Tag Archives: movies

John Carter

John Carter isn’t nearly as terrible as everyone made it sound. I was pretty disappointed about that.

There might be spoilers in this review/coping mechanism to get me through the movie. You’ll only feel that they spoil the movie if a) you ever plan to see it and b) you’ve never seen a movie and c) you enjoy unexpected and fairly pointless scenes of alien baby-creatures covered in viscous mucous but prefer being pleasantly surprised by their inclusion in the movie.

If you were going to choose answer “c” I guess I already ruined it for you, so you might as well keep reading.

The movie just suffers from lack of a clear audience and characters you don’t care much about because of their flat affectation. But not that Wes Anderson-esque lack of affectation that’s minty-hipster-fresh, just…a dullness that suggests they’re all depressed to have to be in this movie but had no choice because their agents are doing a significant amount of gambling in riverboat casinos and can stop at any time, but so far, have chosen not to.

When I wrote the 1st draft, I had no idea that Wes Anderson is the great-grandson of John Carter’s creator. I read it on wikipedia so it must be true.

A Civil War vet named John Carter dies, leaving his nephew a journal that details the weekend he spent drinking slivovitz, a 100 proof damson plum brandy that he probably shouldn’t have been alternating with absinthe. In his defense, he just needed to take the edge off all that opium.

None of that is true, except the nephew and the journal, but it’s a slightly better movie if you believe that.

Carter kills an alien dude in a cave. The dude looks humanoid for whatever reason. Then we’re on Mars.

The lack of a clear intended audience leads to confusingly conflicting elements. John Carter has a gleeful and wacky leaping session in the weak gravity, and that scene really ought to be accompanied by a nose harp soundtrack and a couple of juvenile jokes, perhaps about nose-picking or how girls are icky or whatever else entertains 8 year olds. Then there’s a scene of a teenage girl being branded for misbehaving. A green, alien, teenage daughter, so it’s okay, I guess, but rationalizing the violence as being against a non-human Other doesn’t make it less incongruous when juxtaposed with the low-G frolicking.

When one of my ex-coworkers was a child, her family lived next door to Edgar Rice Burroughs. Storytime after tea was pretty cool. But not William S. Burroughs, because that would not be cool if you were a little girl.

I had some Gungan jokes about the aliens, but this movie wasn’t nerdtastic enough to deserve them. Even Michael Chabon as screenwriter wasn’t enough to salvage this thing from a vista of mediocrity so far and wide that, if you stare at it too hard, you’ll feel like you’re looking out a plane window while flying across west Texas. How did this happen?

The main problem with this movie is that it’s not bad enough to be funny, not good enough to be Bad. What it needs is Liam Neesen. We all know how well that turns out.

Wrath of the Titans (Or, this movie sucks so much it will break your furnace)

Wrath of the Titans is a clunky inept sequel to a clunky inept remake of a clunky inept movie from the 1980s. Young Boomers/older Gen Xers, who thought the original Clash of the Titans was great because they were young and impressionable when it first came out (and were probably stoned when they saw it) are now the people green-lighting the big budget IMAX 3D reboots of movies that they would realize weren’t very good if they weren’t currently working as “Creatives” and consequently making business decisions while smoking pot.

The people who greenlit this movie also know two things. One, that the kids who are willing to shell out weekend box-office don’t comprehend, or care, that the original movie was Not Great. Two, GenXers will Netflix or purchase the reboot in a fit of pique and/or out of misguided nostalgia. What this means is this: lots of people will get paid.

Everybody wins.

Except us, because we’re watching it. Right. Now.

This movie, like all movies, co-stars Liam Neesen.

Seriously. What the hell?

I just watched The Haunting (1963), one of the all-time scariest movies of all time ever. I spotted the 1999 remake on HBOHD and, being too sick to think, decided to see if it was as bad as I remembered.

It was. Got a post about that drafted, you’ll have to wait for it a little longer – the relevant point here is that the remake starred Liam Neesen.

Husband decided to watch all the Star Wars movies. We watched 4, 5 and 6 over the holidays. But we know who’s in the the first 3: Liam Neeson.

Our Tivo, OverLord II, recorded Unknown for us. Never heard of it. Looked at the description. Liam Neeson.

The Netflix fairy sent Battleship. Liam Neeson.

The Dark Knight Rises? Liam Neeson.

Maybe the connection here isn’t “Liam Neeson.” Maybe it’s “our questionable movie selection judgement.”

I’ve been sick for 3 weeks. I don’t know what Husband’s excuse is. I guess that doesn’t explain the last 20some years of our movie watching co-existence, does it?

Moving on.

I guess I have to quit copying IMDB links for Liam Neeson movies and pay attention to the screen if I want to describe Wrath of the Titans to you. There aren’t any spoilers in here. To be fair, I think to have a movie spoiled you probably need to care about the outcome. Trust me, no one should care about the outcome of this movie.

Except Liam Neeson’s agent, who should probably wake up with a horse head in his bed or something. This dude has been in some shitty, shitty movies.

Wrath of the Titans. Wrath of the Titans is about Perseus and Zeus and a bunch of other Gods who lived back in the Ancient Greek Lack of Hygiene World.

Liam Neeson is Zeus. His half-human son, Perseus, has to rescue him from the underworld and

I just realized I’ve been sitting here trying to remember why the guy woke up with the horse head in his bed in the Godfather and I’ve forgotten what came next in that unfinished sentence you see above this paragraph. I fall asleep every time I try to watch the Godfather. I’ve seen the scene but I have no idea what it means. (What? It was before my time. Plus I was afraid of New Jersey as a kid so the Godfather isn’t really my thing. Sorry).

Back to Wrath of the Titans.

Perseus has Poseiden’s pitchfork. It’s a Magical God Pitchfork, which means that it glows orange whenever it’s near manure, I think. That describes the overall quality of the script for this movie, so the pitchfork glows a lot. Husband thinks it might be more complicated than that, but Husband had to get up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday and work all day and he’s had a few drinks so I don’t know that you should trust him.

Plus, he’s still really bitter about the whole midi-chlorians thing, which he seems to be holding Liam Neeson personally responsible for.

So, Perseus has the pitchfork and he goes off to find his Dad.

Perseus ends up in a cave with Bill Nighy, one of our favorite actors. Nighy performs a monologue from a one-man Off Broadway show. Or outtakes from Love Actually. I’m not really sure, but I think it must be one of those. Then he shows Perseus and Andromeda a shortcut to destroy the Underworld that seems to defeat the whole “I’m on an epic quest” story-arc.

Husband: “There’s a small thermal exhaust port right below the main port!”

Liam Neeson, incidentally, was in Love Actually.

Wait, what’s Andromeda doing there? When did she show up? Perseus rode off alone on his Pegasus. Then he fought a bunch of badly rendered monsters and then I think he flew around some more.

Whatever.

Sometimes the dialogue is hard to understand. The sound mixing is actually pretty good. To be honest, the biggest problem is that we keep yelling lines from other movies, which makes it hard for us to hear the movie we’re watching. Husband hasn’t seen Taken, and neither of us has seen Taken 2 or the forthcoming Taken 3: the Quickening, but all of the trailers look the same so it seems safe to just make up dialogue.

Seriously, how many movies can there be in the Someone Stole Liam Neeson’s Daughter franchise?

It’s possible I made Taken 3 up…but I bet it gets made.

Since Perseus gets around on a fast-flying Pegasus, I’m not really clear on how all the other characters seem to be able to keep up with him. Nevertheless, Pegasus and Perseus go flapping away and everyone they left behind is just somehow with them in the next scene.

Husband: “A small one-man fighter should be able to penetrate the outer defense!”

Hang on a second, there’s some kind of fire-monster warrior guys attacking our band of plucky morons. That’s sort of cool.

Honestly, I have no idea what’s happening.

Husband: “Get this big walking carpet out of my way.”

The tagline for Wrath of the Titans is “Feel the Wrath.” That’s the best they could do?

Anyway, Andromeda and Perseus are on an epic quest. At some point while I was trying to make up a joke about feeling the wrath a bunch of shit happened and now I’m confused about who’s fighting who or what the quest is. It seems to have changed.

I actually thought the movie was over because they’d gotten out of the Underworld and put on deodorant (I think that’s what they were doing. I might be mistaken). But now the people who I thought were mortal enemies are fighting on the same side and I can’t figure out who in the hell they’re fighting.

Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers summed it up when he wrote, “…Clash of the Titans sucketh the mighty big one.”

We aren’t even bothering to recite movie dialogue anymore, we’re just moaning and mumbling to ourselves. Husband just said something about his blast-shield being down, but, having realized that the credits are rolling and our servitude is over, we’re both too busy scrambling for the remote to think clearly.

post-script
After the movie ended I was giving this post a quick edit to remove eighty percent of the profanity while Husband stared at the blank TV screen looking, frankly, happier than he’d looked over the last 92 minutes. That was when our furnace – which is located in the basement – directly below the television – emitted a terrible sound.

Husband has been down there for the last 10 minutes trying to repair it enough that it will limp along until Monday. Mostly, we’d prefer not to pay Double Jeopardy Magical Super-Overtime, or whatever the rate is you have to pay for a furnace repair at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night in February. Honestly, I’m also a little afraid if we call the furnace company they’ll send Liam Neeson over. Or, the more likely scenario will occur: my cough medicine will take control of my mouth and I’ll just blurt out a request that they not to send Liam Neeson.

They probably don’t get a lot of out-of-the-blue requests to not have Liam Neeson dispatched to people’s homes. It actually wouldn’t be the craziest thing I’ve ever called and asked them. Still, cross your fingers that Husband’s repair gets us through. Just in case, we won’t be subjecting the furnace to any more bad movies this weekend. It’s all Downton Abbey from here on out.

Yeah. Right.

Powdered Donuts

I spent hours today crafting a post about professionalism and web-presence. Then I glanced at twitter and all hell broke loose (in my brain).

I’m not, by any means, a fearless person. Still, I like to think that I don’t let any phobias control me, but I know that’s not true.

I’m deeply, utterly, completely afraid to eat powdered donuts.

Suffice to say it’s all because of Gamera Vs Guiran, Creature Feature with Dr. Paul Bearer, and the fact that a tiny irrational part of my brain wants me to believe eating powdered donuts will enable these women to open my skull and eat my brains:

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Today, Scientific American asks: “Nano-Powder on Your Donuts: Should You Worry?”

Hell, yes, you should worry!

You should lie awake all night tonight worrying about this, like I’m going to.

I haven’t even read the article yet, I’ve been so busy worrying about the headline.

Those women are going to try and steal all of our brains.

All. Of. Our Brains.

All of them.

Or, if you’re unconcerned with food safety and/or alien brain-suckers, you can revisit this early 21st century classic meme, (turn up your speakers) the creepy donuts, which is what I found when I searched my archives for a post about The Powdered Donut Monster Movie Incident of 1976.

Only 43 days until Halloween

There’s so much annoying stuff like life and school that’s always threatening to interfere with the highlight of the year: Halloween. I mean, really.

I will not be deterred. I’ve been contemplating a theme for months, although I haven’t had an easy time making a definitive choice.

I don’t know if I can be as ambitious as I was with 2010’s 31 Ghosts, but still, October 2012 needs a theme and Halloween is too generic.

I was thinking witches or werewolves, probably because my Tivo, Overlord II, keeps recording The Craft and Ginger Snaps every single time they’re on. A witch-themed October runs the risk of aggravating me because most movies about witches are filled with misogynistic bullshit or superfuckingannoying new agers, and that will distract from the fun. Drunken ranting mixed with critical theory? Never ends well.

I thought I’d covered Werewolves, but I was mistaken. I considered it in 2009, but clearly didn’t get very far.

Then I thought, what the hell? why not Witchcraft and Werewolves?

Just for the record, I don’t think this is a binary topic, Witchcraft OR Werewolves. I think there’s an interesting intersection of the werewolf and witchcraft genres in movies (or TV shows or books or graphic novels) where people transform into non-lupine creatures. Come on, you know there are going to be tangents and random selections made by Overlord II and things like that, anyway, so let’s just build in a little flexibility into the system and be done with it. There are loads of great examples, if you don’t believe me:

Wolverine? Maybe.

Maybe not. Probably not, because that was a terrible movie.

Cat People? Yes!

Plus other movie examples I’ve forgotten in the time it took me to type the last sentence and look up the links to both the 1942 and 1982 versions of Cat People and then spend a few minutes contemplating that Ronin Tunney is the girl in The Craft, which I looked up on IMDB a few minutes ago when I linked my earlier reference to it, and Robin Tunney looks familiar because she’s the boss on The Mentalist, which is a deeply stupid show I can’t stop watching even though I find Patrick Jane incredibly unsympathetic and the entire premise of the show a farce and the repetitive incidental music annoys the hell out of me and why the fuck has that show been on for FIVE seasons? This is the SIXTH season? Does the devil own Bruno Heller’s soul? Apparently not, since he was one of the producers of the failed Bionic Woman reboot. Not even, he was only the producer of the unaired pilot of the doomed series. But still, what the hell?