Tag Archives: movie

Movie review: Insomnia / Insomnia

I don’t often watch movies back-to-back with the American remakes. However, I failed to see Insomnia in its original Norwegian incarnation, and since the US version was directed by Christopher Nolan (who had previously directed the excellent Memento), I decided to watch both versions in one week.

Both are good movies. If you hate subtitles, feel free to watch the remake; it’s a perfectly good adaptation, taking into account Hollywood’s sensibilities–which I shall now proceed to discuss, with the aid of copious spoilers, so you have been warned. Continue reading →

Movie review: “The Room”

I’ve seen a lot of terrible movies, from “Night of the Lepus” and “Battlefield Earth” to “Xanadu” and “Plan 9 From Outer Space”. “The Room” beats them all. Believe the hype, this could be the next Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Let me start by listing the things that are right about this movie: The sets are competently lit.

Everything else is wrong, even the most basic elements of movie making. Scenes are intercut with what you might mistake for establishing shots, for no apparent reason. Actual establishing shots start to tilt part way through panning. Even the end credits have mysterious blacked-out areas that scroll at the wrong speed. And through the whole thing lurches the auteur responsible, Tommy Wiseau–writer, director, producer, and for want of a better term, actor.

He’s a man for whom English is clearly a second language. His characters often speak in apparently random collections of clichés, or hammer home plot points through verbatim repetition. People in “The Room” lurch from laughter to sorrow and back like they all have rapid cycling bipolar disorder, until you start to feel faintly hysterical yourself from trying to keep track of what the mood of the scene is supposed to be. Above all, the lead characters exhibit an autistic level of emotional understanding, behaving towards each other in ways that make no sense at all. It’s a world where chickens tweet, pillows have sharp edges, and men casually ask friends “So, how’s your sex life?” The reactions of the characters in the final climactic scene make me wonder if the writer has even met any human beings. It’s almost as though the script was written by an alien, or generated by a piece of software.

If Wiseau as a writer is bad, Wiseau the actor is even worse, making the rest of the porn-movie-grade acting look good by comparison. He has the facial expressiveness of a stroke victim, and walks as though he was taught to do it by chimpanzees. His robotic flatness of affect is bizarre, given that he’s apparently able to show emotions in the director’s interview. The sex scenes are the stuff of nightmares–well, I say ‘scenes’ plural, but the second time his Johnny character air-humps his girlfriend, we’re treated to the exact same shots as the first time (though mercifully cut short).

Wiseau allegedly spent $6m on “The Room”. This is no low-budget production; rather than just shooting on top of a convenient building, he apparently shot the rooftop scenes in a studio using green screen, and then dropped in footage of San Francisco by computer. Of course, since he didn’t use motion control cameras, the background doesn’t always end up moving properly relative to the characters. The studio set is then re-used later on to represent a different location–one whose physical existence is inexplicable given the supposed exterior of the apartment where most of the action takes place.

In short, “The Room” is amazingly bad. It’s almost hard to believe it’s not deliberately bad, some sort of dadaist prank. If you enjoy watching bad movies, you really need to see this one.

Idiocracy

Idiocracy is Mike Judge’s new live action movie. Well, I say “new”; I gather it was pretty much finished in 2004, and since then he has been battling with 20th Century Fox to get it released. Right now, it’s showing in a handful of cities, probably a contractual obligation release before it gets shuffled off to DVD or buried outright. One of the cities is Austin, so we went to see it last night.

The premise of the story is the observation that smart people pretty much aren’t having children, while mouth-breathing idiots can’t seem to stop doing so. A supremely average guy from the army is chosen to be the subject of a suspended animation experiment in 2005. Unfortunately, after he is put into the suspension chamber the military end up forgetting about it, and our hero wakes up in the year 2505—and discovers that the world has gotten so dumb that he’s now the smartest person on the planet.

So we get to see a future where the cities are like giant trailer parks, the only clothing that exists is sports gear festooned with dozens of corporate logos, and nobody can even comprehend the idea of drinking water without coloring, sugar and flavoring added. Language has devolved into strings of rap clichés, disconnected phrases, and grunts, and the President is a pro wrestler.

I laughed more than I have in months. The pace starts to flag after about two thirds of the movie, but it’s still pretty damn entertaining if you like satire. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who thinks monster truck rallies are legitimate entertainment, then you’re probably not going to appreciate having so many barbs fired in your direction.

Celebrity-obsessed entertainment publications like JAM! Showbiz and Entertainment Weekly have panned the movie, all too aware that it sets out to mock their readers. It rips into Hollywood too, and has made a few corporations unhappy. Starbucks seem to have taken the jokes in their stride, like they did with Austin Powers, but Pepsico have clearly forbidden any of their trademarked logos from being shown in the movie. As such, the Negativland Dispepsi approach is followed, with significantly disguised parody logos being used and the real product name referred to only verbally. I daresay a good few jokes were removed or muted by the corporate censors too.

Still, probably worth going to see, and definitely worth renting on DVD.

“Equilibrium”

An experiment in cloning goes awry: director Kurt Wimmer attempts to clone The Matrix and inject it with Brave New World DNA, and ends up with a truly ghastly piece of derivative sci-fi that takes a noble premise and turns it into exploitative cartoon violence. What plot twists exist are telegraphed so far off you’d need to be heavily sedated to miss them.

Like the uneven but popular movie it slavishly copies, it can’t decide whether it wants to be intelligent and philosophical, or to just revel in pointless unrealistic violence; and whereas the original at least had a plot device to explain the unreality, the cheap knock-off has no such excuse. Netflix thought I’d rate it 4/5, but adequate acting and special effects can’t drag it above a 2.

I find myself wondering whether Roger Ebert actually watched it before giving it 3 out of 4 stars, especially as he mentions a memorable scene of the protagonist listening to jazz. In the scene in question, the music played is Beethoven, the guy even mispronounces “Ludvig Van Beet-hoven” before putting the record on.

New music and movie releases

If James Brown is the hardest working man in showbiz, Richard H. Kirk must surely be the hardest working man in electronica. He seems to be able to effortlessly drop an album or two every year without the quality suffering. I noticed the other day that most of his back catalog is now available from the iTunes music store, generally priced way below what you can find the limited release CDs for.

Meanwhile, Leningrad Cowboys Go America is finally available on DVD…in Finland. Or from an online store in Denmark, which wants $32 plus shipping. Ouch.

TELEX have a new album out later this month, How Do You Dance? (answer: badly). No sign of it appearing in the US. There’s also a single and a video, can’t find any trace of those either. $19 for the CD, plus shipping from France, equals ouch again.

I suppose I should be grateful that Kraftwerk’s complete remastered box set hasn’t appeared yet.

Snakes on a Plane

Snakes On A Plane. You can just imagine the pitch meeting.

Turner: I have got this killer idea for an action horror movie.

Ellis: Sure, hit me.

Turner: OK, here’s the setup…there are a bunch of people on a plane. And the plane is carrying a load of, like, poisonous snakes. And the snakes are accidentally let out.

Ellis: Are you drunk?

Turner: No, listen, there’s more. Samuel L. Jackson is on the plane. He, like, kicks the snakes’ asses.

Ellis: I’m not sure snakes have asses.

Turner: Tails, then. But you get the idea…Samuel L. Jackson. In a plane. And the plane is full of snakes.

Ellis: So what’s it called?

Turner: Snakes On A Plane.

Ellis: I knew it, you’re baked.

Turner: No, it’s marketing genius. Nobody reads what it says on posters, we don’t need reviews, we don’t even need trailers—it’s, like, all there in the title. Snakes…On A Plane, man!

Ellis: Wow. It’s almost Zen-like in its minimalism. So outline the plot for me.

Turner: You’re still not getting it. I just did! It’s snakes…on a plane. Obviously I’ll get a few of my friends to help pad it out to an hour and a half, but it’ll practically write itself.

Ellis: OK, sounds good, get me a draft. Anything else?

Turner: Sure, and you’re going to love this. One word: sequels.

Ellis: Oh, yeah, I’m liking that.

Turner: There’s no telling where this baby could go. Snakes On A Boat. Snakes On A Train. Snakes On A Bus. Snakes In A Restaurant. Snakes In A Goddamn Movie Theater, and we drop rubber snakes on the audience half way through! It’s fuckin’ genius, man!

Ellis: Oh, yeah. I think I just creamed my pants. I’m taking this to New Line, Emmerich will green light this faster than Terry Gilliam can blow a budget. Let’s do lunch next week.

Let’s predict a few key bits of plot:

.

  • Snake emerges from aircraft lavatory.
  • Oxygen masks drop down, only some of them are snakes.
  • Constrictor gets into lifejacket, is worn around neck.

Timeline

My Netflix queue contains over a hundred items. As a result, it’s often the case that by the time a movie appears in my mailbox, I’ve completely forgotten why I wanted to watch it in the first place, or even what it’s about.

This was definitely the case for Timeline. I can’t think why I would have put it in the queue; I’m not a big fan of anything mediaeval, I’m not wild about director Richard Donner‘s previous movies, and Michael Crichton has written some pretty cheesy SF.

I certainly didn’t pick it based on reviews. The movie got a complete critical savaging; you’d think it was Battlefield Earth 2 from some of the comments:

“No film in recent memory has cried out this much to be mocked.”

“Timeline may not be the dumbest movie to be released this year. But it’s certainly not for lack of trying.”

I find it interesting that there’s a massive disparity between the critics’ reviews, and the average rating given to the movie by ordinary people. I think the critics are way out of line on this one. If you want to see a really excruciatingly bad SF movie, one that’s so wildly implausible it makes Timeline look like an episode of Scientific American Frontiers, consider The Core. That stinking piece of cinematic excrement got way better reviews from the pro critics than Timeline, which tells me that there’s something seriously wrong with the critics’ sense of judgement.

[Spoilers follow, if a movie as badly reviewed as this can be spoiled.]

There’s one criticism that leaps out as wildly inappropriate:

“It looks like cheesy ’60s television, with paper-thin characters and crummy special effects that wouldn’t even have made it in the last season of Star Trek.”

—Stephen Whitty, NEWARK STAR-LEDGER

Since I’ve had the benefit of watching the documentary extras on the DVD, I can reveal that there really weren’t any special effects in the movie. They got the special effect of medieval trebuchets launching projectiles by actually building a bunch of full-size trebuchets and having them launch flaming projectiles. They got that unconvincing effect of a castle blowing up by actually building a full-size castle and blowing it up. The people fighting in a burning smoke-filled courtyard? Well, they set the courtyard on fire, then had a bunch of people fight. The metal swords? Yes, they were made of aluminium, but they were still actual metal swords. And so on.

Make no mistake, there are a lot of grounds for criticizing this movie; but physical verisimilitude isn’t one of them. Still, let’s get a few of the valid criticisms out of the way.

First the plot. It’s easy to say that the foreshadowing is heavy-handed and the outcome predictable, so let’s put some numbers to it: I worked out the major plot twist and knew the basic outline of what was going to happen 12 minutes into the movie. (I jotted a note of the time.) Really, as far as the story goes there’s nothing you haven’t seen in dozens of episodes of Star Trek—right down to the two red-shirted security officers who get killed almost immediately, and the anachronistic object found on an archeological dig. (At least this time it’s not someone’s head.)

Then there’s the medicine. My history teacher (yes, the one who’s now in jail) always used to say that if you did travel back in time, the first thing you’d notice would be the stench. Yet somehow, disease is never a factor in this story—the peasants all look clean and healthy, and today’s bacteria and viruses, with their 600 years of evolutionary head start, fail to impact the people of the past in any way.

Then there’s the language issue. The heroes take back a French guy to help them talk to the locals. The trouble is, we’re heading to the 1300s, when English looked like this:

Love is a gretter lawe, by my pan,
Than may be yeve of any erthely man.
And therfore positif lawe and swich decree
Is broken al day for love in ech degree.
A man moot nedes love, maugree his heed,
He may nat fleen it, thogh he sholde be deed,
Al be she mayde, or wydwe, or elles wyf.
And eek it is nat likly, al thy lyf,
To stonden in hir grace, namoore shal I,
For wel thou woost thyselven, verraily,
That thou and I be dampned to prisoun
Perpetuelly, us gayneth no raunsoun.

I’ll let you extrapolate to French. Maybe you can piece together what most of the above is saying—but speak it? With passably correct pronounciation, good enough to fool knights on the lookout for foreign spies? I don’t think so. Yet nobody in this movie, whether English, French, Scottish or (god help us) American, has any significant trouble understanding anyone else’s accent or vocabulary. Which is a pity, because the situation could have been so much more tense and menacing if they had. I mean, why use authentic medieval costumes of sackcloth and leather, and get genuine heraldry from England, if you’re going to have medieval French people speak modern English with a modern French accent?

Finally, there’s the essential countdown to doom caused by technological limitation. You’ve seen it in countless Bond movies (and movies based on Michael Crichton stories), but let’s overlook the cliché. Instead, let’s think about the fact that a team of half a dozen engineers somehow manage to rebuild a destroyed multi-million dollar computer-controlled time machine, one which it took years of research to construct. And they do it in under 5 hours. In reality, they’d still be installing Windows XP Service Packs by the time everyone got permanently stranded in the past.

Then there’s the acting. Yes, some of it is pretty bad, but what do you expect? It’s a Hollywood action movie. Trying to believe that Paul Walker is Billy Connolly’s son is like trying to believe that Keanu Reeves is the spawn of Sean Connery, but we can probably write off that lousy piece of casting as a market-driven attempt to appeal to the teen and early 20s audience who liked 2 Fast 2 Furious.

More troubling is the complete inability of the cast to make us believe they have a convincing enough motivation to step into an experimental time machine and go through a wormhole in space that they’ve been warned will rip them into electrons so that for a moment they won’t even exist. In the documentary, Richard Donner mentions that in Crichton’s book the technological detail and the characters arguing over what to do ran to around 100 pages, but that they managed to condense it down to 5 pages of movie script. Well, yes, I guess technically all the essential plot points were left intact, but…

Enough negativity! Because if you can somehow look past all that, it’s really not that bad a movie. The medieval detail is well done, and there’s something about real buildings and tunnels and mud and thatch, something about real explosions and smoke, that computer graphics still can’t duplicate. The pacing is evenly fast, so you don’t get bored, and there are some satisfying moments.

So in summary: it’s some painstaking attention to detail that really belonged in a better movie. Sadly, it was stuck into this overgrown B-movie instead. It’s an enjoyable but mindless couple of hours, basically a mid-point between The Messenger and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. And I promise you, it’s better than The Core.

Deer oh deer

Some time ago I read about someone who gets lots of review copies of books set to her for free, because she writes good reviews of them on Amazon.com. I thought at the time that that was pretty cool. It made me wonder just how much I’d have to review to get free stuff, and whether my reviews would all have to be breathless Joel-Siegel-style enthusiasm.

I got my answer. Amazon and Disney sent me an advance copy of the new remastered DVD release of Bambi to review. Yes, Bambi. I can only assume they didn’t pick me based on what I’ve reviewed in the past. Either that, or they noticed I’d been browsing for books and movies about skunks, which would be worryingly efficient of them.

Anyhow, I watched the movie and reviewed it. Hey, why not? Ignoring the plot, the animation is beautiful, and I’m a sucker for anything with a cute animated skunk in it.

So when my RSS aggregator picked up on a review on filmcritic.com, I decided to take a look, just to see if my conclusions were the same as other reviewers. Let’s just say that the guy who wrote that review clearly hasn’t watched the movie since he allegedly saw it as a kid; not even the first five minutes. How can I tell? Well, Bambi is male. He’s referred to repeatedly as the new young Prince of the Forest right at the start of the movie. Bit of a giveaway, that.

I know it’s crazy, but I kinda feel that movie reviewers ought to watch at least part of the movie. I can understand book reviewers not finding time to read the entire book in every case, but come on, how much effort is it to watch “Bambi”?

Meanwhile, I could get to like this Amazon reviews thing. Maybe next time they can send me something from the other end of the tastefulness scale. There’s a new unrated edition of Orgazmo about to be released…