enjoyable crap

another catch-all thread–this time for disposable entertainment that goes down easy but doesn’t warrant much analysis. recently in this genre for me: the flight of the phoenix via hbo ondemand. apparently, this is a remake of some b-movie from the 60s. i don’t know if i would have been happy paying $8.50 for this but free it was worth every cent. a bunch of people crash-landed/stranded in the gobi desert (which looks suspiciously like the sahara) rebuild their plane and fly out (what? did the name of the film not already give this away?). dennis quaid as a bit of an arrogant jackass whose arrogance causes the crash (but no one seems too upset when they find out); giovanni ribisi having a very good time as a fop of uncertain origin (in the role originally played by hardy kruger!); and a lot of sandstorms. in many ways this was like a slimmed down version of “lost”: a bunch of people stranded in the middle of nowhere with no one coming for them, danger both from nature and from “others”, one passenger who reveals remarkable hidden abilities; but most importantly: no stupid backstories. unfortunately, also no evangeline lilly. but you can’t have everything.

as homer would say, “i didn’t learn a thing”–except maybe to not go out alone to pee in the dark in the middle of a sandstorm–and thank god for that.

97 thoughts on “enjoyable crap”

  1. Frisoli, Ribisi. I get ’em confused because of names. I can’t tell Italians apart.

    I was kind of bored by Flight, except for the guy dying horrifically after peeing, but I’ve seen the old one–which I probably enjoyed in exactly the same way you enjoyed the new one: cheaply, and mindlessly. That one had Jimmy Stewart, too (plus!), and Richard Attenborough (big, big minus).

  2. i’m not still young and smashingly handsome?? richard attenborough is typically a minus, though not bad in The Great Escape, a pretty overrated movie. Mike, you racist! Italian-American is still a special affirmative action category in New York!! suck on that, you mopes.

  3. I found Flight to be boring as well. But I will warn everyone that Mr. and Mrs. Smith is crap, crap, crap! Not even fun crap just “what were they thinking” crap. Brad Pitt has zero charisma . . . what’s up with his starshine? The two leads have some chemistry but Mrs. Pitt is more of a grotesque Thunderbirds puppet head than the Harry Potter kid. Angelina Jolie frightens me.

  4. watched “red eye” last night. disposable entertainment that clocks in at 76 minutes. efficiently done, but no real thrills. cillian murphy is creepy though.

  5. too bad the lugubrious Batman Begins didn’t use more of Murphy as The Scarecrow–his face alone creeps me out.

    somehow earlier I had missed Jeff’s post, expressing his hatred for Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I actually enjoyed that movie, finding that it had a rather light touch, despite pushing the “sexiness” of its stars too much. and yes, angelina jolie may be a little offputting, but I’d wear a vial of her blood around my neck for a couple of weeks.

  6. we saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith last night and didn’t dislike it. i agree that brad has zero charisma (bizarre, isn’t it?), but, unlike you guys, i thought that angelina was great. when they are about to go out and fight the baddies and brad is scared and she comforts him by saying that it’ll be a “piece of cake”, she gave me the shivers she was so sexy. i want to post more properly on action movies in which the gender politics seem actually all right, but let me say here in anticipation that i think this is one of them.

  7. the cave. saw the preview for this on another dvd recently, and then a colleague with equally lurid taste recommended it. completely incoherent, not very well edited but many notches above something like virus. it would have been a lot better if the filmmakers had embraced the b-movie aesthetic; instead they try to get above the material (which would have been very well suited to an early season x files monster episode) and almost wreck it. i can almost hear the studio pitch: “it’s like alien meets pitch black in an underwater cave!”. they set up for a sequel at the end–if it materializes it will likely be straight to video, and thus may be good.

  8. OK so here’s an example of what I find to be enjoyable crap: Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Crustaces et Coquillage (better known in America as Cote d’Azur). This breezy, inconsequential French sex farce stirs together a little Shakespeare (think As You Like It), a little Feydeau, a lot of flesh, platters of shellfish, unexpected musical numbers, infidelity, masturbation, same-sex desire, and one gorgeous young man (Romain Torres who looks 15 but is probably in his early-twenties) who appears to be the highly desirable love-child of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. The plot is just too silly to recount, but I found this erotically charged, ambisexual romp to be flirty (albiet pleasurably crappy) fun. The directors, whose previous films have been the charming, queer coming-of-age drama My Life on Ice and the equally queer Funny Felix are obviously branching out and engaging all the colors of the rainbow.

    OK . . . I did watch the first 25 minutes of Elektra the other night, and it was a lot better than I imagined it would be. Tightly edited with a minimum of cheese but I just couldn’t follow it through to its obvious conclusion. Still, I am interested in this idea of the female as the new action hero. What is that about? And around the corner is yet another example of this newly emergent genre: Ultraviolet.

  9. “Still, I am interested in this idea of the female as the new action hero. What is that about?”

    not so new, just recycled. Have we forgotten Police Woman, Cleopatra Jones, Modesty Blaise, Bloody Mama and the like?

  10. jeff, how does the process of “finding [insert name of film, or description] to be [insert adjective and abstract noun here]” work? does this involve a separate layer of intellectual activity after the film viewing has ended? also, what is “ambisexual”? is that like being ambivalent about sex or does it refer to sex in ambulances?

    as for the film you describe, it sounds exactly like a weekend with frisoli–except there’s nothing unexpected about his “musical” numbers.

  11. Well you know . . . I find films (this process, however, rarely involves anything so technologically complex as a divining rod), I classify them, attach the odd adjective to them if necessary, run a string of descriptive words together to situate the film to you lot in some recognizable way and voila! Ipso-facto! Presto-redundo! Sounds like life at Frisoli’s to be the wave of the future (does he too live on the Mediterranean?

    According to http://www.dictionary.reference.com, ambisexual means: Suited to either sex; unisex: “The patterns also are available for men because [the designer] believes in ambisexual fashion” (Women’s Wear Daily). But you knew that already didn’t you arnab?

  12. so, if i understand you correctly when you say this film is an “ambisexual romp” you mean that it is suited to either sex? and when you “find something to be fun” you’re not saying you enjoyed it.

  13. i discovered last night that we also get encore ondemand on digital cable and that i now have access to even more films i didn’t feel a strong urge to watch in theaters. among them this week is deep rising. i remembered mike saying good things about it on the “utter crap” thread and so decided to watch. it was time excellently spent and i recommend it as well for anyone who likes movies in which treat williams and a bunch of mercenaries battle deep sea monsters on giant luxury ships on the south china sea. well, maybe that’s a very specific niche. it is not the most efficiently made film–the setup in particular is weak–but the script is witty throughout, the actors well chosen, and it doesn’t get caught up in special effects (perhaps because the budget was manifestly low). why treat williams never became a big action star, i don’t know.

  14. ‘Ultraviolet’ is an enjoyable if mindless version of the sci-fi female action hero genre. More satisfying that ‘Aeon Flux’ because it makes not the slightest pretension to having a plot. The entire 95 minutes involve a series of extended fight sequences with guns, swords and martial arts. Milla Jovovich just mows down hundreds of helmeted nonentities. Whereas ‘Final Fantasy’ is lifelike animation, this is as close to depicting human actors as animated characters as I have seen. It is perhaps not good enough to justify picking it for the summer club, but it belongs in this category.

  15. I agree, I sped through this film last night and it is the closest thing I have seen to depicting human actors as animated characters, but I guess that made my experience fast-forwarding through the thing all the more problematic (and shouldn’t animated characters actually be animated). I didn’t mind that the mise en scene reminded me of unfinished drawings for a film requiring a much heftier budget. I didn’t mind the sloppy fight sequences. But the script and the line readings by the actors (especially Cameron Bright, a child actor about whom I am thinking very seriously about writing a critical essay for a conference presentation or beyond) were absolutely atrocious. Milla Jovovich (wasn’t she in Dazed and Confused) was embarrassingly bad. Bright was just as bad as he seems to be playing a parody of himself (didn’t he already play this role in X-Men III: The Last Stand) and he’s only like 12 or 13 years old (still the film keeps my C.B. thesis in tact so that’s a good thing). Look, I expected nothing and was rewarded with next to nothing. I knew exactly what this film was when I popped it into the machine, but still. Aeon Flux, as bad as that film was, had a much more engaging visual aesthetic (and a much stronger actor in the central role). I will say the opening credit sequence was quite fun, and, SPOILER ALERT, dying kids always tug on my heart, especially when they can come back to life. But this film strikes me as a “wait till it shows up On Demand” title at best.

  16. Agreed, this was very sloppily put together, but I was comparing Milla Jovovich’s acting in this to her acting in ‘The Fifth Element’ (an early sign of Bruce Willis’s frighteningly bad choice of movies), and ‘Ultraviolet’ does not fare so badly in that comparison! All I would really say for the movie is that it has no pretensions to anything other than cartoon violence. ‘Aeon Flux’ had that irritating morality play about man, science, nature, blah, blah.

  17. Pirates of the Caribbean II falls into this category. It has a horribly convoluted and illogical plot, runs far too long, and does not bother to have an ending. But the set piece battles are fun, and the pure unalloyed joy of seeing Johnny Depp camp it up is worth the price of admission.

  18. Hmm…. Saw Pirates. As Chris noted, there is a sense of glee and wit in two of these enormous action sequences: one involves a giant wheel, and there are some great, Chuck-Jones’-worthy, wonderfully ridiculous, precisely-composed visual gags. But even there I got more “sense” of glee than actual effects; the film was trying so hard, was so packed with information and event, was so busy that much of the sideways pleasure of those shots or even of Depp got a bit lost for me. All the baggy sense of playing silly under the radar of Bruckheimerian bathos in the first film gets sucked into a Bruckheimerian approach to being silly… kind of like when a teacher lets you throw spitballs, laughing too loudly along with your hijinks. What’s the fun in that?

  19. In contrast to ‘Crank’ ‘B-13’ definitely belongs is this category, though probably it will appeal only to Arnab and to me. The movie is a mere 80 minutes long, with the flimsiest of plots. A sort of ‘Escape from Paris’ without Snake Plissken, it is set in the near future when the police and civilized society have given up on the poor suburbs (in France the suburbs are poor and the inner city is rich — the reverse of here) and simply encased them in police cordons letting criminals run their own mini empires. Presumably one could claim some canny political commentary in light of the suburban rioting in immigrant neighborhoods last year, but the movie doesn’t try very hard to be serious.

    The movie proceeds in three parts: 1) honest civilian Leito stuck in tower block flees from drug dealers, is betrayed by police and has his sister handed over to kingpin as personal drugged slave; 2) supercop Damien brings down another set of bad guys a few years later; 3) Damien and Leito team up to bring down kingpin, save sister, and defuse nuclear bomb.

    Each part has some astonishing action sequences, with the best being the first. The Leito character appears to be made of rubber as he slides, jumps and dives all over a series of rooftops and hallways. So, taken only as a masterclass in choreographing chase scenes, B-13 is pure entertainment.

  20. I’ll second the plug for B-13, adding only that its master class in choreography is coupled with expert understanding of the economy of genre. In the first 10 minutes, with little dialogue, and none of the usual moron lines which “clarify” what is happening, we get a streamlined yet substantive sense of backstory and character. There’s a sometimes-sly sense of humor and an anti-authoritarian political bite in keeping with the film’s other glorious plunderings from John Carpenter. A kick. Easily the best action film I’ve seen all year.

  21. As a masterclass in choreographing chase scenes, B-13 is pure entertainment . . . then again I remember making the same case for a Tony Jaa film (Ong-Bak) not too long ago and a handful of you jumped on my shit with a “been there done that” refrain. The first ten minutes of District B-13 was pure adrenaline and as Reynolds notes it was accomplished with an economy of style and storytelling that was quite impressive. But to call this the best action film of the year . . . well, it’s obviously been a might damn sad year for action films. I found myself getting a little confused as we moved from section one to section two (the title card was not translated with subtitles so I was in the dark for about ten minutes trying to figure out who that dude with the long hair and a fu manchu mustache was). It was an amusing trifle, yes, but nothing more .

  22. Jeff, were you wearing a monocle when you wrote that it was “an amusing trifle”? I sensed a pinky off the keyboard.

    I would agree that calling it the best action film of the year says as much (or as little) about this year’s crop as about the film itself. Still–fun is fun.

  23. finally got around to b 13. good fun indeed. i couldn’t quite make out the racial politics of the film–the cops etc. all seemed uniformly gallic, most of the bad guys seemed north african or black; what was leito supposed to be? ah well, probably not worth spending too much time on. the expository bits were laughable, though thankfully not as sentimental-nostalgic as jeff’s favourite, ong bak. the main baddie, taha, reminded me of robert carlyle. whatever happened to him?

  24. Good question and judging by his entry in Imdb, not much. But I notice Carlyle is signed up for ’28 Weeks Later’ the follow-up to the not bad ’28 Days Later.’

  25. I was going to joke that Carlyle is doing theatre, which is what “happens” to actors who aren’t as visible anymore. Turns out it’s true. He’s teaching at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. And doing stuff with his own company, Rain Dog Theatre, as well as various television spots.

    There’s a decent fan site here.

  26. i quite enjoyed ultraviolet. the first 20 minutes or so were truly excellent–a downhill slide from there, but still fun. of course, i had no idea what was going on. the plot, as chris notes, is disposable, but i actually liked that they didn’t bother to explain any of the very cool looking technology.

    i was distracted, however, by the fact that milla jovovich with black hair looks exactly like selma blair.

    and re carlyle: there was a preview on the ultraviolet dvd for some straight to dvd crap he stars in. mrs. hogglepuss’s singing dancing prancing academy for fine actors with no shame or career, or something like that.

  27. ah, nacho libre. sometimes when you are a man you like to watch movies about mexican wrestlers in stretchy pants in your room. it’s for fun.

  28. why did i for second think i would like district b-13? i don’t learn, that’s why. but yes, the first rubber-ball sequence is great, just like the similar opening sequence in casino royale is. after that, i read philosophy book catalogs while the tv droned on. amazing how many great philosophy books get published every year.

  29. in this category falls the first instalment of species, which i watched last night and which illustrates just how fine the line between entertaining and utter crap can be. and no, the line doesn’t fall between natasha henstridge’s breasts–though those are on fairly prominent display. it is the performances and the casting that put this over the top. particularly fine in a ripe blue cheesey kind of way are ben kingsley–doing his special brand of edgy discomfort as though he were in a much better film–and forest whitaker as an empath with a talent for understatement: upon arriving at a scene covered in blood he notes, “something bad happened here”. or thereabouts. and alfred molina as a horny (and skinny) harvard anthropologist is pretty good too.

    species 2 which i just finished is more in the utter crap end of the continuum–again, despite henstridge’s breasts, which should have negotiated separate billing. this despite the inspired casting of richard belzer as the president of the u.s (unfortunately, seen only briefly on a spaceship monitor) and one great line uttered by a general with one glass eye: “spare us the alien rights agenda–just put her in the cyclotron!” it does have some cool and gross alien creature effects.

  30. Babelfish is more fun, but em Inglês: Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces at its best cracks a Mad-Dog-soaked, meth-fueled leer as it runs its assorted crazies and criminals through their paces. Call it carny noir: often funny, overheated, generally fun. But, like the carnival, the film can be a bit much. You finish feeling like maybe you shouldn’t have spent all that money, consumed all that sugar. Maybe some of the rides were not really fun, or were trying too hard to make you have fun. The film slips, as well, into a kind of (sincere? at least quasi-sincere) histrionics that felt silly. After the fifth close-up of Jeremy Piven’s puffy face and cracked, redrimmed, tear-filled eyes, it felt more like watching a painfully sad clown than a man on the edge. Still, I recommend: Jason Bateman alone is worth the price of admission. But–Giovanna & Mauer–you know that my recommendation should be absolutely ignored, and scoffed at, by you, right? You’d hate this.

  31. ‘The Shooter’ is predictable, wallows in its kill shots, and has a couple of loose ends that never make sense, but it is executed competently and is an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. The action sequences really are good, the scenery (supposedly Montana) is gorgeous, and this is exactly the kind of starring role that Wahlberg can pull off: it doesn’t ask too much of him, he gets to glower and he even has a couple of funny lines. There is a sort of fatuous post-9/11, post-Iraq War political theme about politicians lying to us and it all being about oil, but it never gets in the way of the lovingly crafted set-pieces. Fun.

  32. nobody other than chris is likely to watch this but i recently passed some time with the fast and the furious: tokyo drift and it turned out to be far more entertaining than i’d expected. the best entry in the franchise, i think. completely stupid, of course, and sexist in the standard “boys and cars” movie way. the first one at least had michelle rodgriguez doing her thing.

    i’ve actually also been watching a lot of good movies, posted about by others on the blog, but of late have felt a strange inertia about making substantive entries in the blog. not sure why–i need to get back on the horse.

  33. I still think the first F&F was the best (I’m a sucker for Vin), but Tokyo Drift was a lot of fun, and a definite improvement after the second installment. I recently saw previews for some fast cars movie in which the drivers all appear to be women. Obviously feminism is making some inroads to this genre.

  34. I actually saw Tokyo Drift in the theatres and so was less impressed but it was still fun if a bit xenophobic (in the way it reduces Japanese culture to a set of broad cliches foregrounding Western characters–or mixed-race Asians who skew Western in their features).

  35. Why are we talking about homo-eroticism and queer pedagogy in ‘History Boys’ when we could be talking about them in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 3’? There is nothing you can really say in favor of this movie: it is 75 minutes too long; the plot lines are hopelessly incoherent; and every scene is larded up with unnecessary dialogue, mindless comic relief, and mascara fetish. And yet, and yet… if you just surrender to it, it is a blast. One glorious set-piece of insanity after another. Jack Sparrow is still the favorite, and even gets to riff off Keith Richards, playing his dad (with a guitar, no less!). Elizabeth and Tom are far more likable in this episode, and we even have Elizabeth as pirate king (queen?) delivering her version of Henry V’s eve of battle speech. There are even some little nuggets of fine film-making along the way. The opening scene, as dozens of pirates are put to death is quite moving, and the destruction of a British frigate near the end is lovingly filmed. Don’t try to make sense of the movie (it took me and both kids the entire 25 minutes car ride home after the movie to make sense of its twists and turns — make sense here means only to follow some internal logic). Just let is wash over you.

    The overall theme is striking. It is a war to the death between the British East India Company and the pirates, a war between the values of the market, and those of piracy. And we are meant to be rooting for the pirates!

  36. Another film you can only let wash over you (I imagine it’s even more labyrinthine than Pirates when it comes to plot) is Oceans 13. I must admit I was completely befuddled by this movie, but the surfaces are lovely and there are a couple of comic scenes (Clooney and Pitt deeply engaged in an episode of “Oprah” being one of the better moments) worth savoring. It is the least entertaining of the three, I think, and the absence of a strong, irreverent female throws the latent misogyny of the franchise into full relief. Poor Ellen Barkin . . . she’s game but her character is reprehensibly manhandled by the screenplay. Then again, it’s only a laugh (a frothy summer blockbuster) so who’s to complain.

  37. if you have hbo ondemand and nothing to do for an hour and forty five minutes, or if it is available on a plane, firewall is a decent enough option. a reasonably well-made thriller that never really achieves any tension but is competently put together, and does have some acceptable fake-outs. the casting of mary lynn rajskub in a small part may be the most inspired part of this film. john bruns is reasonably effective as the cold mastermind, though i noted he’d put on some weight.

  38. I watched Shooter last night (I promise to get right to the Argentinian films, tender indie relationship pictures and uplifting English social realism next!)I pretty much agree with Chris’ post (#40 above)–but I found myself more of a sucker for the film’s politics. ’70s stalwart Ned Beatty belting out that there are no democrats, no republicans, etc. (just “have’s and have nots”) gave me a shock that such a sentiment would be so nakedly spoken even in a genre film these days. What I also liked was the rather forthright anti-liberal violence of the film (and perhaps you will say here that I have lost my moral compass thanks to countless disreputable genre films)–Sarah kills her captor/rapist and nobody bats an eye. When (SPOILER) Swaggart (Wahlberg) learns that “the system” will take no action against the secret and illegal organization operating right in its midst (and authorizing torture and killing across the globe), Swaggart simply walks into the Senator’s home and kills everybody, including the weaselly secretary who pleads for his life. Not a “but if you do this, you become just like them” speech in sight!

    If Bourne indulges the liberal belief that the system will correct itself (thanks to good figures like the Joan Allen character), Shooter is the less respectable working class version where the system protects itself at all costs, thereby making necessary some sort of violent rupture by an outsider. Of course, the film does not allow its cynicism to touch the higher reaches of the executive branch (apparently nobody higher than the AG knows of this little cabal)–but the outrage is refreshing.

  39. the violence in shooter, which i saw a while ago but failed to comment on, was legitimized for me by the fact that it was revenge for the slaying of his dog. that makes everything okay. oh, and levon helm is great in a small role.

  40. yes, Helm is great. I liked this film a lot more than I thought I would. If I remember correctly this particular film doesn’t rely too much on cell phones and their ilk (do I remember correctly). Michael your comparison to Bourne is nice.

  41. i don’t know if shooter is the working class version so much as it is a far-right version–you know, way out there in the right where there are all kinds of strange overlaps with the left. wahlberg’s character has no politics really, though he does respond very quickly to the call of the flag. far-right anti-big government vigilantism cloaking itself in working class populism?

  42. i must shamefacedly place in this category, ghost rider, a film that makes no sense, as no film about a man who turns to a burning skeleton at night to become the devil’s bounty hunter should. not a bad way to avoid work.

    also in this category, resident evil: extinction. amped up milla jovovich kills zombies. fine by me.

  43. don’t mess with the zohan is not quite crap, but it doesn’t deserve a thread of its own. no real laugh out loud moments–i think i chuckled loudly a couple of times–but entertaining enough. i recommend for a plane or for that bored afternoon moment months from now when you’re scrolling through the ondemand menu of your digital cable and wondering whether to take a chance on wild hogs. then again i watched it in a mostly empty theater this afternoon–it might have been funnier with a full house. it may also be funnier if you’re really up on your israeli stereotypes, or can tell fake hebrew from real hebrew.

    sandler is surprisingly un-annoying, but john turturro as his palestinian opposite is terrible. you’d think the role of jesus in the big lebowski would have been perfect training for this, but where sandler’s performance is committed to its loopiness, turturro goes for slapstick.

    probably not worth getting exercised about the film’s politics or depictions of israelis and arabs.

  44. perhaps we need a new list for acceptable crap. in this category would fall jumper which is not entirely enjoyable, but nor is it utter crap. no one on this blog other than chris should bother, unless the thought of samuel l. jackson as a white-haired “paladin” is appealing to you.

  45. i’m still not entirely sure what the twist in it’s plot was but hitman is a good genre workout. not a whole lot to say. olyphaunt plays the title role in the exact same way that he played seth bullock on deadwood–tightly wound, humourless, and it works. desmond from lost shows up briefly with an outrageous russian accent, many guns are fired, people leap out of buildings, interpol is involved, and i think i’ll be back for the sequel.

  46. journey to the center of the earth is pretty good fun–i recommend it for plane watching and also for mindless sunday evening entertainment on ondemand. brendan fraser can be a very good actor, and sometimes i wish he’d find more work where he can demonstrate that, but he’s really very good in movies like this. he undercuts the machismo that is so often a feature of the genre with both a good feel for slapstick and general affability. if they make that sequel about atlantis that’s pointed to at the end i’ll watch it on ondemand on a sunday evening as well.

  47. David Twohy’s A Perfect Getaway is highly enjoyable crap (even better, it’s highly enjoyable, straight-to-DVD crap). This tense, exciting, cat-and-mouse thriller concerns a young couple in love trying to outrun a pair of infamous “Honeymoon killers” on one of the lesser populated Hawaiian islands. Great scenery, beautiful bodies, well-edited action sequences, bloody violence, twists, turns . . . what more do you want? One of the central characters is a screenwriter, and Twohy has some self-reflexive fun sending up the generic expectations of the obligatory three-act structure . . . but mostly it is a hoot due to Timothy Olyphant’s slippery, charismatic performance as an ex-military special ops commando. The less said the better.

  48. i mostly agree re the perfect getaway which i coincidentally watched on the plane from london yesterday–the disagreement is merely on the straight-to-dvd part: it did decent business in theaters. olyphaunt is great–he should be allowed a twinkle in his eye more often, and even steve zahn rises above his usual tendency to the tic. however, i did not buy milla jovovich’s character. i’m too used to seeing her kicking alien and zombie ass to be able to believe her in any kind of danger.

    i also watched district 9 yesterday, and g.i joe: the rise of cobra and land of the lost on the way out. more on these at some point in the relevant threads.

  49. The Unborn . No. Jane Alexander, Gary Oldman and Idris Elba must have dope habits or extra car payments. A dybbuk tries to take over a young woman, for some reason. Let’s have a moratorium on the following: creepy kids with weird eyes in old-fashioned suits; anything in the mirror; insects in eggs; dogs skulking around with their heads on upside down; crabwalking humans with their heads turned around; movies that laboriously explain the “rules” surrounding the supernatural force and then pointedly break them for the sake of a “shocking” (generic/conventional) ending.

    Paranormal Activity . Yes. But be warned: it looks like it cost $15,000. I mean it’s made with a handheld video camera and it takes place in two rooms mainly. It also pretty much follows the model of The Blair Witch Project but with far less impact and cleverness: 45 minutes or so of moderate tedium to set up the situation, another 45 minutes of escalating terror, with the manifestations of the evil force becoming more overt and threatening. Also, no mirrors, kids with weird eyes, crabwalking, etc.

    Surveillance . By David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer (David Lynch produces and also sings a weird song at the end in a high-pitched voice–don’t miss that). Yes and No. Very unpleasant but compelling. Jennifer effectively uses one of her father’s techniques: weird still and creepy tableaux, suggesting violence, without directly presenting it (though there is some of that). Don’t read the back of the DVD. Odd–French Stewart and Cheri Oteri have small to medium roles here. Simmer down now.

  50. I too liked Surveillance. Thought I would fast forward through it but was pulled in and surprisingly held captive. Paranormal Activity, however, is a big ass joke if you are sitting alone on your couch in front of the TV. “Ah, there’s a sequence that would have provoked an audience response,” I murmured to myself far, far too many times. I got the escalating part; I just missed the terror.

  51. French Stewart! Gesundheit. Congratulations, that’s our secret word of the day.

    Tell Michael what he’s won, Johnny.


    It’s your very own scary spider-walking grandpa!

  52. I don’t really have anything to say about G.I. Joe except that I enjoyed it more than G.I. Jane. Basically it was pretty harmless. But I was struck that the cast included Byung-hun Lee from ‘The Good, the Bad and the Weird’ and Saïd Taghmaoui who I haven’t seen in anything since ‘Three Kings’. He was great in that earlier movie, but here he and Lee were reduced to the usual regional caricatures. Pretty sad really.

  53. Legion is a perfectly enjoyable piece of silliness. God has apparently decided to cleanse the earth by sending an army of possessed demons or humans, or potty-mouthed grannies, led by the angel Gabriel, to wipe out all of humanity, with particular emphasis upon the unborn child of a waitress working at a tiny diner in the middle of the desert. The angel Michael decides to disobey God and organize the little band of diner workers and patrons in order to protect the child, and thus the future of humanity.

    There is some confusing theology (is God serious about eliminating humanity, or is it some kind of a test?), though I may be at fault for never having taken a bible study course, and some inexplicable elements to the story. The Terminator references are too obvious. But it is still enjoyable. The movie is surprisingly talky as the moments of mayhem come in rare spurts. In between there is plenty of conversation as we get the back story of each character, and assorted conflicts are heightened before being worked out.

    To the credit of the screenwriters, I didn’t even accurately predict the order in which the characters would die. What ultimately works is the small scale of the movie. We don’t see destruction on a mass scale. We rarely leave the diner. It is just a simple story of a group of ill-matched strangers fighting overwhelming odds. Worth a rental.

  54. Legion was a major disappointment, especially since I hoped it would hold its own with those other weird Archangel on earth Prophecy movies starring Christopher Walken. Unfortunately, like most other horror movies, it goes for pointless effect and generic convention over sense or innovation. Why does that weird ice-cream guy stretch and scream when nobody else does? Why do we have the pointless scene of Dennis Quaid blowing up the diner, to absolutely no effect? Why do the angels dress like extras from Spartacus ? And, just why the hell does “humanity” need that baby anyway? And what’s up with god–how did he become so manic-depressive. He wants to destroy humanity. He loves humanity. He wants to destroy humanity. He saves humanity…..wow, Abilify, please!

  55. knowing is a lot better than i thought it would be which is not to say it is good. but it’s moody, nice to look at (directed by alex proyas) and has a couple of stunning disaster scenes–in particular, one of an airplane crashing across a highway. cage is oddly restrained (which might be a bad thing) and the film held my interest almost all the way to the climax at which point i realized i was only 45 minutes in and there were still another 75 to go. still it’s not too tedious even if [mild spoiler alert]……………………. the end seems to involve the rapture. in a postmodern touch the dvd extras includes a small feature on millenial thinking which debunks the exact kind of person who would be likely to be sucked into this film.

  56. I’ve invested ridiculous expectations in what will almost certainly be a piece of shit, but this and Kick-Ass are all that seems exciting about the pre-blockbuster season: http://www.the-losers.com/

    Isn’t it interesting that Idris Elba is identified in the publicity for “Obsessed” and not “The Wire”?

  57. The sequel to District 13 (District 13: Ultimatum) is disappointing. It messes with the formula by giving us a convoluted plot (as opposed to no plot at all), and has more martial arts than parkour. The last third has all the gangs of B-13 (each with is distinctive ethnicity and fighting style) overcoming their differences to launch a daring raid on the Presidential palace in Paris. I think it is time for a sequel to Warriors.

  58. knight and day is stupid but quite entertaining in a stupid way. of course, you have to overlook the fact that most of the plot is based on the premise that a woman will find deeply attractive a man who keeps rendering her unconscious in order to abudct her (disrobing her in the process). there’s a small last act which attempts to turn this around but it is gratuitous and cynical (and drags the movie down). it’s too bad whoever wrote the final version of this script (the new york times had an interesting article earlier this year about the twisted path this film has taken in development over the years) didn’t figure out a better way to handle the unconscious/abduction thing because the unconsciousness of the character who is the audience’s perspective is a pretty clever way to transition from one setpiece to another without having to provide all the connnective tissue of plot, or spending more money on expensive chases, explosions or effects. not that there aren’t some good examples of those in the film. the first setpiece on a plane is great (and the best) and there’s one car chase in boston that’s pretty good too.

    but the real attraction in this film is the chemistry between diaz and cruise. diaz is really quite good (she carries every scene she’s in) and cruise is too, mostly because he is playing the blank cipher he seems to be in real life: a performance in a performance of a performance. and since james mangold once had serious filmmaker pretensions the small scenes and characters are also done well (paul dano is particularly good in a small role).

    but i don’t want to make too much of this. it’s enjoyable but nothing more.

  59. legion is crap, but films about the apocalypse with battling angels are always fun. even when the battling angels are paul bettany and that minor bad guy from lost. and i learned something: if you’re ever waiting out the apocalypse in a diner in the mojave desert make sure you have a couple of black guys at hand so they can die before you while saving your pointless ass.

  60. I actually saw this in a movie theater. Don’t remember why. But it is perfectly enjoyable, and it cemented my distrust of harmless-looking grannies.

  61. ‘Losers’ is nowhere near as bad as one might expect. Of the three or four movies that came out last summer in which a band of lovable mercenaries blow stuff up to clear their name, or just because they like to blow stuff up (see A Team and Expendables) this is probably the best. The action scenes are well crafted, the repartee is adequate, and Jason Patric seems to enjoy himself as the urbane but ruthless CIA agent.

    ‘Predators’ is faithful to the original as it follows a band of carefully chosen killers (some military, some underworld) as they are picked off one-by-one on a foreign planet that serves as a hunting preserve for our favorite alien. Adrien Brody makes an unlikely tough mercenary character, and his voice appears to be doing a Batman impression at times, but there is a certain pleasure in watching the group slowly figure out where they are and what is going on. There are some plot elements that are utterly incomprehensible (two factions of predators, a human agent for the predators, Laurence Fishburne) but only a purist would let those get in the way of the fun.

    P.S. I still don’t get a proper editing window.

  62. chris, you’d get a proper editing window if you’d log in before commenting.

    i quite liked predators. and i thought the fishburne character was the best thing about it. he wasn’t a human agent for the predators though, was he? he’d just been hiding from them for a really long time. i look forward to many sequels with diminishing returns.

  63. It was the doctor (Topher Grace) who seemed to be the human agent for the predators, no? Did you understand what his secret or role was?

  64. oh–no, i didn’t see him that way either. i saw him functioning in the role of “really silly plot twist”. i figured he was selected as another ruthless killer, who just managed to hide his true self from the other abductees. it would have been better if he had in fact been just a doctor selected to keep the others alive during the hunt, and if there’d been no last reel reveal.

  65. marginally enjoyable crap: the prince of persia. gyllenhaal is good, and there’s an attractive woman carved from orange plastic, but the real reason to watch is to relish alfred molina’s performance as peter ustinov.

  66. chris, i’m going to have to disagree with you again: the losers is much better than “nowhere near as bad as one might expect”. i enjoyed the hell out of it, and robert patric is the best action movie villain in years. did it do well enough for a sequel?

  67. Arnab, you are missing my English talent for deliberate understatement. i liked it. But I think it sank without trace at the box office.

  68. this is for chris alone: ninja assassin is surprisingly good fun. i look forward to 7 increasingly crappy sequels.

    now, i’m starting a movie with the heartstopping credit: “based on a story by luc besson”…

  69. Thanks for the rec. I need some enjoyable crap. Which Luc Besson? “Taken”? I like that Liam Neeson has turned into the haunted vigilante type. Good career move.

  70. no, not taken, which is nasty crap: from paris with love, which is merely ludicrous crap, but acceptable on a plane (which i was not on).

    also, resident evil: afterlife desecrates a great franchise.

  71. Ninja Assassin: yes! Thanks for the rec. It has a much more satisfying level of goriness than the usual entries in the martial arts and ninja field. As you say, there are eight more clans, so we can expect, and hope for, a number of sequels.

  72. Wait, on Resident Evil: Afterlife… I saw it when it came out in IMAX and it was the first 3D movie to actually work as an action movie in 3D for me. It really did use the technology in a convincing fashion. Pity about the movei itself.

  73. skyline is just barely enjoyable crap. by which i mean it is just barely enjoyable; its craptitude is readily apparent. still worth a look for those who enjoy alien invasion films. some nice creature effects, but best of all, no explanation for what’s going on. apparently this is intended to be a series–it made a decent profit–and i expect the next entry will be in the “utter crap” category.

    the main thing i learned from it though is that the guy who played the hobbit’s drug-addicted (later recovering addict) older brother on lost is actually american.

  74. The new Conan is a perfectly serviceable piece of crap. An early scene when the young Conan fights, kills and beheads a bunch of marauders is actually very well filmed. And the movie keeps it fairly light, winking at the audience whenever some particularly lunatic reference to the occult is made. Worth a rental. Or watch the red label trailer that has the early scene with Conan as a boy.

  75. Attack the Block has its moments. It is played tongue-in-cheek with a focus on the teenage kids rather than the implausible alien monsters (whose fangs glow in the dark for some unexplained reason). The storyline is just the aliens attacking an inner city tower block and a bunch of kids fighting back. The fun is mostly in the inane but hilarious dialogue. My younger son now repeats the line “I’m not even lying. Truth” incessantly. Nick Frost appears in all the trailers, but is barely a presence in the movie, so I assume he was there to expand the audience. What I did find disturbing about this movie is that it received National Lottery money, and support from FilmFour. Really? Is there no better use for these funds that this?

  76. macgruber. more enjoyable than i’d expected it to be. the opening credits, in particular, are great. will forte is reliably amusing, kristen wiig, shockingly, less so. some very nice extended absurdist set-pieces and/or dialog. perfect for a plane, but not bad at home either.

  77. Not really crap, but kinda enjoyable: James Franco’s reading list of film studies texts and films to be studied alongside them while in the PhD program at Yale:

    * Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds.: Film Theory and Criticism (Oxford Press)
    * Andre Bazin: What is Cinema? (UC California Press)
    * Christian Metz: Film Language (Chicago Press)
    * Tom Conley: Film Hieroglyphs (Minnesota Press)
    * Theodore Adorno: The Culture Industry (Routledge)
    * Jerome Christensen: America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures (Stanford)

    We will also study the following films:

    Vertov: Man With the Movie Camera
    Eisenstein: Battleship Potemkin
    Chaplin: Modern Times
    Fritz Lang: Scarlet Street
    Siodmak: The Killers
    De Sica: Umberto D.
    Godard: Contempt
    Kobayashi: Kwaidan
    Warner Bros.: Bonnie and Clyde

  78. I was wondering that, too. But then I realized I was wondering about some damn syllabus for a course James Franco was taking, and then I decided to go shave another part of my beard.

  79. Supposedly Franco was accused of getting some film studies professor fired at NYU because the prof gave him a D. So the Yale prof weighed in on his experience with Franco. Said he was darling. He didn’t post the syllabus as much as provided the texts and films to be studied. I too was curious why Penn was left off.

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