Sarcastic Movie Reviews

I’ve been intellectually raped! I’ve been bent over and rogered with a copy of “Psychology Today”. I feel like I dropped the soap at a Mensa meeting.

What I’m getting at is when I watched the trailer of Wicker Park it appeared that the movie was a psychological thriller.

Sort of, “Single White Female” meets “The Vanishing”.

“Matthew’s girlfriend Lisa just disappears one day in the park and he spends the next 2 years wondering what happened to her. He meets a girl and she attempts to help him unravel the mystery but as she starts to fall in love with him we wonder if she had something to do with Lisa’s disappearance.”

Wow. What a gripping idea. We envision a frenzied climax with Matthew shaking the girl screaming “What have you done with Lisa?!!” Perhaps she attacks him with a sledge hammer like in “Misery” and locks him in a secret room so that she can keep him as her pet.

Well, forget it kids. The trailer LIED. You have as much chance of seeing what I just described as O.J. does in becoming a spokesperson for the Ginsu Knife Company.

Rollerskating monkeys will deliver keys to your new Porsche before this movie delivers on THAT promise.

Let’s discuss what the movie is REALLY about.

Josh Harnett (he of the terminally constipated expression) plays “Matthew” a talented photographer who works for his girlfriend’s brother’s advertising agency. One day while having a business lunch with a Chinese client Matthew thinks that he sees his ex girlfriend from 2 years ago. Rather than flying to China later on in the day, Matthew decides to take a hotel key that the phantom girl leaves behind and sneak into her room. This is after he takes a sleeping pill that makes him drowsy so he naturally falls asleep on the bed and dreams about how he first met “Lisa” (his ex) from 2 years ago.

Oh yeah. I wish I had a dollar for every time I thought I recognized someone and then broke into their hotel room and fell asleep in their bed. Even Goldilocks would be slapping this guy and saying “What are you, nuts?!!”

Gee Mat, maybe Lisa dumped your ass because you’re an unbalanced stalker loser who is willing to throw away his career to add another line to his already impressive criminal record and restraining order collection.

I could understand hanging out in the hallway, the hotel lobby, or the restaurant. Hell, you could even rent a room on the same floor and wait for her, but using the hotel room key and waiting for her in her bed is a bit…. um…. odd?

Listen I have fantasies of coming home and finding women waiting for me in MY bed but they’re just that…. FANTASIES!! If I did come home and a naked woman was in there I’d be checking my DVD collection to see what she ripped off and applying a choke hold to her while I dialed 911.

ESPECIALLY if it was an ex girlfriend!!

Normal people wait for an invitation to climb into your bed. You might want to jot that down for future reference.

The creepier part is that when he dreams about Lisa we discover that he stalked her 2 years before as well. He worked in a video store and saw a tape of her in a camera that a customer brings in. When he recognizes her on the street a few days later he starts following her.

Isn’t that sweet? Isn’t that romantic? Where’s my freaking pepper spray?!!!

Somehow she ends up giving him her number and they fall in love.

Awwwwwwwww…. that’s so beautiful. All of the 16 year old girls in the audience clutch a crumpled Kleenex to their chest as they sigh out loud. All of the 26 year old women who’ve had the misfortune of dating a possessive stalker freak shake their heads in disbelief.

Oh well, this is Hollywood where tales of cheating spouses become romantic movies about forbidden love. Are you listening to me “Bridges of Madison County?!!”

Back to the present for now.

Matthew wakes up and steals her antique silver compact from the hotel room. I guess 2 felony charges weren’t enough for him. Theft rounds off the list so nicely. Maybe he could stab the chambermaid on the way out and hit for the cycle!!

This is one of those annoying “screw with the time line” movies where we don’t know what the hell is happening for the first 45 minutes or so. Listen Hollywood. It isn’t clever anymore. Sure it was kind of cool in “Pulp Fiction” but after “Memento” and “28 Grams” I just started wanting to slap directors.

Wait, it gets better. Matthew figures out where Lisa lives and now he hides in the stairwell waiting for her to come home. Instead her boyfriend shows up and leaves a rose on her doorknob as he slides a letter under the door. We already know that Matt is an unbalanced future serial killer so it comes as no surprise to us when he fishes the letter out and discovers that it conveniently contains a KEY.

Why stop now you obsessive freak? You’ve lost your job, will lose your girlfriend when she discovers what you’ve been up to and are already looking at a nice cell with a bitching view of the workout area in a Texas prison. Go let yourself in. Maybe you could masturbate in her sink to top things off.

As he’s in there sniffing her clothes he hears the door open and he panics. Geeze…. maybe this isn’t a great idea after all.

He hears a woman come in and after initially hiding he wanders out saying “Lisa?!!”

Well, it’s Lisa all right but not his ex. She freaks out, bites his hand and almost crushes his skull with a statue.

Finally, something that makes sense!!

Oh wait. She’s not calling the police. What?!! She’s bandaging his hand and pouring him a drink? What?!! She’s letting him sleep on the couch?!! Now she’s getting naked and they’re having sex?!!

I thought this guy was already involved but was willing to give it all up to look for his long lost love. Now he’s humping some other chick on the coffee table.

Hey Matt, IF she decides to charge you with rape after this how will you explain that you have her teeth marks in your hand, and have already broken into her hotel room AND her apartment?!! See, now that would be another decent thriller twist but this movie will have none of that.

Ok, I’m going to stop here because the stories start to intertwine in a ridiculous series of amazing coincidences that would just have you saying “As IF”, or “Huh?” as I tried to explain them.

Suffice to say that the movie is really about love lost, love found, unrequited love and … uh…. break and enter.

The 16 year old girls were all weeping and wanted to marry a guy JUST LIKE MATT. To which I say there’s tons of them out there. I’ll book your safe house now and it’ll be waiting for you in 3 years after psycho boy has thrown your cat off the balcony and written a poem to you with his blood on the hood of your car.

As for the marketing people at MGM I’d tell them to expect a decent opening weekend followed by the burning to the ground of their homes by an angry mob.

Ok, it’s a little bit “Silence of the Lambs” and a little bit “Seven”, but not as creepy or as suspenseful as either.

Let’s call it “Silence of the Sevens.”

Our movie opens with a rather large traveling salesman having a bite to eat at a roadside café during a thunderstorm in the middle of the night.

Ohhhhh ….scary kids.

The lightning flashes and a silhouette of Ben Kingsley appears in the window. The audience chuckles because you’d know that bald head and set of jumbo ears anywhere. Would it have killed them to give him an afro?

At least some Brit Pop bed head a la Oasis?

ANYWAY, Ben is one creepy little dude. He sits his ass in the seat across from our burly traveling salesman and starts tossing charcoal etchings onto the table that make Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” look positively cheery. I don’t know how tall Ben Kingsley is in real life but I’m thinking that he’s in there somewhere between Prince and Dustin Hoffman.

In short…. Ben is short.

If I was eating my grilled cheese sandwich in the middle of nowhere and Gary Coleman started tossing smudged sketches of screaming babies in front of me I’d stab him with my fork and stuff his size 3’s into a cup holder. Not this guy. He gets spooked and shambles off into the wet, deserted, dark, parking lot all alone because we all know that’s what we’d do if Charles Manson asked us for the ketchup on Interstate 45.

As luck would have it he doesn’t check the back seat and this has really, REALLY bad consequences for him Ahhh yes.

The old ’serial killer hidden in the back seat trick’. It’s nice to see the classics still have legs in Hollywood.

Bring on the FBI agent!!

Shall we go with the “gifted but just out of the academy” character, or the cop who is in trouble with his superiors so they stuck him out in the middle of nowhere?

Decisions, decisions….

Agent Mackelway suffers from headaches and visions which get worse as he starts getting baited by Ben’s character. His fax machine gets clogged up with posters of missing children with 6 digit numbers scrawled along the top but he keeps investigating these grown men who end up dead and are missing their eyelids. What’s the connection?

Throughout it all Ben plays a weird tape recorded message that places him into a trance as he sketches more posters that look like photos from a Marilyn Manson concert. After each episode he seals the sketches in a large envelope and labels them carefully. It’s very important for serial killers to be neat and organized in Hollywood.

That’s why people have nothing to fear from me. I live in filth and clutter. Forget about me killing you or your loved ones, I can’t even be bothered killing the germs in my apartment. The only thing I kill is time as I look at the mop in the corner and say “ehhhh… I’ll clean up that spaghetti stain LATER.”

If I ever start ironing my shirts start to worry!!

Of course we’re missing the love interest so Agent Mackelway’s previous “partner-slash-lover” (played by Carrie Anne Moss) is brought in to help him out. A www… that was nice of them, except they hate each other.

When did hatred become foreplay in real life anyway? I know it’s a rule in Hollywood that whenever someone annoys you it usually leads to a sweaty embrace somewhere but I only screw people I hate metaphorically.

I’d like to see more of these former couples putting sugar in each other’s gas tanks or at the very least dropping a cup of hot coffee in each other’s laps.

To no one’s surprise Agent Mackleway starts to wig out after the 50th headache and after he suggests an insane theory about what Ben is doing he’s forced to “take some time off”.

Let’s go to Beverly Hills!!

Oooops, wrong movie. Sorry.

Whew… that was almost 20 minutes in between Hollywood clichés.

As usual when a cop is forced off the case he keeps his weapon and a large file folder full of information so that he can discuss in vivid detail with his “still on the job” partner what he’s going to do so that when he finally confronts the serial killer by himself, his former lover can save his ass at the last second.

Or something to that effect.

They attempt a twist in this movie but I figured it out after 10 minutes so let’s call it a quarter turn.

It’s not horrible, but I still say no one is creepier than good old Kevin Spacey in Seven, or Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs..