“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is the most American movie ever. To be more specific, it’s an expensively, maybe even carefully, constructed meta-prank about America, pop-culture and other topics best left un-addressed by giant talking robots. “Revenge” can only be a goof. It must be—that it would make a boat load of money was a given, and with that goal out of the way, director Michael Bay, stars Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox and the rest of people responsible for this travesty must have had some other endgame in mind. Laughing with and at everything that is great and stupid about modern life in America seems as reasonable an explanation as anything presented in the movie, though that’s damning with faint praise indeed.
June 28, 2009
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
The subway is the fastest way to get around New York City, a fact that’s noted more than a few times in Tony Scott’s “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” a bland retread of the 1974 heist flick of the same name. The subway system is the city’s circulatory system and so long as the trains keep running, the city remains alive. Messing with something so important by, say, hijacking a subway car full of people would typically invite a sense of urgency, but everyone in “Pelham,” from the city employees tasked with saving the day down to the hijackers themselves, move along as though it’s no big thing. It’s a fine attitude to have when dealing with a crisis, maybe, but it’s the kiss of death for what should be a taut summer thriller.
May 31, 2009
Drag Me To Hell
“Drag Me To Hell” may just be the movie Sam Raimi has been waiting his whole career to make. Raimi is one of those directors who has vision to spare, with an off-kilter visual aesthetic and an expert understanding of how terror and comedy so often overlap. But he’s always been forced to make concessions, whether due to budget limitations, studio pressure or both. That’s why, as awesome as “The Evil Dead” is (and make no mistake, it is really awesome), it still feels like a rough draft when compared to “Evil Dead II,” and why other Raimi classics like “Darkman” and “Army of Darkness” are almost-but-not-quite exactly what the director initially had in mind.
May 17, 2009
Angels & Demons
After almost a decade of conservative Christianity dominating America’s social and political landscape, it feels like the never-ending debate between science and religion finally is entering a cooling-off period. But just like its protagonist, Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon, “Angels & Demons” rushes in just as the party is wrapping up, ready to breathlessly opine on the tenacity of faith and the power of science. Except, of course, “Angels & Demons” is a summer thriller, and so these central ideas that ignite the plot have about the same weight as a crossword puzzle where all the across clues are about the Pope and all the down clues are about particle physics. After that, all that’s left is for “Angels & Demons” to be thrilling, which it accomplishes just well enough to be entertaining.
May 5, 2009
Next stop, severed fingers: Shuttle
I’ve been on a few airport shuttle rides in my time, and most were miserable. But none were as taxing as the ride in Edward Anderson’s Shuttle. My review is up over at Cinema Suicide, so go check it out.
May 3, 2009
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Since he joined the X-Men in the mid-1970s, the clawed Canadian mutant brawler Wolverine has always claimed to be “the best there is at what I do, but what I do isn’t very nice.” And for most of Wolverine’s comic book escapades, it wasn’t really clear what he did, apart from kick ass, smoke cigars and grow epic facial hair. The character’s origins were kept shadowy, with vague hints that Wolverine (known only as “Logan” when not in costume) had done everything from fighting in World War II alongside Captain America to becoming a ninja in Japan. As new writers took on the character, Wolverine’s past got increasingly confusing, but his core elements—a life marked by tragedy, betrayal and rage and augmented with uncanny healing abilities and an unbreakable skeleton—remained the same.
Wolverine has always been the most popular of all the X-Men (he currently appears or stars in at least a half-dozen comics each month), and when the X-Men made their transition to the big screen in 2001, the character, as played by Hugh Jackman, quickly became the focal point of the franchise. When it comes to flagging film franchises, even the slightest ambiguities can be mined for new cinematic chapters, and so it goes that “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” arrives on scene, partly to reveal the true past of America’s favorite mutant and partly to help boost the X-Men films that stalled out after 2006’s “X-Men: The Last Stand.” If anything, the movie should have been big dumb fun, but everyone, including Jackman and director Gavin Hood, tackle the proceedings with such grim seriousness that “Wolverine” winds up being mediocre at best and a big dumb growling match at its worst.
April 28, 2009
On the third day, they scavenged
Here at Stately Clow Manor, we’re always looking for ways to keep life interesting and fun, and there are few things more interesting and/or fun than gallavanting around Dover in a quest to solve puzzles and collect random junk. That’s why my associate Mike and I started organizing a semi-annual Scavenger Hunt for our friends and neighbors–after all, the alternatives to a life devoid of interest and fun are simply too chilling to contemplate. And so it was in that spirit that we sent 15 players (divided up into 6 teams) on a mad journey throughout Dover this past weekend as part of a scavenger hunt/puzzle-solving adventure based in part on a certain Parker Bros. board game and a 1985 movie of the same name.
The task: solve a series of 18 puzzles, the solutions to which revealed the location of the murder, the suspect who committed the crime, and the weapon with which the dastardly deed was performed.
A sampling of some of the puzzles.
April 21, 2009
Crank: High Voltage
It took a little more than a decade, but someone finally did it: the internet has been made into a movie. That movie is “Crank: High Voltage,” a hyper-kinetic mash-up of the all the sex, violence, casual racism, stupid humor, cameos by washed-up celebrities, video games and sick videos that collect like artery-clogging sludge in the series of tubes that make up the internet. It’s a cinematic endurance test that is quite possibly the harbinger of the next generation of B-movies. “High Voltage” is a movie meant to be consumed, not pondered, and thinking too much about it as about as useful as thinking about a can of Monster Energy Drink.
