The Horse With No Name- JONAH HEX Review

Here's what plot remains in the studio hack-job that is Jonah Hex- the eponymous Hex is a Confederate soldier turned bounty hunter who can commune with the dead after being left for dead himself by his radicalised comrades. Then the man who killed his wife and child, Quentin Turnbull, re-announces himself after faking his demise, on the eve of a plot to destroy the United States of America, and he sets out for revenge.

You all surely know how big a deal it is when Clint Eastwood directs a Western. He was the iconic Man With No Name in the Dollars trilogy, and behind the camera, he's been responsible for greats like High Plains Drifter and Unforgiven. In Jonah Hex, we have a film I believe to have been made by the Horse With No Name.

That, to me, is the only rational explanation. Whoever put together the film as we see it in cinemas obviously had some ostensible understanding of the genre, and of the DC Comics source material, but no understanding whatsoever of human communication, or of what entertains or appeals to audiences. So why not a particularly experienced equine actor? This seems like the film you'd make if you wanted to get away from being sat on by Clint Eastwood.

The credited director is former Pixar animator Jimmy Hayward, and the screenplay is attributed to Crank creators Neveldine/Taylor. The pair were tagged to direct until they departed due to “creative differences”, and the sheer amount of studio mandated reshoots and schedule changes makes authorship a moot point with this. The horse is merely my scapegoat, as it behooves us to disassociate Pixar from the drop-dead worst film of 2010 so far.

Neveldine/Taylor don't escape blame though- the script, even though the scenes have clearly all been muddled up, is terrible. The plot centres around the dumbest kind of historical allegory involving an anachronistic WMD and the sight of bandits wrapped in dynamite stepping in for suicide bombers. The dialogue is awful too- at one point, we have John Malkovich delivering the line “We will show them that we will do that which we have most assuredly come here to do.” In a terrible Southern accent.

There is no way I'm going easy on this just because the studio went to town on the final cut. There's already enough wrong with it that I'm sceptical this mess of footage was ever salvageable. It feels too long. Even with the whole origin story largely condensed into a poorly rendered motion comic in the first five minutes, it feels too long. Even though it's not asking anything of its audience, it feels too long. Even though it's 81 minutes long, including nine minutes of credits, it feels too fucking long.

Oh, but here's the one really positive thing to come out of Jonah Hex- it feels so long that you'll be checking your watch. And when you check, you'll notice the big hand pass over Megan Fox's 15th minute of fame, spent playing Lila the hooker in this piece of trash. Even for her, it's a thankless role, and without the adolescent goodwill garnered by her semi-annual Transformers appearances, her career's going nowhere but down from here.

I already mentioned Malkovich, but the rest of the cast don't really acquit themselves either. Josh Brolin is fine and craggy as Hex, but he really doesn't have enough to work with to make any kind of impression. I found Michael Fassbender's fleeting appearance more memorable, but that's because he's an actor who makes the most of every role, good or bad, and also because, unlike Brolin, he wasn't unintelligible due to facial prosthetics.

Watching Jonah Hex, I found it really all too easy to imagine a horse demolishing an editing suite, his hooves destroying a keyboard as he tries to edit a love scene between Hex and Lila. He knows what he wants to evoke. He wants to signify why we should care about these characters, and why their relationship is worth a damn. Ultimately, we shouldn't and it isn't. And he's too witless, too unfocused and too utterly inept to make even a tenth of an enjoyable film out of this hash of an adaptation.

The comic has its fans, who've naturally renounced this film version, so there's no blaming the source material. Besides, we know from the example of High Plains Drifter and others that a supernatural film that deploys the codes and conventions of a Western could be awesome. What we get here is a worse version of Wild Wild West. Jonah Hex is not merely bad. It's “I really think a horse might have directed this film” bad.

Jonah Hex is now playing in select cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Jonah Hex, why not leave a comment on the film and/or my review? If you were hoping for a review of The Last Exorcism, come back on Wednesday- I wanted a repeat viewing today before I gave my review. In a nutshell though, go see that film instead of this one.

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

Underrated, Overrated, Rambling Free...

I don't pretend that I go against the current in any way, shape or form. Once you start Media Studies at degree-level, you realise that for every blog slating a really rubbish mainstream film, there are about four journals or academic writings to say you're Michael Bay's bitch. The two big mainstream preoccupations of the year I can't pretend to understand the appeal behind though are probably Megan Fox and Michael Jackson. And Britain's Got Talent. And Twilight. And... alright two OF the preoccupations. And alright, I'm not saying MJ was anywhere near as talentless as Megan Fox, but I'd have to get back to you on who looks more plastic...

The point is eluding me in talking about it all like this- what we're here for is reviewing. Specifically, reviewing Jennifer's Body and Michael Jackson's This Is It. 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. With This Is It not following any conventional narrative structure, you could argue that the only spoiler there has been widely circulated in the news media for the last three months.


But first, to Jennifer's Body. The eponymous Jennifer is played by Megan Fox, and her sole characteristic at the start of the film is that she's the hottest and most desirable girl in her high-school. That's right, you have to believe that Megan Fox is young enough to be at school... again. Her best friend is Needy, played by Amanda Seyfried, a bespectacled, nerdy but sweet young lady who follows Jennifer's every whim. That's right, you have to believe that Amanda Seyfried isn't attractive and popular. But on with the story- an indie band has stumbled upon a satanic ritual whereby they'll become famous if they sacrifice a virgin, and they mistakenly believe that Jennifer still has her cherry. Bad juju and demonic transference ensues, and Jennifer is suddenly possessed of a demon that must consume boys to survive.

It's an interesting enough premise from Diablo Cody, the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind Juno. I enjoyed Juno very much, but I don't think that the cast and director behind Jennifer's Body is anywhere near as talented as those behind the earlier film. That aside, there's nothing particularly awful and horrible about the film, and in some ways that's a bad thing- it is meant to be a horror film after all, so there should at least be some scares. But as a film, the lack of awful, horrible shite makes this far and away the best thing that Megan Fox has ever been attached to. I still remain unconvinced that she can act, nor that she was cast here for anything other than needing a body worth naming the whole film after, but with a half-decent script, she's not as intolerable as I usually find her. That pout that makes her face look like a kazoo is still there though.


Far more endearing is Amanda Seyfried, though this is actually the first thing I've seen from the apparently much-lauded actress. Her character is burdened with a unnecessarily uncommon name that I suspect may become Diablo Cody's trademark, but Seyfried is never any less than watchable in her role. JK Simmons makes an always welcome appearance too, and Fox aside, I don't really have anything bad to say about the cast. Even though I said the cast and director elevated Juno to what it was, the script here shows that Cody isn't quite the writer I thought she was. The esoteric slang that only niggled slightly in her first feature positively irked me this time around, mostly because it's so inconsistent with the characters. Jennifer is meant to be a ditz, but can snappily come out with cracks about MoveOn.org- it seems Diablo Cody is writing her own dialogue rather than her characters' dialogue.

It's a slightly disappointing sophomore effort from Diablo Cody, but while Jennifer's Body won't be winning her any more awards for writing, it's still a cut above most of the horror films that came to cinemas this Halloween. It's not as original as people seem to think, as this type of premise has been around since Carrie, and the soundtrack is incredibly intrusive throughout, but in spite of its minor flaws, the film is actually a fairly enjoyable guilty pleasure. It's lacking in genuine scares and it's kind of forgettable, but it's still entertaining enough to make a decent dark comedy.


I'm actually fairly loath to reviewing Michael Jackson's This Is It, because it's not like anything else that's been reviewed on this blog before now. Covering two months of rehearsals, this is a look into the show Michael Jackson was planning to put on across 50 sold-out dates at London's O2 Arena, compiled by the show's director and the director of numerous Zac Efron aberrations, Kenny Ortega. The film includes interviews about Jackson with dancers and technicians, as well as the supplementary effects footage that would have played during the performances. It's a concert film essentially, and being the laziest music listener in the world, a review of a live music performance puts me out of my critical comfort zone a little.

It's tempting to go off on a cynical rant about how this is just being released to make money off of Michael Jackson's death. That's because it is, really- the man's own father proclaimed that his son was worth more dead than he had been when he was alive. And to some extent that's true as well, if you want to be blunt about it, given Jackson's chequered medical history and the staggering prospect of doing the show this film tries to represent not once or twice, but 50 times. I think to do that would be to get too wrapped up in context rather than looking at the film itself. What there remains to say about the contextual detritus is that the opening caption, "for the fans", just about sums up the selling point. I'm not particularly a big fan of Michael Jackson, and this didn't entirely change my mind- there may well be something someday that does that, but ironically, this isn't it.


The ethical issues I had with the film only became greater once I'd seen it. Although it didn't convert me into a fan of his music, it did persuade me that Jackson was a consummate perfectionist. He stops performances throughout the rehearsals to correct a dancer or a technician who've fouled up in seemingly inconsequential ways. He's every bit a performer, and it looks like this gig really would have been his masterpiece. The highlight of the whole thing for me was the video that would have accompanied Smooth Criminal, shot in black and white with Jackson digitally inserted into a chase sequence with Humphrey Bogart. It's visually stunning, whether you believe Jackson could give Bogart that much trouble or not- I mean, it's Humphrey chuffing Bogart! The other sequences never make as much of an impression as that one, particularly the cringe-inducingly tacky short for Earth Song, which is a cringe-inducingly tacky song to begin with.

Where the ethics come in is that I don't think Jackson ever intended this rehearsal footage to be seen by his fans, especially seeing how perfect he wanted things to be. Imagine if Terry Gilliam had simply made a film with Heath Ledger talking to people on the set of Doctor Parnassus, and you'll come pretty close to what Kenny Ortega's sort of done here. For him, This Is Not It- the actual concert would have been It. Nevertheless, I have to admit that This Is It won me over in the end. Money-grubbing or not, the fans who did really love Michael Jackson's music will really want to see this, especially those who had tickets booked for the concerts before his untimely death. And I can't begrudge anyone that- the man did create good music and greater performances, even if his body of work isn't constantly rattling around my iPod. Fans will love it, and if you can abandon your scepticism like I did, I'm sure you won't hate it either.

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Next up will almost certainly be Harry Brown and 2012, though I may slip An Education in instead of Roland Emmerich's latest war on the world. Early reports say that film is so bad, it's good, but that guy must really hate the world. Greenpeace need to get onto him, I'm sure he's hurting the environment more in a pretend way than Land Rovers ever could in real life.

In the meantime, if you've seen Jennifer's Body or Michael Jackson's This Is It, why not share your comments on those films below?

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

Review: Transformers- Revenge of the Fallen

I like midnight screenings. The atmosphere is generally good at such screenings, because everyone there has made an extra special effort to see the film first, so you can expect they'll be fans. It was with some trepidation that I remembered this while sitting in the cinema auditorium early on Friday morning, because it was clearly full of people who liked 2007's Transformers. Having rewatched the first film recently, I decided I can't hate it for being stupid. I can hate it for idolising both the US military and a fake orange porn-star who can't act her way out of a paper bag, sure, but not for being stupid. It's a Michael Bay film, so that's par for the course. However, I like to think I came to the sequel with an open mind- it wasn't impossible that Bay would create a totally superior sequel, and so I was cautiously optimistic once the trailers finished.

And what follows is my review. No summary for those who are just skimming- I demand that you read all of it. Mostly because this film will do huge numbers at the box office no matter what I say about it, and I honestly believe it's less painful to read this review than it is to watch the film itself. It's taken me this long to review it because I actually have had problems articulating how bad this is. I'm not so childish as to ruin the plot, so I've taken measures to make this review as spoiler-free as I possibly can. There is a fair bit of profanity, but I try to use that sparingly in reviews, so I won't apologise for the frequent verbal gesticulating in this one.

TRANSFORMERS- REVENGE OF THE FALLEN

Who's in it? Shia LeBeouf (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), Megan Fox (How to Lose Friends and Alienate People), John Turturro (You Don't Mess with the Zohan), Ramon Rodriguez (Pride and Glory) and Josh Duhamel (Transformers).

What's it all about? Two years after the All-Spark was destroyed, Sam Witwicky (LeBeouf) is off to college when he's embroiled in the war between the Autobots (goody robots) and the Decepticons (baddie robots) once more. It emerges that the Transformers have had a much greater hand in human development than anyone realised, and the original Decepticon, known as the Fallen, is out for revenge on Autobot leader Optimus Prime, and on the Earth...

Any good? The paradox of Revenge of the Fallen is that, as a Michael Bay film, it ought to start badly, continue to be bad, and then finish awfully. You'd certainly expect exactly that from the build-up I've given this review, but I actually caught myself enjoying the film for the first 45 minutes or so. There's an interesting diplomatic set-up with the Autobots and the US Government, and Sam's comic-relief parents are used sparingly and with slightly better effect than in Transformers. Bigger than that however, the major set-piece of the first hour is a fight set in a forest that, besides displaying an apparent disregard for anything tree-related on Bay's part, is actually stunning. I cared about what was happening in a way I never had in the first film. The feeling of being slightly unclean aside, it was refreshing to actually enjoy what I was watching.

However, this does not last, and it becomes ever more apparent that Michael Bay is concerned solely with showing us what it looks like when you're given $200m with which to film whatever you want. And a lot of that is very bang, boom, wallop. As in the first film, the bangs, booms AND wallops are all vapid, uninteresting and same-y once that superbly realised forest sequence has been and gone. But this time the bangs, booms and wallops are spread over 149 minutes, and that's about 100 minutes too long, considering what follows. After a key plot turn at the end of this golden period, the plot derails with all the horror of a train full of puppies crashing into an aircraft carrier full of screaming babies. While the comic relief was restrained largely to Sam's parents in the beginning of the film, it feels like every other character here is now there for some lame attempt at a laugh.

"I died for your sins, Sam... so stop putting me in shitty movies."

And boy, is the comedy in this film lame. I can only imagine Michael Bay was sat watching Verne Troyer hump Beyonce Knowles' leg in the third Austin Powers film and thought it was so funny that he put no less than FOUR humping jokes into this one. That people were laughing at these moments in the cinema made me despair for humanity, to put it bluntly. And then there were the Twins. Oh, sweet cattle of Seattle, those Twins. Remember how everyone really fucking hates Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace? It's like they went out of their way to include TWO characters exactly as annoying as him. And these two robots get more screen-time than any of the 44 other robots in the film. Not that you can tell many of them apart, due to the simple fact that there's 46 of them. If one of the biggest problems in the first one was that you couldn't particularly tell what bit of robot was hitting whose bit of robot, then why in the name of Optimus Prime would you add MORE robots?!

And more importantly, why when you have the superbly voiced and animated Optimus Prime, Megatron and the eponymous Fallen, would you focus on the fucking Twins?! They are hideous, borderline racist stereotypes who should never have got past the drawing board- nay, the fucking skirting board! And I reiterate what I say about those other three characters- Megatron was clearly the best part of the first one and I was actually happy to see him back, and this time around, Optimus Prime is actually imbued with some of that "better than Jesus" heroism stuff that you hear the really dedicated fanboys talking about. And of course, there's the Fallen. In a film subtitled Revenge of the Fallen, you'd think the Fallen would really be the centre of the plot. And that his role would involve revenge. But after the plot hares off into so many different strands, trying to bring back everyone from the first film as well as introduce the aforementioned multitude of additional robots, the title just doesn't ring true.

Nuh-uh. The film's not really about the Fallen. Or his revenge. Or anything, really.

And that's another thing! All the returning cast members! It's bad when a sequel needlessly suffers from "the whole gang's back!" syndrome, but this takes it to ludicrous extremes, as Bay's films are wont to. Ignoring the two abominable young leads for a moment (was their romance so timeless that we had to endure it for another 149 minutes?), more or less everyone is back. Remember Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson's characters from the first film? They're back, for little reason other than having been in the first one and being in the US military. Remember Simmons, John Turturro's shady government character in the first film? He's back. Hell, they travel halfway around the world for Simmons, just to have him explain what the fuck has happened to the plot since they left the forest! And I feel slightly unfair criticising Simmons, because Turturro soldiers on with the poor lot he gets in the script, and is in fact one of the more watchable aspects of Revenge of the Fallen.

But now onto the inevtable. I don't hate Shia LeBeouf, but I think he's terribly over-rated- he's gone from being one of the more enjoyable parts of the first film to being one of the many awful parts of this film, via an excruciating turn as the son of Indiana Jones. There's none of the charm that some of his lower profile performances exuded, and I'm swiftly losing patience with his work, full-stop. And then there's Megan Fox. I have never found her hot, nor will I ever, and if karmic retribution should turn out to be an actuality, anyone who's told me that she is shall be struck down, as seen in the picture below. More pressingly though, Fox absolutely cannot act. This is a woman who really made a big impression in the world of acting in another Bay film, Bad Boys II, in the memorable and gruelling role of "Stars-and-Stripes Bikini Kid Dancing Under Waterfall". And in this film as in any other, she is rubbish, rubbish, RUBBISH. And she's still not attractive!

Yeah kid, that'll teach you to worship your false orange idol.

It's handy though, because Bay's portrayal of Megan Fox is a useful allegory for his entire approach to directing. You get the feeling that if he were directing outright honest porn instead of big Hollywood films, he'd be lauded as a genius. You know, by professors of cinema and such-like, as opposed to being lauded by 13 year old boys worshipping false orange idols. That's because his approach to anything, be it robots hitting each other, women fixing automobiles or most notably, the US military, has something leery and unsettling about it. Part of me is curious about what a Michael Bay porn film would look like- it'd have explosions and the like. But I digress, his pornographic approach to film is what makes this so inexcusable. Transformers is apparently critic-proof because this is a franchise for kids, not adults. Why then do we see so many references to women as sex objects, drugs (YES, drugs) and racial stereotypes? Are these appropriate for kids? I'm actually astonished that this film can still make money, and be accepted as a summer blockbuster, after the success of Iron Man, The Dark Knight and Star Trek, and even more amazed that this film has the same screenwriters as the latter of those films. How did they go so right there and so wrong here?!

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the lowest common denominator- Leni Riefenstahl made more likable films than this. Even as enjoyable and as lightweight as I found the opening 45 minutes or so, there are still those hideous tropes of Michael Bay's filmography on display- lens flare, upskirt shots and masturbatory idolatry of the US military. Particularly nauseating is Sam's college, where every student looks like some variation on Megan Fox, which would personally be my idea of an academic nightmare. It gets the rating it does solely for the promise of the early film, and that much-mentioned fight in the forest. The rest is ludicrously self-indulgent, stupidly long and worst of all, it's not even entertaining rubbish. I've already mentioned the lack of the Fallen, so Transformers: How Fucking Annoying Are These Twins? might be a more prudent title for the film. Or more succinctly- Transformers: Bleh Bleh Bleh Bleh Bleh!

Awful! Awful! Awful! (Mostly.)



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If you think that star rating is slightly odd considering the drubbing I just gave this film, just remember that I at least liked the start of it. The forest fight is like a scene from another movie, and I'd give everything up to and including that point a 4/5, because I was entertained, so I felt it was doing its job. Seeing as how I'd give the rest a 0/5, the maths goes like this.

4 + 0 = 4
4/2= 2

So it's 2/5. Though still probably the worst film of the year.

(shudders) The next update will definitely involve The Hangover, and probably Telstar and Looking for Eric, looking at my plans for the rest of the week. Just be glad we've got Transformers out of the way- I can't see anything this year making me rant at you as much as this did. One thing to come out of this review- I like to imagine Michael Bay scribbling that simile down in a notepad- "Aircraft carrier... screaming babies..."- for future reference.

Until next time, don't watch Revenge of the Fallen,
Mark

With thanks to Fearn Sobers for the Movie Goat art- for more of her work, go to her site, fesoes.net, linked on the sidebar.