My Bloody Quarantine

I've still got legs! And with my limbs intact, I really can't ignore the fact that I have to review Valentine's Day, giving even more thought to two hours of my life that would have been more pleasurably spent slamming my head in a car door while the massive cast took it in turns to cut the all the webs between my fingers and toes with scissors. Cringing? That's nothing to actually watching the film.

The sole reason this gets a post of its own is because it is literally tainted. I have also seen From Paris with Love, which... SPOILER ALERT... was pants, but not so pants as to deserve the fate of being "the one I reviewed alongside Valentine's Day." Yes folks, this is the blog's first ever conscious quarantine of a film review.

***WARNING***
THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS EXTREME PREJUDICE TOWARDS AWFUL SHIT.
IF YOU OR ANYONE YOU KNOW HAVE BEEN AFFECTED BY AWFUL SHIT, PLEASE PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

Sigh. OK, here goes. If I were to take a run at what this film's about, I could sum it up by saying it follows a number of tumultuous relationships and unlikable people on one Valentine's Day in LA. More operatively, very famous actors playing unlikable people. The traditional, but largely unconscious format of these reviews usually sets aside a paragraph to talk about the cast and their performances, so I'll take a run at that now. Deep breath...

Ashton Kutcher is irksome and twee, Jennifer Garner is a downright stupid character played by a usually enjoyable actress, Patrick Dempsey succeeds only for being a smarmy fuck finally cast in the thankless role of "Smarmy Fuck #2", Queen Latifah is still pointing out that she's a larger lady for anyone who hasn't noticed, Jamie Foxx continues to bend over and take an arse-fucking to his career in the name of a paycheck, Jessica Biel's character spends the whole film voicing problems with commercialised love that really should've been considered by the writers, Anne Hathaway is winsome but underused, Topher Grace builds in annoyance on the foundation of the less than sterling performance he gave in Spider-Man 3, Taylors Swift and Lautner are just abominable, Hector Elizondo is bewildered and Shirley Maclaine sort of deceives him and then dresses up as a Quality Street at the end, and finally, Jessica Alba, Bradley Cooper and Julia Roberts are all pointless addendums to a horrifying running time.

Yes, this film runs for 125 minutes and covers no more ground than a dead baby turtle. Cringing again? A dead baby turtle would hardly be more abhorrent than this film. In the same way as (500) Days of Summer was a terrific romantic comedy but not a great date movie, I literally cannot imagine a worse date movie that this. No other film in recent memory tries so tepidly to quantify love with dialogue that sounds like it comes from the trailer narration of a Jennifer Aniston film rather than anything else. The odd thing is that this film came out on the weekend of February 14th, and another Garry Marshall-directed film was re-released for the day, Pretty Woman. Valentine's Day has, unbelievably, become a huge hit in the States, but it's almost like they were hedging their bets by counter-programming against their own awful piece of celluloid crap.

Some will call me bitter- that's the stock excuse against people who call Valentine's Day the crass and commercialised greeting-card-company funding drive that it actually is. No, sorry, this is just a bad film. The mooted sequel, New Year's Eve may be doubly terrible, but it won't be certainly won't be better than this. If Valentine's Day is about love, then it's not about watching Valentine's Day, and given how that's the one day of the year when you're presumably supposed to watch this awful shit in years to come, they've failed on every single level. Even by the measure of people who like it, and I presume those who contributed to the Memorable Quotes page on IMDB do, there is not a single funny line in the thing. It's a film about a bunch of attractive actors tricking you into an auditorium to steal your money and worse, what feels like a year of your life. It is just abysmal- it's not the worst film I've ever seen, but it's down there.

To end on a sensitive note- February 14th isn't just one day of the year where you should be romantic with your loved one. You should show your appreciation all year round, signify your feelings with every loving caress. And most importantly, the time not to watch Valentine's Day with them is all year round. Avoid this film like genital warts.

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Righto, everyone to the radiation showers if you read through all of that, and then back here later in the week for the review of From Paris With Love, which will likely be paired off with either Precious or The Crazies, and then there'll be a look at Disney's Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland by Disney at the weekend. If you've seen Valentine's Day, please do get in touch with the comments below. We have to stick together here- we didn't die, so we can presumably survive anything. Be strong, everyone. Jesus loves you.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch it. Really, I know I did, but don't go and see it. Don't!

He's Going To Kill EVERYONE?!

'Tis the season to be jolly and all that. Problem is, I still haven't seen either of the two new Christmas films in the cinema this year, so I can't blog on that topic just yet. Arg. Instead I'm going to do a short post on a film my busy university and work schedule has allowed me to see this week, Law Abiding Citizen with Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx. As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion on here- others are available. As ever, mild spoilers may occur in the process of reviewing, but never so far as to spoil any major plot developments.


Moving right along, the film starts with two killers bursting into Clyde Shelton's home and mudering his wife and daughter in front of him. Shelton survives, but is dismayed when an ambitious young lawyer, Nick Rice, allows one of the killers to go free on a plea bargain. Ten years later, Nick is the District Attorney of Philadelphia, and the Shelton case is about to come back to haunt him. He hunts Clyde down after a series of killings and puts him into police custody, only to find that Clyde is a master tactician, and that the killings aren't going to stop just because he's behind bars. Law Abiding Citizen attempts to broach the failings of the American justice system with as many booms, bangs and wallops as possible, but right away, there's a problem with that.

The slightly vanilla title aside, I expected this film to be quite good- the trailer looked just crazy enough to be this year's equivalent of Taken, a thriller that had a serious core but which still carried a warning along the lines of "don't think too much". What this film is instead isn't quite as memorable. If the film had took itself as seriously as I was taking it, it would immediately have jumped up a notch in my estimation. I wasn't taking it seriously at all, and thus that's where Law Abiding Citizen fell down for me. Shelton's murderous antics from inside the jail have been done similarly before and done better, with the Joker in The Dark Knight remaining the high benchmark for post-Hannibal Lecter criminal masterminds. An unfair comparison perhaps, but for the large part, watching this film felt like watching those ten minutes where the Joker is in prison, but in slow motion.

More than that, Gerard Butler- oh, sorry, I'll say it right, GERARD BUTLER! still isn't turning in much in the way of a memorable or distinctive performance. In fact, both he and Jamie Foxx are sort of miscast as their characters. Butler is still best known as that bold and caps-locked fellow we remember from 300, and though he's considerably more clothed here, he still fails to convince either as a bereaved family man or as the James Bond government agent type that Clyde turns into after the story's been set up. Jamie Foxx just seems to turn up for the paycheck too, though I've never really been convinced he's as good an actor as people say he is. This miscasting also brings down that message that the film's trying to send, turning what could've been an enjoyable action flick into something that needlessly tries to be more weighty and falls considerably short of its mark. That said, the action setpieces are good, and the plot unfolds in a largely satisfying manner up until the last ten minutes or so, where a bonkers twist leads into a consequence-free climax. Nobody learns anything, further undermining the "serious" factor.

If you saw the trailer for Law Abiding Citizen, prepare to have been mis-sold on the premise a little. It's not as action-packed nor as enjoyable as the advertising campaign has made out, but I definitely recommend you take my approach before you go in and don't take it seriously. Ignore the slight preachiness about the justice system, because the ending is strictly by-numbers and several earlier threads are left dangling in the wind. I found the film moderately entertaining, albeit overly grisly. Indeed, the 18 certificate could have been avoided with one minor cut or alteration to the violence, and this film might have found a broader audience. It's not bad, but you might want to hold this one in contempt for a while, at least as long as it takes for the DVD to be released.

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It is December, so some Christmas films and posts are imminent. Please don't yell at me, and if you've seen Law Abiding Citizen, why not share your comments below?

Don't forget, we're also reaching the end of the year, the end of the 2000s and most crucially, the end of David Tennant's era on Doctor Who, so you can expect some best-of lists mixed in with some of the reviews towards January.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.