Lucky You

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

"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.

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

'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

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

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

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.