SOMETHING BORROWED- Review

Not since Vampires Suck has there been such a momentously shit film as to prompt a Lolcats style banner to the effect of "FUCK THIS MOVIE". This is a film that slightly deviates from the predictable romantic comedy formula but in all of the wrong directions. A film that is a torturous and toxic viewing experience. A film that happens to star Kate Hudson. This is the neutron bomb, folks- this is Something Borrowed.

The premise itself is not entirely uninteresting. Two best friends, Rachel and Darcy, are in love with the same bloke, Dex. Dex and Rachel were study buds, and had a painfully shy mutual affection for one another all through law school. He ended up engaged to Darcy, and after a drunken surprise birthday party, Rachel winds up sleeping with Dex. Interested? Here's where they go wrong.

The principal character trait in this one, often despicably brought forward as a virtue rather than a foible, is cowardice. Dex is too cowardly to break off his engagement and go for Rachel, and Rachel is cowardly to a cartoonish degree, to the point where the entire message of the film is that she should think about herself rather than thinking of others. Isn't that almost like a Russian reversal of most romantic comedy plots?

If you haven't gathered from my strident hatred for the film so far, it's another of those romantic comedies that's neither romantic nor funny. Best typified by the recent oeuvre of Allan Loeb, the principal flaw in the mainstream genre is that characters won't communicate with one another. Nobody simply comes out and suggests that talking like grown-ups might be a more desirable course of action. Something Borrowed represents a film in which that problem is lampshaded and yet still never addressed.

That, to me, is even worse. The film is not simply being inept- it revels in its ineptitude and the immaturity of its characters. It's also a film that has even less faith in its own central conceit than the audience will. By Rachel's inaction, you might think her best friend would be the more sympathetic character, but the film goes to pains to practically portray Darcy as a supervillain. She's obnoxious, boorish and twatty, and in its own way, that makes Kate Hudson's performance quite a success.

Ginnifer Goodwin is a likeable enough actress, but there's only so much you can do with a heroine of such inaction, and she fails to even do much of that. Many fans of the perpetually vanilla John Krasinski have this down on their to-watch list. He's similarly afflicted as the Gay Best Friend, mired in further inaction by the fact that his character is heterosexual. Furthermore, he's another unlikeable bumbag who represses everything rather than putting it out where it might be less painful to watch. At one point he tells an old flame, who is demonised for weak comic effect, that he's gay rather than simply say he's not into her.

None of this is funny. None of it is clever. Some of it is just insanely offensive, actually. It spends so much of its 111 minutes consoling itself that it's not a film about unlikeable characters prolonging their own agony that it doesn't notice how it's a film about unlikeable characters prolonging their own agony, and the audience's agony. It's another film in which moneyed arseholes superficially hash out their problems as though they're insecure teenagers. In a film that principally features moneyed fucknuts hashing out their problems in a state of utter self-absorption, and the supposedly sympathetic Rachel's whole character arc is to make her more selfish, what the hell is there to care about?

Does anybody actually like Kate Hudson? Her fanbase must be concealed and I fear they may strike at any moment like stupid ninjas, because it's on her name that Something Borrowed is sold. So I spit on her name, for inflicting any part of this emotionally infantile, self-absorbed, self-consolatory twatastrophe upon the planet. It is, finally, a romantic comedy that doesn't end the way you'd expect, but at what cost? The actual ending is not surprising so much as unbelievably crass and unconsidered, just like the rest of it. If cinema sinks lower this year, I'm quitting.

Something Borrowed is now showing in cinemas nationwide- don't you give it a fucking penny.
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If you've seen Something Borrowed, why not share your comments below? Oh, and speaking of Vampires Suck, guess what? As if this week couldn't get any worse, this happens...

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

SUCKER PUNCH- Review

I like Zack Snyder. I don't think he makes guilty pleasure films, except for maybe 300- I think he makes visually exciting and generally very well-made adaptations. Dawn of the Dead, Watchmen, Legend of the Guardians and yes, 300 too, are all fine adaptations from what you could call difficult source material, in terms of their baggage if not in terms of their suitability for the screen.

While Snyder might be amongst the best in the business for adaptations, his new film Sucker Punch is all his, and so his visionary side takes a lemming-like leap into the depths of narrative incoherence. Baby Doll is a 20 year old girl who is left with her younger sister and her abusive stepfather when her mother passes away. When the stepfather attempts to rape the sister, Baby Doll snaps and he commits her to an insane asylum, on the fast track for a lobotomy. She then retreats inside her own mind in order to go on an epic quest to secure her own freedom.

Not everyone hates Sucker Punch. That's gonna surprise certain film fans, who should by now be familiar with the vitriol that has greeted this film since its release in the States a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, the audience with whom it's most successful is made up of males aged 13-25, an audience who are not exactly poorly served by the cinema of delights such as Transformers. Worse still, Zack Snyder has been telling anyone who'll listen that this is a story of female empowerment.

Female empowerment is a thorny subject. Last week, I read a blog post by filmmaker and Nostalgia Chick Lindsay Ellis, who speculated that even women now find it difficult to write their own gender because female characters are judged more stringently than male characters. Ellis contrasts Robert Langdon, a vacuous mush of a character created by Dan Brown, with Bella Swan, a vacuous mush of a female character created by Stephanie Meyer. The gender distinction is there in popular criticism, and as I'm not a woman, it makes it all the more difficult to talk about why I don't think Sucker Punch works from a position whereby certain women won't get angry and certain men won't call me some kind of Democrat.

Here's the very simple maths of why it lost me. Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung are our leads, and they're all very attractive young women. I don't phrase it like that from the position of someone trying to be diplomatic about gender equality, but from the position of someone who was utterly disinterested in the film. The reason? Their characters are all objectified by Snyder's lens, and it's as objects that they're on a par with Charles Foster Kane's sledge, or the One Ring, or any other narrative object that would be as difficult to root for if we were expected to empathise.

And so as these sexy young ladies plough through a cavalcade of admittedly gorgeous action sequences, involving undead Nazis, robots, samurai, dragons and fighter planes, it's deceptively boring. It's like a picture of a beautiful woman- a representation of what is good looking about that person, but without any personality. More than that, it is extraordinarily contrived, taking on a fetch quest mechanic that really would have made it more suitable for a video game endeavour by Snyder rather than a movie.

The imagined reality angle has led some to compare the film to Inception as both a negative or a positive comparison, depending on if they disliked the film or if they're 13 years old. To me, I was reminded of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, if only because this is a succession of video game setpieces, but sans any hint of humanity. It is lifeless in a way that Edgar Wright's film was not, and the distinction between them should be greater than it will probably end up. This one's really more like Repo! The Genetic Opera, an overrated film with a much greater cult following than Sucker Punch will ever accrue.

In all fairness to Snyder, his film was hobbled slightly by poor test screenings, which led to studio interference with the final cut. Although an even longer musical version of this film doesn't sound too appealing to me, I can at least appreciate that this ain't entirely what Snyder wanted to do. For another thing, movies have more financial taboos about their ratings system than video games, and Sucker Punch is further crippled in its grislier aspects by the 12A certificate. There are about five or six attempted rapes in the film, and in order to avoid a higher rating, that's an act which only becomes as threatening or as damaging as walking towards someone slowly with a creepy grin.

There's only so much damage that could have been done to Sucker Punch by the studio, because I struggle to pinpoint the salvageable stuff in this indefensible folly. The cinematic visuals can only make for a plot as absorbing as a music video, when combined with shonky dialogue and plot twists and dreadful sexual politics that are nigh on unforgivable in a film trumpeted as a piece of female empowerment. It's a piece of something, alright. It's a catastrophic misstep that, whether intentionally or not, values upskirt shots far above character development, and it's an embarrassment to all concerned.

Sucker Punch is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

BATTLE LOS ANGELES- Review

The makers of Battle Los Angeles have intimated that the Brothers Strause, the directors of Skyline, bailed out of their jobs as special effects artists on this one to make that one. It's an interesting story if true, but now that Battle Los Angeles has been released, it reveals that it is in fact on quite shaky litigious grounds. Skyline might be a little bit like Battle Los Angeles, but then Battle Los Angeles is a lot like many other films.

Aaron Eckhart plays Staff Sgt. Nantz, a Marine who's just handed in his resignation after 20 years of service and has a bad reputation after his last tour of Iraq went badly wrong. Before Nantz can say his goodbyes, however, a meteor shower in close proximity to the coast of Los Angeles prompts a military evacuation of the city, and he's drafted in to help out. But similar meteor showers have occurred all over the world, and it soon transpires that the meteors are cover for an invasion of Earth.

It's unusual for me, to hear a film's music score speak so comprehensively of not only the film's content, but of the film's quality. Brian Tyler, a composer on the likes of the Fast and the Furious franchise and the Final Destination franchise, has turned in the most generic and lazy assault my earholes have endured in a long, long time. We've recently seen a score elevate a film just by its presence, seeing as how Daft Punk's soundtrack to Tron: Legacy was the best and only reason for that film to exist, but Tyler actually creates a problem that brings the film down.

My hatred of the score is the most prominent thing to mention about Battle Los Angeles, because it's really just a big, loud and disengaged disappointment of the worst kind. I went in with a fair bit of anticipation for the film- I had liked the trailers, and I like Aaron Eckhart, and I was absolutely in the right mindset to enjoy it. My experience of watching the film was like constantly running after it and trying to get involved with it, but always being left some distance behind.

It's not that it's an especially complicated film, although its subplots tend to convolve the action, but it was like I was sitting in orbit of the action rather than ever becoming involved with it. There are films that have been likened to watching somebody else play a video game, and to me at least, this film is absolutely that. The cascade of disposable war movie characters are trotted out from the outset, to the point where it's impossible to tell who's getting killed off as the death toll ramps up, at least until the ending where there are only a handful of Marines surviving.

The Battle of the title is definitely the operative part, because the action is near enough relentless, in true video game style. As usual, we're siding with the humans in this battle, even though we get a very interesting aside at the outset of the action. Two snipers sitting atop a building and watching the encroaching aliens mutter about how they don't seem so different, pondering the thoughts and feelings of their opponents, which shows something of the war film the filmmakers were hoping for. The film then drops that thread as though it's a matter of total disinterest to the viewer.

Instead, we're asked to find some kind of relatable quality with characters who bitch about their personal issues with Nantz at a point in which the entire world has gone to hell. These remarkably self-centred characters are utterly ignorant of the huge world-changing events happening all around them. Just as soon as they're not shooting at them or blowing them up, that is. Aaron Eckhart gives a classy performance in a role that fits him like a glove, but Nantz is the only character whose name I wouldn't have to look up afterwards- that's how poorly these characters are developed.

The disinterest in the aliens is staggering. Some might like the way that we never get what anyone would call a satisfactory idea of what these adversaries look like, because they're only ever seen in long shots or extreme close-ups. I can see how some would appreciate being distanced from the aliens in that way, and left to come up with their own idea of what these world-invading bastards look like, but I can appreciate that someone, somewhere, actually gave some thought to the design of these things. So it's all the more maddening that we're supposed to be more interested in the human characters, who all come from Michael Bay's US military porn stock, Nantz excepted.

Battle Los Angeles has a couple of bits of properly exciting action and a decent performance from Eckhart, but all else seems so obnoxiously loud as to actually become quiet. Maybe that's what the excellent trailers were hinting at all along, because there's little of the implied subtlety of the Johann Johannson-scored trailer in the final film. The score is horribly incompetent, the camerawork is shaky and Bourne-like even in supposedly subdued moments and the character development is so negligible that you start to root for the aliens. However this battle turns out, everybody lost in the battle between this film and Skyline.

Battle Los Angeles is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

I AM NUMBER FOUR- Review

Here's one that's real difficult to write about. It's not a case of hating it for producer and twatbag Michael Bay's involvement, because I recognise that Bay can be said to have a technical aptitude for filmmaking. What makes I Am Number Four such an unsavoury spectacle is that its genesis is entirely what I would previously have imagined the genesis of a Michael Bay project to be- the product of an assembly line.

As to the story, this Twi-lite fantasy flick follows Number Four, one of nine aliens who survived a planetary holocaust in another solar system and fled from the genocidal Mogadorians to Earth. Outright stealing the Doctor's alias, he styles himself as John Smith, a high school student in small-town America. With the Mogadorians on his tail, it emerges that they're killing off the aliens in order, and three have died already, leaving Number Four next in line.

Look, the story behind the book this was based on can be found on other sites, so I'm not going to recap it and overwhelm my review of the film. However, I recommend that you read about the controversy behind this film because it informs the level of suckiness on which it operates. As I've said, it's Twilight-lite, which means that it's something so insubstantial that it's almost ethereal. It more or less flips around the premise 180 degrees- a boy has supernatural powers, a bored small-town girl falls in love, but this time the boy is our hero.

Presumably, the idea is to try and get the insensible target audience for most of Michael Bay's films, 14 year old boys, to go and see a film that is like Twilight, which in turn appeals to Twilight fans, and thus results in huge profit. Whether or not it will work remains to be seen, but it is nevertheless a product of shameless mathematics, rather than anything even resembling imagination. The various elements are not trans-generic, but intertextual- there is literally nothing in here that is not from another text, but names have been changed to protect the unoriginal bastards peddling it.

Bay's gaze is so fixated on sequels, and on box office success, and on replicating the successful formula of other films, that it is impossible to engage with it. I mention Bay and not director DJ Caruso because there was a long period where Bay was attached to direct this thing. It shows, and it's a shame that Caruso, who previously made the noirish and intriguing The Salton Sea, has devolved into a director for hire. There's no room for much of anything creative, because everybody involved is complicit with the formula.

For their part, the cast do alright- there are no casting gaffes as monumentally shit as Shia LaBeouf or Megan Fox, but they're all in stock roles. Alex Pettyfer is the incredibly athletic and dreamy guy who somehow still gets bullied because he's new at school. Dianna Agron is the cute girl who, in this case, is a little bit stalk-y in her amateur photography pursuits. Timothy Olyphant is Henri (Wan Kenobi), a mentor character for whom the only surprise is whether or not he'll turn out to be the traitor behind it all or the guy who sacrifices himself so Number Four can win the day. Kevin Durand is a goddamn skinhead in a trenchcoat. That's what we're dealing with.

And for all of its predictability, it's deceptively difficult to follow. I get that Number Four's goal is to avoid being stabbed up by Mogadorians, but the world building becomes so convoluted, so intent on dangling loose threads for a sequel hook, that it becomes incomprehensible. When it turns into the Transformers patented action clusterfuck in the final act, the only discernible goal remains "don't get killed". Quite an elementary quest in a fantasy film, right?

At least in other franchise non-starters, there was more self-containment. They bothered to tell stories that established the world and left their unrequited sequel hooks to the final shots. I Am Number Four builds a world with its sequel hooks, because it's so bland and forgettable that it's counting on becoming a massive movie series just so it has some continued significance once the credits start rolling. The film is one that's looking forward to its own ending so it can make some money. I was just looking forward to it ending.

I Am Number Four is now showing in cinemas nationwide,
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

JUST GO WITH IT- Review

From R-L: Twat, Twat, Surprisingly Good

Consulting the IMDB, I realised today that before Just Go with It, the last time I saw a Jennifer Aniston film at the cinema was The Break Up, all the way back in 2006. For Adam Sandler, same story (save for a Funny People shaped blip) with Click. After seeing Just Go with It, I realise I haven't particularly missed either of them.

Sandler plays Danny, a man-whore plastic surgeon, and Aniston plays Katherine, his hard-working secretary. Danny's trademark ploy with women is to wear a fake wedding ring and pretend that he's in a deeply unhappy marriage in order to get laid. When the ring messes up his chances with a woman he has something more than utter contempt for, maths teacher Palmer, he constructs an elaborate web of lies to cover his mistake, pulling in Katherine and her two kids.

After an experience like this, I often find myself looking for someone to blame. Forgoing Adam Sandler, who should know better after sending himself up so richly in Funny People, and Jennifer Aniston, who is surprisingly the best thing about this film by far, then the prime suspect is Dennis Dugan. He's a frequent collaborator with Sandler, and he's been likened to a neutron bomb to comedy. But then you look at the screenplay credits, and you find Allan Loeb. Loeeeeb!

This man, who reduces me to fits of Shatner-esque screaming rage, has had two credits in the last 12 months that particularly stand out to me. First, on last year's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which subsisted upon risible dialogue like "Greed got greedier." More recently, there's The Dilemma, which somehow subsisted on being fucking awful. If this seems unreasonable, that's because I review films, but Loeb's now been involved in three films I really hated. Focusing on this minute bit of trivia, he's my new nemesis.

I hate to call children Twats, but I will say that there's more than one Twat in this picture.

At his door, I lie most of the blame for the repulsive waste that is Just Go with It, because it exploits an audience's willing suspension of disbelief beyond endurance, just like The Dilemma did. As with that film, I thought of a simple solution to all of the conflict within the film that would have worked just ten minutes in, without us having to be subjected to the following 106 minutes. Instead, no one thinks of my perfectly workable solution of pretending to be married to avoid getting hit on by women who want to shag a plastic surgeon, and so the stakes build up like an enormous Jenga tower made out of Twats.

Sandler's character, as so many of his characters are nowadays, is an capital-T Twat. He's clearly capable of better if Punch-Drunk Love and, yes, even Funny People demonstrated, but he's using his star power for evil these days, it seems. Let's look at some of the other characters' backgrounds- Palmer is a maths teacher. Now, Palmer is played by model Brooklyn Decker, and the film objectifies her just as much as the marketing. No matter how much her character's stupidity is played up, we saw her being a maths teacher, so that's acceptable- she's just a silly woman, after all, right?

Jennifer Aniston, though trying her best with the awful detritus she's given, is even more marginalised and trodden upon during the proceedings, being utterly passive and apparently wearing glasses that made her look so dowdy that nobody noticed until she takes them off that she's actually, well, Jennifer Aniston. Then there's the "comedy" cousin, the "comedy" disfigured plastic surgery patient and the obligatory precocious little twats, one of whom adopts the most grating British accent imaginable because it's a "cute character quirk" that actually makes a real life American version of Battle Royale seem a more endearing concept.

Something happened while I was watching this film that never, ever happens. Something happened that so insulted my intelligence that I had to actually walk out of the screening to gather myself for a minute. It's a joke about a sheep. If you've seen it, I'm talking about the call back, not the first instance. This highlight of comic genius is heralded by the clunkiest set-up ever, delivered by a wooden actress, and it pushed my endurance beyond limits. I returned a minute or so later, but it's a first for me. Shit often stinks so much that I hold my nose, but it's rarely so offensive that I can't even look at it.

How many laughs did it raise? Just one, at a visual gag that would be a minor highlight in another film. That gives a ratio between minutes of screen time and funny jokes of 116 to one. There's no type of bad film I hate more than a bad comedy. Did I mention that this film is far, far too fucking long? I think I've already given the impression that it's effluvient self-indulgence of the basest kind, but it's the amount of time it wastes that really grinds my gears. 116 minutes is too long and yet still apparently not long enough to actually bring a conclusion to the leaning tower of a narrative, which is explained away in a narrated montage in the last two minutes of the film.

"Why can't you be a Twat like the rest of us?"

Weirdly, my new nemesis Allan Loeb has compensated for his earlier efforts on The Dilemma in penning Just Go with It, a film that's even worse! It's so bad that it makes you yearn for The Dilemma, even though it's only marginally less shit. He cannot be allowed to go on doing this- watching this film already feels like your brain is being deprived of oxygen for almost two hours. Blame could be assigned elsewhere, but it's the genuinely horrible script that really puts this film through the bottom of the barrel. The queasiest and most abominable kind of film.

Just Go with It is now showing in cinemas nationwide,
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

YOGI BEAR- The Schrödinger's Bear Experiment

This is going to be a short one. Largely because there's very little to say about this film that hasn't already been said in my proper review for Den of Geek, but also because even before I wrote that other review, there's very little to say about this film that would surprise anyone.

Yogi Bear is shit. If that's all you need to know about the film, then come back tomorrow when I'll be talking about the Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston romcom vehicle Just Go With It. But if you'll have a little more patience, maybe we can talk cod quantum mechanics and get some interesting scientific discourse out of the turmoil.

Here's a video you might have already seen. Courtesy of YouTube user estefez, it's an unofficial alternate ending to Yogi Bear that plays out something like the death of Jesse James in Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. With nothing short of ridiculous optimism, I wondered if I could expect that ending into the actual film, in a Schrödinger's Cat style experiment.

So as long as I couldn't see the ending, it could be the death scene AND something much less interesting simultaneously. Up until the ending though, we all see the film as a closed box, looking a bit like this...

It's a talking bear pictured above, which is for some silly reason, the least of Yogi Bear's plot, which is more concerned with environmental messages and hackneyed "They're going to kill trees unless we stop Them!" gubbins. Given the carbon emissions that probably came from the production of this debacle, the closest it comes to being green is in recycling plots and gags that we've seen before in other films; other rubbish films, for that matter.

Its reluctance to bring in hip pop culture references to modernise the character is as close to charm the film ever gets, in between Dan Aykroyd's anybody-could-do-this impression of the title character and the predictable joyless mush that is the script. Justin Timberlake, Anna Faris and Stephen Daly might be trying harder than the rest of the cast, but there's only so much you can do with a script that looks for all the world like it was written with Crayolas.

It's not merely a case of over-analysing a film intended for children, because my issue with the film, and I think most children would agree, is that children are smarter than this film. These are children who flocked to see Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon in the last 12 months. You can't give kids Smarties and then go back to giving them radishes at snack time, just as you can't go from showing them proper family films to expecting them to just sit there and endure Yogi Bear.

Still, if it's that unpleasant, perhaps the fundamental misunderstanding that was my Schrödinger's Bear experiment could pay off. The 3D puts you right there in the film, right? Maybe if I expected that ending enough, it could transpire?

Alas, however much you expect this...

... you're still gonna end up with this.

The bottom line is, watching the title character tool around for any sustained period will make you wish for that ending instead of expecting it, and that's potentially where the theory falls down. My experiment was a failure, but then so is this film. Give it a miss, eh?

Yogi Bear is now showing in 2D and 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

In The Dark...

Um, what?

Good for the Superbowl, for being the most-watched programme in American television history. Around this time of year, I always notice that some of the same people who say it's not worth caring about the Oscars pretend to care about sports, and watch this football game purely to catch a glimpse of the new infinitesimal glimpses of movie trailers.

With this being a slower week, or as slow as any week can look preceding the descent of a distributive clusterfuck on Friday, I've decided to have a look at one of those trailers, having watched them all online like any right-minded film fan who doesn't like American football. It's a matter of very public record that I'm not a fan of Michael Bay or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, so let's have a look at the first properly representative trailer for Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

You can bitch about bias, but I have no reason to pre-judge this movie. I gain nothing from it being a pile of shit like the first sequel, so I have to hope for the best. But really, look at this trailer. It looks almost exactly the same as the first two, to the point where it could actually be a fan trailer for the third film, cannibalised from bits of the other films and uploaded on YouTube.




Well, it doesn't have Megan Fox in it like the first two, but it does have a big fucking fight in a major city, like the end of Transformers. It's also impossible to tell what the fuck is going on in any given still from an action scene, like in Revenge of the Fallenm, even taken from 720p video. Observe.

 

 

I can understand not wanting to showcase the plot (I know, don't laugh), but if you choose to showcase your action sequences instead, it's a pretty piss-poor show. You'd be better served by checking out the spots for Super 8 or Captain America, or just the trailer for Richard Ayoade's Submarine, which came out the morning after the Superbowl and manages to look more visually arresting than any of the major blockbusters peddled the night before.

I know it seems like I'm bashing Transformers: Dark of the Moon already, especially as this is a rant posted in a slow week, but I'm only judging its piece-of-shit trailer (and also the piece-of-shit title) and not the film itself. My mind is not already made up about Bay's final outing with the giant robots, because above all else, he can't make a worse film than Revenge of the Fallen, can he?

Can he?

THE DILEMMA- Review

Whenever Vince Vaughn seems to be having fun, you know it's going to hurt.

On Monday, we saw that a romantic comedy can be salvaged from mediocrity or outright awfulness by good casting. Today, we see how a romantic comedy that features Jennifer Connelly and Winona Ryder, directed by Ron Howard, can be utterly fucked up by becoming Vince Vaughn-centric.

The Dilemma has a simple plot, or it should, anyway. Ronny is a reformed gambling addict who looks up to his best friend Nick and his wife Geneva. Ronny and Nick are in business together, and they're on the cusp of selling a new engine design to Dodge when Ronny catches Geneva in an affair with another man. His dilemma is in whether or not he should spill the beans to Nick as their deadline with Dodge approaches.

For the sake of full disclosure, let's put the cards on the table early on. I hated The Dilemma. Just about every bit of its stultifying 111 minute running time was offensive to my eyes, ears, brain and face. Even as a self-proclaimed Vince Vaughn detractor, I went in wanting to like this. Even though I'd heard negative reviews, I had heard enough positive things to pique my curiosity about seeing it.

Let's list those positive things then, as seen from where I sat in the cinema. The best thing about The Dilemma is Channing Tatum. Yes, that's Step Up and Dear John star Channing Tatum. That should tell you all you need to know, but to be completely fair to Tatum and to the film, his character was the only one to hit my deprived funny bone all the way through, and he did a fine job of it. Of course, the representation of his character is just one of the many problems of the larger film, but I'd go so far as to say that this is actually his best role, and his best performance.

On the whole though, this is a film about Vince Vaughn. It's not just a principled dislike of Vaughn that makes that a bad thing in this case. He's just the person with the least to like about him, in all of this. His character, Ronny, is in a situation that might at least provoke sympathy, and get viewers asking how they would react in his situation. The problem is that the answer to that question is always going to be "Not like that". He fills that huge running time with a cavalcade of dickery and supposedly good-intentioned slapstick. And worst of all, just so you can tell we're supposed to like him, the characters all take the time out to appreciate how hard all of this has been for him, as though his feelings would be most damaged by the explosion of someone else's marriage.

Who's there to appreciate how hard the events have this film have been for me? Hm? Certainly not Kevin James, who finally joins my shit-list just a little later than he figured on everyone else's. I didn't mind him in Paul Blart- Mall Cop and I missed Grown Ups entirely. Certainly not Winona Ryder and Jennifer Connelly, neither of whom have anything to do as they watch from the sidelines and appear to be monstrous and submissive, respectively. And certainly not Ron Howard, who really, really ought to know better by now.

It's not just the unintentionally funny token appearance of his brother Clint, more famously seen in the movies of Uwe Boll than in anything Ron has to offer. It's the way that this entire film feels like a product fixated upon the white heterosexual male who most often goes to the movies, quantified by box office spreadsheets and charts, rather than a film by an actual human being, least of all Ron Howard. It's hideously white, souped up by manful discussion of cars and sports and other cool stuff that's cool, and it has an ugly passive-agressive homophobic streak. All of this without ever forging an emotional connection. Or even raising a laugh that doesn't involve Channing Tatum.

The Dilemma is a baggy and self-indulgent stinker that's over-directed, over-developed and overdone. And in amongst all of that, most of the jokes fail to land, making it an excruciating watch, especially in the first hour. I'd like to think that it's not just an ingrained hatred of Vince Vaughn that led me to this conclusion, but it's more than enough reason on its own to hate this fucking movie. I never walk out of films at the cinema, but this one drove me close to the edge. Perhaps that surprisingly funny turn by Channing Tatum was calculated to coincide with my endurance breaking, because there's no latching onto anything else in this shite.

The Dilemma is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Dilemma, why not share your comments below?

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

The Mad Prophet's Bottom 10 Films of 2010

Happy New Year! Out with the old, in with the new, and whatnot! We'll miss 2010, as we're thrust into the cold light of 2011. As we leave behind cinema like Inception and The Social Network and squint at the uncertain future to be had in a whole year's worth of upcoming movies. As we slowly and sickeningly realise that we're once again in a year that has a new Transformers film scheduled for release.

But you know, 2010 wasn't all great. If I compile a bottom 10 list, for instance, there still wouldn't be enough room for some of the really rubbish stuff. I'd have to give dishonourable mentions to such joyless films as From Paris With Love and Wall Street- Money Never Sleeps and Takers just because I couldn't fit them into the ten spaces available.

What would that look like, that bottom 10? Seeing as how we're waiting around for the final 10 favourites, let's pinch our noses and have a gander...

10. The Last Airbender (dir. M. Night Shyamalan)

"So low/high on the list?", I hear you cry in dismay? There was a point where I at least conceded the thrill of the special effects and the cinematography by Lord of the Rings DP Andrew Lesnie was enough to elevate this one out of the pits of the year. However, I can't discount how shit the story and everything else about it was, no matter how much I like the source material. A wasted opportunity of cataclysmic awfulness- go and watch the season of the animated series that this film is based on instead.

9. Shank (dir. Mo Ali)

Only in compiling this list did I realise that I forgot to review this film on here, but I did cover it for Den of Geek. In a world where nobody uses an S where a Z will do, this comes as a cross between Mad Max and Ken Korda's magnum opus Speeding on the Needlebliss, from The Adam and Joe Show. The thing reeks of inexperience in a way that I can't forgive. It shares its name with an apparently much better film from 2009, which sucks because it's already confused enough without being confused with something else.

8. Little Fockers (dir. Paul Weitz)

One of two late entries on the list, Little Fockers marks the boiling point for the complete combustion of Robert DeNiro's career. It's lazy, it sets up jokes that go nowhere, and it also has jokes with set-ups that are entirely too obvious, and most depressingly, it's DeNiro's second film on the trot that co-stars Jessica Alba. It has a disjointed narrative, in which there is no development of characters, and neither are there any laughs to be had. Who cares if the actors had fun making it? I had no bloody fun watching it.

7. Life as We Know It (dir. Greg Berlanti)

Filmed on location on planet Earth, Life as We Know It is a thing of perverse contrivance, which has nothing even close to the romantic feelings it's supposed to evoke. Katherine Heigl continues to be such a hateful presence that she crushes every leading man she's paired with underfoot in mushy displays of obnoxious behaviour and self-importance. Poor Josh Duhamel, is what I'd say if he were any better. Predictable, inscrutable, and once again, capital-P Perverse.

6. A Nightmare On Elm Street (dir. Samuel Bayer)

What is it about brown and green colour-grading that's so popular in shit American horror movies these days? Is it that watching through the fug of what looks like shit and snot is meant to distance us as viewers from just how excruciatingly bad Platinum Dunes remakes like A Nightmare On Elm Street actually are. This is the second year running that Michael Bay's horror-raping production company has made something unworthy enough for the bottom 10, and in 2011, we're promised a remake of The Birds. Yes, Hitchcock's The Birds. In that much at least, I'm very scared, but nothing else is frightening in movies like this.

5. Valentine's Day (dir. Garry Marshall)

The existence of this one is probably least surprising of all the films on this list- the world was yearning for that film that crossed Short Cuts with one of those 15-word crossword magazine tie-breakers that starts "Love is..." This vomit-worthy ensemble piece has more loose threads than a particularly unhinged jumper, and yet nothing to really grab onto. There are some starring here who know better, and had better work in 2010, but it doesn't change how I had to sit through a whole two hours of this.

4. Jonah Hex (dir. Jimmy Hayward)

This should be the subject of an episode of CSI at some point. Where did it go wrong? Which pillock cast Megan Fox? What was up with that prosthetic that stifled Josh Brolin so? Why was John Malkovich so rubbish? And was it really, as I suspected, directed by the horse who played Clint Eastwood's steed in the Dollars trilogy? The studio cattle brand might be all over its arse and it feels like watching the subject of a cold case investigation and wondering what happened to this Western along the way that mussed it up to be so crap.

3. Old Dogs (dir. Walt Becker)

For American audiences, this was one of the worst films of 2009, and it finally made a plop into UK cinemas in March. The worst out of this travesty is clearly John Travolta- at least Robin Williams redeemed himself later in the year with World's Greatest Dad, but Travolta only had the similarly execrable From Paris With Love. Together, they shared a screen in the most anti-Disney film imaginable, full of corporate back-and-forth, lame and occasionally racist jokes, and Seth Green being embraced by a gorilla.

2. Gulliver's Travels (dir. Rob Letterman)

The other late entry on the list is one I really wanted to put at #1/#150, but seeing as how it's failing massively at the box office anyway, it almost feels like it isn't doing enough harm. It harmed me though, filled as it was with outright offensive awfulness. It becomes ironic because of it's utterly un-ironic approach to depicting some little people who all gratefully accept whatever mass-culture detritus Jack Black has to give them, and now all of us "little people" aren't bothering to take this crap. Well, except me and a few others, who now share a sacred bond, and a shared suffering.

1. Vampires Suck (dir. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer)

Cheap, nasty and not as funny as just watching the Twilight movies it's supposed to be spoofing. Because it was cheap, it made its money back, meaning they're bound to turn out another lame spoof in 2011 despite their careers being thought dead before this latest atrocity. Because it was nasty, I'm appalled that they're going to be allowed to do it again. And because of all of the above, it's such a ringer for the title "Worst of 2010" that I'm almost tempted to disqualify it on the grounds of not being a film. I'm too angry for that, so let's put it up on this fridge of shit, where everyone can see it. FUCK THIS MOVIE.

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Tomorrow should bring the video special counting down my top 10 films of 2010, and we'll wrap up the New Year Bank Holiday weekend on Monday with a look forward to this year.

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

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS- Review

It's as bad as it looks. And worse.

Huh.

Sometimes I just...

Right, let's start with story, shall we? Theoretically, the story of Gulliver's Travels, created by Jonathan Swift to subtly satirise government and politics so as to avoid being executed for his views, is a travelogue by Lemuel Gulliver. Gulliver is shipwrecked in a country where the inhabitants are 1/12 of his height, and variously travels to several other weird and wonderful places as the narrative progresses and Swift's critiques of the established order are embellished.

In Gulliver's Travels, a film from the makers of Shrek and Monsters vs. Aliens, the tale is modernised to centre around Jack Black as the now more implausibly named Lemuel Gulliver, an dislikeable bumbag who is never going to get out of the rut of employment he's nestled into at the New York Tribune. After resorting to shameless measures with the travel editor to bag a writing assignment in the Bermuda Triangle, Gulliver winds up shipwrecked in Lilliput. And that's where any manner of faithfulness to the text ends.

I'm only putting the gloves on for the advertising. To go into a rant about how it's stupidly over-exposed in trailers and adverts, like The A-Team before it, belies how apt the advertising actually was. It was crude, it looked terrible, and I for one wanted nothing more than for it to fuck off and die every time it assaulted my eyes and brain. That's pretty much how Gulliver's Travels, the movie, turns out. Some honest fellow in 20th Century Fox's marketing department deserves a quicker death than his cohorts in this enterprise. 

Gulliver's Travels is bad. And I mean, really bad. That salient point is the only way I can quickly get across my thoughts and feelings on this utter train-wreck of a motion picture. It is without wit, without irony, without innovation and without thought or feeling for anyone silly enough to pay cash money to see it. More notably however, it's without laughs. The kids in the screening I caught will testify to that. I'm not making this up- many of them laughed at the trailers before the film, for coming attractions like Gnomeo and Juliet and Yogi Bear, and at the Ice Age short that played before the main feature. For the entire duration of the main attraction, the whole cinema was deathly silent. You'll have more fun reading about Jonathan Swift's descent into madness on Wikipedia is than watching this film.

But what's wrong with it specifically? Well, simply put, it's Gulliver's Travels a la Dreamworks. I have been harsh on Dreamworks in the past, but I am speaking literally here- one of the screenwriters worked on the first two Shrek films and the director is Rob Letterman, who made a decent job of last year's Monsters vs. Aliens. But think of everything that comes with a bad Dreamworks film. Inane pop culture references, repurposed but no less blatant product placement, unfunny jokes that aim no higher than the shins of the lowest common denominator, and most annoyingly in this case, Jack Black.

As a rule, I generally like Jack Black, no matter how much of a pounding he took in my estimation after A Clockwork Orange style consumption of that Orange advert for this film before each and every one of the 40 films I've seen in the cinema since August. The trouble is, his repetitive schtick can get sort of irksome, especially when you cast him as a character as flagrantly abominable as this film's rendition of Gulliver. People say he plays himself, but I can't quite believe the image of Jack Black in films is anything close to the man himself. Because otherwise no one would be able to stand working with him.

Towering over the cast of Liliputians as he does, there's a fair argument to be made that Black is acting in a different film to them, added in afterwards through the magic of green screens. Supporting players like Billy Connolly and Jason Segel and Emily Blunt and Catherine Tate and... well, most of the little people are better than films like this. Only James Corden seems on the same wavelength as Black, with the consequence that you actually root for Chris O'Dowd as the film's villain as he calls out Gulliver's every action for the bullshit that it really is.

It's even more of a wasted opportunity when you consider that there are no prominent grown-up adaptations of Swift's novel, which contains more invention and intelligence than anyone bothered with on this version. Nothing about it shows an understanding of the potential of the source material. Too often, themes of corruption and war are glossed over by the need for apparently box-ticking sequences involving Jack Black playing Guitar Hero with little people, or pretending that Star Wars is the story of his life (and even that idea has been done elsewhere), or fighting a Transformer, or having a fucking song and dance number.

And so its lack of irony actually becomes something quite interesting. Look at that supporting cast again- they're all English, except for Jason Segel who makes a good stab at an English accent. Along with his rambunctious nature and ego issues, Black's Gulliver brings with him the worst parts of American culture. To get political for a moment in a vain effort to reclaim the original text's perspective, is it possible that with David Cameron installed in government with the aid of News International, Murdoch subsidiary 20th Century Fox sees Britain as an island of little people who gratefully take what we're spoon-fed via cultural imperialism? As a commentary on hegemony, it could be quite fascinating. However, it's supposed to be Night At The Museum, and it's actually a big pile of shite.

If this version of Gulliver's Travels hadn't been made, someone would have made it up as a joke. Indeed, I know many people who were initially confused by the Orange adverts for this film, believing it to be a joke trailer in the vein of the company's previous campaigns about Danny Glover's Dial Hard or Sean Astin's Lord of the Ringtones. The trouble is, it does exist, and it's hard to find anything funny about this film's existence. Gulliver's Travels is rotten- plain and simple. It is assembly line fodder of the most outright stupid kind, and nothing brings me more cheer at the end of 2010 than to see this film failing to make bank. Keep up the good work by staying at home, away from its awfulness, and 2011 will look a lot brighter.

Gulliver's Travels is now showing in 2D and 3D, at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Gulliver's Travels, why not share your comments below? If you're wondering where this places on my bottom 10 list, rest assured it's on there- come back soon to find out what the other 9 are...

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

LITTLE FOCKERS- Review

In doing my reading around the film before I wrote this review of Little Fockers, I realised it's been six years since Meet the Fockers was released. I was much younger, and that film was quite funny, then. Now, it doesn't really hold up, and making me feel old just compounds the crimes of this worse sequel, in my view.

The Fockers of the title aren't that big a part of the plot, but they're Henry and Samantha Focker, the young twin children of Greg and Pam. With big plans for their upcoming fifth birthday celebration, Greg's father-in-law Jack Byrnes suffers a minor heart attack. His pride and legacy on the line, he begins training Greg to take over as the patriarch of the family in case Jack's heart condition should worsen. Does that sound funny? Hell, does it even sound like a narrative?

Let's name and shame the greatest offender in Little Fockers right off the bat- it's Dustin Hoffman. One of the first bits of news that came out about this long gestating sequel was that Hoffman wouldn't be returning as Greg's father Bernie Focker because the script they were going ahead with wasn't good enough. I like Dustin Hoffman, and can admire that decision. That he eventually consented to reshoots, inserting him so clumsily into the film that he might as well have been composited into scenes with a green screen shoot, means only one thing- they offered him the right amount of money.

For everyone else in the cast, I can believe that it wasn't the money. The script is terrible, but I could see this as a rainy afternoon movie. Not as in the kind of film audiences like to watch when the weather is bad and there's nothing on telly, but a film that these actors would resort to if they were stuck without anything else to do and wanted to revisit a formula that worked in the past. Look at this cast! Ben Stiller, Robert DeNiro, Owen Wilson, Barbra Streisand, Blythe Danner and Teri Polo all return, and Jessica Alba and Laura Dern sort of stand around smiling for the camera, and you have to wonder why this film exists.

Robert DeNiro really needs talking to. This is his second film on the trot that co-stars Jessica Alba, and it's getting embarrassing. Just because The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle is still his rock bottom, it doesn't mean that he shouldn't be trying harder than this. Jack Byrnes, like all of the other characters in the Fockers canon, is a character who does not grow, or develop. He is crabby, he mistrusts Greg, he gets into various misunderstandings, realises the error of his ways and appears to come out of things wiser. Except he just resets to zero at the beginning of the next sequel.

Thankfully, it's difficult to imagine Little Fockers doing well enough for anyone to demand another outing for the Fockers and their extended family. It's less a film and more like a TV sketch show spin-off, based on the first two films. It takes those characters and completely divorces cause from effect in its narrative construction, and gives us a series of comedy skits rather than a film. They must have some amazing jokes to justify the existence of this thing, right? Wrong.

This film is not funny. What it is, however, is repetitive. It repeats itself as much as the previous two instalments. Have you seen the trailer for this thing? Jack calls Greg to tell him that he needs Greg to take over as the Byrnes family patriarch, and become... and there's a pause, just to allow you to prepare yourself for the orgasmic hilarity of this joke. And after the pause, he says... the Godfocker. Well if your sides split hearing that exchange in the trailer, you'd better bring spare pants when you see the whole film, because the very next thing Greg says is "The Godfocker?" And then Jack reiterates, for the cheap seats and says... "The Godfocker."

It wasn't funny once. It was not funny the third time. And Little Fockers is the third time out for a franchise that outstays its welcome with the Godfocker exchange, with over 70 minutes left of almost mirthless flim-flam to enjoy. It made me smirk two or three times, but so disconnected is its script that every time we go down a thread that might potentially be very funny, we cut away to find out what Owen Wilson's doing to earn that sweet sequel salary. Dustin Hoffman almost made me laugh once, but I was still too upset with him to enjoy it. It's a weak end to the series, to say the least, because I don't know that it is the end, but if I at least say it is, it might come true.

Little Fockers is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Little Fockers, why not share your comments below? If you do ask for a fourth Focker film, and that comes to pass, I'm coming to get you.

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

TRON: LEGACY- Review

There is actually a sequel to Tron. And it comes almost three decades after the release of the original. We are now in a realm where all things are possible, and there's nothing Grid-like about it. I saw Tron for the first time yesterday evening, right before catching a midnight screening of Tron: Legacy. I may profess myself disappointed by Tron, but believe me, it's got nothing on the sequel as a sheer letdown.

The sequel picks up with Kevin Flynn having taken his company Encom to its peak after the ending of the first film, but then he disappears, leaving his young son Sam behind, all alone. Flash forward two decades and Sam gets a message that suggests his father might still be around, living in the computerised world known as the Grid and working on a breakthrough that could change the course of human history. Sam ventures into the Grid, and finds his father in hiding from his own digital counterpart, Clu, who rules the state with a pixellated iron fist.

At least Tron: Legacy starts how it means to go on, with an on-screen notice about how this 3D presentation features many 2D scenes. It only compounds the dishonesty of the gimmick by playing out this disclaimer only after cinema patrons have forked out extra for the "3D experience", taken their seats and sat through ten to twenty minutes of ads and trailers. The film starts out low, and continues to disappoint, specifically in how it looks in completely the other direction to its predecessor.

Even if Tron isn't that impressive, and looks dated by today's visual standards, prominently on display in this film in particular, there's a prescience about it. Tron was released before the Internet was widely known, but its relation of the inside of a computer to arcade games and social interaction could well be linked to the world wide web. In Tron: Legacy, every single thing is not only understandable in terms of every development in cinema and technology that has happened since, but also identical to them in so many ways.

It even borrows heavily from the first film in the name of in-jokes and references. Lines are repeated, shots are recreated, and it's practically a remake in all things except for the continuing arc of the elder Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges. Bridges plays Flynn very well, although burdened with a suddenly emergent tree-hugger outlook, but even the Dude himself can't manage to salvage Clu from the haze of overhyped de-aging SFX. There's not a single frame where Flynn's ageless doppelganger looks photo-real, even when framed alongside the computer generated vistas of the Grid. For his part though, Bridges does a damn fine job- it's always a pleasure to see him as nature intended.

With regard to other intertextual gubbins, the first half hour plods along with Center City looking an awful lot like Christopher Nolan's Gotham. And we're introduced to Garrett Hedlund's Sam, a protagonist so impossibly vacant that he couldn't be more dull if he were played by Shia LaBeouf. To break the monotony, he dives off buildings and breaks into corporate headquarters- in 2D, mind you- in a number of other scenes reminiscent of The Dark Knight. This also sadly includes how seriously it takes itself, which works less well for lightcycles and electric data frisbees than it does for a masked vigilante fighting mob rule.

Poor Michael Sheen also has very little to work with, and frankly, he's made to look like a twat in his role as Castor, the film's most useless and inexplicable character, who runs a disco for programs on the Grid, for some reason. He enlivens the proceedings in much the same way as Jar Jar Binks enlivened The Phantom Menace, and I'm not exaggerating. Olivia Wilde comes off rather better in her naive warrior woman role as Quorra, making her the most magnetic screen presence by default and a joy to watch whenever she gets to bounce off of Jeff Bridges.

Many negative reviews have said that Tron: Legacy is to Tron as The Matrix Reloaded is to The Matrix. I'm going to go one further, having already invoked Jar Jar. It's funny that Tron came out of a period in Disney's history when they tried to find the next Star Wars, and now years later, this sequel comes close to the drudgery that characterised George Lucas' largely abysmal prequels. It's not as bad as either Episode I or II, but it has all the clunky dialogue, over-reliance on visual effects and general matter-of-fact-ness about it that made those films such a pain.

Tron: Legacy might have decent special effects, but it looks and feels like the moodiest night out you'll ever have, set in a giant orange and blue neon-lit club where nothing really registers as important.  I've been wrong before, but I think Disney may have made a $200 million mistake. It's taking the slot in which Avatar broke the bank in 2009, and it's a similar mish-mash of recent developments that's not even as good as "Dances with Wolves in space". It feels like it goes on for way longer than its two hours, and the script is too incredibly convoluted to forgive or even to follow. Despite occasional and apparently accidental lapses into real entertainment, and great performances from Olivia Wilde and the proper Jeff Bridges, this last hope in a dismal Christmas movie schedule is a massive letdown.

Tron: Legacy is now showing in 2D and 3D, at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Tron: Legacy, why not share your comments below? If you think the Star Wars prequel comparisons are a tad harsh, come back when you've seen the film and your lexicon of words to describe the sun is suitably expanded...

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