Thursday, April 30, 2009

A Spiritless Film

The best part of The Spirit is the preview for Repo: The Genetic Opera.


I'm not joking. This is a bad, bad movie. The storyline is convoluted and doesn't really seem to have a point. Let's see...this guy died, and now he's an indestructible superhero who calls himself The Spirit (Gabriel Macht). All the women in the city are in love with him, and he's in love with all of them. Of course, he used to be in love with a girl named Sand Serif (Eva Mendez) whose dad was a cop, but he died, and she likes shiny things. There's this bad guy called Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) who is, um, an angry black man with 8 of everything, and he's got a smart sexy chick sidekick named Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson) and a seemingly endless army of semi-retarded clones. And there's a cat.

So Octopus wants this trunk, because it has a vase full of the blood of Heracles, which will make him immortal. Except he sends the semi-retarded clones to get it while he fights The Spirit in a swamp, whacking him with a toilet. So, the clones accidentally grab an identical trunk which, instead of having a vase of blood, has the shiniest thing of all--which shiny-thing lover Sand wants. And Sand has the vase of blood! O, the hijinx!

The film has all the subtlety and facility of acting as a high school play. We're not talking about a school for the performing arts...we're talking about an entire drama club full of not-quite-functional illiterates who need to be fed each line one word at a time. The film appears to be kind of set in the 1940s, although cell phones (specifically the LG enV), photocopiers and online banking are key elements of the plot. At one point, Octopus puts on a Nazi uniform.

Frankly, I have no idea what this film is about. It's pointless. And the special effects, which were so good in Sin City were lame. Mostly they relied on weird color saturation. And the worst part is that they left an opening for a SEQUEL!

Honestly, if the film were a 20-minute kindergarten sock-puppet production it would be vastly superior to the feature film. If you haven't seen it, I'd avoid it like swine flu--although the flu will probably leave you feeling less sickly.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Truth in Advertising

Sometimes a film comes along that tells you exactly what it is in the title, and as bad as that film may be, you can't help but love the film. A good example? Shoot 'Em Up. The film features, well, people shooting. A lot. A bad example? Death Race.

The reason Death Race is so bad is that it takes itself seriously. Shoot 'Em Up, in the first five minutes of the film, gave you its jump the shark moment when Clive Owen jams a carrot through someone's skull. And the film is riddled with puns. Death Race, in the first five minutes, does give you what is clearly a mannequin being ejected from a car. And there are no puns.

What there is, however, is a car race, to the death. The film takes place in the future, when the economy has collapsed to the point where prisons are converted into money-making machines churning out MMA-style fighters as well as the infamous Death Race. So, let's say sometime in the next 6 months, the way things are going now.

It features inmates from the hardest prison in the country, in cars not only souped up to race, but loaded with crazy weapons. Jason Statham stars as Jensen Ames, a former race car driver who is framed for his wife's murder in order to have him imprisoned so he can replace Frankenstein, the prison's best driver who has secretly been killed in a crash. How can he replace the fans' favorite driver? Well, Frank's face is supposedly so disfigured from crashing his car that he drives wearing a mask. The corrupt prison warden (played by Joan Allen) arranges this race, promising that if Ames wins the race he'll be granted his freedom, as it would be Frankenstein's fifth win. But first, Ames has to beat Machine Gun Joe Mason (Tyrese Gibson), and decide whether he can trust his hot-chick navigator on release from the women's prison (Natalie Martinez).

I will tell you, without spoiling the end of the film for anyone who loves movies with a lot of action and no real raison d'etre, that Ames manages to secure his freedom and open the door for a sequel...but not quite the way most people might expect.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Angelina Jolie is a TERRIBLE Actress

Desperate and grasping. Yeah, that's how I'd describe Angelina Jolie's performance in Changeling. Which is really too bad, because you would think someone who's been around as long as Clint Eastwood would have either gotten a better performance out of her or hired a better actress. I guess it proves that thing people say about not being able to squeeze blood from a stone.

I think the problem with this movie, other than Jolie's performance (and her emaciated frame making her not only look like she's in her late 40s rather than early 30s, but causing her to bear an eerie resemblance to a La Catrina figure [see below]), is that the story isn't a story American audiences enjoy. On the one hand, it's based on the true story of Christine Collins, a woman whose son disappears and is given a replacement son by the LAPD, who go out of their way to prove she's crazy when she insists the boy isn't her son. They even institutionalize her. The story becomes intertwined with the story of a boy the cops find living on a farm who claims to have been forced to be an accessory to kidnapping and killing dozens of other little boys.

I wanted this story to be more of a mystery. Is the boy really not Walter Collins? Is Christine really insane? But, it's clear from the start that the boy isn't Walter, and Christine is just a desperate mother trying to find her child. And yet, Jolie's over-the-top hysterics make her more ridiculous than believable in the film. The desperation in her acting doesn't translate into a desperate desire for someone to listen to her and find her son, but more a desperate begging for some talent. Or a sandwich.

On the other hand, audiences would have been far more interested in a gruesome horror story about the farm on which the dead bodies were found. Showing the little boy being held captive go through stages of terror, maybe crying and vomiting the first time the predatory killer makes him chop up another little boy, and then finally the cops discovering the operation.

The worst part of the film is that the whole thing builds towards learning what happened to Walter Collins, and you never do. You find out that, since it was before DNA testing was available, none of the remains at the farm could definitively be identified as Walter. While the cops think it's reasonable to believe the boy was probably among the dead, Christine Collins never accepted that assessment and never stopped looking for her son.

So, what we end up with is a story that should be compelling but isn't and provides no real resolution, an actress who can't act, and a director who should have known better. If you're thinking of renting Changeling, I suggesting changing your mind.