Movie Reviews
Sep. 3rd, 2008 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficSame deal. I watch the movies for free so you don't have to. And trust me, you really, really don't have to.
Mirrors - Watching this, I was so tired of ghost stories wherein ghosts demand that someone solve their murder or whatever and make this request by scaring the shit out of the person in question. Imagine if this happened in real-life.
You: Hey, Jesse, where are...
Jesse: BUGA BUGA!
You: AHHHHHH!
Jesse: Ha ha ha. Hey, wanna help me move?
Fortunately, it turns out that the ghostly entity in Mirrors is a demon, so it's entitled to be an asshole. Unfortunately, it spends the entire movie trying to get back into the possessee from which it was once separated. Now, you'd think the two of them getting back together again would make the demon even more powerful, right? After all, that'd only make sense. Throughout the movie, this demon is shown to be able to kill anyone so long as they're near a reflection (why Mirror Master can't work on anyone's reflecting eyes is anyone's guess. Also, how it's able to burst pipes so that water - which as Kiefer helpfully reminds us "It can create reflections!" - can flood out a house). Yet it trades that in so it can have a fistfight with Jack Bauer. Jack wins.
Director Alexandre Aja has never impressed me as a filmmaker. He's so hamfisted, no Orthodox Jew could take a punch from him. His High Tension had a frankly insulting ending, the raison d'être for his Hills Have Eyes remake seemed to be making the original more bloody, rapey, and politically anvilious. Admittedly, that could be argued to be a good thing in a slasher movie, but in a ghost story?
Yes, Mirrors is a remake of a J-horror movie. Perhaps that's why the demon spends the entire movie trying to possess a dark-haired little girl (potentially unaware that she has grown into a nun for Kiefer to kidnap). So, what would you imagine it does? Yes, the movie quickly blows its ghostly wad by subjecting Kiefer to every manner of apparition, to which he dutifully follows before evincing fright. At one point, he follows a woman's screams into a dressing room, upon which he finds that the woman is only visible in (dun da dun!) a mirror. So, what do you think he does? Does he leave? No, of course not. Kiefer drags the mirror over to the woman so he can get a closer look.
All of this leads in to the movie's big selling point (and the fact that this is the selling point should tell you something). Amy Smart is getting into a bath. This never ends well for characters in horror movies. The movie doesn't even let her get out of the tube in a bathtowel to investigate some weird noises or a fuse blowing. Instead, when she moves away from the mirror, her reflection... DOESN'T! (Reflections not moving when the people casting them move, or vice versa, is one of the principle "scares" of the movie. It becomes as overused as "something dark whooshed in front of the camera!") The reflection grabs her own mouth and begins to pull until Amy Smart's jaw is completely ripped off.
This was sold big. The poster has a big picture of a woman screaming without a lower jaw. It showed up in TV spots. I even saw one of those annoying Flash ads where it had KIEFER SUTHERLAND looking perturbed, but AMY SMART grabbing her jaw as if she were about to remove her retainers the hard way. The entire movie is being marketed on this one thing.
This is one of only two gorefests in the movie, a sure disappointment to slasher fans, so you'd think it would be a jaw-dropper (sorry). Unfortunately, no. Amy Smart's cheeks ripping through are depicted with glaringly fake CGI. Just a few discerning cuts, to leave these things to our imagination (blood falling into the bathwater while we hear gruesome noises, f'r instance), would make the scene a lot scarier. But no, God forbid you leave the money shot out of a porno. Rob Bottin's prosthetics in The Thing worked much better, and that came out BEFORE I WAS BORN.
It's all downhill from there. It's obvious the mirror demon has no rules to abide by and it's even more obvious that the script will determine who lives or dies, since otherwise there's no reason that the demon can't kill anyone at the drop of a hat.
Star Wars: Clone Wars - It says something about George Lucas that the purportedly serious installment for fans of his original trilogy is named "Attack of the Clones", while the kiddified version is dignified with the title "The Clone Wars". Now, anyone can tell you how a Star Wars story starts. There's a big scroll of yellow letters, then we see a starship fly by on the way to some direly important business. So how do you think this starts?
With someone READING the text crawl. Worse yet, it's a narrator in the style of old WW2 newsreels, just to destroy the last bits of versimilitude that weren't obliterated by the diner in AOTC. We get to see snippets of the narration being dramatized, which at least introduces us to the butt-ugly character design and animation right off the bat. Everyone looks like they escaped from a Sega Saturn cutscene.
It's hard for me to oversell how completely un-Star-Wars this makes the enterprise feel. Imagine John McClane's "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" line from Live Free Or Die Hard being neutered and then multiply by ten.
Of course, why anyone would want to do a series on the Clone Wars is beyond me. We saw the war begin, we saw its most important battle in the opening of ROTS, then we saw it end. Furthermore, the entire war was a shellgame from the beginning. Star Wars works best when it's about good versus evil, archetypal fantasy, Joseph Campbell. The Clone Wars were evil versus slightly less evil. Why are we supposed to care about these various Jedis and clone troopers when they're all going to turn out to be martyrs and fascists, respectively? Speaking of, I wonder how an order of mystic warriors who could see the future, sense evil, and had lightning-fast reflexes were brought down by SURPRISE LASERSEX! You'd think, while they were kicking back brewskis with a bunch of clonetroopers, one of them would have come across that whole "secret orders to kill you when the time comes" thing during a rousing drinking game. "I never... had a sleeper program embedded in my subconscious to kill any Jedi in my proximity." "Damn!"
Which brings us to our new characters. Ahsoka Tano, for starters. She's Anakin Skywalker's new Padawan. Anakin and Obi-Wan are Jedi Masters, able to deflect thousands of blaster bolts and destroy armies of droids, yet they still wear modified stormtrooper armor. So what do you think Ahsoka, this noob, this beginner likely to make mistakes, will wear? Yes, that's right, a tubetop. She's 14, so at least the lolicon crowd is happy.
Having already established how full retard the character design is, let's get into the character. You'd think, being that she's Anakin's apprentice, she'd either...
A. Be an interesting character in her own right.
B. Be an interesting foil to Anakin's character arc.
C. Hopefully both of the above.
The answer is D, none of the above. Ahsoka is spunky and sweet and generally unsufferable. The less said about her, the better. Yet R2-D2 gives her a big whooping noise when she introduces herself, as if something wondrous, nay, mystical has happened, like Barack Obama giving a speech. Why are you steering me wrong, R2? I thought we were friends.
Of course, since we're doing a big story about how BIG the Star Wars universe is, how varied and exotic it is in aspect, how many different characters fought in the war and were touched by the war, there is of course Jabba, who by now has been in more Star Wars movies than Lando. Star Wars isn't one thing after another, it's the same damn thing over and over again.
Oh, and they make a visit to exotic Tattooine, which by now is as familiar as the corner grocery store. Sand, moisture farms, wretched hive of scum and villainy. You know, I've always wondered why Obi-Wan didn't just grab a brick of credits, haul ass to Tattooine, and pay Watto to free Anakin's mom. He could put her in a nice retirement home, his Padawan could rest easy, win/win? Instead, he let her languish in slavery so that Anakin could let go of his weebly little attachments to stupid things like his loving mother. One of the reasons I'm glad the Sith managed to shitcan all the Jedi. Bastards had it coming.
But not only do we get Jabba, we get Jabba's son, Stinky. You read that right. Stinky. His infant son, Stinky. We're supposed to find a baby slug with arms cute. Somehow, Lucas has managed to make a character even more unappealing than Jar-Jar Binks. Not only that, but we get Jabba's gay uncle, Ziro (just so we can get the obligatory child molestation joke out of the way... "OH MY GOD, JABBA BLEW UP THE BUS!" Kids, ask your parents). You've probably already heard of him. He speaks English. In Truman Capote's voice. Yes, I'm sure all the kids in the audience will love a pointed skewering of In Cold Blood. They'll all laugh gayly and recall the hours of fun they spent watching Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of the author. Yes. That. Perhaps in the upcoming TV series, we'll be able to see Jabba's stepfather, Jabba's second cousin twice-removed, Jabba's babysitter, and of course Jabba's tragic lost love. Sniff. Sniff.
You've probably noticed I haven't mention the plot. There isn't one. It's like a callback to old NES games. Jabba the Hutt's son has been kidnapped. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the Hutt? The Jedi go through various levels, fighting bosses like Asajj Ventress and Count Dooku (which is a less shitty, sorry, name now that "Stinky" is canon), and eventually getting Yoda to declare "A winner is you!" It actually manages to make space battles, lightsaber duels, and epic battles boring. Scene after scene, the Jedi run around wartorn planets with blaster bolts flying around. So many blaster bolts, it looks like something went wrong with a paint-by-numbers bukkake coloring book. Occasionally, the clonetroopers will go hand to hand with the droids or there'll be a scene in which the Jedi fight up the side of a mountain. Then it goes back to A-Team shenanigans in which thousands of lasers fly through the air, never actually managing to hit anything.
I should also mention the ending, in which Anakin and Ahsoka return Stinky (after the laziest plot to frame them for the kidnapping that has ever been seen in the halls of villainy). Jabba has been lied to and told his son was killed by the Jedi. Seeing his son alive, you'd think this brilliant crimelord would realize the Shit are full of sith... err, whatever. Instead, he orders the execution of the Jedi. Just then, Amidala happens to call and talks Jabba out of it. This is because her character needed to be crowbarred into the movie (as it turns out, once you get rid of Natalie Portman wearing dominatrix outfits while telling Anakin they can't be together... mixed messages much?... you don't really miss her) since she was such a strong female character. And thank God, as otherwise we wouldn't have Big Gay Ziro and his subplot!
So we leave Jabba snuggling his son, to see him again when Han Solo walks on his tail, and then again when he supposedly becomes a threatening villain to be serenaded by big CGI musical numbers.
I'd call it a Saturday morning cartoon, but that would be an insult to Saturday morning cartoons. Even at its most dire (read: Beast Machines), Transformers had more integrity than this.
Mirrors - Watching this, I was so tired of ghost stories wherein ghosts demand that someone solve their murder or whatever and make this request by scaring the shit out of the person in question. Imagine if this happened in real-life.
You: Hey, Jesse, where are...
Jesse: BUGA BUGA!
You: AHHHHHH!
Jesse: Ha ha ha. Hey, wanna help me move?
Fortunately, it turns out that the ghostly entity in Mirrors is a demon, so it's entitled to be an asshole. Unfortunately, it spends the entire movie trying to get back into the possessee from which it was once separated. Now, you'd think the two of them getting back together again would make the demon even more powerful, right? After all, that'd only make sense. Throughout the movie, this demon is shown to be able to kill anyone so long as they're near a reflection (why Mirror Master can't work on anyone's reflecting eyes is anyone's guess. Also, how it's able to burst pipes so that water - which as Kiefer helpfully reminds us "It can create reflections!" - can flood out a house). Yet it trades that in so it can have a fistfight with Jack Bauer. Jack wins.
Director Alexandre Aja has never impressed me as a filmmaker. He's so hamfisted, no Orthodox Jew could take a punch from him. His High Tension had a frankly insulting ending, the raison d'être for his Hills Have Eyes remake seemed to be making the original more bloody, rapey, and politically anvilious. Admittedly, that could be argued to be a good thing in a slasher movie, but in a ghost story?
Yes, Mirrors is a remake of a J-horror movie. Perhaps that's why the demon spends the entire movie trying to possess a dark-haired little girl (potentially unaware that she has grown into a nun for Kiefer to kidnap). So, what would you imagine it does? Yes, the movie quickly blows its ghostly wad by subjecting Kiefer to every manner of apparition, to which he dutifully follows before evincing fright. At one point, he follows a woman's screams into a dressing room, upon which he finds that the woman is only visible in (dun da dun!) a mirror. So, what do you think he does? Does he leave? No, of course not. Kiefer drags the mirror over to the woman so he can get a closer look.
All of this leads in to the movie's big selling point (and the fact that this is the selling point should tell you something). Amy Smart is getting into a bath. This never ends well for characters in horror movies. The movie doesn't even let her get out of the tube in a bathtowel to investigate some weird noises or a fuse blowing. Instead, when she moves away from the mirror, her reflection... DOESN'T! (Reflections not moving when the people casting them move, or vice versa, is one of the principle "scares" of the movie. It becomes as overused as "something dark whooshed in front of the camera!") The reflection grabs her own mouth and begins to pull until Amy Smart's jaw is completely ripped off.
This was sold big. The poster has a big picture of a woman screaming without a lower jaw. It showed up in TV spots. I even saw one of those annoying Flash ads where it had KIEFER SUTHERLAND looking perturbed, but AMY SMART grabbing her jaw as if she were about to remove her retainers the hard way. The entire movie is being marketed on this one thing.
This is one of only two gorefests in the movie, a sure disappointment to slasher fans, so you'd think it would be a jaw-dropper (sorry). Unfortunately, no. Amy Smart's cheeks ripping through are depicted with glaringly fake CGI. Just a few discerning cuts, to leave these things to our imagination (blood falling into the bathwater while we hear gruesome noises, f'r instance), would make the scene a lot scarier. But no, God forbid you leave the money shot out of a porno. Rob Bottin's prosthetics in The Thing worked much better, and that came out BEFORE I WAS BORN.
It's all downhill from there. It's obvious the mirror demon has no rules to abide by and it's even more obvious that the script will determine who lives or dies, since otherwise there's no reason that the demon can't kill anyone at the drop of a hat.
Star Wars: Clone Wars - It says something about George Lucas that the purportedly serious installment for fans of his original trilogy is named "Attack of the Clones", while the kiddified version is dignified with the title "The Clone Wars". Now, anyone can tell you how a Star Wars story starts. There's a big scroll of yellow letters, then we see a starship fly by on the way to some direly important business. So how do you think this starts?
With someone READING the text crawl. Worse yet, it's a narrator in the style of old WW2 newsreels, just to destroy the last bits of versimilitude that weren't obliterated by the diner in AOTC. We get to see snippets of the narration being dramatized, which at least introduces us to the butt-ugly character design and animation right off the bat. Everyone looks like they escaped from a Sega Saturn cutscene.
It's hard for me to oversell how completely un-Star-Wars this makes the enterprise feel. Imagine John McClane's "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" line from Live Free Or Die Hard being neutered and then multiply by ten.
Of course, why anyone would want to do a series on the Clone Wars is beyond me. We saw the war begin, we saw its most important battle in the opening of ROTS, then we saw it end. Furthermore, the entire war was a shellgame from the beginning. Star Wars works best when it's about good versus evil, archetypal fantasy, Joseph Campbell. The Clone Wars were evil versus slightly less evil. Why are we supposed to care about these various Jedis and clone troopers when they're all going to turn out to be martyrs and fascists, respectively? Speaking of, I wonder how an order of mystic warriors who could see the future, sense evil, and had lightning-fast reflexes were brought down by SURPRISE LASERSEX! You'd think, while they were kicking back brewskis with a bunch of clonetroopers, one of them would have come across that whole "secret orders to kill you when the time comes" thing during a rousing drinking game. "I never... had a sleeper program embedded in my subconscious to kill any Jedi in my proximity." "Damn!"
Which brings us to our new characters. Ahsoka Tano, for starters. She's Anakin Skywalker's new Padawan. Anakin and Obi-Wan are Jedi Masters, able to deflect thousands of blaster bolts and destroy armies of droids, yet they still wear modified stormtrooper armor. So what do you think Ahsoka, this noob, this beginner likely to make mistakes, will wear? Yes, that's right, a tubetop. She's 14, so at least the lolicon crowd is happy.
Having already established how full retard the character design is, let's get into the character. You'd think, being that she's Anakin's apprentice, she'd either...
A. Be an interesting character in her own right.
B. Be an interesting foil to Anakin's character arc.
C. Hopefully both of the above.
The answer is D, none of the above. Ahsoka is spunky and sweet and generally unsufferable. The less said about her, the better. Yet R2-D2 gives her a big whooping noise when she introduces herself, as if something wondrous, nay, mystical has happened, like Barack Obama giving a speech. Why are you steering me wrong, R2? I thought we were friends.
Of course, since we're doing a big story about how BIG the Star Wars universe is, how varied and exotic it is in aspect, how many different characters fought in the war and were touched by the war, there is of course Jabba, who by now has been in more Star Wars movies than Lando. Star Wars isn't one thing after another, it's the same damn thing over and over again.
Oh, and they make a visit to exotic Tattooine, which by now is as familiar as the corner grocery store. Sand, moisture farms, wretched hive of scum and villainy. You know, I've always wondered why Obi-Wan didn't just grab a brick of credits, haul ass to Tattooine, and pay Watto to free Anakin's mom. He could put her in a nice retirement home, his Padawan could rest easy, win/win? Instead, he let her languish in slavery so that Anakin could let go of his weebly little attachments to stupid things like his loving mother. One of the reasons I'm glad the Sith managed to shitcan all the Jedi. Bastards had it coming.
But not only do we get Jabba, we get Jabba's son, Stinky. You read that right. Stinky. His infant son, Stinky. We're supposed to find a baby slug with arms cute. Somehow, Lucas has managed to make a character even more unappealing than Jar-Jar Binks. Not only that, but we get Jabba's gay uncle, Ziro (just so we can get the obligatory child molestation joke out of the way... "OH MY GOD, JABBA BLEW UP THE BUS!" Kids, ask your parents). You've probably already heard of him. He speaks English. In Truman Capote's voice. Yes, I'm sure all the kids in the audience will love a pointed skewering of In Cold Blood. They'll all laugh gayly and recall the hours of fun they spent watching Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of the author. Yes. That. Perhaps in the upcoming TV series, we'll be able to see Jabba's stepfather, Jabba's second cousin twice-removed, Jabba's babysitter, and of course Jabba's tragic lost love. Sniff. Sniff.
You've probably noticed I haven't mention the plot. There isn't one. It's like a callback to old NES games. Jabba the Hutt's son has been kidnapped. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the Hutt? The Jedi go through various levels, fighting bosses like Asajj Ventress and Count Dooku (which is a less shitty, sorry, name now that "Stinky" is canon), and eventually getting Yoda to declare "A winner is you!" It actually manages to make space battles, lightsaber duels, and epic battles boring. Scene after scene, the Jedi run around wartorn planets with blaster bolts flying around. So many blaster bolts, it looks like something went wrong with a paint-by-numbers bukkake coloring book. Occasionally, the clonetroopers will go hand to hand with the droids or there'll be a scene in which the Jedi fight up the side of a mountain. Then it goes back to A-Team shenanigans in which thousands of lasers fly through the air, never actually managing to hit anything.
I should also mention the ending, in which Anakin and Ahsoka return Stinky (after the laziest plot to frame them for the kidnapping that has ever been seen in the halls of villainy). Jabba has been lied to and told his son was killed by the Jedi. Seeing his son alive, you'd think this brilliant crimelord would realize the Shit are full of sith... err, whatever. Instead, he orders the execution of the Jedi. Just then, Amidala happens to call and talks Jabba out of it. This is because her character needed to be crowbarred into the movie (as it turns out, once you get rid of Natalie Portman wearing dominatrix outfits while telling Anakin they can't be together... mixed messages much?... you don't really miss her) since she was such a strong female character. And thank God, as otherwise we wouldn't have Big Gay Ziro and his subplot!
So we leave Jabba snuggling his son, to see him again when Han Solo walks on his tail, and then again when he supposedly becomes a threatening villain to be serenaded by big CGI musical numbers.
I'd call it a Saturday morning cartoon, but that would be an insult to Saturday morning cartoons. Even at its most dire (read: Beast Machines), Transformers had more integrity than this.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 04:50 pm (UTC)Ha! Great way to start the morning. Thanx! =)
Thank you for sparing me...
Date: 2008-09-03 05:12 pm (UTC)Your review, however, cracked me up. I'm still LOLing about the gay uncle bit and R2D2 being (somewhat) a fan of Obama. LMAO!
no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 02:31 am (UTC)It was a schizophrenic demon in a mirror! LMAO!
no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 02:47 pm (UTC)One, CT's don't really drink, and two, the implied canon explanation is that they've been living and fighting with these guys for years. Any such orders would pretty much be background noise. Like how you don't notice the elevator music after a few days.
Yeah, I know.
You're pushing that harder than you pushed "-A BOX OF SCRAPS!" arentcha?
It's only A Team Firing when the characters are just shooting randomly. If they're supposedly aiming, it's Stormtrooper Syndrome.
/nerd