Category: Film

For the moment, imagine there’s a picture of Megan Fox’s boobs here.

Oh, there they are. Very good.

There is practically no purpose served by writing about Revenge of the Fallen, because it’s already been said. The bombast has been brought, and it has been good, from Roger Ebert’s “horrible experience of unbearable length” to the Awl’s "fall[ing] into a city sized Cuisinart” and io9’s argument of the film’s merit as a breakthrough piece of avant-garde movie making. I have a certain barometer in my office, a man of diplomatically different tastes to my own. Even he was unhappy with the film, thinking that Michael Bay should maybe have dialed it back a bit so that he could have an idea of what was happening. That said, he liked the twins, so we're all doomed despite the little beams of hope that penetrate the dense canopy of hopelessness that is the modern cinema.

I have since learned to stop asking people what they thought of it because so many responses I have received have been depressing in their likeness: how “awesome” is a word that could ever be applied to this visual and narrative mess is entirely beyond my ken. One of my best friends informed me in a text that it was good, "not as good as [the] first but that often happens”. You can never really know a person …

The fact of the matter is that Revenge of the Fallen is so bad that after a time I started feeling nostalgic for the first movie, which is odd considering that I’ve spent the last two years bitching about it on street corners to whomever will grant me an audience. I don’t know if there’s such a strain as “Super Stockholm Syndrome”, whereby your present captor is so bad that you find yourself longing for the tender embrace of your last, but I think I got myself a case of that.

This movie gets so exponentially worse as it progresses that you long for the minutes when it was absolute shite rather than whatever expletive it evolves into. Sam’s mother ended up becoming a highlight of the movie, and she was really just crude and shrill up to that point. I’ll probably go to my grave not knowing what the point of the French interlude was, or why the audience hung on every word that Sam's idiot parents spew forth from their gormless gullets.

I got the impression after a while that Megan Fox was the only person on the film actually trying, and her performance actually endeared me to an actress whom I traditionally see as an inexplicable holy grail for heterosexual men. When she started bouncing away from explosions in slow motion, I laughed legitimately for the first time. She brings a sort of warmth to the role of Mikaela (Mikaela … Bay?) that is lacking in the remainder of the movie, no matter how many times we see Shia LaBoeuf shed tears for his precious robot chums.

This was truly a schadenfreude experience for me, seeing it with a friend who thought that the first film was a masterpiece, without exaggeration. He ended up comparing Revenge of the Fallen to the Matrix sequels. My friend Tony declared that Dragonball Evolution was a better film, and we came out of that in a waking dream that we only shook an hour and a half later. I’ve also heard unfavourable comparisons to Speed Racer, which isn't fair at all. Speed Racer tested credulity, challenging me to acknowledge and accept and at least try to understand its existence. Eventually I came to terms with it as something that should not exist but was awesome purely because it was able to gain a foothold in our dimension. I understand why Revenge of the Fallen was made, and it depresses the Hell out of me.

There's probably some rider in my contract that says I have to go into more detail about the movie itself. You may have detected that I don't really give a damn about this execrable excursion into the cinematic form, so it goes without saying that there will be spoilers.

Again, I find myself feeling like a traitor, a stranger in a strange land: I’ve seen a franchise film in a franchise that I’ve forever been indifferent to. Star Trek is a franchise I was never really the right age to get into, and prior to JJ Abrams’ latest outing I’d only seen Generations at the cinema and that one where Data swears (that’s really all I remember of that particular title).

I’ve had a rough few weeks at the cinema. I wanted something good that I could watch without wanting to tear somebody’s eyes out. I got precisely that from Star Trek. I was so grateful for the quality of the experience that tears sprang to my eyes a few times. It was just that beautiful.

It was so well done that, after saying “Eric Bana was the villain?”, Raymond was then heard to remark “the characters were good”. They are. Star Trek is essentially a character driven film with a more than working story that effectively sets up a new Trek continuity in a wholly accessible way. I know that a lot of people are going to avoid it by virtue of it being Star Trek, but they’re doing themselves a grave disservice. I’ve ran into so many people who have loved Wolverine, though, that I simply don’t know what to think of society anymore.

Basically: watch Star Trek.

Bad movies need to stop being made or else I am going to die. Today’s plan was to write a screed about reviews in response to Shamus‘ review lore. But first I am going to have to kill X-Men Origins: Wolverine in the face for being such a slipshod, lazy and uninteresting movie. Even as someone who doesn’t have an investment in the X-Men franchise, it wouldn’t have taken much to make this movie enjoyable. The premise of the franchise is sound: dudes have cool powers, get discriminated against because of it, and blow shit up in a variety of ways using those powers.

If you’ve seen the trailer for Wolverine you’ve seen all of the cool bits. The extent of the long awaited Gambit’s involvement is really throwing a few cards and using a sort of shock stick (I’m not a scholar; I don’t know the technical terms). What you have left after that is a total lack of momentum and a lot of smirking from Liev Schreiber. Hugh Jackman’s arms really cannot carry a movie by themselves, not even in conjunction with the unmercifully brief showing of Ryan Reynolds’ arms. It’s just not on.

Twitter is the place to go if you want a fairly instantaneous review from me, and I said all that needed to be said in 123 characters:

Wolverine was poorly shot, badly motivated and the characters seemed little more than cameos. I would recommend against it.

But I’ll write a little more and get the word out. I would suggest that if you were a kneejerk reactionary who doesn’t think about his choice of words, you could suggest that several of your favourite X-Men characters have been “raped” by this movie. If you want to say stuff like that, I’ll see you for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in a couple of months!

There’s a right way to go about making a film centring on nostalgia, and Richard Curtis’ The Boat That Rocked goes about it the right way. Casting aside the shackles of romantic comedy that have burdened him for so long, Curtis has produced a funny, largely plotless, broadly charactered examination of a period of time plainly dear to him accompanied by an excellent soundtrack.

Knowing is probably not 2009’s The Happening, but that doesn’t make it a good film. It takes a special kind of movie for me to say “but nothing’s happened” when fifty minutes remain and I’ve borne witness to a fiery plane crash and a lengthy train derailment – and all at high speeds!

Knowing is a singularly unconscious film. It’s impossible to pinpoint the genre of a film that can’t decide whether it’s a supernatural mystery, a thriller, horror or a treatise on the apocalypse. It doesn’t quite manage to be any of them and the result is not so much incoherent as it is inconsequential. If the audience (that is, me) doesn’t care about the fate of the world, let that mother burn.

I realised, after watching the Watchmen film today, that I had been approaching it as an adaptation rather than as a film. I really don’t know how it is as an actual film, apart from the fact that it is quite long with no indication as to its pacing if you’re unfamiliar with the story, and that it remains fairly episodic.
What do I think of it? The reviews have been mixed, I know. Unlike Wil Wheaton, I have not been waiting for Watchmen for more than twenty years. Unlike Roger Ebert, I don’t consider it a four star film.
A brief history of me and Watchmen: I bought it about eighteen months ago, and read it last month. As is the case with such things, the moment of consumption is the moment that you kick yourself for not doing it earlier. It was very good. I was even moved at points, and would describe the end of chapter eleven as one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen in comics.

The movie is brought to us by “the visionary director of 300“. I advise rereading that sentence. If it makes you shout “THIS IS SPARTA!”, carry on. If it makes your eyes roll back into your head and your mouth begins to foam, I accept no responsibility for your medical bills. I’m not sure how much of a visionary you have to be to produce near carbon copy faithful recreations of comic books, but I’m not sure that Zack Snyder is one … particularly in light of the fact that, despite the absolutely ridiculous fidelity to the source material, Watchmen differs in places both minor and key … including the much talked of yet infuriatingly vaguely whispered new ending.

SPOILER CITY FROM THIS POINT FORTH

NO, SERIOUSLY, I SPOIL THIS MOVIE SO HARD

I find this poster offensive.

I’ve long been a proponent of matching a trailer to a film. This has never been clearer than the last few weeks, my beloved Oscar Season. I understand that sometimes there simply aren’t enough films to match to any given film, particularly if that film is heavy. Still, some things aren’t quite excusable.