For the Love of a House

Brideshead Revisited is a love story. About a house.

This is one of those movies that you watch and feel like you really need to read the book when it's over. The whole thing feels like something is missing...like the middle, or details or something really, really important. And without that thing that's missing, you can't understand why anyone would read the book, much less watch the movie.

Here's the basic plot: Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) is a man of limited means who goes to Oxford to read History, but his real passion in life is to become a painter. At Oxford he meets Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), and they become friends...the kind of friends that make out. Sebastian is deeply in love with Charles, although Charles appears to be kind of indifferent (thanks to Matthew Goode's inability to demonstrate any kind of emotion or present any facial expressions), so Sebastian takes him to meet the most important person in his life: an old woman who, although they never come out and say it and we never see the woman again, appears to have been his nanny.

But, when they get to Sebastian's house, the great mansion Brideshead, Charles falls in love with the house (I think--still no emotions or facial expressions). Sebastian, however, is in a great hurry to Charles out of the house, but is not quite quick enough and, as they are driving away they see Sebastian's overbearing mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) and his sister Julia (Hayley Atwell). When the men go to their separate homes for the summer vacation, Sebastian misses Charles so much that he pretends a tiny injury is life-threatening so Charles will come and spend the summer with him.

But, it all goes awry. While Charles is visiting the Flytes at Brideshead, their father calls them to Rome to visit with him and his mistress, so Charles, Sebastian and Julia go, and Charles finally acts on his growing love for Julia (without, of course, showing any emotion or changing his facial expression). Sebastian sees this and is heartbroken, and begins a self-destructive spiral into severe alcoholism. Julia, however, pushes Charles away...their love can never be because Charles is an Atheist and Julia can only be married to a Roman Catholic.

And then there's some more movie after that...half of the movie, actually, but it lacks the narrative coherence of the first half of the film, so I'm not entirely sure what's happening or why or how we came to that place and then it randomly ends during the second world war.

The movie, I guess, is really about sickness within a family, and the way an overbearing mother, a strict religion, and an absent father can destroy children. Julia and Sebastian both feel trapped within their family and their faith (especially Sebastian, who's gay). Sebastian manages to escape through his escalating alcoholism, by drinking himself into disease in Morocco and being unable to travel back to England. Julia, however, finds herself in an unhappy marriage living at Brideshead, and, even when Charles offers to abandon his own marriage and run away with her, she just can't leave, partly because she knows that Charles loves Brideshead and the lifestyle he imagines it represents more than he really loves her.

The movie isn't really bad, per se, just really dull and lifeless. And Charles, whose perspective the film is shown from, just doesn't have any emotional depth, so it's almost impossible to identify with anyone or feel anything while you watch the film. In fact, I kept losing interest and it took me 3 days just to get through it. And I should love a film where one of the characters is so fabulous he describes himself not at an alcoholic homo but as a dipsomaniacal sodomite.

Blah.

Eagle Eye, or, Why Bother Shooting in Chicago

This movie is actually only kind of mediocre, especially when you compare it to Shia LeBoeuf's blasphemous breakthrough in Disturbia, the poorly executed rip-off of Hitchcock's Rear Window. The premise was fairly interesting, and, depending on how paranoid you are, not 100% far-fetched. The acting was nothing particularly special, Shia was better in Even Stevens and Michelle Monaghan was better in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Rosario Dawson was worse in Down to You, although everyone was bad in Down to You.

What makes this film bad is the way they insisted on shooting the Chicago scenes in Chicago, but failed to be true to the city in any way, shape or form.

When Jerry is first captured by the FBI and detained at their headquarters, he jumps from the window and lands on the El tracks in the Chicago Loop. Which is fine, except that there is no El stop near the FBI building. The El station the landing was filmed at is nearly 4 miles away from the FBI building, and the building at that El stop is a university building.

I know this because I was there when they were setting up the shot at the Washington and Wells station. They don't however, mention the name of the stop--and when they do mention the name of a stop, it's an entirely made up name!! The trains run in weird directions, but then when they jump off and go for the street level shots, it's no better. The intersperse shots on Upper and Lower Wacker drives (a street, frankly, that begs for high-speed chases) with shots of other streets, which, even if you're not from Chicago and don't recognize what's happening, should give you a weird feeling because there's the Lower Wacker caves next to shops and buildings. What the hell was the point of actually shooting in Chicago if you're not going to use the city as it is?

The other thing that makes this film bad is that Julianne Moore, who's voice is clearly recognizable as Aria, the surveillance system/weapon controlling the action, and yet she's not credited.

Harrison Ford and the Crystal Aliens

Okay, we all know that space is where film franchises go to die (provided, of course, that they were not already set there). Think Jason X or Dracula 3000. But what do you do when your film is set in a historical period that predates the space program and your hero isn't immortal? Well, you just bring space to your hero!

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull does just that. And with any luck, its space theme will be the death of the franchise.

The film just kind of starts off ridiculous and stays that way. Granted, I have not seen the other Indy films in a while, so maybe they're worse than I remember them being, but in the first scene of the fourth installment, Indiana Jones has been kidnapped by Russians, who take him to Area 51 to look for a mysterious magnetic corpse. Of an alien. Then, Indy survives an atomic bomb test blast by hiding in a refrigerator, which, although everything else in the bomb's path is vaporized, is blown completely free of the blast unscathed. Of course it is.

And then Indy and his new sidekick Mutt (played by the poorly coiffed Shia LeBoeuf) head off to the depths of the South American rain forest in search of a lost civilization and its crystal skull, which they need to return to its rightful place in the City of Gold (the crystal skull thing, by the way, is real, although the myth around them is that they were created by the citizens of Atlantis, not by aliens). But, the Russians want it too, as it turns out the skull is the actual skull of a psychic race of crystal-skeletoned aliens and can be used as a psychic weapon against the Americans. The film ends with a flying saucer demolishing a part of the rain forest (although it gets filled with water, probably to appease environmentalists). Then it really ends with Indy marrying Marion Ravenwood, who is Mutt's mother--oh, and Indy's his father.

First of all, Steven Spielberg needs to stop making movies. And people need to stop reading a script as ridiculous as the Crystal Skull script and letting the film get made.

Second of all, Harrison Ford must have done all his own stunts in this film, because there's a whole lot of very awkward moments and movements--like when he jumps on the back of Mutt's motorcycle and almost doesn't make it. Of course, there are not nearly as many stunts in this film as some of the previous Indy pics, but Ford is 198 years old, so I guess they tried to make that part believable at least.

So how painful is this movie to watch. Actually, it's only a little like chewing on tin foil while your ears are ringing. Of course, it completely destroys the integrity of the Indiana Jones franchise, so if they make another Indiana Jones film, I will personally find Steven Spielberg and bitch slap him. Especially if they make Mutt Williams the lead.

The Love Guru Leads Razzie Nominations

I held out on this movie for quite a while because it just looked like a bad idea. At one point in my life, I would have seen just about anything because it had Mike Myers in it. At that point, however, I had only seen So I Married an Axe Murderer and Wayne's World. The Austin Powers trilogy got progressively worse, and in The Love Guru we have a case of a man who's made a lot of money being allowed to do pretty much anything he wants.

So what makes this movie so bad? The premise is absurd: a guru who grew up in Deepak Chopra's shadow is trying to become the most important guru in America by teaching a hockey player who dumped his wife to bang models, then wanted his wife back as soon as a rival hockey player hooked up with her to love. This will get him a spot on Oprah, and, hopefully, win him the team's owner's (Jessica Alba) heart.

Let's talk about the casting. One of the indicators I will be henceforth using to prejudge a film as probably not good will be that Jessica Alba is in it. I have yet to see a movie with her in it where she is any good, and the only movie I've ever seen that was good and had her in it was Sin City. She's just sort of a flat actress, possibly because she is an emotionless android. And in this film, she makes a warbling choking sound I think was meant to be singing. Next, we have Justin Timberlake, who should never, ever, under any circumstances, be allowed to act again. Then Sir Ben Kingsley, who is normally so good in everything, plays a cross-eyed guru who's name is a nod to masturbation. God only knows what kind of scandalous dirt Mike Myers must have on him to have gotten him to do that. And Verne Troyer should only be cast in non-speaking roles. See Bubble Boy if you need more proof.

But the worst of it is Myers himself. His fake Indian accent frequently sounds like Scottish, and the character is poorly constructed. Frankly, I thought that at any moment Deepak Chopra was going to reveal Myers's guru as a fraud. The film's ruby slippers moment is that the elephant motif chastity belt he wears had a snap at the back, so he could have taken it off at any time.

Frankly, there's nothing good about this movie. It's not interesting, smart or funny. It's not well written, well directed or well acted. There's a reason that it got more Razzie award nominations than any other film for 2008. So how painful is this movie to watch? It is as painful as gnawing off both your own legs without anesthetic and hobbling through fields of salt and Tabasco on the raw bloody stumps to escape having to watch it.