Kelly WandSummer (and Early Autumn?!) Movie Roundup Review Blogtacular ‘09
October 16th 2009 09:17
If I were a zombie, I'd bite her too. And by too I mean still.
God, I am one terrible blogger. Maybe it has something to do with blogging not really being considered a deadline (or is it more like having a 24/7 deadline?). I’m pretty good with deadlines but don’t exactly seek them out.
Anyway, enough about my terribleness, onward to Hollywood’s! Also, in the interest of offering better value for something that’s already free, herewith instead of the usual long single movie review is a comprehensive analectic take on every movie that I saw this summer and early October, including, at no extra charge, a bunch I didn’t*:
Inglourious Basterds – Best repeated baseball-bat to the face, best Nazi, best dialogue, best Italian accent by Brad Pitt, best redneck accent by Brad Pitt, best ending, best opening, and worst anachronistic music-video interlude involving lipstick (did de Palma ghost direct for a day?). I went into it with lowered expectations because a friend who’d caught an advance screening had complained about how it was “talkier even than Grindhouse.” Well, yeah, except that here instead of loquacious girls dicking around in bars for an hour, it’s people talking because they’re spies trying not to get shot by supernaturally perceptive Nazi officers at a single verbal slip-up. You can tell by the neglect of most of the Basterd backstories that like Mulholland Drive this was originally intended as a much vaster tapestry reduced to a pared-down Cliff’s Notes version, but this one efficiently saves you those 18 extra hours. Which you can then spend watching crappy movies based on toys or forty-word-long children’s books that feel way longer than this. Thanks, Quentin!
Terminator: Salvation – Didn’t catch this one because it was rated PG-13 (or rather, Mc-PG-13), and also because nothing in the trailers was dark-blue-tinged or showed skulls getting bulldozed as enticingly promised in the first three movies. Plus they cut Moon Bloodgood’s nude scene. Thanks, Warner Bros.!
Transformers 2: Rise of the Fallen – Didn’t see because I’m tired of movies about giant robots who want to kill everybody but never kill anybody. Plus I can get Megan Fox on a motorcycle at home. Or at least Robert Foxworthy in a bear-suit.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – Did this even come out? Most Boring Characters Per Longest Movie/Book Series Ever**. I think I’ve seen half of one of these, the one that ends in a cave, like all movies. The cave was referred to as a “chamber of secrets” although it contains no secrets, just some monster that the supposedly heroic, wise dumbasses who ineptly run Hogwarts somehow never noticed lives right under their school (and eats what? ineptitude vibrations through the walls?). I hear this is the one where Snape kills Dumbledore (spoiler alert).
Land of the Lost – Didn’t see this because they turned an eerie cheap-ass jungle I loved as a child into an expensive desert under a normal sky, and a stranded family into a milquetoast British girl, a redneck (Danny McBride, really stretching) and a physicist who are all grown-ups and genetically unrelated. Fuck that noise. Note to soulless movie execs: The Brady Bunch Movie parodied its source material by actually resembling the source material. At all. In fact, that was, like, the joke. The family with bad hair was still a family with the same names, ages and personalities as the original characters they were spoofing. This resemblance made people laugh. /pats soulless shoulder-pad: I know. Comedy’s complicated.
Up – Saw eagerly and loved because it’s about an old man who hates everyone, which I can identify with. And a bird. After WALL-E, the first kids’ movie, or any movie, to suggest that the conquest of space would be boring, ecologically unsound, and not even worth looking through the viewports at, I was grateful for some Pixar visuals that flaunted their exotic, lush, natural geographies and had characters with motivations more nuanced and comprehensible than those of an insane captain’s wheel.
Jennifer’s Body – Horribly directed and acted except for shapely Megan Fox, who reveals an unexpected (and underrated) flair for throwaway lines and crazed demonic leers. Both of which, by the way, are harder to pull off well than they look, maybe even more so if you were initially hired just to be gorgeous and bitchy and had to learn these skills on the fly. But it’s a bad, formless movie, persistently vague about crucial details: I still don’t get who started that fire at the club or why or whether it was deliberate, or why the artsy guy wouldn’t have told every, let alone any, of his classmates that he’d landed a date with the hottest girl in school that night. And why would Jennifer trance out during that endless wretched straight-faced indie-rock musical number early on? Those musicians weren’t demons themselves, just douchebags. Rather, wannabee douchebags. Their music is supposed to (and does) suck so bad, they need to make demonic pacts to succeed. As in the Resident Evil movies, the camera here always seems to be cutting away from the gore, the sex, anything good. But its worst omission? Back in my youth, R-rated horror films like this were at least choc-a-bloc with bare breasts. I pity teen audiences today, and myself…And Megan. It drags when she’s not around.
Zombieland -- Like one of those live-action Disney movies from the ‘70’s, only with zombies instead of Dean Jones. Spoiler alert: I was so baked I actually thought that was Michael Cera. One great sequence set in a celebrity home is worth the price of sneaking in but so is Woody Harrelson’s performance and Emma Stone’s face. My only gripe is that Stone’s excruciatingly hot character Wichita is set up as a bad-ass con artiste able to get the drop on Woody Harrelson’s unflappably competent Tallahassee twice, but then just like the Naomie Harris character in 28 Days Later and Rose Byrne’s in Weeks she goes soft and stupid toward the end, reverting to an immobile damsel of distress after flooding an amusement park with zombie-attracting lights and clamor without at least clearing and sealing off the area first. The trailers for this looked dull but I must admit I haven’t seen a movie kill a mid-day audience like this since Borat. Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick make comedic mincemeat out of Diablo Cody, kinda like Emma Stone’s face does to Megan’s Body. Zombieland may even wind up rendering the upcoming World War Z movie dated. If the hacks who wrote Epic Movie and all those other “__ Movies” wrote Zombie Movie and were talented, it still wouldn’t be this good.
Capitalism: A Love Story – In which we learn that airline pilots make 19K a year yet for some reason don’t fly planes into skyscrapers. Daily. My modest proposal: bankers can now fly only commercially.
Couples Retreat – A movie for girls to drag their boyfriends to about guys being dragged to something they don’t want to do.
Black Knight – Admittedly this came out 8 years ago, but caught it on satellite the other night and it so holds up. Martin Lawrence meets L. Sprague de Camp! Magical.
The Avatar trailer – Pure awesome till the smurf speaks about three seconds in.
Well, that’s it for now, movie review aficionados. I hereby promise to see more remakes, reboots, sequels, and rip-offs next summer, and in the frostier meantime to provide more of the lovable snideness that’s the next best thing to actually seeing a movie and blogging about it yourself!
*It’s like I’m my generation’s Gary Franklin, only slightly less bulbous.
**Does Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s body of work count as a “series”?
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Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
Pity you don't live in Sydney, I was gonna invite you to the Orble Xmas drinks ...