Archive for March, 2005

Melinda, Melinda… a review

March 31st, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »

Woody Allen really needs to change his name to Wooden Allen because he has the comic timing of a two by four in aisle number 2 at Ikea. It’s like listening your your grandfather try to tell a joke except that hopefully your grandfather doesn’t seduce you afterwards.

Why do actors line up to be in his films? Does he even make enough money to pay for the gas that the truck used to ship this crap out of the factory?

The movie’s concept is clever. He takes the same basic story and tells it twice. Once as a tragedy and once as a comedy. Wait… once it’s a tragedy and then it’s a drama. Um, maybe it’s Anime.

I don’t know what the hell it is, but it ain’t comedy.

Oh you think I’m being hard on Woody? (no pun intended)

Let’s delve into the pretentious world of rich white directors who live in New York and see how in touch they are with the common man shall we?

Will Ferrell is a struggling actor who explains that he once played the role of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion with a LIMP!! Oh I laughed, I cried.

Actually I didn’t do anything and neither did anyone else in the audience.

Wait… wait… later on he offers to play Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with a LIMP!!

Bwahahahahahahaha… you’re brilliant you child molesting pretentious piece of crap.

Maybe if he wrote the movie in iambic pentameter he’d give some English professor an embolism but the rest of us couldn’t give a shit.

How out of touch can you be?!!

Then there’s his ridiculous dramatic dialogue from the tragic moments.

When Melinda spins her tale of woe to her dear friend from college, she responds “I’m overwhelmed.” Wow… go easy on the emotion there baby. Don’t pull a groin muscle. If I just explained that my spouse caught me having an affair and took away my kids and then my lover dumped me and you clutched your chest and said “I’m overwhelmed” I’d be keying your car in the parking lot. How about a hug and a good old fashioned “Oh my God, I’m so sorry”?!!

Throw in some bullshit clarinet jazz soundtrack that sounds like an outtake of a black and white cartoon from 1920 and you’ve entered the bizarre world in which everyone is afraid to point out to this guy that he’s more out of touch with the common man than Howard Hughes was when he was collecting his own piss in ziplock freezer bags. Unless you enjoy that kind of thing, in which case knock yourself out. Please Mr. Allen… I beg you. Stop making films.

Millions… a review

March 30th, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »

Danny Boyle (the creative mind who brought us “Shallow Grave”, “28 Days Later” and “Trainspotting”), brings us the charming story of 2 young boys and a suitcase full of cash in the new film called “Millions.”

Try not to get this confused with the court transcripts from the Michael Jackson trial.

A charming movie about children? So far Danny’s movies have been about murder, heroin and flesh eating zombies. Yup, sounds like a natural transition. I can’t wait for the chain of Ron Jeremy and Axl Rose daycare centers to open next.

In “Millions” Damian and his older brother Anthony have lost their mother and have just moved into a new house with their widowed dad. As they try to settle into life at their school it becomes apparent that Damian is going to have a more difficult time fitting in than his brother if for no other reason than his obsession with Catholic saints and the graphic details of their grisly demise. It doesn’t stop there though, because the saints like to pop by and have a chat with him every now and then.

I hope he grows out of this. Imagine fumbling with your first bra and seeing Mother Theresia on the couch saying “It’s got 2 hooks you moron!!”

Contrasting Damian’s holier than thou past time is older brother Anthony’s obsession with local real estate values and the exchange rate of the Euro. Makes you want to go home and hug your X Box addicted rug rat eh?

One day as Damian watches a train rumble by a large suitcase full of cash falls out of the sky and tumbles into his lap.

What a coincidence!! Whenever I have a large suitcase of cash a stripper tumbles into my lap.

In that Damian is a religious zealot (I predict a seat in the American Senate coming his way) he naturally feels that this is a gift from God and after showing the cash to Anthony, Damian decides that the best thing to do is to give it all away.

Anthony has other ideas. He wants to buy a condo but it’s kind of hard for a 10 yr old to get a mortgage so he settles on paying girls to show him their naughty bits.

I love this kid.

Damian is the embodiment of innocence and so he wanders around the neighbourhood asking if people are poor and then shoves fists full of cash into their mailbox at night and thus the battle continues between Anthony’s desire to live like Gene Simmons and Damian’s desire to get a front row pass to heaven.

Then one day the “owner” of the cash starts to poke around and the movie takes an interesting turn.

My only problem with the film is that the whole “morality” aspect of it gets tossed to the side. People who are supposed to be raising cash for poor people in Africa reject their values and run to the mall to go shopping and reality takes a vacation as the “saints” start intervening inexplicably and sporadically.

Things start happening just for the sake of convenience and logic takes a vacation.

Unfortunately the bizzare ending takes a lovely movie and turns it into a curious oddity instead of the great family film it could have been.

It’s not bad, but it could have been much better.

The Ring 2… a review

March 21st, 2005 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

As anyone who watched the first “Ring” knows, the trick to lifting the curse from yourself is to burden someone else with it.



Oh, if only herpes was that simple.



It’s a year or two later and Rachel (Naomi Watts) has taken her creepy dead eyed son Aidan (David Dorfman) to a small town to escape the evil that beset them in Seattle. That’s like the kids from “Friday the 13th” just switching cottages to avoid the guy with the chainsaw. Evil has a car and GPS. You aren’t getting off that easily.



The film opens as a teenage boy gives his girlfriend a tape and tells her to watch it because it’s “really scary.” Nice guy eh? Well, at least it adds a whole new meaning to the term “Messy break up”. At any rate the teenage boy is a bit nervous because (as usual) he’s left it to the last moment and now he has to convince his girlfriend to watch the tape in the next 2 minutes or he’s toast. I fully admit that I left a few book reports until the lunch period before English class when I was 17 but this is a bit ridiculous. He had an entire week to curse someone else and this idiot waits until he’s getting the 2 minute warning?! Call me proactive but about 5 seconds after my buddy cursed me I’d be going over to the VCR display at Futureshop and cursing the people in aisle number 5.



When word of the teenager’s death (oh, sorry…. am I giving too much away here?) reaches the tiny newspaper where Rachel now works it all starts to sound a bit familiar and so she decides to go and look at the body. Anyone killed by the curse looks a bit… um…shall we say “distinctive” from your regular run of the mill heart attack victim, so when Rachel pops into the unattended ambulance to unzip the body bag her worst fears are confirmed.



My worst fear is that when I die the ambulance attendants will be off having a smoke and leaving my body unattended while a large burly man in a leather kilt lingers nearby but I digress.



Sensing the opportunity to put and end to the curse, Rachel takes the videotape and sets it on fire which leads us to the next logical question. If someone has come back from the dead and can kill people by imbuing her evil spirit onto a videotape do you think that there might be a remote possibility that it won’t be that easy? Does she think that Samara is playing hearts on her computer and then will get up to check her portal of evil and say “Son of a bitch… someone has melted the door out of here”? If a rat can chew through concrete the devil child is going to find a way back.



And that of course is where we start borrowing heavily from just about every other horror movie out there.



Samara has decided that since her abstract tape of evil is now a puddle of molten goo the best way to get revenge is to come out of the TV and possess the body of Aidan.



I have to check my abacus of plagiarism on this one. Is that ripping off the Exorcist or Poltergeist? Hang on, it gets better. Since Samara doesn’t sleep you can only be safe in your dreams. Does reversing the plot of “Nightmare on Elm Street” count as not stealing? That’s like a guy going out and killing nothing but hockey goalies on Saturday the 14th.



The Ring 2 starts relying heavily on what I like to call the “33.3% Rule” of horror. At least 1/3 of of the time that you look into a reflective surface or close the medicine cabinet door the audience will see the evil spirit standing behind you. Likewise, anytime that you are engrossed in reading something or examining an object there must be at least a swelling of music to make us THINK that Samara is hiding over there behind the couch but she won’t really be (except 1/3 of the time when she will actually be over there).



The worst example of stealing from a movie is at the end when Rachel (more or less) screams out the same line that Ripley gave us in “Aliens 2.”



“I’m not your mother bitch.”



If I had never been to the movies in my life it might have been scary, but it’s to horror movies what a pie in the face is to comedy.



In short, this movie sucks. Avoid at all costs.

Hostage… a review

March 21st, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »

The camera slowly pans over the mountains and glides over a bathroom sink as we gently drop down to eye level like a soap bubble. Welcome to the B.S. world of cinematography when you get a European director doing a North American action flick.

Listen, you can put silk panties on a sow if you want but it still looks like a pig to me.

I don’t want my action films to look like outtakes from a National Geographic special on airborne bacteria in the bathroom, ok Pierre?

As usual Bruce Willis is a former hostage negotiator who had one of his cases go horribly wrong and now he’s now retired from the biz. It’s like the season opener to every episode of 24!! Just once wouldn’t it be nice if these guys were good at their jobs and still employed at them? It always seems to be a retired cop/firefighter/bomb disposal agent who gets pulled back into his old profession because he happened to be eating lunch at the wrong place, or knows someone who is in danger (family, former coworker, lover) or just happens to be on the airplane when stuff goes down.

Note to self, never go on vacation with Bruce Willis. The moped will have microfilm in the gas tank.

In this instance Bruce is the chief of police in a small town (hey, at least he’s not an unemployed alcoholic like I was expecting) and for reasons unexplained 3 teenagers decide to pursue a luxury SUV to it’s gated high security home in an attempt to steal it.

If I see one more scene in a movie where people are scaling a wall just as the guy sitting in front of the security camera looks away I’m going to hurl. What’s the point in having the $50,000 security system if you have to put a coffee addicted non blinking schmuck in front of it 24/7? They always seem to be tying their shoes when the bad guy splices in the fake security tape anyway.

Here’s an idea. Might I suggest that you put a spiky fence around your property? How about a yappy poodle? A light with a motion detector on the back porch?

Anyway, apparently the rich family not only have an easily scaled wall, but they don’t have locks on their doors because as soon as you can say “first plot point” the teens have walked into the house, beaten the father and killed a police officer who showed up to investigate their abandoned pick up truck on the side of the road. How’s THAT for 5 action packed minutes?

Now, if I had just broken into a house and was terrorizing a family at gunpoint the last thing I’d do would be to gun down a cop on the doorstep. It really tends to tick the neighbours off and you’ll never get a pizza delivered as long as there is a corpse laying around out there. The kids today have no sense. I hear that Texas now offers a high school credit called “Shooting Cops-Bad-101″

If you were thinking that this would be a very similar movie to “The Negotiator” you’re half right. The rich guy does happen to have some information that the baddies want but instead of trying to kill him, they kidnap Bruce Willis’ family and force him to retrieve an encrypted DVD with some overseas banking information on it.

Let’s discuss some holes in the old plot shall we?

In this house there is an extensive series of office building style ductwork running throughout the premises that the youngest urchin seems to enjoy playing inside of. In fact, our young Indian Jones has built himself a veritable tree house inside complete with Christmas lights, comic books and ladders.

How did the builders explain to the owner that the 4000 sq ft house he paid for has only 3000 sq ft of living space but you could park a Hum Vee in between the living room’s walls? How much air conditioning does this house need? Are they barbecuing a water buffalo in there? It looks like they bought the air conditioning unit from a garage sale at the Aliens 4 movie lot. Secondly why are air ducts always back lit with a blue light? Who puts a lighting unit in their ductwork? And another thing… where’s the freaking dust? Would it have killed them to sprinkle a bit of talc in there? Come on, at least make it a LITTLE dirty. Also, this kid has the run of the house. He pops out of said ductwork into his sister’s room (could be a bit embarrassing if she had just finished showering eh?) as well as (and this is the beast part) his dad’s panic room. That’s right, dad has a room with a 2 way mirror, bullet proof glass, and a large vault like door but there’s a man sized vent above his shoe tree that can be accessed from anywhere in the house. Oh details… details…

Then there’s the fact that Junior knows the combination to his father’s gun box. You know, I always tell my 8 year old the whereabouts of my personal “hand cannons” just in case he wants to blast a few sparrows in the back yard.

Now, let me ask you another question. If you had a group of fake FBI agents why would you bother kidnapping the Chief of Police’s family? They even go so far as to tell him to take over the hostage negotiations but not to enter the house. Why not just send you goons in and bypass the whole Chief of Police anyway? This part made no sense to me. At first I thought they needed to get a man in the house (i.e Bruce) but when they showed up with a crew of 10 guys with machine guns, armored vehicles and night vision goggles I was a bit confused. It’s like asking your 5 year old daughter to make butter sandwiches for everyone until Martha Stewart shows up with her smoked salmon croquettes.

The last 20 minutes is a mess of slow motion explosions and preposterous action scenes as one of the crazy teens starts taking out the trained assassins in full body armour while the house burns to the ground.

As far as action movies goes, it’s still better than a Dolph Lungren flick but I’d wait for the rental.