Kelly Wand
Not all stuffed pink bears are megalomaniacs but why risk it?
Tracking analysts (which as I understand it are soulless marketing wonks who predict how much money a movie will make in its opening weekend but, much like other astrologists, never eat crow even after being proven repeatedly wrong) are calling this a “weak” blockbuster summer because the only two hits so far have been threesequels, Toy Story and Twilight, while everything else has, relative to their arbitrary estimates, “underperformed.” Uninterestingly, both of these hit movie titles have two “T”s in them (not including the “3”’s), yet The A-Team, which didn’t have Mr. T in it, tanked. What’s this tell us? Everything. Or, to be more precise, nothing.
To put this in better perspective, the summer of ’82, back when I was 12, gave us E.T., Poltergeist, The Thing, The Road Warrior, Rocky III, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Tron, and even something for the ladies: Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. In ’84 we got Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Gremlins, Sixteen Candles, Top Secret!, Bachelor Party, The Karate Kid and something for the old folks, Revenge of the Nerds. But ’83, sandwiched right between these mighty peaks? Return of the Jedi and Octopussy. Talk about a parsley sandwich.
So if you’re a pre-teen movie enthusiast now, ‘010’s basically your generation’s ’83, only minus the hope of an ’84 anytime soon (except maybe for 1984). If it makes you feel better, back in Christmas of ’84, the movie 2010 predicted that this was the year we’d suddenly get a second sun in the sky and name it after the devil, but instead we got The Last Airbender and an oil slick the size of the Gulf of Mexico. What’s the difference? Cleaning up the oil slick will ultimately cost slightly less.
Still reading? Let’s fix that:
Killers – Katherine Heigl dissed Apatow and her Gray’s Anatomy writers for not giving her quality material. So she made this. Featuring Tom Selleck, as per usual, as a “Russian pervert.”
Robin Hood – Good news for bellhops: Russell Crowe’s now officially too fat to throw a phone. This movie takes all our treasured iconic Robin Hood moments like archery contests, swordfights on stairwells, swinging from chandeliers, swinging from vines, robbing from the rich, giving to the poor, outfoxing a Sheriff of Nottingham, quarterstaffery, and zest for life, and vaguely promises them all in an unlikely sequel. Featuring Cate Blanchett as an empowered Maid Marian who promptly almost drowns herself the second she dons chain armor shortly after mourning her father’s grisly death by ecstatically necking with some pudgy bandit she met only a couple weeks earlier. Seriously, I hope to christ Ridley Scott never frames another catapult. Unless it’s aimed at an alien and/or replicant.
The Losers – The most bad-ass carnage you’ll ever see in a 2D PG-13 movie based on a comic book without a Nolan involved (i.e., bloodless and generically frenetic), but interspersed with lots of quips, or lines delivered with the same arch timing as quips. The sniper, Cougar, wears a hat. The tech-nerd, Chris Evans, wears funny T-shirts. The good black dude is married. The bad black dude is tall and angry. The leader, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, is Clooney-esque (in that he rarely keeps his head still). The girl is two-faced and likes to break bottles over the heads of her prospective suitors, but they have just enough faith in her deceptive personality to not fatally hit her when they shoot at her through a bathroom wall. The bad guy is promised a slow, painful death but gets blown up instantly. And the losers win. At the end, even though they’re all wanted by the CIA, led by evil Jason Patric, they go to a girls’ soccer game, where the T-shirt guy picks a fight with the soccer referee. Movies that make faking your death look easy suck the life out of me.
The Messenger – I haven’t vomited so much during a movie called The Messenger since the Milla Jovovich Joan of Arc one, although in this case I had some kind of stomach flu (spoiler alert). But don’t let that scare you off; this is actually the most uplifting movie about the art of tragic-news delivery since Apocalypse Now*. The title’s a misnomer since there are actually two messengers: Woody Harrelson as a guy whose weakness is alcohol and Ben Foster as a guy whose weakness is having Jena Malone as his ex-gf. The two dudes bicker and bond and bicker bondingly; Foster falls for new widow Samantha Morton but ends up alone in a kitchen. Twice. If I’d written this movie, it probably would’ve ended with an angry gun-toting parent (Buscemi) reacting to the news of his son’s demise in combat by shooting Foster on his porch, then Harrelson having to go inform both Morton and Malone that their ex-bf had died in the line of duty. Thankfully I’m not allowed near dramas.
Shrek Forever After – Purgatory = even worse than your kid’s birthday party!
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (synopsis) – A beggar kid named Dustin Diamond saves another kid from getting killed by the King’s horses and leads the royal guards on a long chase across rooftops, resulting in dozens of injuries and zillions of drachmas in destroyed property. Impressed by the lad’s reckless insolence, the King adopts him as his son, which neither of his real sons mind much. The kid grows up and they all invade another city because it supposedly has WMDs (those gullible Arabs!), where Dustin uses his jump powers to start a fire at an intersection, which wins the battle even though it doesn’t kill anybody. The king gives the conquered princess to Dustin, but she’s a spitfire so they don’t rape her. She has this thing called the Maguffin of Time that lets you go back in time whenever the plot calls for it for exactly however long it needs to undo an unwanted fatality, but it only works if you use this special sand that’s incubated between Gemma Arterton’s ripe, lush, orange button-mashers. The King dies mysteriously, so Dustin proclaims his innocence by running away with the princess, and the uncle turns out to be evil because his hands were burnt, which no one at the court noticed somehow (and because he’s Ben Kingsley), and there’s some chasing, and sand, and more chasing, and everyone dies but comes back to life because magic, but they still fall in love even though she doesn’t know him yet in this rebooted chrono-verse. I’m not convinced Hollywood really gets the non-retcon possibilities of time travel yet.
Splice -- Not that I minded everything up to and including the wtf sex scene, but director Vincenzo Natali is essentially Chris Columbus spliced with Cronenberg, if Cronenberg wasn’t awesome. How come in movies mentally unbalanced scientists always manage to produce unkillable complex organisms they can breed with but real-life ones can’t even make a simple boner pill without a chalky undertaste? Chalk in the P.M.’s never agreed with me (see my Messenger review above).
The A-Team – As Hannibals go, I vastly prefer how Anthony Hopkins gave George Peppard’s TV character some unexpected humanity in the first A-Team movie, Silence of the Lambs, which incidentally was a lot funnier than this third entry in the trilogy. Other than that, I rather enjoy in theory the situations the A-Team gets into, from Jessica Biel to parachuting via tank out of an exploding plane. But every character’s too interchangeably hyper, when only the Sharlto Copley character should be. Man, being a grown man deconstructing the characterizations in an A-Team movie over the Internet feels fucking awesome.
Toy Story 3 – The ending only makes sense if it’s Woody’s dying hallucination. C’mon, seriously? He can forge the mom’s handwriting on a Post-It note while both humans are in the room? Two-inch-high rubber alien toys somehow got into the locked claw-room? A kid who played with action figures at 15 would get into college? And just out of curiosity, what’s the plan when Bonnie hits puberty? Also, should I feel guilty about throwing dice? Or aroused when I plug my memory unit into my X-Box controller? Man, I can totally see Walken voicing my newly red-ringed 360 in Toy Story 4. '012 will pwn.
Knight & Day – Tom Cruise plays a Tom Cruise-y assassin named Knight and lovably blonde Cameron Diaz plays a character named Havens. They hit it off after he has her unknowingly smuggle a radioactive super-battery through an airport metal detector and he kills everyone on their plane, crash-lands it in a cornfield, then somehow gets her across the country and into her sister’s apartment via some other form of transport, makes her an omelette, and composes numerous cute Post-Its he leaves lying around before he sets out to spy on her from somewhere nearby so he can sandbag her in a crowded diner a few minutes later. As the movie progresses, he gets Diaz to fall in love with him by slipping her rufies every time he’s about to do something cool (she never seems strung out, though) and by shooting her fireman friend for trying to save her (who neither minds nor tries much to court her or ascertain whether she’s alive or dead thereafter). They outrun some bulls in Pamplona on a motorcycle and much like the Indiana Jones monkeys the bulls only overturn the cars containing bad guys and don’t maul anyone else. At the end, Diaz turns the tables on Tom by drugging him and somehow absconding him to South America while he’s dying from a bullet-wound, where they invite his parents to visit them but the dad gruffly insists he doesn’t know what the hell’s going on. Again, the ending only works if the whole movie is Cruise's dad's Alzheimer’s-based dying hallucination, which understandably set in while he was watching the eerily similar Killers.
The Last Airbender – Pure awesome till the first frame.
Don McKay – The less you know, the more you’ll like it.
Twilight: Eclipse – I watched this movie’s reflection off a piece of white cardboard and confess that I did get quite turned on when Kristen Stewart started making out with the hot shirtless chest-waxed zombie as he ate the metrosexual mummy’s brain. To paraphrase Will Rogers, if cannibalism had been this in with teenage girls back in my day, I wouldn’t have needed to incinerate my prom pix while the FBI battered my door down.
Well, that’s all I and Hollywood have for now. Fans of this space should feel free to check out my weekly movie podcast at www.quartertothree.com that I co-host with two other nerds (I’m the one who sounds perpetually too baked to finish a sentence), or better yet, anything at random on the Internet. Way things are going, and much like 3D, it won’t be around forever. Just ask the artist sporadically known as Prince.
*Strangulation counts as bad news. Especially if you’re a neck!
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