Kelly Brook star in this little tale about a rich asshole, his hot wife (just keep telling yourself that you are straight, Zane) and a hot-headed Argentinian guy who worked for them on a yacht cruising the Caribbean. Sound familiar? Sure...basically the plot of Wertmuller's very good Swept Away and the very bad remake by Guy Ritchie. Just add Zane and wackiness ensues. Probably that way in real life too. You would have to ask around certain West Village clubs in NYC to be sure.

The story goes a little something like this: Rich asshole, his wife and their friends rent a yacht for a luxury tour of the Caribbean. Rich asshole pisses off fiery worker on yacht to the point were fiery worker quits. On the boat. In the middle of the ocean. Okay? Anyway, I guess he plans to swim to the nearest island because he grabs a pair of goggles right before he "accidentally" causes a fire on board. Everyone dies except the fiery Argentinian dude and the rich asshole's hot wife. The wind up on a deserted island alone. Or so we are led to believe.

After a couple of days of leering and nude swimming, the fiery Argentinian dude finds Billy Zane unconscious on a reef a little ways off the island while fishing. He should really just end his suffering, but he decides to save his gay ass. That's when all the trouble begins. Zane is extremely jealous so he tries to assert his dominance. That doesn't really work and his hot wife winds up attracted to the fiery Argentinian dude. They have sex while Zane is off fishing and the game is afoot.

The boys try killing one another in various ways, blah blah blah. It just really sucks. And there are montage shots of a crazy witch woman doing a voodoo dance all through the film that is really annoying. Has something to do with something that happened towards the beginning of the film. I think. I really didn't care enough to pay attention.

The only thing worth watching this film for is the lovely Kelly Brook. Not her acting. She couldn't act her way out of a paper bag. But she looks pretty good in a bikini. Tell you what, leave the film alone and check out some of her NSFWish stuff here, here or here.

You are most welcome.

The Butterfly Effect 2

2007-10-24T02:28:00.000-07:00

I wonder sometimes at the sanity of studios. See, I would have to wonder who thought The Butterfly Effect warranted a sequel. The first movie was fucking awful and made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

I remember my girlfriend at the time loved it, it was her favourite film. She insisted I watch it with her, despite my reservations. I watched it then took it apart, pointed out why it was utter nonsense and she then sulked for the rest of the evening. But then, she was pretty fucking sulky, so bollocks to her.

So some cunt thought it would be a good idea to make a sequel…

First things first, this is only 76 minutes long. The DVD case will say the running time is 10 minutes longer, but that is ALL credits. This movie has the longest end credits I've seen in years, and for no good reason; they're just indulgent and really really slow. Why? To pad out the running time, of course.

I'm not kidding when I say this story could have been told in 45 minutes. I've never seen so much plot filler in my life. Two completely superfluous sex scenes (in one, the main man's wife keeps her bra on – is that for certification or for herself? If for herself, why the fuck would you accept a role where one character has sex with another? Ami I being naive?), a shit-awful story and so-so acting – except the main man, who is largely pretty good.

Story: blokey and friends are in a car accident, and everyone dies or something. Except him. His girfriend dies, anyway. A year later, he discovers he can travel back to certain points in time by looking at a photograph and making the camera go all jiggly, and picking his nose until it bleeds. When back in time, he can change events and thus, change their future. When he comes back and his nose is bleeding, events in the present are altered.

This way, he brings his girlie back, gets himself promoted and has sex in the lavs of a restaurant. Yay. He also owns a BMW in this future – a dead giveaway, I would have thought, that he has become a complete cunt after changing these past events. And guess what? In the BMW future, he is indeed a cunt!

I don't even know if this 'review' is making sense. Maybe it's best that it doesn't, because the movie sure as bananas doesn't. It's just so fucking shit. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit. Could have been an interesting Twilight Zone episode or something, but not dragged out to a movie.

Fuck this, rent Severance or something equally amusing instead.

Boy Eats Girl

2007-10-16T01:03:00.000-07:00

I'm noticing a pattern. Many of the worst movies around have titles that are a small step away from being a porno movie. Well, this one isn't just a small step, it could easily be a porno title.

Sadly, it's not a good movie. The reasons for this are legion. It's a zombie movie, or a Zom-Rom-Com, if you will. Except it's very light on the 'Com', the 'Rom', though there is plenty of 'Zom' it's all shite.

Normally, I would champion a low-budget horror movie. Often, their only limitation is budget, so horror filmmakers have to use plenty of creativity to get a vision across on screen. And the viewer often has to use lots of imagination, too. But with Boy Eats Girl, there's no inclination to use your imagination, because if you do you'll be engaging with the movie on some level, and that's impossible.

Okay, the story. I know, I know. I'm just too negative. Right, Irish lad likes Irish girl. They go to the same school. He thinks they're getting together one night, her dad stops her going out, he waits, thinks he's been stood up. Goes home and gets drunk, and in an utterly inexplicable move, puts a noose round his neck because he has one handy. Mum walks in, knocks the chair over and kills her son.

Luckily, mum stumbled across an ancient voodoo tome at the local church. Yes, really. She uses the book to bring her son back from the dead, and he appears to be fine until the dance that night, when he decides to take a bite out of a classmate who's kicking the shit out of him. Classmate becomes a zombie too, and the rest is history. Zombies spread like wildfire, cheap effects abound, and our hero eventually is saved and gets the girl.

The girl is part of the problem. I've never been quite sure of why I have heard of Samantha Mumba, but I have. She made some music back in the day, and appeared in minor roles in a couple of films… But that's all. And this? Hardly a career progression, luv. She acts without expression or feeling of any kind, and I still have no idea why blokey is so fixated upon her in this film. There's far cuter – and more expressive – girls at his school.

There are a couple of decent performances in this, but they're bit-parts.

How do you fuck up a zombie film? I mean really? It's so damn simple, but this movie is what it looks like. A shite film with a shite title. Devoid of wit, imagination and anything positive. Avoid.

Renegade

2007-10-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

I love movies with names like this. RENEGADE! Sounds impressive, right? It was actually originally released under the name Blueberry (after the main character, Mike Blueberry), which is not nearly as macho as RENEGADE! Typing it all in capitals helps. Also when you read it you should say it in your mind like you are the announcer at a monster truck show. Now showing....RENEGADE! Oooh...even better with large type!

OK, enough about the name. Here are some reasons why I should have loved this film:

It's a Western. I love Westerns. The sight of a man in chaps riding a, er, um....did I just make this too personal?
It's a comic-book adaptation. I love comic-book adaptation. Except comic-book adaptations of Jean Gerard's work. He goes by the name of "Moebius" for you comic-book buffs out there (Slyde), and I've always had a problem with that. I mean if you can pick a name that is more effete or condescending than Jean Gerard, it would have to be Moebius. Besides, as Quentin Tarantino and Crimson Tide taught us, the Jack Kirby Silver Surfer is the only real Silver Surfer and the Moebius Silver Surfer is shit.
An incredible international cast: Vincent Cassel (Le Pacte des Loups), Djimon Hounsou (Amistad), Eddie Izzard (funniest man alive), Temuera Morrison (Once Were Warriors) and Michael Madsen. Now normally, I would gladly spend 2 hours watching ANY of these guys read from a phone book, but...
A completely naked and spread-eagled sequence of Juliette Lewis underwater. OK, I take that back...it was totally unnecessary. Lot a fur, people...lot o' fur.

And now for the reasons why I didn't love this movie:

It sucked.

Tres, tres disappointing. The whole film is told in flashback from the point of view of a man on a bad peyote (or ayahuesca) trip. And it was filmed just like that. The third act was almost unwatchable, and yet I did it for you, oh my readers and only friends. The mystical drug trip sequences were something straight out of H.P. Lovecraft. The words "eldritch" and "cosmic horror" kept creeping into my subconscious. And it was boring. Just really, really fucking dull.

Almost all of the talent in the film was entirely wasted. Vincent Cassel was just fine in the lead role. He was channeling a bit of Clint Eastwood as a Cajun-raised US Marshall keeping the peace between the town folk and the neighboring Native American tribe. Temuera Morrison was especially good as his best friend and guide to the spirit world. And Michael Madsen always lends a gleeful joy to his villainous roles. But Hounsou, Izzard and the rest of the cast were not given anything at all that they could work with.

So I can only recommend this turd if you really like confusing, dull, drug-fueled and kaleidoscope-like dream sequences. Or if you just miss having them on your own from back in the day.

Poseidon.

2007-09-24T02:42:00.000-07:00

Take a classic disaster movie, packed to the rafters with stars and made damn-near perfect, then fill it with B-list and faded 'stars', make it far shitter and what do you have? Poseidon!

It opens with a spectacular CG shot of the ship, it really is huge. That shot alone could have financed God knows how many independent movies. I'm not going in to the plot other than to say, there's a big luxury boat and it gets flipped over in the middle of nowhere, in the deep blue sea. End of.

The fundamental problem with Poseidon is the cast. Is there a 'leading man' out there with less charisma than Josh Lucas? I don't think there is, no. He is almost unwatchable in everything he does. It's not his fault, I'm sure. I bet he's every bit as hard-working as every other actor out there. It's just that he shouldn't be given any work in the first place. He should be as hard-working, but in McDonald's.

In short… my apathy for this movie is so great, and it is riddled with so much mediocrity that I would not know where to start. Just don't watch it. You can see where the money went in this one – an estimated budget of $160m – as it's all on screen. It's just that Wolfgang Petersen hasn't got a fucking clue what to do with the visuals.

He's still coasting on two movies, in my opinion, one of which wasn't even that good (Das Boot, which is truly wonderful, and The Perfect Storm, which isn't). Hopefully Poseidon's dismal showing at the box office will be a wake-up call for him. Surely something as fine as Das Boot couldn't have been a fluke?

The Weather Man

2007-09-24T02:33:00.000-07:00

This is a curious thing. Nicolas Cage plays a TV weather man who seems to be heading for a breakdown after hearing his that his dad (Michael Caine) is dying.

Really, that's about it. The movie goes nowhere and does absolutely nothing. It's beautifully photographed, full of bleak, washed-out colour, but the photography is capturing nothing. Reasonable performances performing fuck-all.

A couple of moments made me chuckle, I must admit. But two in a 97-minute movie which purports to be some kind of black-ish comedy? Pffffft.

I would imagine this was a low-key movie when it started out; that works in my head, anyway. A decent script, a low-budget movie, possibly with a lot more bite to it than it ended up with. But then you get stars involved, and the budget spirals upward… And a big-name director gets attached, and the next thing you know a movie which does nothing but make you wonder how you can get those 97 minutes back is expected to have decent box office.

Hmmmmm. Maybe I should be running a studio, because if Gore Verbinski had come to me with this and said 'it'll cost $35million', I would have told him to fuck off, given him $6m and told him to get on with it. Where the hell did they spend $35m? I can only assume it went on salaries, because nothing happens in this movie to justify that budget. Okay, I know that's not especially high for Hollywood, but even so...

Shite. Avoid, then come back and thank us because you haven't seen this.

Snakes on a Plane

2007-09-21T11:34:00.000-07:00

Hi there, MovieGrenaders! Slyde here, finally getting his lazy ass in gear and writing my inaugural post here on the (soon to be) ultimate movie review site.

Part of the reason that it took so long for me to post is, because since I haven’t watched too many movies lately, I therefore haven’t watched too many SHITTY movies lately, which kind of doesn’t leave me a lot to write here about, does it. Of course, another reason why I haven’t posted yet is because, as I already implied, I’m a lazy bastard.

But none of that is really here nor there, since me being lazy isn’t the reason I am posting.

No, I am here to talk about the god-awful mess of movie that was Snakes On A Plane.

Two years ago, when the net first caught buzz of this then-soon-to-be-released turd, bloggers went absolutely ape-shit with how fucking cool this movie was going to be. As information and small snippets of the film were leaked to the press, the blogging community collectively shit their pants at how fucking rad this movie was DESTINED to be. The momentum on the web kept building and building right up until a few months before release, when the word from the studio went out to report that the principal cast was rushed back into the studio to “re-shoot some scenes to make them even MORE violent”. That pretty much sent the movie-loving geek community into a collective orgasm.

I must confess that I WAS one of the aforementioned geeks who was dying to see this film.

Mind you, I KNEW it was going to suck. We all KNEW it. No movie with a title like Snakes on a Plane could be anything other than bad, but we all hoped it would be one of those “It’s so bad it’s really good” movies that we all love (but don’t admit to).

Unfortunately, this movie fell under the category of “It’s so bad, that it just sucks”.

I really found nothing redeeming, or at least funny, about this movie.

First off, all the deaths were pretty fucking stupid:

Snakes kill a couple who are fucking in the bathroom, by biting the girl’s breasts.

Then another guy is taking a leak in another loo when a snake swims up to bite his hog.

Another snake then squirms up the dress of a fat girl sleeping in her seat, to bite her in the eye.

Then the deaths REALLY start to get stupid.

It just goes downhill from there. Plus if I see ONE more bad Samuel Jackson movie where he continues to pretend to be a bad-ass in a movie that just sucks, I might just kill someone. Mr. Jackson, you haven’t made a movie where you were a REAL bad mutha-fucka since Pulp Fiction, and you probably never will again.

The final capper for me on why this movie needs a grenade: The stereotypes! Pretty much everyone on the plane is a stereotype of some form or another. The prissy rich girl who keeps a little dog in her purse, the arrogant hip-hop star who needs to get back in touch with his “real” side, the Asian kick-boxer who boards the plane in a tank top showing off his biceps (I’m not fucking making this shit up!). The list goes on and on.

At one point I was just expecting EVERY fucking stereotype imaginable to show up on the plane. Chinese guy in komono pulling a rickshaw; Ski-parka Eskimo complete with whale harpoon, shifty-eyed gangster in black pin-stripe suit fiddling with a violin case......

You get the idea.

Do yourselves a solid, and give this fucker a pass.

Cyborg 2

2007-09-19T15:08:00.000-07:00

OK. I'm not sure if this is what Badgerdaddy had in mind when he started this site. A 14 year-old film that was never released until it was shot straight to video in 1999. Six years after it was completed! Of course it's gonna suck! To what levels...well that is for you to decide. No wait! That is for ME to decide! I think I may be done using exclamation points for a little while. That last one hurt.

Let me start off by saying that I have a bit of a soft spot for the first Cyborg film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. It had it all. He did splits and shit while duking it out with post-modern pirates in the desert after some kind of plague-induced holocaust or something. What's not to love? The plot was silly. JCVD must protect a cyborg with info on a cure for the plague on a trip to Atlanta (Atlanta?). Really it was just an excuse for him to do splits and shit. The kind of stuff his fans really wanted to see in 1989. I saw this one in the theaters when it came out, fact fans. Honestly.

The sequel doesn't seem to have a whole hell of a lot to do with the first one. Sure, there is this one dream sequence that references the first film with moon-lit shots of the Muscles from Brussels (hey...I didn't create the nickname). But it really could have ignored the original film altogether and it wouldn't have been any worse. It wouldn't have been any better either, but that is neither here nor there.

This version of the Cyborg is played by Angelina Jolie in her feature-film debut. An 18-year old Angelina Jolie, that is. Sure, she was in a movie with her dad back when she was a kid and she did a few short films for a friend of hers, but this was her first real starring role as listed on her IMDB page. I gotta say...she is pretty damn hot in this movie. Her acting is a bit robotic, but she is playing a cyborg. Ha...see what I did there? I made a funny. Erm.

Oh, and she gets naked in it.

There you go. If you wanna see a naked Angelina Jolie when she was 18 or so for a few seconds, then by all means watch Cyborg 2. If you can somehow get through life without that little bit of titillation (yeah...I went there again) then you are a better man/woman than I.

I can die a happy man now. All of a sudden I'm a little sleepy. Nite all.

Smokin' Aces

2007-09-15T03:33:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is a controversial-ish choice, and I don't have much time at all. My gripe isn't with the movie, but the marketing.

I know marketing people are among the lowest in the universe, but seriously, what were these cunts thinking? Most of the UK marketing advertised this like it was some sort of knockabout action comedy adventure, where some hitmen were all trying to kill the same target, causing mayhem somewhere or other.

Well, the same target bit was true. The hitmen/women bit was true. Knockabout action adventure kinda thing? No fucking way.

The target is fucked up on drugs, hates himself and is given little choice in selling out his comrades as he tries to turn state's evidence and get into witness protection. It hurts him. He's off his tits a lot of the time. He's falling apart. Ha ha, oh the humour!

Some of the hitmen are killing indiscriminately and are really quite vile. Not a huge amount of humour about any of them, save for one band of twisted fucks. Even their deaths are amusing.

A lot of the action is brutal, not knockabout in the least. The deaths hurt, on the whole. And there are a lot of deaths. People take revenge, people hurt. Some of it's pretty fucking ugly too.

There is humour in the movie, definitely, but the marketing people would have had both barrels from me if I had paid to see this in the cinema. It's been a long time since I've seen a film so completely mis-sold in its advertising.

So see this if you like action movies, it's got a reasonably solid script and a superb cast (led by Ryan Reynolds, who is usually the best thing about any movie he's in, alongside a rather good Ben Affleck, Ray Liotta, Andy Garcia and the always-great-value Jeremy Piven. Oh, and the very surprising Alicia Keys), it's just maybe not what you would expect from seeing any of the trailers. So there.

Superman Returns

2007-09-08T11:09:00.000-07:00

Let me start off by saying that despite my love of all things comic-book related, I hate Superman.

I fucking hate him! The character doesn't make any sense to me. His alter-ego, Clark Kent, makes no sense to me. How the hell are we supposed to believe that intelligent people can't see through a pair of glasses and a different hair style as a disguise? He is a boring, do-good superhero with ridiculously powerful abilities. Abilities that really can't be overcome unless one wields kryptonite. And one always seems to wield kryptonite. But my biggest problem with the character is his ability to fly.

Hawkman can fly, but he has a costume and some kind of "ninth metal" that defies gravity which allows him to do so. Angel of the X-Men can fly, but he was born with wings. Iron Man can fly, but he uses rockets and his costume to do so. All fairly weak reasons, but at least they are reasons. Superman can fly because, er, well...our sun is yellow.

Huh?

Super strength? Fine. Speed? Check. Invulnerability? Sure. Freezing breath? Stupid, but why not. But flight? No way! At least give me a reason besides "uh, well...he flies", fer crissakes! Okay...I'm done. Onto the film.

It sucked.

The story takes place a number of years after Superman (and Clark Kent, by the way. Hmmm?) has disappeared to find his home planet of Krypton. He comes back...blah blah blah. Lois is married with a kid...blah blah blah. Lex Luthor is planning world domination...blah blah blah. Who fucking cares? The plot is stupid. Superman is ridiculously powerful so they can't find an villain for him to "fight", so they pull the old evil genius trick out of the book. One they have used a million times. And he uses kryptonite to weaken Supes! Genius! How do they keep coming up with these things?

Let's talk about casting. Brandon Routh is fine. I mean they were just casting a face and body type, so the acting part of it was totally secondary. But Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane? Five or six years after the last time we saw her when Superman defeated General Zod? 23-year old Kate Bosworth playing someone who should be in her mid-30's? Gimme a fucking break! And why the hell would Superman, or anyone for that matter, want to bang her bony ass? Someone needs to give that poor girl a sandwich.

And I glad to see that the Lex Luthor/Kitty (Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey) dynamic hasn't changed all that much since Gene Hackman and Valerie Perrine played those characters in the 70's. Okay, Perrine played Eve, but the character was the same. Why would an evil genius like Luthor put up with such an inane bitch?

James Marsden plays Lois Lane's love interest, well besides her super-lust for Superman. It looks like he is stuck in a rut playing characters in comic-book adaptations whose wife/girlfriend gets the hots for a cooler guy. Must suck being James Marsden.

So if you want to see a film with a more-than-obvious plot, actors sleep-walking their way through their roles, and one in which Superman fights, er, well no one...then Superman Returns is for you. Oh, and good luck with the Special Olympics. I'm rooting for ya, buddy!

Shooter

2007-08-26T18:32:00.000-07:00

This one really hurts.

I was really looking forward to the film adaptation of Stephen Hunter's Point of Impact earlier in the year when it was released. I even wrote about it here. Sure, I was hesitant about the casting of Mark Wahlberg as ex-Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger, but I was ready to roll through it. You know...for the sake of the art involved.

Well...it sucked. Big time!

Sorry. I hate to be one of those jerks who complain about how Hollywood ruins books when they transfer them to film. I tend to agree with someone like Alan Moore who believes that any film made from previously published source material should be viewed as an entirely different entity. But damn, "they" really ruined this one!

And that sucks, because Stephen Hunter is an award-winning film critic for The Washington Post, and his novel almost reads like a screenplay. But "they" had to fuck with it. Fuckers!

But the crappy screenplay is only the beginning of the problems with this film. The acting was absolutely atrocious. And that includes the awful work done be Danny Glover and Mark Wahlberg...usually dependable actors. Wahlberg mumbled his way through the entire movie and Glover was almost as hard to understand. I think he had braces on his teeth or something, but he was really annoying to listen to every single time he was on screen.

I'm not even going to get into the crazy political message that the filmmakers were or were not trying to make. I got too bored to try and figure it out. Actually, it's not too hard to figure out. They beat you over the head with it. It's just too tiresome to chat about here.

Your best bet? Stay far, far away from this MOVIEGRENADE!

The Covenant.

2007-08-24T03:04:00.000-07:00

This is very, very special indeed.

It's so bad it's highly, highly amusing, and also contains what I think might be the worst line I have ever heard in a movie. Ever. Amazing.

Okay, the 'plot' centres around a group of four friends, who are teenage boys. They're all real purdy, too (why are they never ugly?). They're also all witches, living in the town of Ipswich in Massachusetts, I think. They are descended from four families of 'untold power' from back in the day; there was a fifth family, but they wanted too much power and were banished or some such shite.

Anyway, strange things start happening to the excessively arrogant boys, like someone else is using some powers and stuff. They suspect one of their own, but then they remember the earlier script reference to a fifth bloodline that vanished and figure it's back.

And what are the chances? The child of this bloodline is also very pretty with a hot body. How lucky it wasn't a KFC-guzzling porkster, or that swimming scene would have made the movie an NC-17 in the States. Or possibly an unprecedented NC-82.

So the boys' girlfriends are sued to gain leverage by new witch-boy as he tries to get Caleb to 'will' him his powers, as he is about to 'ascend'. Using the powers is addictive, and it seems to have sent new bloodline boy a bit mental and power-crazed - but he's more powerful than our 'heroes' as he's been willed his father's powers.

With Caleb's powers too, he'll be even stronger, and more mental.

It's flimsy, it's filmed like a pop video, and the cast seems to have gotten work because they look nice. It could easily have been maybe 40 minutes long, but somehow has been dragged out to more than 90. And the twist which helps our hero survive is flagged so early in the film I feel embarrassed typing this.

Oh, and the worst line ever. Picture the scene. Two boy-witches fighting. It's like normal fighting, but they're 20 feet apart. And I mean it's exactly like a regular fight - they're throwing punches but they're like, erm, wobbly air, and they hurt and stuff. Even kicks produce this devastating wobbly air. Whoooo, dramatic. And really, really boring.

Anyway, they're facing off, and more-powerful-new-bloodline-boy is kicking the fuck out of the super-purdy Caleb. MPNBB then says, from on high, looking down at his wounded opponent:
"I'm going to make you my Wee-yotch!"

You see what they did there? It's like bee-yatch, but for witches. And it made me laugh out loud, then feel shame for all the professionals involved in this utter piece of shit. And to think, Renny Harlin's past movies have often been passable. A couple were even damn good – Cliffhanger and Long Kiss Goodnight, for example. But watching this, he is clearly nuts, as are the studios who financed this pile of hairy arse.

Lady In The Water

2007-08-20T05:21:00.000-07:00

I've been mulling over whether to include this as a grenade or not, and I've realised today that I have no choice.

Lady In The Water is fundamentally really, genuinely not very good at all.

I'll tell you why I was in two minds though; like all of Shyamalan's movies, it's just so fucking sincere. With all his films so far, if you can buy into the premise, it's nearly always an interesting ride. Not always great, sometimes not even good, but usually interesting. And I am a fan of his. Unbreakable is one of my favourite films, it's incredibly good. It may even be in my top five. Signs is excellent, especially the second time when you can watch with emotional distance and see how damn funny it is.

But Lady In The Water… Not so good.

The plot's kind of tricky. This chap (Paul Giamatti) is working as a caretaker in an apartment complex. He's nice. A lady appears in the swimming pool, seemingly from nowhere. He takes her in. She's chased by a bad wolfy-grass beast.

Did I say it was tricky?

Okay, water nymph lady (as it turns out) is there to fulfill some destiny malarkey; different people in the complex will play different roles as she seeks the person she will inspire. Luckily, as this is all from some ancient Chinese folk story, there is an ancient Chinese woman in the complex.

Christ, now I'm writing the plot down, I can't think for the life of me as to why I was in two minds about this GRENADE!

Anyway, a giant eagle is to collect the nymph and take her home as she's a special, special nymph, and the people in the complex have to help her do that safely. (and you thought the synopsis couldn't get any worse)

The assorted characters are fine, and all well played, with particular nods to Giamatti, who is probably the main reason I was undecided about this, and M Night Shyamalan, who I thought was also pretty good in his role.

The problem is that it's just hard to care about the nymph. A giant fucking eagle? A wolfy thing made of grass that looks like it's actually made of Lego when you actually see it? Too many contrivances make you feel manipulated, and this fucker is packed with them. It's too neat, too pat, and yes, too damn contrived.

Best thing about this film is the guy who is experimenting by only bodybuilding one side of his body. He's great. But even his role is telegraphed from distance, if you know your movie devices. He crops up early on, then just about disappears; the rest of the cast have similar introductions but stick around. So you know he's coming back for something significant, and as soon as that thought clicks, it's a short step to figure out what that role is.

All in all, annoying, without charm, with some damn good performances that can't save what is, ultimately, a big pile of old wank.

The Marine

2007-08-19T18:24:00.001-07:00

OK. I've really got no excuse for watching this horrendous piece of shit. It was really late and I couldn't sleep. Maybe I got taken over by an alien pod-thing that loves pro-wrestlers. I dunno. All I do know is that I think I lost 10% of my brain cells during the excruciating 85 minutes that was this film. That sucks, because I usually like to kill brain cells the old fashioned way...with alcohol.

So John Cena (WWE wrestler) plays the titular ex-Marine. Hey...shouldn't they have called it The Ex-Marine? Anyway, he comes home from a tour o' duty and he and his wife get accidentally wrapped up with some bad guys on the run. Bad guys kidnap wifey, and Hulk smashes!!!

Robert Patrick (he of Terminator 2 fame) has the only fun in the movie as bad guy with a sense of humor. He is so over-the-top in his portrayal that he actually winds up on the bottom again. But there he goes...chewing up all the scenery Australia has to offer. Oh yeah, it was supposed to be set in South Carolina, but someone obviously thought that SC and the land Down Under were pretty interchangeable. Someone who has never been to either South Carolina or Australia, if you ask me.

So here it is...the best/worst moment in the film. Cena comes after the bad guys with a vengeance. Every time they think they lost him, he pops back up again. At one point he is chasing them on a motorcycle and one of the bad guys says: "Who does this guy think he is...the Terminator?" Cut to a shot of Robert Patrick in the rear-view mirror making a surprised look with his eyes.

Yeah. They went there.

You....stay away. Please!

A Sound of Thunder

2007-08-14T11:56:00.000-07:00

I had only heard of this stinker in passing when it came out a few years ago. The title doesn't really give a whole lot of insight into what the film is about, and I think it spent all of one week in the theaters.

So before watching it the other night, I looked it up on IMDB and saw that it was a time-travel sci-fi kinda thing based on a short story by Ray Bradbury. And it starred Ed Burns, Ben Kingsley and a bunch of others. Now Burns is maybe one of the worst mainstream actors out there, but his films are usually OK. And Kingsley is a legend, although he has starred in some shitters before...so you never know.

I should've known with this one. What a fuggin' awful movie! The special effects were shit. Looks like it could have been made for a cable TV channel instead of a major movie company. I see on the trivia section of the site that the original production company went bankrupt during post-production...so that could explain it. Lemme put it this way: the blue-screen scene in the original Wayne's World movie (we're in Delaware...ugh) was far superior to the shot of Burns and his assistant walking through the streets of future NYC. I almost couldn't believe how bad the effects were in that shot...for a movie made in the 21st century!

The plot was shit too! This tech company figured out a way to use time travel to send rich assholes back in time to hunt dinosaurs. The only catch is that they couldn't affect anything from the past. No stepping off the "Jesus walked on the water" path that they send back in time. No killing of anything except the dino, which was about to die anyway by getting stuck in a tar pit and then covered with lava and ash from a volcano that is about to erupt. Nothing. They are absolutely adament that any change at all can cause drastic harm to the current timeline. Even the killing of an insect, because that insect could lay eggs that...blah, blah, blah.

(Sidebar: They must have really improved the carbon-dating process in the future to figure out when this specific dinosaur died to the exact minute. And that it all happened 5 minutes before a volcano was about to erupt. Truly amazing what they can do in a crap script!)

Dum, dum, duuuuuuuuuh!!!!

Guess what happens? One of the asshole, rich businessmen steps on a butterfly by accident. That tiny event causes waves of changes in the future. It doesn't matter that the butterfly was about to go extinct anyway because of the volcano that was 5 minutes away from exploding. Nah...not to our screenwriters, it doesn't. The changes to the future happen in waves, like the ripples from a stone thrown into the middle of a pond. Our heroes have to figure out a way to go back and give this poor butterfly another 5 minutes of life to preserve our future.

Ugh...that bored me just writing it!

You know what? Just don't see this movie. Period!

Aeon Flux

2007-08-13T04:53:00.000-07:00

Picture the scene: I'm on a plane, it's a 12-hour flight from Hong Kong to the UK. My tactic, to avoid landing and being completely fucked, is to stay awake through two movies, then sleep. This way, I wake up half an hour before landing, and the flight doesn't seem so bad. It's always the last few hours of a long flight that suck the hardest, after all.

Anyway, there I am. The plane is dark, and everyone else is asleep. I mean, the entire plane – we left HK at about 1am, so this is understandable. I flick through the movies on offer, and they're all either shite, or I've seen them before. Oooh, what's this? Aeon Flux? Charlize Theron's first movie after her Oscar-winning performance in Monster? Well, that could be interesting, I think.

The most interesting thing about Aeon Flux is that I'm sure there's a good porno version of it out there, in which they only had to take the 'l' out of the original title.

In the 25th century, a virus has wiped out a big chunk of the world's population. Survivors live in Bregna, a fortified city surrounding by a big, fuck-off wall. Wow, that's pretty much superfluous. If I'd just said 'fortified', I think you would have pictured the fuck-off wall. Aeon Flux is the name of a female assassing, played by Theron, who works for an 'underground' rebel group, led by The Handler (Frances McDormand) or something. Aeon is sent to assassinate Trevor Goodchild, head of hte council that runs the city, but Aeon finds out lots of stuff and decides to protect him instead. So she becomes a target for The Handler's crowd, and blah blah blah.

It's actually quite a nice looking film, though every scene looks like it was shot on bluescreen. Or greenscreen, pedants.The problem is that there's just nothing here. It's flimsy beyond belief. Who do we care about in the film? No-one. The cast includes Pete Postlethwaite, Frances McDormand, Marton Csokas, Sophie Okonedo (who was so brilliant in Hotel Rwanda) and many more, yet I wanted everyone to die in the first 20 minutes.

The problem with movies like this is that they need to establish a universe for you to accept. The movies that do this best, do it without you realising. X-Men is a great example, as is Blade Runner. And Alien. You see things functioning, you see how the world works, and you're intelligent enough to accept and assimilate it. I'm always suspicious of movies that have to explain what's happening in too much detail. The obvious exception is Star Wars, which kept its descriptions so simple and its illustrations so detailed, they they worked very well together. You read the scrolling words, the next thing you see is a space pursuit with huge craft and flashing lasers, and robots aplenty. And you accept.

The world of Aeon Flux is well drawn, nicely realised, a little trippy and hyper-real in fact. But you just can't give a fuck about this non-existent script, a really slight story and no meat at all to grab on to. Even the action is average, being way too showy and extravagant. It's just not effective.

In short, if you watch this movie after reading this, you deserve to watch this movie. It's good enough for a 12-hour flight when everyone else is asleep and no-one can see what you're watching, but apart from that exact circumstance, avoid. Buy a box of tissues and rent Aeon Fux instead.

Ultraviolet

2007-08-10T11:50:00.000-07:00

OK, this is a movie that I really, really wanted to like. It's got violence (of the ultra kind), vampires and a very sexy Milla Jovovich (My "v" button almost didn't make it through that sentence). What's not to lovvvve?

To date, I have tried to watch this un-watchable piece o' crap 3 or 4 times. I've never made it to the end. It's just so damn confusing. I've read on IMDB that the original version was over a half-hour longer, and maybe they cut some of the more important plot points in favor of the stylized violence that drives much of the movie. Dunno. All I do know is that a simple action flick like this shouldn't be that demanding.

Here's the plot in brief: It's sometime in the future. A virus has turned a portion of the population into Hemophages - vampire-like beings with enhanced strength, speed and intelligence. Their is a war going on between the humans and the 'phages. A woman (Jovovich) who is infected with the virus is sent on a mission to steal/destroy a weapon that the humans have developed to destroy all the 'phages. The weapon turns out to be a young boy who has anti-bodies in his system that can and will destroy all the hemophages. Silliness ensues! Phew...that wasn't easy.

The acting is awful, even with the presence of the lovely Ms. Jovovich. Let's face it...she's not much of an actress, but she is good on the old ocular lenses. There are some roles ably played out by character actors such as Nick Chinlund and William Fichtner, but even they can't save this movie grenade.

The action is mind-numbing. They often speed up and slow down the action ala The Matrix, because that's pretty hot right now...or was a few years ago. And it looks like the whole film was an excuse to play with special effects and blue-screen technology. Violet kept changing the color of her hair, nails, and outfits for no apparent reason than that the filmmakers could do it. Mission accomplished, douchebags! Next time give us a story and some dialogue to, er, sink our teeth into. Those of us with possessing more than a 3rd grade education appreciate it.

I would totally spoil the ending for you right now, but as I state above, I haven't quite gotten through this dud. Hopefully, I never will.

The Ring Two

2007-08-06T04:38:00.000-07:00

I quite liked the Hollywaood remake of the first Ring movie; it had some atmosphere, and was shot with suitable gloom. It looked great, actually, despite adding a bizarre horse motif, perhaps to mark it out as its own film, as the Japanese Ringu is pretty fucking shit-hot.

This sequel, however, has no redeeming features and is shite from start to finish. I'd tell you why, but I already feel bad enough that I watched it. Just avoid, it's cobblers.

There, that was short and to the point, wasn't it?

Godzilla

2007-08-06T04:31:00.000-07:00

Yes, the recent-ish remake. I think some spoilers might follow, but if you watch the movie and couldn't work them out anyway, you're a fucking muppet. So let's assume you would have and move on.

Now, this is a fun film. Dumb as fuck, great fun, loads of monster action. It's still shit, but it's a great guilty pleasure of mine.

It's a real MOVIEGRENADE! kinda film. Some moments of brilliance (the cars bouncing when 'zilla takes a step, for example – beautifully done) and one moment of utter shitness that stands out above all the others.

Well, most of them. And I will keep this short, as this 'blockbuster' has probably been seen by most of you already.

There's a 'thrilling' chase through Manhattan's streets, with Godzilla chasing a bunch of helicopters that were initially hunting the big fella/fella-ess. Godzilla is big, and fast; the helicopters are hunted down, hunter becomes hunted and all that shite.

What I've never understood is, why didn't they just fly up? I mean, they knew Godzilla couldn't fly or anything, and they… well, they were flying.

Maybe that's not so surprising. Maybe it's more surprising that the script went through rewrites and rewrites, was read by studio, director and producer, plus cast, and not one of the cunts realised that the helicopters could just fly up.

Like I said, it's dumb as fuck. I'd even go so far as to say, Godzilla is so bad it's good. And it has a decent cast struggling manfully with a slender script – Jean Reno, Harry Shearer, Hank Azaria, and, erm, some others.

Into the Blue

2007-08-04T08:09:00.000-07:00

Just wanna thank the daddy of badger for asking me to join him in trashing some truly "bad cinema". It never gets old.

So, as I mentioned on my blog last week, I stayed home last Saturday licking my wounds from a truly out-of-nowhere drunken evening the night before. Part of my penance was to watch this truly awful movie from beginning to end. I thought about changing the channels many times, but I just didn't feel that I had suffered enough yet. Then I wanted to see how far they would go in copying The Deep from beginning to end.

They went pretty far.

First the plot: A group of divers (Paul Walker, Jessica Alba, Scott Caan, and Ashley Scott) discover an ancient, long believed to be mythical, shipwreck. They also discover a downed plane in the vicinity with a whole shitload of cocaine. Didn't that happen in The Deep, but with morphine? Anyway, local drug-runners soon find out that they are diving in that spot and they may have found their coke. Lots of macho posing later, they finally come to a *hum* heroic underwater climax. Good guys win, bad guys lose. Pretty sure that happened in The Deep too! Wonderfully original. I say if you are going to remake a film, you should fucking acknowledge that it is a remake.

OK...a couple of things I liked about the movie. Jessica Alba's ass, but that should go without saying. It was so perfect that it was inhuman. Real women don't have asses like that. I'm pretty sure she must be a robot. Also, I've been a huge fan of Ashley Scott ever since the short-lived series, Birds of Prey. She's all right! She did get her leg chomped by a shark in this one, and I am fascinated by sharks and shark attacks...so that worked for me. And I have to be honest, I was utterly amazed by Paul Walker's swimming ability and his underwater acting while holding his breath. I don't know how he did it!

Yeah, that was about it for the good things about the movie...which was real pretty to look at. Just like a beautiful, dumb blond with fake tits and a good tan. You know, that's how the NY Times should have reviewed this bomb. "Into the Blue: a beautiful, dumb blond with fake tits and a good tan. Enjoy!"

You know, one of the weakest things that an "adventure/action" film can do is give away a seemingly important plot twist in the very beginning of the film. We are introduced to the #1 wreck diver early in the film played by James Brolin. Fairly well known actor, and from the get-go there is tension between him and Paul Walker's character. Turns out...dum dum duuuuh...that he is not really a wreck diver, but he IS the local top gun of drug running. Wow! I totally didn't see that coming! Well known actor shows up early in the film as a minor character, but then winds up being the big bad later on in the film? Must have been looking at Jessica Alba's ass or something. Do they really think we are stupid? Dumb question. Of course they believe we are stupid. It's why Hollywood keeps making piles of money on piles of shit like this one.

Generally, the acting in this MovieGrenade, was poor to mediocre at best. Ashley Scott and Jessica Alba are nice to look at, but they can't act their way out of a paper bag if they tried. I guess the same can be said for Walker and Caan, except I don't float that way. Hell, they even got model-turned actor Tyson Beckford to play a baddie in it. I don't see any Oscars in the future of any of these "actors".

I think that if anyone out there wants to see this movie, they should do themselves a favor and watch it with the sound off.

Then it would be just like having a pretty scene of an aquarium playing on your TV, and that can be really soothing.

28 Weeks Later

2007-07-30T13:20:00.000-07:00

Including this as a Moviegrenade! is something of a shock, not least to me. I walked out of the cinema stunned by parts of the movie – but let down by its core. And there may be some spoilers in this, but if there are, they're not fundamental or surprising. Trust me on this.

Let me explain. If you don't know the plot, this movie kicks off, yes, 28 weeks after the end of the first movie. In the first movie, England was ravaged by a virus called Rage, which made infected folks really, really angry. And murderous. And mental. It was a fast, furious and in parts, fucking fantastic movie. Violence exploded and died down like in real life, it came out of nowhere; and it posed interesting questions; which is worst, a world full of infected mentals or a world full of non-infected mentals with guns?

The sequel attains some of the same highs and still made me gasp with its brutality at times. It takes a lot to do that, I love my horror movies. I even watch the news on TV occasionally. The opening sequence, in which Robert Carlyle and his missus are boarded up in a farmhouse during the initial infection period. It echoes the first movie, with an ejaculation of barbarity, people doing anything to survive against ridiculous odds and mindless murder. Carlyle escapes. Next time we see him, he's meeting his kids off the train as London is repopulated, 28 weeks on.

Turns out, his wife survived the farmhouse attack he ran from (and to be honest, I think anyone would have run from it). And within her, the virus has mutated – and is passed on to Carlyle.

By the way, Robert Carlyle is a pretty bloody good actor and I don't hold him responsible for any of the following shitness.

Anyway, the virus gets out. Carlyle spreads it, and it moves like wildfire through the new population. The army of course has a huge presence, and in a very powerful scene, snipers are on rooftops trying to pick off the infected in a fleeing crowd of hundreds. Eventually, seeing how fast the virus moves, they're given the order to kill everyone on sight. It's surprisingly moving, despite viewing most of the action from the rooftops.

We move on. Some survive, and are trying to escape the area before it is napalmed to destroy the virus.

Robert Carlyle, infected and mental, also manages to escape; in one of the movie's most shit scenes, he steps into a side street to avoid the wall of fire which kills everyone else. So he's infected, but he can reason? Why can no-one else? Not only that, but he follows his kids to try and chomp them as well. This just doesn't work in any way as a device. It's fucking annoying, in fact, that we're supposed to buy this. Why is he different? No reason. At all. Except maybe to inject some kind of pathos while throwing logic, burning, out into the street.

Even so, there's some real tension, and like the first movie you're never quite sure what's going to happen. I left the cinema shocked and stunned by parts of it and insulted by others.

Yes, it's a grenade, but it's one worth seeing. The good far outweighs the bad, and while it's more sensationalist than the first movie, it works as entertainment with no 'message'. If you ignore the Carlyle thread running through it like Rage, of course.

Hollow Man 2

2007-07-30T13:07:00.000-07:00

Straight-to-video is a fertile ground for finding undiscovered gems or real pieces of shit – both of which come under the not-so-strict Moviegrenade! remit.

Hollow Man II falls into both categories. Well, all three, I suppose – straight to video/DVD, an it's an… undiscovered piece of shit.

The story is simple; government funded scheme to make people invisible goes haywire when invisible person goes mental. Lots of killing happen because he needs 'the buffer' to stop the invisibility serum destroying him; only one woman can make the buffer, which was denied him by the government/big business who wanted his existence kept secret so he could murder political opponents.

Into this stumbles cop and James Blunt lookalike Peter Facinelli, who really should know better. He tries to protect scientist bird, who is supposed to be hot totty but isn't. And no, she doesn't get her norks out, in case you were wondering.

So, what do you need to know? Budgetary constraints are obvious; Christian Slater is the Hollow Man in this outing, and he appears as himself for maybe six minutes of screen time; the rest, it's his voice and some dodgy-sounding heavy breathing. It's amazing he wasn't caught straight away with that asthma. His transformation uses footage from the original and more expensive movie, and scenes where the invisible is visible are kept to a bare minimum.

I kept wondering why the movie was based in Seattle; usually, when a city outside of New York or LA is used it's for a reason. This reason doesn't become apparent until the end, when Blunt-A-Like and Slater go head to head in a rainstorm. Just as well really, or two invisible men fighting would have made the shittest film climax ever.

Worst moment of the movie is right in the nonsensical middle. Scientist Bird suggests that in two hours they could be in Oregon, and no-one would know where to find them, so they would be safe. She also points out that Slater can only survive another month at most. Fuckwit copper says no, how can she say that when Slater killed his partner. No, he says, I'm going after him.

Riiiiight. So there's army and SWAT after this guy, and he's going to die in a month anyway. And you have to go after him. You twat.

Definitely one of those movie moments where you pull for the bad guy. And while it's fun in (short) parts, it's still one to avoid. Consider this a moviegrenade I jumped on for you, and thank me in your prayers.