Wallcock? Han-E?

I've seen two movies of late. Both very good, but I don't have a lot to say about either, so I'm slappin' em together!

First up, Wall-E. A clever movie, all in all. I liked the absolute minimalism of it. Let this be a lesson to you, Hollywood! Lots of dialogue does not a great movie make! You can have a compelling story with tons of emotion without people barfing up dialogue all over the place.

Wall-E himself hardly says more than "WALL-E", "EVA", "DIRECTIVE". Eve says hardly more than that, herself. And yet they're incredibly captivating characters. The animators deserve awards upon awards for creating this wonder. The story was so wonderful, the characters so real, that by the end, I was moved to tears.

However, being a Manly Man, I refrained from public weeping. I believe my Manly Response to this movie was breaking the front legs of a homeless man's dog, after gouging out the man's eyes in an alleyway. Then I engaged in a three-way with prostitutes whom I promptly tortured and murdered.

Anyway, loved it. Expected a good movie, was satisfied by it being such a thing. Yay!

Next, Hancock.

This one is strange to me. I Am Legend looked like a really great movie, with a lot of drama and cool stuff. Hancock looked like a "turn off brain, recieve bacon" kind of movie, with awful writing and bad acting. Little was I to know, but my impressions of both Will Smith movies were actually for the other!

Hancock is actually a good movie. (I know, believe me. Just as surprised as you.) The movie was well-written, Smith delivered a nuanced performance, and the plot twists were nice instead of fucking dumb. Easily seen ahead of time, but still nicely done and inoffensive. The kind of plot twist which is required to make the story work, and that's welcome from the "Well, we need to put one in now. It's 70 pages in, and the formula says so!" style of plot twist.

I love the idea of a superbeing who doesn't want to be a hero in a costume and shit. Marvel movies pretty much always have the people instantly jumping into costume and Fighting Crime. Hancock just seems to want to be alone, but can't not save people. And he's a drunken asshole, so people hate him. It's a nice twist on the usual stuff.

I realized just now I keep using the word "nice." Well, Hancock IS nice. It's a nice break, both for superhero movies and for Will Smith's career. Superhero movies are taking themselves too seriously, and so was Willie, despite his increasingly-bad acting choices.

Also, Jesus Christ! Charlize Theron really blends into shit, doesn't she? I didn't realize she was in this until the credits ran at the end.

So, uh... arbitrary movie rankings?
Wall-E: 4/5.
Hancock: 4/5.
Conan the Destroyer: 5/5.

Indiana Jones and the Terrible Movie

It's another installment of "D Bitches About Some Fuckin' Movie". Today, the latest Indy, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Before I get to fine detailed points, however, I just want to give a shout-out to the Greys. You big-headed, googly-eyed alien motherfuckers get a lot of currency out of looking as unthreatening and awe-non-inspiring as possible in this cynical movie-going age, and I'd like to congratulate you on this. Scary movie monsters have come and gone, some have come around again, and some are even still scary. Some have transcended their origins as "scary" and become "cultural" and "significant," which is a hilarious way to describe Wolf-Man, but ok, AFI; we'll roll with that one.

Anyway. The Greys. Since the whole "Roswell" thing, the idea that aliens are bipedal like us, but with a big head, big glossy black eyes, and no external features has become pretty common. It's everywhere. Hollywood loves those guys, and Steven Spielberg is no exception. He loves them, perhaps, more than he loves appropriate characterization and coherant plot lines. But they have never been scary. Not in even the awesome flashback during Fire in the Sky, where everything else in that scene was creepy and frightening, were the Greys remotely scary or inspiring-of-awe.

Steven. Pal. Buddy. Please. I get it, really, I do. You like the idea of Greys. Every alien that appears in your movies is some minor variation upon them. Christ, even the fucking robots from A.I. were goddamn Greys. The Martians in War of the Worlds? Greys. Close Encounters? Greys. The Precogs in Minority Report? Greys. Seriously, Steve. You're actually worse than Jim Cameron and his hard-on for WATER. I never thought I'd say it, but someone is more irritating than James fucking Cameron. Go figure.

Anyway. On to me bitching about the movie, which is what you came for. When I first read about Crystal Skull, I read an interview with Spielberg. He said that he had to study the old films to get back into the head of the man he was 20 years ago, so that this new film would stylistically mesh with the old ones. I don't know what old Indy movies he studied, but this new Indy stunk of modern-Spielberg bullshit shenanigans. CG everywhere! Unrealistically-moving cameras! Motherfuckin' aliens! An insistance on style over substance!

Seriously, this is the movie we've been waiting for twenty years to get? This wasn't an Indiana Jones. For fucks' sake, the relic wasn't even magical; it's a fucking alien skull that somehow gives you mental powers because OMG Greys are a hivemind or something. The fact that Steven felt we needed to know exactly the mechanism behind the relics' power shows just how far he's moved from Last Crusade. In Last Crusade, we were told it was the Cup of Christ. It was his drinking cup at the Last Supper and held his blood after the Crucifixion. Christ being Christ, his cup is gonna be magical. Magical rocks from the gods ruled the day in Temple of Doom. The Ark contained the remains of the Covenant, which was touched by God Himself. Powerful stuff. No more explanation than that. So why the modern-scifi compulsion to technobabble an explanation out? Fucking idiots. Grow a pair and count on your audience to accept it without wasting my time.

But Spielberg isn't all to blame. I blame George Lucas just as much. These two yutzes came up with this movie themselves. (David Koepp may have written the script, but he did so with their outline in hand.) Lucas seems to have this ruining-a-classic-trilogy thing down by this point, and it showed.

Art is a funny thing. When you're suffering, art comes easy. It's full of your agony and pain, and good art shows that struggle. By now, George and Steven are fatcats. Huge success, huge money, no problems doing whatever they want. No edge. No hunger.

No good movie. This wasn't an Indiana Jones. This was bad fanfic, and I'm ashamed of Lucas and Spielberg for trying to pull the wool over our eyes on this.

Also, Shia LaBeouf? Fuck off.

A Day at the Movies, Part II (Holy motion sickness, Batman!)

You know, for a movie called Speed Racer, it was actually fairly slow, with not as much racing as you would expect from a movie with "racer" in the title. Strong start, strong finish, but the movie sorta falls apart in the middle. But hey, at least the Brothers Wachowski were kind enough to leave out the painfully obvious Christ metaphors this trip.

Now, don't get me wrong; the racing that is there is incredible. The massive rally race that opens the final third of the movie is a great feat; Phantom Menace's podrace has nothing on Speed Racer. However, in this entire film, there are only four races. The first, we catch only the final lap of, and it's chock full of exposition as well as a ton of over-used transitions that, sadly, don't disappear from the movie ever. (If you enjoy seeing peoples' heads used as fucking wipes to a flashback, sure, you'll love this effect. I, however, am not a retard, so I got frustrated really quick.) The second race, we only see a minute or two of, and that's entirely to illustrate how the evil villain, Royalton, is an evil villain. As if his disgustingly stained teeth and threatening demeanor weren't enough, right? (Yes, we get it, he's bad. Did we really need to have the fat kid and his goddamn monkey figure it out in their own scene? Christ.)

The third race, the cross-country rally, goes on and on, and is wholly worth the price of admission, hilarious plot holes and all. When Korean popstar Rain, playing Japanese racer Togokhan, gets poisoned after the first day by ninja clad in iridescent sneaking suits, Speed and Rex Racer Racer X devise a sneaky, sneaky plot, wherein Speed's longtime girlfriend will pretend to be Togokhan for the next day of racing. Togokhan, as it turns out, isn't badly poisoned, he's just in bad shape enough to not be able to drive in the morning. Or something. It isn't explained well, if at all.

Anyway. Trixie dresses like Togokhan. Togokhan's sister takes Trixie's place in the spotterchopper, and Togokhan dresses up like his sister and leaves on another helicopter-thing. Trixie isn't that bad a driver, frankly, and she kicks a ton of ass on the road, while Speed sits there bitching about how you can't trust something that bleeds for four days every month and doesn't die. I guess? I mean, I can't figure out exactly what Speed was complaining about. I guess they spun the wheel of "Who Will Speed Dislike This Scene?" and it landed on Trixie.

After a bunch of driving, wherein Team Togokhan presumably kills a dozen other drivers by blowing their cars up, they enter a valley to swap everyone back to their places. What follows is an exercise in terrible editing and overreliance on special effects, with mobsters randomly appearing, armed to the teeth, and getting their asses kicked by a morbidly obese John Goodman, a boy and his monkey, a popstar who's allegedly recovering from poisoning, and a handful of girls led by Emily Emeril Emile Hirsch. Racer X was somewhere in there, too, but he's an incredibly deadly man, and thus not worth showing much, apparently. After beating up and arresting all the mobsters, the racers get going again, having to regain their positions after spending not only a ton of time beating up criminals, but also a ton of time just standing around jerking off before and after the fight. Seriously, just fucking GO. This movie is called Speed Racer, not Painfully Tedious Dialogue Racer, after all. And again, Speed murders a man at the climax of the race. Team Togokhan wins, and everybody's happy!

Well, until the soulless Korean sensation doublecrosses not just Speed, but apparently Interpol as well. Then nobody's happy. Speed is mad, so he goes driving. An understandable reaction. Togokhan used Speed purely to drive up his company's stock, and Speed angry! So he goes driving. Racer X shows up in the Xmobile, and the "Who Does Speed Hate?" spinner lands on Racer X, who is promptly run off the road by our noble hero. They talk, Speed accuses X of being his long-thought-dead elder brother, Rex Racer. X reveals himself, in a pleasant plot twist, to be someone else incredibly boring. Yes, it's Jack from Lost! Proving himself incapable of having any charisma at all, Matthew Fox forces out a grating speech, designed to inspire Speed and torture us. (After all this, however, we find out that X actually is Rex, but with plastic surgery, the miracle medical procedure that can make you look like an entirely different person with different bone structure, eye color, voice, and everything! So much for a cool plot twist.) But, it could have been worse. Apparently the part of Racer X originally went to Keanu Reeves, proving the Wachowskis have no idea that real actors are people, not cardboard cutouts.

After this, Togokhan's Japanese sister, played by Chinese actress Yu Nan, gives Speed a way into the Grand Prix, the most fixedest race that was ever decided ahead of time. I'm sure you know what happens here. Every single racer is out to kill Speed, and in the end, Speed duels with a character briefly introduced much earlier in the movie and never seen again until now. (This is what's called an emotional climax by bad writers.) Speed wins, setting new records, winning a ton of money, and showing that If You Have Enough Heart, You Can Change The World or some impossibly naive bullshit like that. Royalton goes to jail, Speed's family troubles are miraculously solved, and we get to watch the credits while our stomachs settle from the nauseating final sequence of the race.

Despite the above bashing, I liked this movie. Not enough, I think to ever own it or watch it again, but it was decent. Sure, it exists entirely in a fucking greenscreen stage, which drove me absolutely batty because it was poorly composited, but the graphics were incredible. The races were top notch, and since I was there to see sweet races, I was happy. I would have been happier with tighter editing, better writing, and more interesting acting, but whatever. It's a Wachowski film. If you expect it to be anything other than a graphically-superior, poorly acted, overly verbose psuedo-art house melange, you entered the wrong cinema, my friend.

So, I suppose all this is to say... if you're going to see Speed Racer, see it now. Don't wait, just go. It'll probably suck on video, anyway.

A Day at the Movies, Part I

Some people say Iron Man follows the "formula for the superhero movie." I think those people are deeply stupid. Let's compare Iron Man (which I saw last night) to Spider-Man (which I saw seven years ago), shall we?

In Iron Man, our protagonist is Tony Stark. He's wealthy, he's successful, he's charming, and he totally bangs a ton of hot babes. In the first ten minutes of the movie, he meets a woman who dislikes him and reduces her to a ravening, cock-thirsty slut. Everything is turning up Tony, so to speak. Unfortunately, or not, he gets captured by terrorists. (The movie sort've belabours the idea that these terrorists aren't Arabs by having them all speak different languages, so half the guards can't communicate with Yinsen and Tony. Brilliant move on their part.) Tony's injured, and to save his life, a magnet is implanted in his chest. He builds a better one shortly and uses this device to power his escape vehicle, the Mark I. In all this, he also finds out that the weapons his company produces are winding up in terrorist hands. After destroying all the weapons at that camp, he makes good his escape and finds his way back to America where he embarks upon a crusade to keep the weaponry he designed out of the hands of the bad guys. He builds a new, more powerful suit, and becomes the invincible Iron Man.

In Spider-Man, our protagonist is Peter Parker. He's a dork, he's broke, the girl he loves barely knows he exists. In the first ten minutes of the movie, he not only misses his bus, but when he gets on, not even the other fucking losers will sit with him. Nobody likes Peter, and his life is going precisely nowhere, fast. Sure, he's smart, but it's high school; nobody gives a shit. On a field trip, Peter's bitten by a radioactive spider, and he gets incredible powers, such as being strong, being fast, and shooting webs. You can still kill him with a bullet, but that's ok, he's Spider-Man! He accidently gets his uncle killed, and that makes him realize that With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility, a theme we will have explicitly crammed down our throats with each passing sequel. His powers don't increase, and by the end of the movie, nothing has really changed all that much for Peter. He's killed his Uncle Ben, and his best friends father, but he's still poor, he still doesn't have the girl, and is life is still pretty much headed nowhere. He just sticks to walls now and has to deal with an incredible amount of personal guilt, which gets piled on higher and higher until it becomes kinda funny.

I don't see much similarity. There is some, but as research has shown, all stories are essentially the same story. So there's no reason to suspect Iron Man of shitty writing for this. In fact, I think the writing was pretty damn good. Many comic movies follow the "superhero formula" to the letter, and that framework is fairly solid, however. It's what you hang on that frame that makes the movie good. If you hang repetitive plot points on it, with flat actors (Tobey Mcguire) and tedious dialogue, your movie will suck. If you put interesting elements on it, though, you get a brilliant movie. The Punisher, Ang Lee's Hulk, and Iron Man are all good examples of this brilliance. (Why people objected to a movie like Hulk, I don't know. The Hulk is a very psychologically-driven character, so why wouldn't a movie about him be psychologically-driven, as well? This new one coming out with Ed Norton looks like Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, which is actually a pretty fun video game, but will just be a worthlessly banal popcorn flick making crude japes at the mental issues surrounding the Hulk without exploring them in earnest. Just lots of smashy-fighty!)

Tony Stark is an odd choice for a hero. He's a womanizing, arrogant drunk. Well, he's not a drunk in this movie, but perhaps the next. Regardless, Tony is not a "good" person. He's a real bastard, and he understandably makes a lot of people violently dislike him within the movie. This makes his transformation into Iron Man that much more potent, because it's a real shift. He doesn't go from "dorky kid" to "dorky kid with superpowers"; it's a complete paradigm reversal from "arrogant, blithe merchant of death" to "socially concerned, determined man with superpowers." It's a more real storyline. More honest. I wish we had more honest superhero movies. In the past few years, we've gotten precious few. Spider-Man 1 & 2, Hulk, Punisher, Batman Begins, and Iron Man. (Persumably The Dark Knight will fall in here, too, but I'll wait until I see it to pass judgement.) Instead, we get crap like Superman Returns, X-Men: The Last Stand, Elektra, Spider-Man 3, and Blade: Trinity. Seriously, writing good movies isn't that hard. Just take some time, and wait for a good story to come along, don't crank the movie out because you can.

I'm gonna go take a Valium, and when I come back, I'll talk to you about the other movie I saw recently, the Wachowski Brothers' childhood fanwank, Speed Racer.