Here's a list of all the movies released this year that I saw (there are 35), along with my rating:
* "Appaloosa" (B+)
* "The Bank Job" (B)
* "Burn After Reading" (B)
* "Cloverfield" (A-)
* "The Dark Knight" (C+)
* "Doubt" (B+)
* "Eagle Eye" (C)
* "Expelled" (F)
* "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (C+)
* "Get Smart" (C+)
* "Hancock" (D)
* "Hellboy 2" (B)
* "Horton Hears A Who" (B)
* "In Bruges" (C+)
* "Incredible Hulk" (C+)
* "Indiana Jones 4" (B+)
* "Iron Man" (A)
* "Jumper" (C)
* "Kung Fu Panda" (A-)
* "Mirrors" (C)
* "Rambo 4" (C)
* "Redbelt" (B-)
* "Religulous" (A-)
* "The Ruins" (B-)
* "Slumdog Millionaire" (B)
* "The Spirit" (F)
* "Star Wars: Clone Wars" (C)
* "Step Brothers" (B)
* "The Strangers" (C+)
* "Sukiyaki Western Django" (???)
* "Teeth" (B+)
* "Tropic Thunder" (D)
* "Valkyrie" (A-)
* "WALL*E" (C)
* "Wanted" (B+)
No doubt you'll disagree with me on some of these, but that's the way it goes, right? If you want, go make your own list.
I was going to do a Best and Worst 10, and then realized I didn't like enough films to do a Top 10. It was hard even coming up with a Top 3. Instead I'll just designate some special awards:
Best Superhero Movie of the Year: Iron Man
Most people will probably think The Dark Knight was the best superhero film of the year. They'd be wrong. True, Heath Ledger was incredibly good as The Joker, but just about everything else about the movie sucked balls, from Batman's ludicrous gravelly voice, to the silly boat dilemma, to the preachiness about civil liberties, to handling Two-Face's origin, career, and death in half an hour, to the absurdly moronic final lines. No, Iron Man was what a superhero movie should be: fun, slick, and action-packed. Bonus points for having an engineer as the hero.
Worst Piece of Propagandizing Swill: Expelled
Ben Stein and the producers of this film set out with deceit and a room full of shitty vintage stock footage and managed to make the most intellectually dishonest celluloid turd I've ever seen put to film. This film wasn't just anti-evolution; it was anti-anything-close-to-rational-thought. And to boot, it was just utterly shitty film-making.
So Bad It Was Good: Redbelt
This was a tough one. There were other strong candidates in Eagle Eye and Wanted, both with plots so silly you just had to laugh (or you'd cry). Wanted was probably the better of those two, for the simple fact that it had people shooting guns and slinging them to alter their trajectory, and they practiced on dead pigs! It also had an army of bomb-wielding rats. In short, it out-sillied Eagle Eye, and that's saying something. But David Mamet's philosophical mixed martial arts movie took the prize, mostly because it took itself so mother-fucking seriously. I think Mamet actually thought he was penning something profound, and not some silly little movie about grift and guys wrestling and kicking each other. And the ending was so very, very silly. But it made me smile.
WTF: Sukiyaki Western Django
Unlike the last category, this one was clear-cut. This bizarre Western with Japanese actors speaking mangled, Southern-US-affected dialect while dressed in outlandish costumes, wielding guns and swords while Quentin Tarantino was some kind of goofy Greek chorus...it was supposed to be cool, but it made my brain hurt.
Overall it just wasn't a very good year. Here's hoping things are better in 2009.
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Friday, November 14, 2008
Religulous
I finally saw Bill Maher's Religulous yesterday.
Overall I enjoyed it. It was very funny in parts. My favorite bit was when they visited a place where Jews invent contraptions to basically try to circumvent the edict against resting on the sabbath. Really hardcore Jews won't even turn a light switch on or off on the sabbath, but this place comes up with all sorts of gadgets, such as a Shabbat-friendly phone:
Maher pointed out that what this amounts to is trying to trick god, and isn't that more than a little silly?
Mostly Maher chose this kind of low-hanging fruit. He interviews truckers, an amusement-park Jesus, and a guy who claims to be the second coming of Christ. On the one hand, you could say that he's just picking on the wackos, but he does interact with a fair number of "normal folks" who make up the rank and file of believers. I don't think the movie would have been quite as funny if Maher had stuck to interviewing university theologians, and Maher probably didn't think so, either. If you want a more serious version of Maher's approach, there's always Richard Dawkins' Root of All Evil, a documentary he put together for the BBC.
Religulous was bookended by some very serious editorializing by Maher about the deadly mix of religion and modern weaponry (a point Sam Harris makes in The End of Faith), but it felt like a jarring mismatch in tone from the light-hearted stuff that had just come before. Maybe if he'd mixed it in throughout, it would have been more effective.
Anyway, I doubt that the film would have much appeal to moderately religious people, though I don't know. Maher's basic tone is, "Come on, people, look how silly this shit is!" which I don't think will resonate very well with people leaning one way or the other, and I doubt they'd go to see this film anyway.
Still, it was very funny in parts, and I would like to see feedback from a group of people across the religious spectrum, rather than just other atheists and movie reviewers.
Overall I enjoyed it. It was very funny in parts. My favorite bit was when they visited a place where Jews invent contraptions to basically try to circumvent the edict against resting on the sabbath. Really hardcore Jews won't even turn a light switch on or off on the sabbath, but this place comes up with all sorts of gadgets, such as a Shabbat-friendly phone:
Making or receiving phone calls is also a no-no on Shabbat, but technology has come to the rescue yet again. The Institute for Science and Halacha has come up with a button-free telephone. All the electrical circuits are perfectly closed, which means that in practice - the only thing stopping it from dialing all the time is an electrical disruption caused by an infra-red ray. If an emergency arises on Shabbat, you just wedge a stick into a designated hole on the telephone. A circuit is made and dialing is enabled.
Maher pointed out that what this amounts to is trying to trick god, and isn't that more than a little silly?
Mostly Maher chose this kind of low-hanging fruit. He interviews truckers, an amusement-park Jesus, and a guy who claims to be the second coming of Christ. On the one hand, you could say that he's just picking on the wackos, but he does interact with a fair number of "normal folks" who make up the rank and file of believers. I don't think the movie would have been quite as funny if Maher had stuck to interviewing university theologians, and Maher probably didn't think so, either. If you want a more serious version of Maher's approach, there's always Richard Dawkins' Root of All Evil, a documentary he put together for the BBC.
Religulous was bookended by some very serious editorializing by Maher about the deadly mix of religion and modern weaponry (a point Sam Harris makes in The End of Faith), but it felt like a jarring mismatch in tone from the light-hearted stuff that had just come before. Maybe if he'd mixed it in throughout, it would have been more effective.
Anyway, I doubt that the film would have much appeal to moderately religious people, though I don't know. Maher's basic tone is, "Come on, people, look how silly this shit is!" which I don't think will resonate very well with people leaning one way or the other, and I doubt they'd go to see this film anyway.
Still, it was very funny in parts, and I would like to see feedback from a group of people across the religious spectrum, rather than just other atheists and movie reviewers.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Maher on The View
Here's Bill Maher on The View, promoting his new movie Religulous.
Here's Part I:
And Part II:
At the end of Part II, Sherri Shepherd asks Maher if he's asked god what he thinks. Maher asks her if god has talked back to her, and she says yes, and he suggests that she should be put in a mental institution.
I was actually surprised the discussion was as civil as it was. But Maher gets extra points for irony for talking about how religious people "build a wall" in their heads, partitioning off religious beliefs while using rationality in every other aspect of their lives. Unfortunately, Bill has a wall of his own. He holds some severely wack-shit views about food, health, and medicine. He denies the germ theory of disease. On his show last week, he made a joke about poison milk from China and equated it with regular milk here, saying our milk is already poison. Nobody laughed, of course, but the implication was that pasteurized milk which comes from cows that have been given hormones to increase milk production is going to kill you.
Tear down that wall, Bill. Tear down that wall.
I'll probably watch his movie, but it's not being released wide, so of course it's not showing in Lafayette. So I'll have to wait for video.
Here's Part I:
And Part II:
At the end of Part II, Sherri Shepherd asks Maher if he's asked god what he thinks. Maher asks her if god has talked back to her, and she says yes, and he suggests that she should be put in a mental institution.
I was actually surprised the discussion was as civil as it was. But Maher gets extra points for irony for talking about how religious people "build a wall" in their heads, partitioning off religious beliefs while using rationality in every other aspect of their lives. Unfortunately, Bill has a wall of his own. He holds some severely wack-shit views about food, health, and medicine. He denies the germ theory of disease. On his show last week, he made a joke about poison milk from China and equated it with regular milk here, saying our milk is already poison. Nobody laughed, of course, but the implication was that pasteurized milk which comes from cows that have been given hormones to increase milk production is going to kill you.
Tear down that wall, Bill. Tear down that wall.
I'll probably watch his movie, but it's not being released wide, so of course it's not showing in Lafayette. So I'll have to wait for video.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Wanted
I saw Wanted last night.
It was absurd, but watchable, mostly because of the sheer audacity and silliness of the action sequences.
The story involves a nerdy accountant who finds out that his father, who abandoned him and his mother, was actually a member of a secret group of super-assassins. This guy takes medication for anxiety attacks, but it turns out that this is actually a mental skill that allows him to enter slow-motion world and do things like shoot the wings off flies.
He gets trained by getting beat up and stabbed and then soaking in a bath of secret formula that "stimulates white blood cells" and lets the assassins heal up quickly.
All pretty silly, but fun to watch. Until we learn that targets for assassination are dictated to the guild by The Loom of Fate, an actual loom that for 1,000 years has been spelling out the name of targets in binary code, which is apparently only decoded by one guy, Morgan Freeman (gee, how could a system like that go wrong?). Which just compounds silliness upon more silliness, so that you either decide you can't handle it and you stop watching or you entirely switch off your prefrontal cortex. I tried, and mostly succeeded, though I think the first half (the hero learning who he is, going through training montages, etc.) was much better than the second.
Anyway, it's worth watching just for some of the goofier, over-the-top action sequences, or if you your women emaciated and tattooed, for Angelina Jolie.
It was absurd, but watchable, mostly because of the sheer audacity and silliness of the action sequences.
The story involves a nerdy accountant who finds out that his father, who abandoned him and his mother, was actually a member of a secret group of super-assassins. This guy takes medication for anxiety attacks, but it turns out that this is actually a mental skill that allows him to enter slow-motion world and do things like shoot the wings off flies.
He gets trained by getting beat up and stabbed and then soaking in a bath of secret formula that "stimulates white blood cells" and lets the assassins heal up quickly.
All pretty silly, but fun to watch. Until we learn that targets for assassination are dictated to the guild by The Loom of Fate, an actual loom that for 1,000 years has been spelling out the name of targets in binary code, which is apparently only decoded by one guy, Morgan Freeman (gee, how could a system like that go wrong?). Which just compounds silliness upon more silliness, so that you either decide you can't handle it and you stop watching or you entirely switch off your prefrontal cortex. I tried, and mostly succeeded, though I think the first half (the hero learning who he is, going through training montages, etc.) was much better than the second.
Anyway, it's worth watching just for some of the goofier, over-the-top action sequences, or if you your women emaciated and tattooed, for Angelina Jolie.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Worst Movie Line Ever
I found the actual quotation from the end of The Dark Knight. It's at IMDB, on their memorable quotes page for the movie.
In other words, people are too stupid to handle the truth. They need to be lied to to make them feel good. Honestly I can't think of a worse sentiment, or a worse line in a movie.
Batman: Sometimes, truth isn't good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.
In other words, people are too stupid to handle the truth. They need to be lied to to make them feel good. Honestly I can't think of a worse sentiment, or a worse line in a movie.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
The Dark Knight
I went to see The Dark Knight this afternoon. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.
It was worse.
I think the thing has been overrated mostly due to Heath Ledger's death, which is a bit ironic, since both his character as written and his performance are the best things by far about the movie. It's unfortunate that just about everything else about the movie sucks.
I was trying to remember the last time a movie villain was far more intelligent and interesting than the hero, and I can't. The most striking thing about this film is how utterly stilted, boring, lame, hammy, and flat-out stupid Batman is compared to The Joker. Batman glares through his batmask and spews out wretched dialog in a raspy, gravelly, and ultimately silly performance.
In the first part of the movie, he drastically underestimates The Joker, and when he does start paying attention, he says The Joker is "just like every other criminal." It takes Alfred to lecture him on the fact that some bad guys aren't like all the others. But should he really need this lecture? Was the guy he fought in the last film "just like every other criminal"? When Batman does get around to taking The Joker seriously, he's always at least 3 steps behind him. When Batman does take action, it's always with his fists or with his vehicle.
[spoilers ahead]
I actually got the feeling that The Joker wouldn't have been caught at the end unless he wanted to be.
Anyway, the souped-up Prisoner's Dilemma at the end was just ridiculous, but it was actually topped by the even-more-ridiculous bit about Batman taking credit for killing 5 people (including 2 cops), so that Harvey Dent could live on in people's minds as some kind of pristine martyr. The whole thing seemed pointless and stupid (why not just blame the extra deaths on The Joker? In many ways, he was the person responsible for their deaths). But no, we had to get some bullshit line about Batman "being able to take it", and then the worst lines in the whole movie at the very end, when Batman says something like "People deserve better than the truth...they deserve to have their faith upheld."
Excuse me while I vomit all over my shoes.
The movie was obviously trying to make some socio-political comment about the dangers of surveillance (with Batman's goofy universal cell-phone sonar set-up). But then it ended with a line about how people can't really handle the truth, so they need to be lied to to make them feel all warm and fuzzy. What a crock of dogshit.
The fight scenes were poorly shot and edited, the whole ending segment with Two-Face dragged on too long, and the movie itself overextended its welcome. But I might have been able to forgive some of those transgressions if its central message wasn't just idiotic to the core.
It was worse.
I think the thing has been overrated mostly due to Heath Ledger's death, which is a bit ironic, since both his character as written and his performance are the best things by far about the movie. It's unfortunate that just about everything else about the movie sucks.
I was trying to remember the last time a movie villain was far more intelligent and interesting than the hero, and I can't. The most striking thing about this film is how utterly stilted, boring, lame, hammy, and flat-out stupid Batman is compared to The Joker. Batman glares through his batmask and spews out wretched dialog in a raspy, gravelly, and ultimately silly performance.
In the first part of the movie, he drastically underestimates The Joker, and when he does start paying attention, he says The Joker is "just like every other criminal." It takes Alfred to lecture him on the fact that some bad guys aren't like all the others. But should he really need this lecture? Was the guy he fought in the last film "just like every other criminal"? When Batman does get around to taking The Joker seriously, he's always at least 3 steps behind him. When Batman does take action, it's always with his fists or with his vehicle.
[spoilers ahead]
I actually got the feeling that The Joker wouldn't have been caught at the end unless he wanted to be.
Anyway, the souped-up Prisoner's Dilemma at the end was just ridiculous, but it was actually topped by the even-more-ridiculous bit about Batman taking credit for killing 5 people (including 2 cops), so that Harvey Dent could live on in people's minds as some kind of pristine martyr. The whole thing seemed pointless and stupid (why not just blame the extra deaths on The Joker? In many ways, he was the person responsible for their deaths). But no, we had to get some bullshit line about Batman "being able to take it", and then the worst lines in the whole movie at the very end, when Batman says something like "People deserve better than the truth...they deserve to have their faith upheld."
Excuse me while I vomit all over my shoes.
The movie was obviously trying to make some socio-political comment about the dangers of surveillance (with Batman's goofy universal cell-phone sonar set-up). But then it ended with a line about how people can't really handle the truth, so they need to be lied to to make them feel all warm and fuzzy. What a crock of dogshit.
The fight scenes were poorly shot and edited, the whole ending segment with Two-Face dragged on too long, and the movie itself overextended its welcome. But I might have been able to forgive some of those transgressions if its central message wasn't just idiotic to the core.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Terminator Salvation
So they're making yet another Terminator movie. Here's the production blog for Terminator Salvation, starring Christian Bale as John Conner. Here's a blog with a teaser trailer (the movie is coming out next summer).
Apparently the premise of the movie is that the nuclear holocaust happens (despite all the attempts in the movies to stop it), and we see John Conner fight the first generation of Skynet's terminator production line. Cool idea...I was always hungry for more scenes set in the post-apocalyptic future in the other movies.
But I have to say...I don't understand why Christian Bale keeps getting cast...as anything other than a humorless cinder block. The man has absolutely no personality. He's utterly flat on screen. He is a handsome man...no doubt about that. But he has the charisma of a dead trout.
The Dark Knight is getting rave reviews, and I'm actually kind of looking forward to it...but not at all because of Bale. I'm interested in the other actors in the movie, but I think Bale is the worst Batman since Val Kilmer. When he's Bruce Wayne, he's a stale, brooding gazillionaire. When he's Batman, he's a hammy, hoarse-throated bore with too much eye shadow.
So I'm not looking forward to him as John Conner. Though he will probably be better than Ed Furlong.
Apparently the premise of the movie is that the nuclear holocaust happens (despite all the attempts in the movies to stop it), and we see John Conner fight the first generation of Skynet's terminator production line. Cool idea...I was always hungry for more scenes set in the post-apocalyptic future in the other movies.
The Dark Knight is getting rave reviews, and I'm actually kind of looking forward to it...but not at all because of Bale. I'm interested in the other actors in the movie, but I think Bale is the worst Batman since Val Kilmer. When he's Bruce Wayne, he's a stale, brooding gazillionaire. When he's Batman, he's a hammy, hoarse-throated bore with too much eye shadow.
So I'm not looking forward to him as John Conner. Though he will probably be better than Ed Furlong.
Friday, July 11, 2008
How I Would Have Rewritten Hancock
Unfortunately, I saw Hancock yesterday. The first half of the movie was pretty good. The second half makes me wish I had one of those machines from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that let's me target and erase specific memories.
I'm not going to write about the second half (I'm trying to purge it from my memory). Instead I'll describe the set-up and then talk about how I probably would have written the second half.
The set-up is actually pretty good. It makes me think that the movie started out as a high-concept pitch and then got written by committee. "Imagine Will Smith as a homeless, drunk, anti-social superhero..." That was probably enough to get the movie made right there. They probably figured they didn't actually need to write a good script because Smith's star power alone would pull people into the theaters. Unfortunately they were probably right.
Hancock lounges around on benches staying drunk, but occasionally rouses himself to actually intervene and do some good, but his efforts end up having mixed results. He catches the bad guys, but usually causes millions of dollars in collateral damage as a result. Plus, he's rude and smelly, and he insults everybody, so everybody hates him.
Then one day he saves a PR guy from being killed by a train. The PR guy takes him home to dinner and offers to help him repair his image. On his advice, Hancock starts to turn over a new leaf. He surrenders himself to prison, gets clean and sober, and goes to counseling. When the Chief of Police calls for his help, he shaves, gets a new suit, and saves the day at a bank robbery.
Then the movie goes off the rails.
So here's how it should have gone...
First, there was a scene in prison in which Hancock literally shoves one inmates head up the ass of another, and for some reason I believe they were playing the theme song to Sanford and Son when they showed the actual shot. It was a bizarre, unfunny, and grotesque scene. Cut it.
Then have the mastermind of the bank robbery actually be...a mastermind. Make him an intelligent, evil guy...an actual force to be reckoned with as a counterpoint to Hancock. Hancock defeats him initially, and puts him away in prison. While in prison, the bad guy develops a plan to avenge his defeat and destroy Hancock. Maybe he's able to get access to the prison hospital and find Hancock's medical records, and he figures out a weakness.
Meanwhile, Hancock is struggling to fit into his new role as clean and straight good guy. He's tempted to fall off the wagon. He's not any happier now than he was before.
And then the bad guy breaks out of prison, kidnaps someone Hancock cares about (maybe the PR guy's kid), and forces a confrontation. The bad guy exploits Hancock's weakness, and almost kills him, but Hancock prevails.
At the end of the movie, he finds some middle ground between being a drunken misanthrope and a squeaky clean superhero. Maybe we have a final shot of him back on the bench from the beginning of the movie, in normal clothes, trying to decide what to do with his future.
Maybe it's not Shakespeare, but it's about a thousand times better than what did happen. Oh, and the movie would have been way better without any attempt to explain his origins. That's one mystery I would have been fine not ever uncovering.
I'm not going to write about the second half (I'm trying to purge it from my memory). Instead I'll describe the set-up and then talk about how I probably would have written the second half.
The set-up is actually pretty good. It makes me think that the movie started out as a high-concept pitch and then got written by committee. "Imagine Will Smith as a homeless, drunk, anti-social superhero..." That was probably enough to get the movie made right there. They probably figured they didn't actually need to write a good script because Smith's star power alone would pull people into the theaters. Unfortunately they were probably right.
Hancock lounges around on benches staying drunk, but occasionally rouses himself to actually intervene and do some good, but his efforts end up having mixed results. He catches the bad guys, but usually causes millions of dollars in collateral damage as a result. Plus, he's rude and smelly, and he insults everybody, so everybody hates him.
Then one day he saves a PR guy from being killed by a train. The PR guy takes him home to dinner and offers to help him repair his image. On his advice, Hancock starts to turn over a new leaf. He surrenders himself to prison, gets clean and sober, and goes to counseling. When the Chief of Police calls for his help, he shaves, gets a new suit, and saves the day at a bank robbery.
Then the movie goes off the rails.
So here's how it should have gone...
First, there was a scene in prison in which Hancock literally shoves one inmates head up the ass of another, and for some reason I believe they were playing the theme song to Sanford and Son when they showed the actual shot. It was a bizarre, unfunny, and grotesque scene. Cut it.
Then have the mastermind of the bank robbery actually be...a mastermind. Make him an intelligent, evil guy...an actual force to be reckoned with as a counterpoint to Hancock. Hancock defeats him initially, and puts him away in prison. While in prison, the bad guy develops a plan to avenge his defeat and destroy Hancock. Maybe he's able to get access to the prison hospital and find Hancock's medical records, and he figures out a weakness.
Meanwhile, Hancock is struggling to fit into his new role as clean and straight good guy. He's tempted to fall off the wagon. He's not any happier now than he was before.
And then the bad guy breaks out of prison, kidnaps someone Hancock cares about (maybe the PR guy's kid), and forces a confrontation. The bad guy exploits Hancock's weakness, and almost kills him, but Hancock prevails.
At the end of the movie, he finds some middle ground between being a drunken misanthrope and a squeaky clean superhero. Maybe we have a final shot of him back on the bench from the beginning of the movie, in normal clothes, trying to decide what to do with his future.
Maybe it's not Shakespeare, but it's about a thousand times better than what did happen. Oh, and the movie would have been way better without any attempt to explain his origins. That's one mystery I would have been fine not ever uncovering.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
But, Dirty Harry is Cool
Mark Harris in Slate takes a look back at the Dirty Harry movies, and doesn't like what he sees.
The movie's most inflammatory sequence is not Harry's famous, twice-delivered "Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?" monologue. It's the scene in which Harry traps Scorpio and then tortures him to learn the whereabouts of his latest victim (who, unbeknownst to Harry, is already dead). "Rights. … I have rights," Scorpio shrieks, sniveling as Harry's foot presses down on his bleeding leg. Because of Harry's literal overstepping, the killer eventually goes free; he then hires a large black thug to beat him up so that he can work the easily duped court system by filing a false police-brutality claim. While the city's brass wants to bargain with Scorpio, Harry knows the only solution is to hunt him down and kill him. Which he (spoiler alert) does.
In other words: Of course this is a right-wing fantasy. Ideologically, Dirty Harry was a well-calculated sop to the group of Americans that Richard Nixon identified in 1969 as the "Silent Majority" (though neither word was entirely accurate), those for whom everything about the period, from burning ghettos to women's lib to anti-war marches represented steps toward barbarism.
Harris fails to mention that the torture of Scorpio was a "ticking time-bomb" scenario. Scorpio had kidnapped a little girl, ripped out some of her teeth and mailed them to the police as proof that he had her, and had stashed her somewhere. Harry thought the only way to save her was to torture Scorpio. Was this justified? I thought it was interesting cinema, because the main character had to make a choice between the law and the life of the girl.
And then Harris leaves out the very end of the movie. After Harry kills Scorpio, what does he do? He throws his badge into the water. There are multiple ways to interpret this action, but I think one clear implication is that he realized that he couldn't function within the confines of the law and still be true to the people he vowed to protect. If this makes Harry fascist, then what does that make Batman look like?
Another significant ommission of Harris' is the fact that in the original movie Harry never kills anyone who isn't either holding a weapon or making a move for a weapon. He doesn't indiscriminately blow bad guys away. He gives them a choice, to gamble with their lives by picking up a weapon to kill him, on the chance that Harry's gun is out of bullets.
The implication of the films is that the system has become bloated and bureaucratic to the point where it protects criminals more than citizens. In that sense it's reactionary. But the character isn't an assassin with a badge. He's more lawful that most movie superheros, and he's at the other end of the spectrum from Bronson's character in Death Wish.
He's just a decent guy with a giant hand cannon trying to protect the honest, hard-working people of San Francisco.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
WALL-E Negative Review Backlash
WALL-E is currently at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, with 129 positive reviews and only 4 negative ones.
Who are these four brave or utterly misguided fools who dared to be in the extreme minority? Well, one is Brian Orndorf of the SciFi Movie Page, who gave the film 2 stars out of 4.
I read through his review, and a lot of what he said I agreed with.
Wait...hypocritical? How?
[Plot points from the second half of the film up ahead...slight spoiler alert]
The guy's got a point. I wasn't that impressed with the preachy nature of the second half of the film. I was more let down by the lame story. But Orndorf points out the hypocrisy of a film criticizing consumerism while its title character is plastered all over lunch boxes, pajamas, and dozens of other tie-ins and products.
Fair criticism, right? Well, here's what some of the comments on Rotten Tomatoes thought:
That's just from the first two pages of comments. There's lots more where that came from.
I always enjoy a level-headed, reasoned response from the movie-going public to legitimate criticism.
Who are these four brave or utterly misguided fools who dared to be in the extreme minority? Well, one is Brian Orndorf of the SciFi Movie Page, who gave the film 2 stars out of 4.
I read through his review, and a lot of what he said I agreed with.
Wall-E is Pixar's biggest creative gamble in over a decade; a genuine cinematic leap of faith. However, the ambition doesn't match the outcome, and while Wall-E dances whimsically, it's a plodding, frighteningly hypocritical, and forbidding film that trips over its fogged intentions at every dreary turn.
Wait...hypocritical? How?
[Plot points from the second half of the film up ahead...slight spoiler alert]
Where Wall-E heads next is sure to divide audiences. Following Eve into space, Wall-E boards the "Axiom," a huge cruise space ship that's home to the loose ends of the human race. You see, in the 700-years since mankind bolted from Earth, they've evolved into overweight blobs of pudding, nurtured by the Buy-N-Large Corporation who use humans to feed the endless, aggressive cycles of profitable consumption, leaving them helpless and totally enslaved to commercial trends. The human characters are obese nincompoops who've lost the ability to walk eons ago, puttering around on floating chairs waiting impatiently for their next needless desire to be force fed to them by the all-powerful corporate machine.
Here's where I remind everyone this is a Pixar/Disney picture. Pixar/Disney. Decrying greed.
The guy's got a point. I wasn't that impressed with the preachy nature of the second half of the film. I was more let down by the lame story. But Orndorf points out the hypocrisy of a film criticizing consumerism while its title character is plastered all over lunch boxes, pajamas, and dozens of other tie-ins and products.
Fair criticism, right? Well, here's what some of the comments on Rotten Tomatoes thought:
Nice last name Brian orndork....... Idiot.
...
Mmm, I've never liked self proclaimed critics. You hurl insults at the movie but I'm not sure I've heard you explain why it's "hypocritical" or "forbidding".
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Apparently any douchebag can start a website and write 'reviews' for movies. Get bent you steaming pile of sh*t.
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Is it Andrew Stanton's fault that Disney will try to sell this like crazy? Why not actually review the film instead of talking about how they'll make toys.
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I'm going to take a guess since you go on for 3 paragraphs about the obese, that you yourself are fat and worthless and took this film personally.
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Hey Brian, you're in luck! If you and your boyfriend Phil move to California, the two of you can get a legal civil union! Then you can cuddle and whisper sweet nothings into each other's ears like, "Wow, I love being completely out of touch with society's tastes in movies!"
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You should quit your day job and go sell mattresses. Moron.
That's just from the first two pages of comments. There's lots more where that came from.
I always enjoy a level-headed, reasoned response from the movie-going public to legitimate criticism.
Friday, June 27, 2008
WALL-E, or Hell is Other People
When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that hell is other people, he probably wasn't thinking of movie theaters, but he hit the friggin' nail on the head.
It's opening day, so I expected there to be a lot of kids, and for there to be a fair amount of background noise. However, what we experienced was beyond reasonable limits. The lady with her four kids on the same row as us got up at least four times during the film, usually at key moments. At one point when she came back, she smelled strongly of cigarette smoke, making me think she basically dragged her kids outside so she could have a smoke in the middle of the film. For this woman, I personally award the Mother-of -the-Friggin-Year award.
Another woman on our row brought two of her kids in late, and was loudly exasperated about not being able to find the cup holder during the first five minutes of the film. The four kids sitting behind us talked pretty much not stop for the first half of the film, as well as kicking our seats. A little girl got up near the end of the film and was wandering up and down the stairs in the aisle. And some poor kid directly in front of us kept making some weird grunting noise.
So how was the film? How the hell should I know?
Actually, it was pretty good...what I was able to see/hear of it. Despite the distractions, I thought the first 20 minutes or so was the strongest. I thought the overall plot was pretty lame, as were the heavy-handed attempts at satirizing laziness and obesity. Still, it was pretty good, what little my brain was able to process through the torrent of kicks, grunts, squeals, chatter, and bodies passing in front of me.
It's opening day, so I expected there to be a lot of kids, and for there to be a fair amount of background noise. However, what we experienced was beyond reasonable limits. The lady with her four kids on the same row as us got up at least four times during the film, usually at key moments. At one point when she came back, she smelled strongly of cigarette smoke, making me think she basically dragged her kids outside so she could have a smoke in the middle of the film. For this woman, I personally award the Mother-of -the-Friggin-Year award.
Another woman on our row brought two of her kids in late, and was loudly exasperated about not being able to find the cup holder during the first five minutes of the film. The four kids sitting behind us talked pretty much not stop for the first half of the film, as well as kicking our seats. A little girl got up near the end of the film and was wandering up and down the stairs in the aisle. And some poor kid directly in front of us kept making some weird grunting noise.
So how was the film? How the hell should I know?
Actually, it was pretty good...what I was able to see/hear of it. Despite the distractions, I thought the first 20 minutes or so was the strongest. I thought the overall plot was pretty lame, as were the heavy-handed attempts at satirizing laziness and obesity. Still, it was pretty good, what little my brain was able to process through the torrent of kicks, grunts, squeals, chatter, and bodies passing in front of me.
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