utter crap

as distinct from enjoyable crap (though, of course, what is enjoyable for jeff is utter crap for everyone else).

in this category falls virus–a film from 1999 that i watched last night courtesy ondemand’s free movie listings. a russian ship is taken over by an alien “electrical lifeform” which then starts splicing humans and machines together–to what end is not clear. hijinks ensue when william baldwin, jamie lee curtis and donald sutherland and some others show up on a salvage ship and power the ship/lifeform up again. there is very little pleasure to be had in this film–though some of the machine/human splicings are cool in a cronenbergian kind of way and donald sutherland’s performance, which i think was powered by a giant dose of nyquil, is also oddly compelling. (someone told me recently that sutherland apparently has a terrible gambling problem and so essentially takes any role that pays–i’m not sure if that’s true but it certainly explains a lot.) if you’re drawn to films that feature bad writing, cheesy special effects, horrible performances and donald sutherland on nyquil then virus is for you.

97 thoughts on “utter crap”

  1. Virus is one of only only 2 films I ever actually walked out of, and this was a free advance screening, to boot. I think I made it about 20 minutes in. I could probably have endured at home, sprawled out in a dark room late at night, but in a theater it was too much. On the way out, one of the previewer/profiler’s asked me why I was leaving, and I said “Not enough monkeys.”

    I had high hopes that Virus was going to be as good as Deep Rising, another abandoned ship slash monster horror chiller theater. It stars the fantastic Treat Williams, has plenty of tentacles and gore, and is far more fun than you could ever expect–made by Stephen Sommers, before he began taking himself seriously (either right before or right after The Mummy, you decide).

  2. Secuestro Express is a quasi-thriller in the spirit (I gather) of City of God, exploiting fast-motion and handheld, sensationalized violence (to allure and repel), a mordant (or perhaps just alleged) sense of humor, and so on, all ostensibly tied to some socioeconomic critique. It helps clarify why City is a superb, or for you nay-sayers at least a superior, film. Its d.v. footage is seemingly shot with style, when you can make out what’s actually happening, but there’s not one bit of wit–in its thrills or its thoughts–worth catching. It probably isn’t as terrible as Virus, but then again it’s a lot more fun when a film is thoughtlessly thoughtless.

    Some reviewers are actively pissed at the exploitation in Secuestro… I’d say it’s in league with Man on Fire, exoticizing (and eroticizing?) extreme poverty and consequent criminality, revelling in the viciousness of its attacks. Both bored more than enraged me.

  3. Regarding Man on Fire, there’s a quotation from Winston Churchill regarding the Germans that’s appropriate for director Tony Scott: “Either at your throat or your feet.”

    two exceptions: The Hunger is a great vampire film, and The Fan is redeemed by a stunning performance from Robert De Niro (ironically he castigates an indifferent baseball player while beeating him “Do You Care Now?” It might be one of the last times de Niro cared).

  4. Yeah, T. Scott puzzles me. I like The Hunger mostly because it’s got Bauhaus on the soundtrack and Susan Sarandon in a labcoat, and find Crimson Tide to be really effective–primarily for Hackman and Washington. But, in general, from the obviously trite Top Gun to the less-obvious, equally trite True Romance, I just find him dull, dull, dull. Maybe a notch above his spiritual descendants (like Michael Bay), but not much more. (Does Churchill have a quote for Bay et al.? Maybe his immortal “Harrumphity harrumph. Complete twaddle. Where’s that gin?”)

  9. OK, but why, John? The remake is certainly bad. It is obviously derivative, it wastes the talents of at least three very good actors (Hawke, Fishburne and Byrne), and all three women are given utterly thankless, stereotypical roles.

    But what makes the original better (as opposed to just being first)? I haven’t seen the original for a while, but the acting is pretty horrible, the plot is essentially the same, and it has that characteristic 1970s jerkiness to the action and the performances of the actors: the actors seem to jabber more, and the action sequences are short and discontinuous.

    I guess what I’m asking is whether there is anything objectively (whatever that means) better about the first, or whether, because the idea has already been done, the remake is damned by virtue of being incompetently unoriginal.

    Now, Carpenter’s remake of ‘The Thing’ with Kurt Russell: that is a fine movie.

  10. Yes, I wish Carpenter would remake his remake of The Thing. Hell, use the same actors and script–just get a larger budget and some better special effects. Still, its a great film.

  11. I haven’t seen the original Assault in a while, but two quick reasons why it’s better:

    a) the little girl gets shot. I don’t see enough movies where kids actually die; too often, they get threatened and then (yawn) saved. By an ice-cream truck driver, to boot! That’s cinema.

    b) The first version has Carpenter’s almost trademark is-that-an-ironic-take-on-masculinity sensibility (the sort where a 15-minute fistfight is played straight but never less than funny, or–in this particular film–the two protagonists make some important life-and-death decision by playing rock/paper/scissors) while the second has a regrettably familiar irony-as-simply-hipster-masculinity sensibility.

  12. OK. a) is enough to win me over. I’d forgotten that scene. I remember Tarantino going on to an interviewer once about how he despised movies which threaten death but then back away at the last minute. He was specifically referring to the last scene in ‘Patriot Games’ when Ford looks like he is going to impale Bean on an anchor but doesn’t.

    b) is a good reason too, but I got lost in the hyphenated jungle of your prose.

  13. I agree with Mike–though they play one-potato, two-potato, not rock/paper/scissors. The former is much more infantile than the latter (which well serves your point about Carpenter’s ironic take on hyper-masculinity).

    Anyway, I like the low-budget aesthetic of the first. Many films like Precinct 13 are enjoyable because, not in spite of, their low budgets.

    The dialogue, too, is well-suited to the cheapness. “I gotta plan, it’s called ‘save ass’!”

  16. for some reason i’d thought reynolds had recommended cellular and so came here to curse him out–but i see no mention of it on the blog. this might be acceptable on a plane but there is no other reason to see it. the plot is ludicrous and the performances are so terrible that they redefine bad acting (amidst the hamming william h. macy picks up a paycheck for doing his william h. macy impression). in fact the first 10 minutes feature such spectacularly bad performances from the other actors that they make jason statham look like ben kingsley.

    i cannot believe films like this get made. the only pleasure to be had in this crap is from a brief performance by some guy who looks very familiar as an oily annoying lawyer/motorist.

  17. I was wondering where to put a link to this article, but Arnab’s very legitimate statement, “i cannot believe films like this get made,” gives me the entry here.

    In a similar vein to Bob Dylan’s recent broadside against the current state of music (and the actual sound of that music, Michael Tolkin gets a little angry/sad in the NYTimes today. I like this article a lot:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/books/31play.html

    This link will vanish soon by NYTimes’ wonderous online strategy, so I’ll just pop it out here as well:

    If Hollywood Is a Game, This Player Says It’s Over
    By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

    It’s just a throwaway line in the opening paragraph of Michael Tolkin’s sequel to “The Player” — “box office was down, it would never return” — and it’s the stuff of so much anxiety in Hollywood these days that you could hardly call it a stretch for a novelist who, between books, makes a very nice living writing and doctoring screenplays.

    Mr. Tolkin’s new installment in the scheming, self-obsessed and periodically homicidal adventures of the studio executive Griffin Mill, “The Return of the Player,” has less to do with the movie business than it does with screwed-up parents, their troubled kids and the aspirations of eerily lifelike gay demicentibillionaires to make it to the next level of obscene wealth, where interest accumulates so fast that a man who pays $125 million for a painting has already made his money back an hour after he signed the check.

    Yet undergirding Mr. Tolkin’s trenchant take on the small world known as the West Side of Los Angeles — undermining that world, really — is his devastatingly pessimistic vision of the future of the movie business, not to mention of planet Earth.

    In 1988, when he published “The Player,” which became a 1992 movie starring Tim Robbins and directed by Robert Altman, Mr. Tolkin said he had written it as his exit strategy from Hollywood after several frustrating years as a screenwriter. This time around, it isn’t Mr. Tolkin but his now-52-year-old character, Griffin, who is looking to get out, and not just out of Hollywood or Los Angeles, but someplace far away and well above sea level, where the melting ice floes can’t get him.

    After listening to Mr. Tolkin for a couple of hours, one would think he should have up and left Hollywood months ago himself.

    “The movies haven’t been very good the last three or four years, they really haven’t,” he said. “Everybody knows that. At least that, maybe more. And what they were will never return.”

    The source of all this creative-industrial-complex angst is the death of what he both eulogizes and parodies: the classic journey-of-the-hero story structure, analyzed by Joseph Campbell in the 1940’s, popularized a generation ago by George Lucas through “Star Wars,” spouted and shorthanded by studio executives ever since, and all but trampled to death, Mr. Tolkin said, by nearly every subsequent action movie and thriller that Hollywood has turned out.

    Or as Griffin puts it: “Physics cracked the atom, biology cracked the genome and Hollywood cracked the story.”

    The result was inevitable, Mr. Tolkin suggested. “The children’s movies — ‘Lord of the Rings,’ the ‘Harry Potter’ movies — can still follow that myth, because the kids are too naïve to be cynical about it,” he said. “But everybody else knows the story. They know what’s coming.”

    That heroic story structure also happened, as Mr. Tolkin points out ominously, to suffice for an American national myth — witness Horatio Alger, James Stewart or “just the myth of the American little guy” — the myth of a hero with a sense of duty, honor, courage, righteousness and justice. But that too, he fears, is dead, and he pinpoints its demise on a spring day in 2004 when pictures of United States soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners circulated the globe.

    “I don’t think America’s had a good movie made since Abu Ghraib,” Mr. Tolkin said, before clarifying that he’s talking about big movies, not the minuscule ones that have met the industry’s quotas for unembarrassing award nominees. “I think it showed that a generation that had been raised on those heroic movies was torturing. National myths die, I don’t think they return. And our national myth is finished, except in a kind of belligerent way.”

    Sitting in his spartan office above his garage in the wide-lawned neighborhood of Windsor Square, Mr. Tolkin recalled that he dreamt up “The Player” after staring at the Iran-Contra hearings and watching Elliot Abrams testify to Congress. “I was obsessed with the question of how could he sleep at night, because it was obvious that he was lying. I guess I was interested in the modern sociopath: the political sociopath, the bureaucratic sociopath.”

    All these years later, Mr. Tolkin said, he chose to pick up again with his Player in the spring of 2002, several months after 9/11 had revealed the collapse of so many systems. That collapse made the kind of nightmares he has made a sub-specialty of — he shared writing credit for “Deep Impact,” and his other novels involve plane crashes and killings that unravel the lives of husbands and fathers — seem so plausible.

    “The great line for that is ‘Enter the Dragon’: ‘You’ve offended me, my family and the Shaolin Temple,’ ” he said. “Me, I could defend myself. My family, we’re fine. But offending the Shaolin Temple means you’ve offended everything we stand for, and we cannot let that by. And our Shaolin Temple has been torn apart, and with it the family, and then with it even the sense of self. And Griffin, in the book, knows that. That’s why he’s panicked about the future, that’s why he wants to leave the country. Because, from the evidence of the collapse of the traditional story in Hollywood, that is the melting iceberg, the telltale sign.”

    It seems odd, amid all this morbidity, to hear a character in “Return of the Player” declare that Hollywood is “the most positive force in nature.” And yet Mr. Tolkin said he believes it is.

    “I do think the movies help bring people together,” he said. “If there was an Arabic cinema that was as good as the Asian cinema, there’d be less tension in the world. I believe that. When the movies were good, America was more popular in the world. The movies showed the world something really powerful, and that vision was so powerful that the movies were restricted, totalitarian regimes tried to keep the movies out because they were so powerful.

    “The American myth is the little tailor that could, the yeoman who can grow up to be president, the humble log cabin leads to the emancipation of the slaves. That’s the most threatening idea in the world.”

    At least it was. Now, as Griffin Mill explains, the world has turned off the fantasies that America once fed it: “When the moral lessons of the movies can’t blunt the pain or give you energy because you’re too poor or hungry or scared or trapped — so trapped that the Journey of the Hero is the story of how your oppressors won King of the Hill — you can’t be helped by anything except violence in the real world, but it’s the kind of violence the movies lay off on the villain, mass violence.”

    Mr. Tolkin said his book is about “the destructive power of despair and hopelessness.” Which may just deter Hollywood producers from stampeding, as they did with “The Player,” to make the sequel into a movie.

    Yet Mr. Tolkin’s watchword, borrowed from Edith Wharton, is “tragedy with a happy ending.” And so, he said, he holds onto hope. Hope that Hollywood won’t fail to find its own path to safety, that the oceans won’t rise to immerse Culver City, that the fanatics won’t inherit or blow up the Earth.

    “I’m still hopeful,” he said, “but it’s an act of will now. Reason tells you otherwise.”

  18. geez, national myths died after Abu Ghraib? Most Americans, far as I can tell, barely gave Abu Ghraib a glance. I thought national myths started dying a slow death after World War II in film noir? They seemed even sickly in the naturalist branch of silent film, like “Greed” or “The Crowd.” One suspects that Tolkin is so disillusioned perhaps because his illusions were unnaturally strong?

  19. It is fortuitous that the ‘Utter Crap’ category popped to the top of the list of recent comments just in time for me to post about ‘Crank.’ I really wanted to like this, and I assumed it would be two parts ‘Transporter’ and one part Guy Ritchie. Actually it was utter crap. While enlivened by a few moments of dark humor, most of them involving severed body parts, this was just a badly made, mean-spirited little movie. Crooked camera angles, rapid changes in film stock and a soundtrack that seems utterly divorced from the movie are all that count as film-making. The action sequences are both few and dull. And a rape is staged for laughs. Yup, in 2006 raping someone to keep your heart rate up in front of a gaggle of Japanese school girls is apparently acceptable and counts as humor. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. Oh, why am I being such a spoilsport? By the end of it, the woman seemed to be enjoying herself, so I guess that makes it alright.

  20. i really cannot explain why i watched bad boys and stealth this weekend, except that they were available on ondemand and i had more important things to do. stealth is actually mostly inoffensive and might be good fun on a plane but bad boys is insufferably bad and incredibly racist to boot. i realize that there aren’t a whole lot of roles for black actors (and that this movie was made almost a decade ago now before will smith was a big star) but i hope black actors have started turning down roles like these.

  22. ‘Lucky Number Slevin’ is really pretty bad. It might be bearable if it was not quite so convinced of its own cleverness. I think I read somewhere that is is ‘Tarantino-esqe.’ It’s not. The dialogue is painful, especially the scenes given to poor old Lucy Lui. Same goes for Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley and Stanley Tucci. What a waste of acting talent. Compare Willis in this and ‘Sixteen Blocks’ to see what he can do if properly directed.

  23. Chris, I am kind of curious why you choose to watch films that are so obviously going to be awful. Reynolds used to do the same thing (and might still – I’ve not seen or spoken to him in decades), but he likes to pretend there’s something good about movies like Crank and Slevin. And Arnab is too lazy to control his own television, and will watch whatever HBO On Demand tells him to watch.

    You obviously seem to know better. Yet you still dutifully watch this stuff.

    I’ll end here with a link to some speed-metal lyrics; particularly good is #6; Demonfist.

    http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/legionofthedamned/malevolentrapture.html

  24. I confess….I deliberately watched a straight-to-DVD made-in-Vancouver police film Edison Force, despite the fact that it starred Justin Timberlake as a cub reporter AFTER THE BIG STORY and Morgan Freeman in his patented OLD MENTOR role and Kevin Spacey in a black Robert Goulet wig…I sat there for a 100 minutes while this tale of corrupt cops in a special force unfolded–It’s supposed to take place in some american metropolis but it’s obviously some clean and alphavillesque Canadian city which appears uninhabited most of the time. the only bright spots were LL Cool J who behaved as though he didn’t know he was in a bad film and Dylan McDermott who was rather good as a CORRUPT COP ON THE EDGE (of course he got all the good histrionic scenes). As for Justin Timberlake…look out Stephen Dorff!

    Why do I watch such thing? There is some weird pleasure in watching a bad movie, noting the small points of its badness, seeing actors floundering in a stew of cliches and sitting there making wisecracks like Tom Servo. plus you can drink while you watch and your increasingly obscured vision enhances rather than hurts the movie.

  25. I kinda liked Lucky Number Slevin till the “twist,” which everyone can see coming, finally arrived. Then the film fell apart. Still, I found Josh Harnett to be charming for the most part. I’m not going to sing its praises too loudly . . . hell, I’m not even going to whisper them. Then again, I didn’t shill out $7 to see Crank so what do I know.

  26. Tough question. I’m not quite sure why I retain a glimmer of hope that bad films will be better than, at some level, I know they will be. In part it’s age: I know I used to like this kind of movie so I keep hoping that it’s the movies that have changed rather than my taste. In part I would much rather find a nugget of pleasure in an unexpected place, than be disappointed by a well reviewed movie that tries too hard. But my problem with the Slevins and Cranks of this world is not the genre: it’s the incompetence. This kind of movie can be made well, and when they are, I enjoy them immensely. I just don’t understand how people who presumably went to film school and were given several million dollars can direct and produce something that fails in the most basic qualities necessary for a movie. It’s not about Apocalypse Now versus Crank. For me, Die Hard succeeds while Last Boy Scout fails, utterly. Why? Damned if I know.

  27. i watch action movies because in general i find a much higher rate of return in terms of satisfaction from action movies than any other genre. they rarely suffer from pretension, for one thing. a bad action movie is always better than a good romantic comedy. and there’s always far more peripheral pleasure in bad action movies than in bad movies in other genres–skimming hbo recently i was reminded of the intense pleasure in watching bob hoskins gnaw on scenery in the otherwise execrable unleashed.

  28. for some reason (yes, yes, it is on hbo ondemand) i just watched about 45 minutes of battlefield earth. this movie is so bad it makes you think that it must be conscious self-parody. which it probably isn’t. i had to stop because my head was about to explode. that doesn’t mean i won’t finish it later.

    craft services must have been a dream on the set–i can’t see where else the money could have gone; the movie looks like shit.

  29. i too watched lucky number slevin, despite all the warning signs. it has been a long time since i have seen a movie so convinced of and smug about its own cleverness. unfortunately, its cleverness is of the sub-sub-tarantino variety. a painful script, horrible characters, set-design torn from the pages of a pottery barn catalog–the only pleasure to be had from this mess, and a very small one at that, is in ben kingsley’s performance.

    speaking of kingsley, is he always listed as sir ben kingsley in credits?

  31. Should we start a crap thread for 9/11 films? The Great New Wonderful is set one year after 9/11/01, where five short-story-workshop groups of characters discover that, despite the death of thousands and the birth of a “war on terror” and so on, their particular personal problems are still all they can think about.

    You get a hint that the filmmakers (the often-estimable Danny Leiner, of Harold & Kumar semi-fame; the astonishing cast; the not-untalented writer) have some ironic edge, that they are not merely celebrating the narcissism of the characters but somehow commenting on it. But a hint’s about all we get–in most of the five sub-plots, the cathartic conclusions suggest that we should feel bad for these narcissists, that our own pain can quite comfortably be channeled into and confirmed/celebrated through the national trauma.

    As such a blatant exploitation of the event for emotional resonance around fairly-unspectacular stories, I’m fascinated. As a film, though, it tends to suck all energy out of the room when it’s not more aggressively angering you as a viewer.

    One exception: one subplot involves a bland pale white-collar worker (played with pitch-perfect fluster by Jim Gaffigan) being interviewed by a troubling psychologist (played by the outstanding Tony Shalhoub). The latter probes, pushes for a revelation of the real ‘rage’ behind the worker’s affable mask. That’s the plot. Their story, though, is funny, off-center and without pat resolution; it gives a far better hint of how filmmakers might circle ’round the 9/11 mythos with wit, and some style.

  33. Damn, I was looking forward to ‘Fearless’ and Netflix says it has already shipped so it’s too late to cancel. I guess it is a good thing this is Li’s last martial arts film. What is the reason for making an announcement like that anyway?

  34. i was disappointed too. there are a lot of fights but nothing particularly inspired. it does make interesting viewing as a text about contemporary chinese nationalism, for what that’s worth.

  35. ‘The Protector’ has two or three fairly decent set-piece fights between Tony Jaa and hordes of nameless, faceless flunkies, and the fighting style is pretty brutal: one entire sequence involves Jaa breaking bones (he is upset about the killing of his elephant). But no aerial acrobatics can save the truly moronic plot. And there is a bizarre scene at Sydney airport where Jaa bumps into Jackie Chan, they apologize to each other and move on. Presumably Chan is being used to legitimize Jaa — to pass the mantle — but Jaa can’t carry it yet.

  36. Epic Movie — obviously expectations were pretty low, but the previews (shown before the execrable ‘Eragon’) seemed funny so I took the kids. It is astonishing that anyone can make a movie that parodies other movies and yet barely produce a single laugh in the entire 75 minutes. How difficult is it to make fun of Narnia, Wonka, Pirates of the Caribbean, Superman, etc? My kids (despite the Jesus stuff) are as enamored of toilet humor as any red-blooded Americans, but even they were stony-faced most of the time. The only real laugh came when a fake newscast described the reign of Gnarnia’s “White Bitch” as marked by wire taps and failed hurricane relief, and then Kanye West popped up to say that “The White Bitch doesn’t like black people.”

  39. two nights, two crappy tony scott movies. yes, i ignored chris’ warning about domino and mike’s warning about deja vu and watched them both. the latter made only slightly more sense than the former. i see denzel washington has decided to just play the same role over and over again.

    however, if someone holds a gun to your head, and tells you to choose one to watch, pick domino. mickey rourke is good in all his scenes, the opening is not bad, and there is one great sequence with a character appearing on the jerry springer show to list a new set of racial categories for mixed-race people. there was actually another scene which i thought was decent while i was watching but now i can’t remember it. just as well. oh, wait, it came back: a bizarre interlude with tom waits towards the end.

    unrelated to anything else note: domino, like syriana features a character speaking terrible hindi. confusingly, the character is supposed to be afghan. well, i suppose there are some hindi/urdu speakers in afghanistan but my suspicion is the actor is of indian or pakistani origin and in the script it just said, “say something foreign”.

  40. game: answer the following question:

    Q what different roles could denzel play?

    here’s one answer: bubba in an adaptation of percival everett’s god’s country.

  42. it’s not quite utter crap, but stranger than fiction is pretty bad. the first 20 odd minutes rescue it from utter crap land, but it all begins to go downhill fast once maggie gyllenhaal shows up (not her fault) and accelerates once dustin hoffman appears (his fault). i suspect there may have been a more interesting iteration of this script that did not get filmed.

    will ferrel is pretty good, and emma thompson is decent too, but, on the whole, a terrible waste of a lot of talent.

  43. I watched Stranger than Fiction not too long ago – on DVD – and for the life of me, I’d have bet good money neither Dustin Hoffman nor maggie gyllenhaal was in that movie. I have zero recollection of them inthis.

    In fact, the only thing I remember about this movie is the trailer, which I must have seen several months prior to watching the movie. Isn’t this the one where Nicolas Cage has a bow and arrow?

    I did recently watch Sherry Baby with Maggie Gyllenhaal. Depressing and earnest, but good.

  44. Is Dustin Hoffman trying to match DeNiro in piling up the mediocre films made in his declining years? Do they have drug habits to support?

    In any case, one has to admire AVP: Requiem‘s unsentimentality in its victims: sympathetic stoners, kids,Iranian soccer fans,pregnant moms, and even babies! too bad it was humorless, filmed in the dark and, like the first, totally inept in its action sequences. I’m looking forward to AVP: Meets Abbott and Costello. I hate that prick Abbott. why do I keep seeing these films you ask? I am drawn to them like maggots to putrefaction. I’d see more tender indie films if I knew someone somehow would get soaked in acid after unloading both barrels of a shotgun into something toothy and sticky. maybe nicole kidman?

  45. well, I’d say go see Margot at the Wedding but that would probably belie the point. Still, I get it. I watched Death Sentence just hoping for some seductive thrills (didn’t work).

  46. nicolas cage with a bow and arrow: the weather man. not bad, actually. not good either, but not bad. you, however, are probably actually being reminded of another cage vehicle, the family man which is one of those alternate reality thingies, and so somewhat similar to this film in its premise.

  47. No, Stranger Than Fiction stars Will Farrell as a corporate drone who discovers his life is being narrated by Emma Thompson, a reclusive novelist who is “managed” by Queen Latifa playing the Morgan Freeman role. Anyway, it was a Charlie Kaufman-esque script without the wit or style of an actual CK script. That being said I quite liked The Weather Man.

  48. I love it when Arnab not only explains my joke, but maps out the path I took to get there. Not that it was a funny joke, but I admire his attention to detail.
    Your Asperger’s Syndrome is showing.

  49. The Weather Man! That’s the one where Nicholas Cage is living in Chicago as a gun-runner, but his neighbors are pagans and putting his children through a ritual where they dance naked in a hotel room. Later on he kidnaps the president and forces him to eat the original draft of the 14th amendment.

    I’m also looking forward to the new “Mummy 3” movie by Nicolas Cage’s toupee.

  50. re: stranger than fiction. anyone can think of a film in which academics in the humanities are not total fucking idiots, and the screenwriter didn’t get the discipline totally fucking wrong?

    will farrell is very good in this. he brings dignity to an otherwise deeply undignified role.

  53. i meant to write “doesn’t,” as in “anyone can think of a film in which… the screenwriter doesn’t get the discipline…. wrong?”

    office. totally 19th century literary paradigms. tv in the office. he’s teaching 5 classes and conducting 2 dissertations (something wrong with this picture!), plus of course whaddayacallit-ing at the pool. and he’s a total idiot. and he cares enough about novels that a) he reads them and b) he thinks their aesthetic success is worth killing a guy. as if literature professors read novels! and they cared how they end! and were not bleeding-heart, softy liberals who wouldn’t kill a fly much less a sweetie like will farrell!

    hi jeff!

  54. 30 days of night is very bad. which is even worse because it could have been very good. i did like the look of the vampires and the complete lack of interest in explaining them, but all it amounts to is a generic, credulity-stretching exercise in figuring out what order people will die in and who will survive. when i say “credulity-stretching” i am aware that this is a film about vampires, but even within those parameters the survival of the main set of characters for 30 days beggars belief.

  55. i swear that as the ludicrous opening of the condemned got under way i thought that my first action after finishing was going to be to start a “really enjoyable crap” thread, but alas chris beat me to it; and even bigger alas, the rest of the condemned doesn’t qualify. it could have been good if the ludicrous premise had been left alone, but instead the filmmakers (it’s a wwe production starring “stone cold” steve austin) try to layer a realistic frame and a media/morality alibi over it, and it’s a nasty and stupid piece of crap. there’s absolutely no reason to see it. austin’s no worse an action star than the rock, however.

  56. The extremely tepid Leatherheads belongs here (though the adjective “utter” may be a bit too ponderous). Still, as director, Clooney can’t decide if he wants to be a second rate George Roy Hill or a third rate Joel and Ethan Coen (I’m throwing my hat in on the GRH side of the fence). Poor Renne Zellweger; she thinks she wandered onto the set of The Hudsucker Proxy, but she ain’t got none of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s moxie.

  59. the second narnia movie is crap. and while i’m sure it is true to the source material, it is vaguely nasty crap, and the allegory so close to the surface it is almost not allegory.

  60. I didn’t much care for the first one, but, yes, the second is worse. I didn’t really understand much of it but there are at least two moments of unpleasant christian hypocrisy–first, the one kid refuses to the kill the nasty guy (this is my level of memory and engagement with the plot) because he is noble, I suppose, but then the nasty guy gets it anyway (hooray!). Then later there is a lot of handwringing over how wrong it is to keep calling on the lion with the creepy Liam Neeson voice, but lo and behold! they call on him and he shows up and everything is set to right! at least the first one had Tilda Swinton and a talking groundhog.

  61. eagle eye. this movie is so bad even i couldn’t finish it (and i’ve sat through jumper twice). and then the next day i told myself that i had sat through jumper twice and so could finish it. and i did. i would sit through jumper another twenty times straight before i would watch this again. i suspect that there was an interesting script at the root of this that went through a major studio rewrite process but what remains is a mass of expensively exploding implausibilities. don’t even watch it on a plane.

  63. do not watch death at a funeral. do not watch it on a plane, do not watch it on a train. do not watch it on a dare, do not watch it with your hair. those rhymes you see are funnier and better written than anything in death at a funeral. i say that because i think it is a comedy. i’m not sure. it may indeed be a treatise on man’s inhumanity to man, or at least frank oz’s inhumanity to man. i made it to 75 minutes because i was interested to see if it was going to make me smile at some point. but it didn’t.

    somehow this film has a 67 rating on metacritic, and reviewers from the new york times to the onion av club to roger ebert congratulate it on its sophistication and wacky hilarity. this must be the joke. don’t fall for it.

  64. I think “do not watch it with a bear” would be much better than “do not watch it with your hair.” you could include a funny little illustration of a bear shooting out a TV screen.

  65. watching it with a bear would be good though. especially if the bear bites your head off before you get to the bit where the old man in the wheelchair almost poops his pants. how a movie featuring an old man in a wheelchair who almost poops his pants failed to make me laugh, i don’t know.

  68. push. for those who don’t believe there could be a science-fiction movie worse than jumper. actually starts out promisingly but goes downhill very fast. in the hands of a better director this could have been good. also if it did not star either the human torch or the incredibly terrifying dakota fanning. i don’t recall how this did in the theaters but i hope the multiple sequels it looks forward to at the end do not come to pass.

    on the plus side it was better than watching the white olympics.

  70. And in the same year as Ghost Town, another piece of shit. All I’ll say in favor of The Invention of Lying is that it really should have been called The Invention of Religion. The politics were quite provocative, for an American audience.

  72. Speaking of 3D, Clash gives you a headache on about fifty-three different counts, most prominently in its shitty conversion of 2D film into digital three-dimensional fun. It was like watching a moving ViewFinder. A really, really bad ViewFinder.

    Plus the movie sucked. Even with the giant scorpions.

  73. Diablo Cody took a lot of heat for Jennifer’s Body, various bellyachers singling out the overheated dialogue and undercooked plotting in the script. Maybe. No doubt the movie utterly sucks, and this from a guy willing to embrace almost any half-assed variant of the form. I mean, it’s just not any fun to watch. None. That’s an almost amazing accomplishment right there, in a faux-sleazy teen monster horror satire.

    But I think it’s less on Cody’s head, and more a pervasive confusion about the recipe. It’s not funny, not remotely scary, not gory enough, not sleazy enough, and there are just enough whiffs of the incisive intelligence lurking behind the story to make one gasp for air during the pervasive deoxygenated witlessness of the whole. In most every particular, I thought–well, that could have been better.

    Good soundtrack, though.

  76. I want rants! I too wanted to say, simply, “Did You Hear About the Morgans? is shite” and leave it at that. But it’s more fun to rant. Even if some or most find the rant annoying.

  78. the latest entries from my “watched on a plane” series are all utter crap: the a-team really suffers from close juxtaposition with far superior the losers but would be crap anyway; robin hood is joyless (where is alan rickman when you need him?); and twilight: eclipse is notable only for julian assange’s performance as a vampire doctor (i think).

    julian assange yesterday

  79. free wifi at schipol allows me to let you all know in a timely manner that my latest movie seen on a plane was also crap: the expendables. poor jet li doesn’t even get to win a fight. i hope the amsterdam-minneapolis leg will not repeat all the movies from two weeks ago.

  80. For a movie that shows a bloody Jerry O’Connell, legs nibbled down to bloody sticks with torso intact, whining about how they ate his penis–and then shows two piranhas squabbling over said appendage, chewing little bits off before halving it–Piranha is remarkably dull.

    I’ll go ahead and throw Cyrus here, too. Though not really horrible, the film is paper-thin–I kept thinking of the subversive comic lusciously-detailed character work of Albert Brooks’ Mother; Brooks also has two men battling over a mother’s affection, but he reveals and revels in the full, separate life said mom actually lives apart from the childish needs of her patronizing sons. Cyrus wastes Tomei and Keener in thankless, entirely-reactive roles…

  81. Piranha was indeed remarkably dull. I kept thinking about the great fun I had watching Tremors or Lake Placid, but this was a mess (and yet it has ranked high in the memory of many critics and bloggers on end-of-the-year lists). And that penis bit you mention struck me as blatantly homophobic. It was the one piece of human flesh in the entire film those piranhas refused to digest. I mean, yeah, the film is one big tits-and-ass spectacle, but the “funny” in that moment left a bad taste in my mouth (bada boom). Poor Richard Dreyfuss. And you know Spielberg signed off on the beginning, so I blame him too.

  82. This may not be entirely fair . . . perhaps it belongs under the middlebrow thread (if an Antonioni pastiche can be considered middlebrow), but George Clooney’s well-appointed The American was about as fun as watching blood dry on a wet, Italian viale.

  84. Point.

    The Mechanic was a favorite as a tween. Jan Michael Vincent, yes? I was a huge Charles Bronson fan back in the day. I like Ben Foster a lot but am not sure I can get behind this remake.

  89. I think M. Night is becoming something of a Brechtian, either through intention or incompetence. Both The Happening and The Last Airbender have an airless and stitlted quality that makes them sort of eerie and unsettling. Every awkward line reading by Zooey Deschanel or Mark Wahlberg is instantly highlighted by the complete lack of dramatic momentum around them. Ironically, nothing happens….What does it mean for something “to happen?” In The Last Airbender the settings are so dark and cramped that all the epic action is shrunk down to a stagey level where we can better appreciate the bizarre performances of the central figures. The epic action looks like something you’d see on the smudged discs for your ancient View-Finder. Congrats to a mainstream filmmaker taking such an unconventional approach to storytelling!

  91. Yep, I finished it..I’m a dumbass and paid $12 for the 3D version. By damn I was going to get my money’s worth even if I went blind trying to see it. I’m glad I watched it until the end–it turns out he’s a dead woman. I’m sorry my local threater did not have IMAX at the time (they have since built one) so that the screen could be even darker and the fuzzy sound louder—and the cost $15. My area has also recently opened a theater where they serve beer–unfortunately I just discovered this too late to see Tree of Life which is no doubt a six-packer. I’m planning to get smashed for the special showing of Bethelehem: The Christmas City .

  92. well, i would have finished it too if i’d gone to see it in a theater. which raises the question of why you went to see it in a theater. was the chronicles of narnia: the voyage of the dawn treader sold out?

    the fact that i didn’t finish it becomes more meaningful when you learn that i watched jumper twice all the way through.

  93. I’d like to take the high ground here but I probably would have seen Narnia if I gotten around to it. I also saw Jumper in the theater, though I haven’t watched it twice yet–Did you catch every nuance, Arnab? Wasn’t there supposed to be a sequel to that?

  95. For now, Arnab, just take the Rachel Bilsson Dove Bar commercial as a kind of sequel…you know the one where she stares dazedly into the camera but says nothing, after walking over the tops of cars to get to the bar…it makes as much sense as the film….I think Samuel L. Jackson even has a cameo in it.

  96. This new French, black & white, silent film, The Artist, is crap. It’s cute and even charming but rarely clever and has little to no sense of the visual flare of silent films from the twenties (didn’t help that I was watching Buster Keaton films the other night). To add insult to injury, the damn thing felt like two hours of my life I will never get back (the company, however, was stellar truth be told). So, yeah, I saw a critic’s screening tonight and walked away less than impressed (yet critics all across the globe are singing it praises). If Harvey Weinstein pulls this rabbit out of AMPAS’s ass, then he is indeed God. The Artist makes The King’s Speech look like it was directed by Kubrick. I did like the dog, but one cute dog a year is more than enough, and I throw my vote behind that mongrel in Beginners.

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