Six random movie reviews

The late nights and odd hours have really messed with my sleep patterns.  I finish up between three and four in the morning and I’m back up again at nine or ten.  Six hours of sleep is a good night because normally I don’t fall asleep until close to six am.  Once I wake up for for the day I can’t fall back asleep.  This means that I have a lot of down time that I’m tired but awake.  I vegetate in front of the computer for a little while or go for a drive.

I’ve also gotten caught up on watching a few movies.  Just to refresh your memories: I think it’s stupid to review a movie without giving a few details on the plot.  I do NOT warn about spoilers.  If you’re the type to care what other people think before seeing a movie but then get upset that you learn what the movie is all about, you might want to go away… forever.  Reviews are useless.  Why would you care what a critic thinks about a movie anyway?  Critics are assholes and I’m no exception!

Jackass Number 2:
Not even really worth mentioning.  More of the same as the first Jackass movie and just an extended version of their television show.  I’ve never been part of a college fraternity but this is what I imagine when I see jock-frat guys.  It was a bunch of guys hanging out, pranking each other and failing miserably at hiding their homoerotic tendencies.  If watching a guy get hit in the nards on America’s Funniest Home Videos is your type of comedy, then this one is all yours…

Hancock:
Will Smith took a lot of shit for this one.  It seems no one liked it at all.  I thought it was pretty good.  Not the greatest movie of his career but not bad.  He’s a superhero that doesn’t give a shit.  A drunk bum that occasionally wakes up to save the day but only causes millions of dollars in collateral damage everywhere he goes.  The people of LA hate him and want him to go away.  One day the fates (Greek mythology is rampant throughout this movie) have him save a nice guy who is a failing PR rep.  He takes Hancock home to meet his family and we immediately see that his wife knows Hancock from somewhere other than the TV.  PR guy convinces Hancock to try and save his image and help the community.
Hancock starts to behave himself, the community comes around and we have the normal superhero living amongst us movie.  He tells the story about how he woke up in a hospital 80 years ago and has no recollection of the past.  Then we see that PR guy’s wife has been hiding her superhero powers and living as a soccer mom.  She tells Hancock that they are both over 3000 years old and are married.  Their kind attract each other and when they stay together, they lose their immortality and die off.  They are the last of their kind.  This is why she left him after he got amnesia and hid her powers.
Minor random bad guys from earlier in the movie attack and both Hancock and PR guy’s wife are wounded.  This would have been a great way to end the movie but they gave it the Hollywood ending instead.  Hancock kills the bad guys and as both superheros lie dying, Hancock musters the strength to limp away and the further away he gets, strength returns to both of them and they come back to life.  The movie ends with Hancock as a superhero in New York and the PR guy and his wife living happily in LA.

Even though the critics tore this movie apart, it made plenty of money (enough to warrant a sequel probably…) and aside from the tacked on happy ending, I liked it.  It was like Highlander starring Zeus and Hera.  I think people are mixed on this one because they think it’s a comedy and it isn’t or they think it’s an action movie and it isn’t.  The effects are good enough and the story is decent.  It just felt like they rushed it to screen or something.  I imagine two writers working on this script from either end and meeting in the middle only to find that they were off by a few degrees.  If this movie had gotten just one more revision or re-write, I think it could have been much better.  Overall, not bad.

Hamlet 2:
When I heard the title on this one I wanted to hate it.  But I just had to Netflix it and see for myself.  It’s pretty bad.  But not because of the title.  It was just a bad movie.  Bad actor turned high school drama teacher puts on one last production in his dying drama department.  He gets all the “bad” kids dumped in his class because the school is eliminating all the other electives as well.  The kids hate him and his life is falling apart so he writes Hamlet 2 as his final attempt to put on an original play.  The kids get into it and they run into opposition from parents and teachers but they put on the play.  The play wasn’t bad at all.  I actually would like to see the production if it were real.

The movie sucked because it had no continuity.  Every time there was something promising, they’d kill it with a bad cut to something that didn’t really move the plot along.  It was like watching modern SNL.  You think that maybe something good will happen and when the show’s over you realize you should have known better.  It could have worked somehow.  They didn’t take themselves too seriously.  They even mention Dead Poet’s Society and Dangerous Minds in the movie so they were poking fun at themselves.  It just didn’t work.   A lot of the plot was fluff.  His wife leaving him was important to the story but every time they showed her I just wanted to move on with the play.  And I like the woman who played her.  I don’t know why.  I’ve only seen her in a few movies but something about Catherine Keener is hot.  I do have a penchant for older women…  But nothing could have saved this movie.  It was a loose collection of mildly funny skits.

The Strangers:
Boy asks girl to marry him.  Girls says no.  They return (planned to be a celebratory vacation if she had said yes) to the secluded vacation home sad, frustrated and confused.  Boy calls friend, tells him to pick him up in the morning.  Strange girl knocks on the door at 4am, wrong house.  Boy goes out for cigarettes (at 4am?), girl starts seeing people outside the windows.  Boy returns, strange girl knocks again.  Boy and girl are terrorized and chased by three strange masked people.  Friend arrives to pick up boy, friend is killed.  Boy and girl are killed, three masked strangers drive off.  The end.
It could have been summarized a lot shorter: Boy and girl go to isolated home where they are stalked and killed by three masked killers.  The end.  But I went into a little more “detail” because the entire movie seems like it was a set up with no payoff.  They start out by saying it was based on actual events.  “ohhh, spooky”…  It seems to me like it would have been a better movie if the spurned boy had set up the whole thing because of the girl’s rejection.  He goes out for cigarettes at 4am?!  The friend that shows up could have been in on it…  This could have been a better movie.

The good parts were the classic horror genre scenes.  The masked bad guy appearing in frame behind the hero only to disappear in the next shot like Michael Myers in Halloween.  Stuff like that.  Another element adding to the spooky atmosphere was the three masked strangers being one guy and two girls.  It felt like a Manson family attack or something.  But the best part was one of the only lines spoken by the bad guys.  After the boy and girl are chased and terrorized, they are tied up and just before they are stabbed to death, the girl screams, “Why are you doing this to us?!”  The answer was a slow, calm, “Because you were home.”  That’s a good line.  No reason is the scariest reason.  It makes the audience feel vulnerable.
It was nice to see a horror movie that wasn’t a direct remake.  It borrowed heavily from all the horror movies that came before it but it was an attempt at something fresh.  They took suspense and terror and applied it to the standard premise of “you’re alone, I can get you.”  The killers played with their victims and made them go through hell before simply killing them and moving on.  The more I think about it, the more I like this movie.  Until…
Until we come to the acting.  Liv Tyler should never be in a movie where she has to act.  She is a black hole.  If she just has to sit there and look pretty she can star in daddy’s music videos all day long.  But when she opens her mouth she sucks the energy out of the entire scene.  Fucking horrible.  The rest of the cast wasn’t much better although to be fair, the three bad guys could have been wooden dolls for all the “acting” they did.  One or two lines and we never see their faces.
A for effort, C for execution, F for acting.  It was pretty bad.

Tropic Thunder:
Another movie that took a major hit from the critics.  I can’t say that I disagree with them but I thought it was a fun movie anyway.  Four prima-donna actors are starring in a major war film.  Because of the actor’s conflicts with each other, the movie is over schedule and over budget.  In a last ditch effort to get the movie made and avoid the producer’s wrath, the director drops the actors into the middle of the jungle and says he’ll be filming from hidden locations.  Then he gets killed.  The actors fight amongst themselves thinking that it was a special effect and they are still acting.  They get lost, some of them get captured buy drug manufacturers and the others have to rescue them.

I generally don’t like Ben Stiller or Jack Black but this time they were tolerable because they weren’t as “over the top” as they normally are.  Robert Downey Jr. was pretty good as the method actor that won’t break character.  There were a few other actors that played good parts in there somewhere.  Matthew McConaughey as the doting agent was funny but the funniest part was probably Tom Cruise as the angry and mildly insane producer.  The entire movie was a farce of “big Hollywood”.  I liked it for that reason.  It was mean and sarcastic but only picked on itself.  The running gags got old real fast and there wasn’t any substance to the rest of the plot.  Not a great movie, maybe not even a good movie but it was fun.

Idiocracy:
I LOVED the first three minutes of this movie.  The rest was fair to good but the intro was perfect.  I believe the first three minutes should be taught in college classes around the world.  I have always thought that I wanted to make a movie, now I don’t have to.  The beginning of this movie says everything I want to say.
It starts out showing how human evolution has started to reverse itself.  It is no longer survival of the smartest, fittest, strongest.  It has become survival of the fastest to drop their pants.  The stupid people of the world are no longer dying off like they should.  Intelligence has become a liability as they wait to breed while trailer parks are filling up with future Jerry Springer show guests.

The movie starts and we meet an Army soldier that is content to sit in an archive for the rest of his lazy life.  Because of his perfect “averageness”, He has been “volunteered” as a subject in a one year human hibernation project.  The project is top secret and of course is forgotten about.  Cut to 500 years in the future and humanity has dissolved into what Disney/Pixar would later rip off shot-for shot and call Wall-E.  The garbage and waste has piled up and humans have been reduced to mono-syllabic consumers. When Joe wakes up, he is the smartest man on the planet.  Mankind is facing extinction because of a planet-wide dust bowl.  The President (pro-wrestler?) enlists Joe’s help to solve all their problems.  Joe discovers that they have been watering the crops with Gatorade because the company that makes the stuff outlawed water.  When the crops don’t immediately grow, Joe is sentenced to death by monster truck rally.  Just as he’s about to be killed, the crops are shown to be growing and he is pardoned.  We close with Joe becoming President and in a very thinly veiled George W. Bush delivery, promising that we will rebuild society.

There was some stuff about a time machine, a prostitute, Starbucks…  But all of that was underdeveloped.  The movie came out a few years before Wall-E and there are more than a few similarities between the two.  The mountains of garbage, the all-in-one chair that you never have to get out of, the television screen with the ads surrounding it, the consumer images on every surface, the giant Costco is just renamed Buy n Large…  The images were almost identical but the ideas have been around for years.  The major difference is that in Idiocracy we have become lazy and stupid.  In Wall-E we have become lazy and fat.  Either way, we’re on our way out.  Humans have overstayed their welcome and because we won’t deal with our own crap, nature is only a few millennia away from kicking us out.  “Pack your shit folks, we’re going away”.
It was a dark comedy that really made a lot of biting comments on who we are and where we’re heading.  The movie suffers throughout because they have a lot of good points that they just loosely toss at you.  I liked it because it was so Un-PC and dark but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that everyone should see the entire movie, just the first three minutes.  If you can handle looking into a dark mirror (and a lot of profanity) then see the whole thing.