Tag Archives: Movies

The Demise of the Dedicated Movie Critic

Movies

There’s an interesting article at CNN’s site, titled, “Is social media killing film criticism?” And it’s an interesting question. I mean, one might wonder if social media is killing film criticism when everyone has an opinion, and people constantly have something to say. I’m no different than anyone else here as I’ve reviewed a couple of movies here recently as well.

But I think there’s more to the situation than just social media as being a knife wedged into the back of film criticism. To begin with, I think film criticism as a whole has suffered a lot lately with the demise of the two media darlings of film criticism themselves: Siskel and Ebert. When Gene Siskel died, that left Roger Ebert as the only one left, and for the longest time there was an attempt to recapture what Siskel and Ebert had on evening television every week. Those two arguing back and forth over whether or not a cartoon mouse was socially relevant in a film, or whether or not Jeff Spicoli really managed to overcome the evils of Mr. Hand to the point of achieving social relevance  (Fast Times at Ridgemont High). Almost every week after Siskel died there was a new replacement to argue with Ebert, and it just never worked. Come to think of it, there was really  never another reviewer or set of reviewers that managed to become as socially relevant as those two, including Ebert alone.

Now, Ebert is suffering from the inability of being able to speak, and his articles are all we have, and it’s just not the same. Movie reviews are becoming 20th century artifacts, and it’s very hard to get anyone to even care what one has to say when it comes to a review.

Nowadays, it’s pretty hard to even go to see a movie because you really can’t trust anyone’s opinion. Reviewers are sporadically relevant, but mostly interchangeable and incapable of achieving a sense of usefulness. I recently went to see Kick Ass, realizing that the reviews were pretty much all over the place, so I had to make a judgment of my own. And with movies being so expensive these days, and so many remakes of remakes, it’s really hard to even trust a trailer because those thirty second soundbytes can sometimes be the best 30 seconds of the entire film.

A new movie is coming out tomorrow that is getting all of the hype, and that’s Iron Man 2, and already the reviewers are all over the place with this one. I’ve heard some saying it’s great, others saying its rehashed old stuff with lots of special effects, and others saying that it’s just not worth our time. The old days of relying on the two thumbs up or down are gone, so we pretty much have to fend for ourselves.

And that’s pretty scary.

Thoughts on Movie “2012” and the Concept of Bad Writing

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I finally got a chance to watch the movie 2012 over the weekend, and it served to remind me that no matter how much money you put into a production, how great the actors are, and how big the premise, bad writing will continuously destroy a movie no matter how much other effort is put into the film. 2012 is one of those movies that had a lot of things going for it. It had a huge budget, the special effects were over the top phenomenal, the actors were all actually high quality actors, including John Cusak and George Segal as well as many other well performing actors. The premise for the movie was pretty big, surpassing pretty much most others with an end of the world theme (which was a lot more impacting than a bunch of transforming cars that fight each other as Megan Fox somehow manages to pretend to act while finding herself in all manners of undress).

But the writing destroyed the movie. Horribly.

It started with one of the cardinal sins of writing, and that’s using coincidence sparingly. (spoiler alert!) Let me start with the basic events of the movie: John Cusak is a writer who published one book that didn’t sell very well, so he’s now working part time as a limo driver for a rich Russian mafioso, ex-boxer. The story starts with him taking his son and daughter on a camping trip to a lake where he and his former wife used to go all of the time on romantic getaways. His ex-wife, by the way, happens to be married to a plastic surgeon who just so happens to be the doctor who did the boob job on the girlfriend of the ex-boxer mafioso Russian. Well, on this trip to the lake, Cusak and kids run into a military operation that is exploring Yosemite, where the ground is becoming unstable. So they meet crazy wacko Woody Harrelson (possibly playing himself), a conspiracy radio host nut who knows the world is coming to an end. When the military detain Cusak, the guy in charge is part of the team that discovered the world is coming to an end, and he just so happens to have a copy of Cusak’s book, being one of the 400 people in the world who has ever seen it, and he recognizes Cusak’s name because he just so happens to be reading it RIGHT NOW.

Well, Cusak, because he believes the crazy nutjob of a radio announcer is telling the truth, manages to get his family out of their house JUST AS ARMAGEDDON HITS and drives them in his limo through California on its worst day EVER, as the Earth explodes all around them. But he has managed to find the one airplane in California that will take them out of danger, so they get to the minor airport, which is where Cusak drove the Russian mafioso guy and his family. But Cusak heard about a map that crazy Woody had, so he manages to get it, and it is a map of China, so they decide they need to fly to China (even though their little plane can’t make that trip). Oh, by the way, the pilot he hired died, so it turns out that the plastic surgeon husband of his ex-wife JUST SO HAPPENS to have had a few lessons in flying, so he flies them out of the worst nightmare of an escape that has ever existed (that is almost as bad as the escape I had when I was running away from an ex-girlfriend who refused to break up with me without at least one of us dead first). Anyway, he gets to Las Vegas where there’s a plane that the Mafioso guy has managed to get a hold of, and because their pilot died, or left, or I don’t really remember what happened to him, it turns out that the “I had a few lessons” guy is now going to fly their plane to China. So they get in that plane and fly it to Hawaii, which is where they need to refuel, but there’s no fuel cause Hawaii is now an inferno, so somehow they manage to continue flying to somewhere in China. Yeah, not really sure how they made it, but somehow they did.

Anyway, I did forget to mention that the guy who ran into Cusak in Yosemite is a scientist and part of a secret plot to build huge space arks that you only discover later aren’t really going into space, but they’re really big water vessels made out of metal. So, if the planet is doomed, that’s not a problem cause they’re still going to be saved somehow because they’re in really big boats now. Meanwhile, the scientist guy’s father is some kind of bad musician on a cruise line with George Segal, who is also a bad musician, too, and they’re on the biggest boat ever, which tips over and kills everyone but not before both dads get to phone their kids and say bye. It’s a good thing to know that during Armageddon, at least AT&T will work as desired, even though AT&T has a bad tendency of dropping most of my phone calls normally (and that’s without Armageddon happening).

So, it turns out the Russian guy booked passage on the space ark fleet for 1 billion and some Euros, and when he gets there, it turns out his space ark has been damaged, so he’s now not going to get to go. So all of the passengers who came with him riot and throw a fit. Meanwhile, an evil government official, who is really not evil but more of a bureaucrat, is trying to keep everyone out of the arks because only the scientifically chosen can be saved (and the ones who had a lot of money, which seems to be the only people who showed up anyway). So Cusak and gang somehow manage to convince a Chinese family that has lived in a Tibetan village their whole life, but all somehow manage to speak English, that they should help them sneak onto the arks. And then fun ensues with lots of rubber tubing getting stuck in the door gears of the most important ark, which cannot be started because for some reason they built a superpowerful space ark (that doesn’t go into space) that for some reason can’t start its engines if the doors are not completely sealed. So, they go on an adventure to “seal the door” and people die, and others live, and sparky the wonder dog somehow gets saved, even though his boob-enhanced mistress does not survive. But the obnoxious Russian twin kids do get saved and somehow become nicer kids in the process, letting Cusak’s daughter play with the dog at one point, whereas they were originally overjoyed that Cusak’s daughter was going to die while they got saved.

Anyway, it’s a complicated story that is somewhat ridiculous, as if the writers weren’t sure if this was an end of the world story, or Earthquake II, in which everyone will live happily ever after. The ending was almost the same ending of Wall-E, and that was kind of disconcerting. There were so many loopholes and plot points that didn’t make any sense throughout this entire movie that I was often flabbergasted that I was watching what I was watching. I kept trying to turn off my critical mind during the watching, but every now and then it would pop back on and say, “um, isn’t 2012 supposed to be about the end of the world, not the moving of the planet’s plates?” In other words, the Mayan prophecies are all about how the calendar ends, meaning the universe as we know it ends, which according to the premise, means that all humanity dies. For me, that meant that we needed actual space arks, not just Noah’s 21st century arks. I kept wondering when these arks were going to fire actual rockets, and then it turns out that they’re nothing more than very big boats. Really? That was the solution to the end of the world?

Anyway, that was the movie, and I was very disappointed. A couple of moments were worth the watching, like trying to see two really old men pretend they’re actual musicians when neither one of them can hum a tune. But other than that, I was disappointed. I had gone into the movie wondering how an end of the world story can possibly have a happy ending, but like most Hollywood productions, they were too frightened to deal with the resolution of the story as the Mayans would have because that would have meant that the struggle in the movie was hopeless and futile. That doesn’t sell a lot of tickets.

One moral I did get from the movie, even though they were trying hard as hell to go the opposite direction of this, is that no matter what you do, no matter how good you are, in the end, those with the most money and power are rewarded with survival; those without are doomed to be swallowed up by the apocalypse and left to die…cold and alone.

Kick-Ass definitely delivers

Movies

There was a lot of hype coming behind the superhero movie Kick-Ass, about a young kid who decides he wants to be a real-life superhero. This concerned me that maybe the hype might be overdone, but I can honestly say that the movie was well worth the viewing.

Unlike a lot of other superhero movies that generally don’t take themselves too seriously, this movie actually takes itself quite seriously. Its main character is a kid in high school who doesn’t look like he can hold his own with pretty much anyone, and in the beginning, he really can’t. But the thing that makes him unique is that he is extremely adaptable, and he realizes what he has to do in order to hold his own, even as he realizes that he is way over his head.

But as most reviews have pointed out already, the movie is completely stolen by a pint-sized actress of 11 years of age, played by Chloe Moretz. Most of the attention paid on her has been the fact that this is probably the most foul-mouthed delivery of dialogue by a little tot in history, but almost every time she does it, it just seems so natural and as it should be. Her father is played by Nicholas Cage, who delivers some of the greatest Adam West-like dialogue whenever he is in character as Big Daddy. There was one scene where I was just busting up because his delivery was so 1960s Batman, but it just seemed to work. But back to little Chloe, not only does she handle the action and dialogue like a seasoned actress, there are some really intense emotional scenes that this little girl carries out better than most Hollywood actresses could ever hope to do. You almost forget that this is an 11 year old girl delivering this performance because she does it so well. If ever there was an Academy Award performance by a toddler, this was it, but because it’s a humorous superhero film, it won’t even get a moment of attention from the film Academy. Pretty sad, if you think about it.

I haven’t gone to see many movies in the last few years, mainly because Hollywood has been making some crappy movies, so this was a rare moment for me. But something told me I had to see this movie because I couldn’t believe that hype about this girl’s performance could be true, but I was wrong. She carries it off quite well.

I definitely recommend this movie.

Writing is SO Easy that ANYBODY can do it…apparently

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Turns out that reality (not so much of a) star Heidi Montag has announced that she is “writing a movie”. Really? It’s that easy? Does she even know how to read?

This is one of those things that really bugs me about people who don’t write. They seem to believe it’s SO easy. For those of us who are actually writers, it tends to really piss us off that someone who is a celebrity for no real reason other than that she has had too many boob jobs, is convinced that she’s now going to pen a GREAT script for a movie. The incredulous part that stems up is mainly attributed to the very nature of stating she’s “writing a movie”. Who says that? Does she even know there’s a script involved?

Bah, this sort of thing really bugs me. Here’s the article.