Total Recall

Colin Farrell, fresh off of his towering performance in the completely unnecessary remake of Fright Night, decided to take his career in a new direction by starring in the completely unnecessary remake of Total Recall.

The 2012 version of Total Recall is the answer to the question on nobody’s lips: What would it be like if a bunch of hacks shot Minority Report on the set of Blade Runner?

The makers of Another Damn Remake hope you haven’t seen the original film, since their film has the exact same plot. I kept waiting for the twists not to follow lockstep with the original, but such a moment never came. This is doubly mystifying since one of the strengths of the original was its mysterious plot. Who is Hauser? Can Quaid trust him? How and why did Hauser get replaced by Quaid? If I’m not me, then who the hell am I? What if your entire life was just an implanted memory? The answers to all these questions in the Total Recall remake are...exactly the same as they are in the original Total Recall. There's only one real plot change, and it renders the entire film pointless.

If you haven’t seen the original Total Recall, then you’re a bad person and also stupid and wrong. Go watch it four times before you come back to this review, because by giving away the plot of the remake, I’m giving away the plot of the original. The remake can go to Hell, but nobody hath committed so great a sin that she should be denied the spectacle of California's hulking Austrian bodybuilding former governor shouting “YOU BLEW MY COVAAAAHHH!” and “Gif dis peepal aiya!” Watch Total Recall, go on, do eet nao!

From this point forward, you’ve either seen the original Total Recall or you’re not reading this because you’re currently watching the original Total Recall, so I’m assuming you know the plot and characters already. So in the original, Hauser agreed to take on a false identity in order to find the leader of the Mars resistance, Kuato. This is necessary because Kuato is a mutant with the power to see through any deception. Thus, in order to reach Kuato and lead the bad guys to him, Hauser must “become” someone who is genuinely seeking him and doesn’t know he’s actually a secret agent for the other side. In the remake, there is no psychic. Hauser (Farrell) successfully penetrates the resistance as himself, but he betrays Cohaagen and goes over to the resistance. He is then captured by Cohaagen’s forces and implanted with the false identity of Douglas Quaid, and in the course of trying to get his original memories back, finds the resistance leader, only to be ambushed by Cohaagen’s forces who have been tracking him.

Um, why was Hauser given a new identity? The original Hauser got a new identity because he was actually working for Cohaagen and needed to hide this from Kuato’s powers. But remake Hauser isn’t working for Cohaagen because he genuinely changes sides, and there’s no psychic to ferret out his true motives anyway! So there’s no reason for him to be Quaid! Cohaagen could've tracked Hauser to the resistance leader exactly as he did without the false identity. Of course, if they’d done that, Quaid wouldn't have a wife to betray him and so the director couldn't put his own wife (Kate Beckinsale) in the movie like he always does.

Now I know who both Kate “Underworld” Beckinsale and Jessica “Next” Biel are, yet I didn’t realize either of them was in this movie until I saw the end credits because the movie's colors are so washed out that both actresses are unrecognizable. Beckinsale got the Evil Girl role so she could switch to her English accent upon being revealed as evil to satisfy the "the English are Evil" trope, and also to make herself instantly sexier. The original Total Recall was hardly revolutionary in terms of its plot or tropes, but still, it was nice that it had the blonde Sharon Stone (pre-Basic Instinct, natch) turn out to be evil and the brunette Rachel Ticotin be the good one. Ah, the 21^st century, firmly rooted in the stereotypes of the 1930s; both female leads are safely white, and the American is good while the Englishwoman is evil. Now if they'd just made Cohaagen German....

Speaking of tropes and stereotypes, Bokeem Woodbine is on hand as Token Black Guy. He doesn’t Die First, but he does die, because really, you expected the black man to survive in a picture with a body count in the low hundreds? He turns out to be a bad guy because, well, the black guy in the original film turned out to be a bad guy, and this film is nothing if not a rote clone of its predecessor. Except, given that the remake is a 21st century film, the black guy is demoted to a meaningless part instead of playing a key role in the story as he did in the original.

The filmmakers seem to have taken “remake” a bit too literally. All they did was combine Michael Ironside’s Richter character with Quaid's double-agent wife character. (This is the movie’s sole right choice. Far be it for me to begrudge giving Ironside work, but the inclusion of Richter always struck me as the filmmakers’ chickening out of making Schwarzenegger's main opponent a dumb ol’ girl.) But the rest is beat for beat the same. Well, except the movie has nothing to do with Mars!

“Now wait just a damn minute, Carl Eusebius!” you ineffectually shout from your mother’s basement. “You just complained the remake was too slavish, and now you’re complaining it’s not slavish enough!” Well first of all, be glad I changed your gibberish into something comprehensible, since we both know you’re incapable of using grade 9 words like “slavish”. But, my drooling neanderthal friend, there are two things that make a Total Recall movie: one, it involves discovering that your entire life was merely an implanted identity and you're actually a secret agent, and two, it has to do with Mars. All you needed to do was have these two things in your Total Recall movie, and the rest was up to you. The jokers who shat out this turd kept all the same plot points (and I do mean all, including the “guy tells Quaid he’s still strapped into his chair at Rekall and this is all in his head” scene and the "gross removal of a tracking device from inside his body" scene) but jettisoned one of the two essential elements. It would be like rebooting Star Wars with the exact same characters and plot, only there's no mention of Jedi or the Force.

Take Battlestar Galactica, just about the best case for a re-make you can make. First, the original sucked donkey balls despite having a great concept, so there’s both a solid core to build on and plenty of improvements to make. Second, the original BSG screamed ‘70s, its futuristic setting notwithstanding, and so is laughably dated. Third, the original BSG was created by a complete hack and re-imagined by a genuine talent. Total Recall fails on all counts, since the original is pretty good and doesn’t come across as notably dated. And its worst failure is on the third count: The original was written by the writers of Alien and directed by the man who gave us Robocop, while the re-make was written by the writer of Ultraviolet and directed by the man who unleashed the horrors of the Underworld franchise upon us, and I don’t just mean Kate Beckinsale’s acting.

But leave that aside and look at what was actually done. Battlestar Galactica took the basic premise (humanity is destroyed but for a hodgepodge group of fleeing ships, protected by the last surviving warship on a journey to reach Earth and escape the pursuing enemy) and developed it in a completely different way. Many character names are the same, but the characters themselves are radically improved. Instead of the original's parade of whiteflesh (barring, of course, its Token Black Guy), there’s a little more racial diversity in the new version. In a similar vein, in the rebooted version, women exist, and they even do things. The near-extinction of humanity is treated with respect and gravity instead of the tossed off “Dude, these devastated human population centers drag, let’s make space tracks” of the original. The enemy, while also keeping the same name, is totally different, because really, the identity of the enemy was never integral to the concept of the show. The new show kept the father-son relationship of the warship’s commander but made it antagonistic. Anybody with half a brain could look at both shows and see that the 2003 version is a true re-make of the 1978 horrible version, yet it doesn’t follow lockstep with the original. At best, events from the original provide starting points for the re-make, but the re-make doesn't steal entire plotlines.

This Total Recall re-make jettisons a key part of the premise but keeps just about everything else, including character motivations and actions, dialogue, and let me just say this again because it’s so amazingly stupid, the exact same plot, twists and all. If all the same people are going to do all the same things for all the same reasons, why not just watch the original? And if you are going to change a key part of the premise, shouldn’t that, I don’t know, affect something? What’s the point of changing it if it’s not going to have any impact on the story or characters in any way? And because we're all stupid in the 21st century, the original's not-exactly-subtle critique of European colonialism has become infinitely more hamfisted. Instead of "the metropole doesn't care how the colony is run, so long as it gets what it wants from the colony", we get "the metropole invades the colony and murders everyone in it because...um, evil." That's right, this remake was made by people less subtle than Paul fucking Verhoeven.

Oh, and I’m just going to say this up front: Colin Farrell is not lead material, at least not in action films. Yep, I went there. He was fine in Minority Report as the smarmy douchebag bureaucrat (presumably not a stretch for a man of Colin’s arrogance and overestimation of his own talent), but he consistently fails in lead action roles. Alexander, Daredevil, the remake that shall not be named even though I named it in the first line of this review, this film right here...he doesn’t have the charisma to pull these roles off. Arnold Schwarzenegger may not be much of an actor, but he had charisma in spades. You want his Quaid to succeed just because Schwarzenegger is such a likeable presence on screen. I never cared if Farrell lived or died, especially once it turned out that Hauser was a good guy after all. Well then what’s the big deal? The climatic conflict of the original Total Recall was Quaid’s refusal to go back to being Hauser because “Guy’s a fucking asshole!” (Remember to say that line aloud in your best Schwarzenegger.) But re-make Hauser went over to the resistance to make amends, so he's kind of a good guy already, meaning there’s no real conflict there. Re-make Quaid’s not wanting to go back to being Hauser just makes him seem petty and selfish. Maybe that’s realistic (hell, you wouldn’t see Carl Eusebius giving up his body for Martin Luther King, Jr.), but it’s not very heroic. And for a bloated, goofy action film, we’re looking for heroism, not realism.

People, The Dark Knight is a good movie. Hell, it’s a great movie. But there are other movies out there to ape. Can we have a moratorium on angsty, conflicted, morally torn anti-heroes? Are we so cynical and ironic now that we can't have genuine heroes? Aren’t there any straight-up unabashed and unashamed good guys anymore, even in fiction?

Wait, what's that?

Oh no. 

N-no. No.

NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

The Amazing Spider-Man

In my capacity as a random asshole on the Internet, it’s my job to deliver to you, the gibbering lunatics who read this blog, the taglined hatred and bile. Sadly, I couldn’t muster up any hate for The Amazing Spider-Man. It’s kind of crappy and a little pathetic, but unfortunately for the 99% of me that hates humanity, somebody cared enough about this misbegotten project to inject a couple of things I actually liked into it.

A lot of people have bagged on Andrew Garfield’s performance of Peter Parker. Now I don’t know who Andrew Garfield is and I don’t care, but the faults of this movie can’t really be laid at his feet. Peter as written is virtually unplayable--a “nerd” who’s handsome and ripped, dresses well, has a cool-by-high-school-standards hairstyle, does skateboarding tricks--and Garfield made the most he probably could out of the role. Likewise, he can’t be blamed for not having any chemistry at all with female lead Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone). This is the fault of director Marc Webb (Get it? Webb? Spiders? Oh bite me, it’s fun!), a detail confirmed by Webb’s claim that he cast Stone based on her chemistry with Garfield. Both Garfield and Stone were believable as high school students despite looking far too old, and Stone was fine considering her nonsensical character: a high school student who, despite looking like the beauty queen, interns with a cutting-edge geneticist, has apparently never been asked on a “date” before, and is attracted to the clumsy stuttering of the (not actually very) nerdy Peter Parker.

Really, most of the stuff that doesn’t involve Spider-Man at all was alright. Great? Hardly, and Garfield is no Tobey Maguire (I can't believe I just had to write those words), but alright. Plus, since I maintain my sanity by blocking out the very existence of Martin Sheen, he wasn’t able to cock up the rest of the movie. There was even some decent Spider-Man stuff mixed in. His costume is okay (apparently replacing spandex tights with “webby latex-type bodysuit” is movie shorthand for “dark and brooding Dark Knight wannabe”), and the filmmakers mostly played straight with the audience, like having Spidey’s web-shooters believably short-out when he gets immersed in water. I liked that Peter at first breaks stuff with his newfound strength, since suddenly being ten times stronger would require adjustment of even such simple tasks as closing doors. Spider-Man’s quips are moderately amusing, and his fights with the Lizard (the Lizard, really?) show him using some innovative ways to get around the giant reptile’s superior strength and toughness. The best scene has Spidey locating the Lizard through vibrations of lines of webbing he has placed throughout the sewer. The shot of Spider-Man sitting in the center of his web detecting vibrations like, well, a spider was a pretty nifty moment. (Which they immediately ruin, but it was fun while it lasted.)

The movie’s biggest problem—apart from its being utterly unnecessary and deeply unoriginal—is that the serious, heady family (melo)drama and high school romance stuff doesn’t mesh at all with the goofy Spider-Man-fighting-a-giant-lizard-monster stuff. This is epitomized by the scene that has Peter going to Gwen’s dad (Denis Leary)—who just so happens to be chief of police in New York City—with a warning that Dr. Curt Connors is actually a giant lizard monster rampaging around the city. Leary reacts as anyone in the real world would, which is completely believable in the My So-Called Life part of the movie, but Peter's reaction is out of the superhero part of the movie, namely utter disbelief that Leary would doubt his giant-lizard-monster story, despite his lack of any evidence to back up that story. (I'm ignoring the fact that earlier the Lizard attacked dozens of people in front of probably a hundred witnesses on a crowded bridge, because the movie does, too.)

In fact, everything with the Lizard doesn’t work. The CGI animating him is cheesy and his look is ridiculous. The actor playing him (some guy I don’t know) is unremarkable, his mad-science dialogue is generic and uninvolving, and his bad guy plot is pedestrian and routine. (Think the Joker’s plot in Batman or, if you have no taste, the villains’ plot in Batman Begins. Or if you have my taste, the man-fish's plot in Zaat!.) Every time the movie might develop a modicum of dramatic momentum, the fake CGI Lizard appears to smash things, or worse, Connors appears to pontificate about how all people ought to become lizardmen before transforming himself into a hammy actor overselling a monster transformation sequence. They also play the oh-so-tired "hero involved in the creation of the villain so that it's personal" card. Actually, Peter says he's responsible for creating the Lizard, but he really isn't. All Peter did was give Connors a bogus equation to finish his turn-people-into-lizardmen ersatz-Predator-blood-serum. It was Connors who chose to then create the serum and inject it into himself in order to turn himself into a man-lizard. Bizarrely, the movie seems to know this, and Peter's reason for fighting the Lizard ends up being more along the lines of "He's the villain, and I'm the hero of the picture, so like, I gotta fight 'im."

Because this movie inexcusably lacks J. Jonah Jameson, Denis Leary's police chief has to fill the role of "authority figure who doggedly hates and opposes Spider-Man no matter how many times Spidey proves himself the good guy". Thus, even after the Lizard begins the movie’s climax by smashing buildings and murdering people, Leary continues to hunt Spider-Man, even as the Lizard is engaged in his rampage. It’s not as if the police are somehow unaware of this, since the Lizard slaughters an entire squad of cops sent to stop him. But instead of making, I don’t know, a second attempt to stop the Lizard from murdering not only police officers but real people as well, Leary orders any number of police helicopters and SWAT officers to capture Spider-Man, currently engaged in the heinous crime of “swinging from buildings by his webbing”. Only when Leary successfully captures and unmasks Spider-Man (oh please) does he finally trust him because, well, he’s Peter Parker, a man Leary met exactly once, when they got into an argument in which Peter, in defense of Spider-Man, accused the police of gross incompetence. If that doesn’t make the chief of police trust Peter/Spidey, what the hell would?

Not content to be merely an unnecessary retread of Sam Raimi’s infinitely-superior-even-at-their-worst Spider-Man films, The Amazing Spider-Man rips off the ending of the execrable Spider-Man 3 by having the villain save the hero from death. Then Leary gets a death scene because, well, somebody’s got to die for some pathos and it sure as hell ain’t going to be the villain a 21^st century superhero movie, so they might as well give the death scene to the movie’s only actual actor. Now I’m a big Denis Leary fan—not the least because he’s a staunch supporter and proponent of the one true sport—but any decent actor can do what Leary does here. Like Christopher Walken, he can be effective in a straight role, but what’s the point? Why hire a man of his particular talents for a role anybody can play? You hire Walken so that his Walkenizing can provide at least a few moments of audience entertainment in your piece of shit cash-grab without your having to do anything that takes actual effort, like doing a thorough script re-write or directing the film with a modicum of flair and style. And you hire Denis Leary for his signature rants. Well, unless you’re the makers of The Amazing Spider-Man, in which case you’re soulless artistic whores of corporate America and I'd like you to leave a comment describing what it’s like to live without a soul.

Oh, and I’d just like to point out, Uncle Ben in this movie is a moron, and not just because he’s played by Martin Sheen. Now, legally, since he had a pistol, the bearded guy who stole money from the convenience store committed armed robbery, even though he didn't use or even reveal said weapon during the theft. (I liked that the robber tosses Peter the milk the clerk rudely refused to sell him when he was exactly 3 cents short. Even better, Peter in turn refuses to help the clerk stop the thief.) Again, he didn’t actually produce said weapon or even claim to have it; he merely tricked the punishingly stupid clerk into looking away from the open register so he could reach over and grab the cash. So at this point, all he’s done is sleight-of-hand some money away from somebody who frankly deserved to get robbed. The fat tub of shit who got robbed chases the thief out of the store, shouting for someone to stop him. Then the thief falls down and the gun tumbles onto the pavement. At this point, Uncle Ben, observing all this unfold, decides to intervene, engaging with the thief in a struggle over the gun. That’s right, a decrepit old man with one foot in the grave thinks he’s going to wrestle a gun away from a man forty years his junior. A gun the man hasn’t used or even shown to anybody. The gun goes off during the struggle, and Ben is kacked. The movie doesn’t even have the thief gain control of the gun and shoot Ben so he can escape. No, it clearly goes off accidentally.

Now as I said, I understand that the Empire's inhumanly harsh "justice" system employs something called the felony-murder doctrine which dictates that, legally speaking, the perp murdered Uncle Ben because once someone has embarked on the commission of a felony, any death that occurs as a result is adjudged murder. But I’m talking about reality here, not the fiction of the legal world. Ben wasn’t protecting any person, or even any property (since the money was already stolen), and the stolen property isn’t even his. No, he was using physical force to stop an alleged petty thief of an entirely unrelated party's property from leaving the scene, which so far as I know is illegal in any jurisdiction of the Empire. The entire chain of events is Ben's fault. He chose to go for the thief’s gun, which the thief hadn’t used or even threatened to use on anyone. Once he failed to reach the gun before the perp, he chose to struggle with him for control of the gun. At this point, Ben is assaulting this guy and attempting to steal his property. The fact that the guy stole at most a couple hundred bucks from the register doesn’t give Ben the right to steal his gun or get into a fight with him. Ben shouldn’t have been involved at all. This isn’t a matter of not having the Courage to Get Involved and Help or not being Cold and Uncaring and Indifferent to the Plight of Your Fellow Man or won't somebody please help the children! This is about not being a fucking idiot and going for somebody’s gun based solely on the word of a fat tub of shit you've never met who didn't even see the guy take the money. Hey Ben, I’ve got an idea: Why don’t you take that cell phone you've been established as having out of your pocket, call the police, and give them the guy’s location and physical description? I mean, nobody is in any danger. The guy isn’t firing the gun or waving it around or yelling that people had better move or he’s gonna blow ‘em away. Frankly, I wouldn’t have cared if the guy had just shot Ben, but the movie doesn’t even go that far because, as noted, the shooting is accidental. Ben shouldn’t have been there, and he got shot due to a situation that he brought entirely upon himself, because he's the one who engaged in violence. There’s a reason the police say things like “Don’t try to wrest a gun away from a petty thief who is currently a threat to exactly no one, because you might end up getting shot in the struggle and dying, you stupid fuck.” Okay, they might leave off that last part. 

And this, this is what inspires Peter Parker to don the mantle of Spider-Man and get repeatedly punched in the face by a lizardman?

Fuck Uncle Ben, and fuck The Amazing Spider-Man. I hate this movie.

Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part II

When I started this blog, I imagined I might deal with the Twilight film once I was through eviscerating the novel. As it's developed, I've found myself referencing the film version regularly, calling into question the need to address it separately. Writing up the other films hadn't even entered my mind, as I was not (and am not) sure I'll have the strength to dig into their respective source novels. The first one is trying enough.

Yet this blog concerns itself with two things: Twilight and terrible movies. What could be more appropriate, then, than reviewing a Twilight movie? Plus I thought, considering my love-hate relationship with this series, I ought to see at least one of the films in cinema, surrounded by Twihards. So on the film's opening night, I went eagerly to see Twilight, Part 4: Part 2.

Yes, Breaking Dawn, the epic story that could not be contained in one movie, split in two and made shamelessly cheaply to maximize profits. Warning: This review is spoiler-heavy, including the one genuine surprise at the film's climax (along with its subsequent ruination). If you have any intention of seeing this film--and God help you if you do--I strongly recommend you read no further. Those who prefer moving slowly through the novel along with this blog will also want to avoid the rest of this review, as it's sure to give away plot points from throughout the series.

Having said that, let's get into Breaking Wind. Since this is the fifth and final in the series of films that make up THE TWILIGHT SAGA (you have to say it in all caps), let me bring you up to speed on what happened in the previous four films.

Edward and Bella got married and had sex, resulting in Bella's pregnancy.

You can see why they needed four movies to tell such an epic tale. And now we have the finale, and it is every bit the sputtering anticlimax you expect from a series of novels that gave away its inevitable conclusion in the first fifty pages but insisted on dragging the story out across three thousand.

Stephenie Meyer's manipulation of her series mythology--such as it is--to suit her plot comes out in full force in Breaking Bad. Vampires don't blink, or breathe, or eat, but they do continue to produce viable sperm and the semen to deliver it, and their hearts continue to pump blood. That's an odd mix of biological processes there. Why, it's almost as if the author hasn't thought through the whole vampire thing and just makes it work however her plot needs it to work.

The fetus develops so rapidly I thought maybe I'd missed Bella drinking the Water of Life, so the newly married couple decides to conceal her pregnancy from Mustache Dad. It sure is lucky they did, because Bella dies giving birth to the half-vampire child. Edward is devastated, but then he remembers that in the Meyerverse, vampire blood not only turns living people into vampires, but dead people, too! So even though she's already dead, Edward makes like the Re-Animator, and Bella's eyes open, vampire-red. End of Part 4, Part 1.

Part 4, Part 2 picks up directly from there. The power fantasy of Twilight's vampirism reaches completion in this installment, as we're treated to annoying zoom shots of Bella Swan's (Kristen Stewart) super-human senses: She can see the tiniest drop of water, hear the movement of air, see the dust motes between the carpet fibers, smell the slightest of farts. Instead of reacting in horror and despair that she is now condemned to the same damnation of attending high school over and over again until the end of time that Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) has endured for a century, she's ecstatic to be a walking corpse that feasts on the blood of the living. Now she can live her suburban white American upper-middle-class unlife until the end of time! Plus, she can run really, really fast by way of a terribly rendered CGI effect, smash slabs of granite with her bare hands without having to, you know, put in any effort to build muscles, and have sex literally constantly since vampires don't sleep or become fatigued.

And every vampire has a special vampire power, on top of all their other powers, so that Meyer can rely on mind-reading, clairvoyance, and seeing the future whenever she can't think of a plausible way to get the characters out of a situation. If you guessed that Bella's special power (which is that other vampires' special powers don't work on her, except when the filmmakers forget and have a power affect her) is the most special-est one of all, give yourself a cookie.

So Bella's the strongest vampire of all the Cullens, and has the best-est power, and is definitely--with the Twilight vampire make-up job and those red colored contact lenses--the hottest. There's the little trouble of bloodlust, though, since newly-turned vampires in the Meyerverse are very difficult to keep from eating people. Edward takes her out to hunt an animal instead, but she gets a whiff of some poor bastard who's just gashed himself open while rock-climbing, and she's off to eat him. Uh-oh, conflict! But this is Twilight, so conflict is either never brought up at all or brought up and then immediately resolved. This time it's option b: Edward runs after her and tells her she shouldn't eat this guy, so she doesn't, and the idea that she'll eat people is never mentioned in the film again; in fact, she's allowed to meet Mustache Dad (Billy Burke), alone, the next day. Man, Edward's one minute of training sure paid off! Bella is about to eat a deer, but not only are these vampires so neutered they don't eat people, they don't even eat cute cuddley-wuddley animals. So Bella instead eats a mountain lion that was just about to eat the deer. She vampire-jumps and hits the beast from the side, taking it down and tearing its neck open with her teeth. And yes, it looks just as ridiculous as it sounds.

Speaking of Mustache Dad, he is now the only actual human being left in Twilight, since Bella's high school friends are absent this film. Progressively through the series, these friends have become more and more apart from Bella until they disappear entirely after her wedding, since her marriage signified her becoming a full member of the Mormon church Cullen clan and so she has no connection to these people from her pre-Cullen life. I don't think Meyer was going for the Cullens as a symbolic dangerous cult, but that's what she gave us. Bella's okay with the Cullens' telling her father she's dead, since she has Edward and is a vampire now and that's all that's important. Spurned suitor Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), though, says she'll want to have her father in her life, so, in a genuinely funny scene--in part due to Burke's acting, which I've already praised elsewhere--Jacob reveals he is a werewolf to Mustache Dad. He does this by stripping off his clothes, making this the obligatory "Jacob takes off his shirt" scene, much to Mustache Dad's annoyance. Somehow this means it's okay for Bella to continue to see her father. Whew, that was...too close. Another conflict raised and immediately hand-waved away!

But why is Jacob there, you ask? Well, the werewolves have this thing called "imprinting". Long story short, it's "there's someone out there just for you" taken to its Meyerverse extreme. A werewolf sees a person of the opposite sex (despite all the shirtless male horseplay throughout the series, these dogs don't roll with teh gay!) and becomes that person's creepy stalker: He has to be with that person, and no other, and the obsession can't be changed or removed. Jacob doesn't imprint on Bella because that would've brought about a genuine conflict with no easy resolution, and we'll have none of that. No, he imprints--and I can't believe I'm going to write this--he imprints...on...the baby.

The baby.

This man witnesses a birth, and upon seeing the bloody, squalling infant, he falls in love with it.

Which means that, throughout the film, he's constantly hovering around the little girl, looking at her with naked longing in his eyes. (It's very, very odd that Taylor Lautner's best acting in the entire series is giving creepy sex looks to a 7-year-old girl.) It was disturbing every time I saw it, astonished that the director filmed those scenes and included them in the final print. I mean, it just has to be seen to be believed. Wait no, because I saw it and I still don't believe it.

The plot, what little there is, is exactly the same as that of Part 3. In that film, Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) and her horde of vampires were coming to destroy the Cullen family, who had to turn to the underwearwolves for help. In this film, Aro (Michael Sheen) and his horde of vampires are coming to destroy the Cullen family, who have to turn to their other vampire friends for help. Most of these vampires are just names and faces that leave no impression, and they don't have much impact on the story. I laughed when one of them proved to be the Last Airbender, and it was nice to see some of the "good" vampires being vampires (i.e., eating people) when the Cullens go to ask for their help.

Now I've beaten up on Twilight a lot. Certainly it sucks, and it deserves all the scorn that has been and continues to be heaped upon it. But I do want to give credit where I can, and two of these new vampires are fabulous. These are Hanz and Franz--I don't know what their real names are, but to me they're Hanz and Franz--Romanian vampires who used to be in charge of the vampire world until the Italian Volturi overthrew them. These guys, with their best Bela Lugosi accents and the way they finish each other's thoughts, are only matched in the shameless overacting department by Michael Sheen--yes, that Michael Sheen--as Aro, the leader of the Volturi. These three men slice the ham thick, and I love them for it. Hanz and Franz are pushing the Cullens and their friends to fight the Volturi, but nobody but Edward is having it, since the Volturi are so powerful no-one can stand against them. Edward gives a "we few, we happy few" speech (consisting of maybe three lines) that won't have Shakespeare looking over his shoulder, and they're all ready to fight. (Personally, the hell with Edward, but I'd fight for Hanz and Franz.)

Carlisle (Peter Facinelli), the head of the Cullen family, exposits that the Volturi are coming to destroy the Cullens so they can force Alice Cullen (Ashley Greene), the vampire who sees the future, to become part of their clan. To disguise this naked power grab, however, the Volturi need an excuse, and they decide to use as their pretext a report that Edward and Bella's daughter, who has the hilariously stupid name "Reneesme", is an "immortal child". That is, a child turned into a vampire, for such are forbidden by the Volturi as too dangerous to be allowed to exist, since they have all the powers of a vampire but the minds of children. Carlisle decides to gather up as many of his vampire friends as he can to "witness" to the Volturi that Alia Reneesme isn't an immortal child. No one points out that this is a fantastically moronic plan, because Carlisle just said the immortal child thing is a pretext. But they carry out the plan anyway, because it's Twilight and Meyer had to fill up four novels despite telling a story that doesn't have a shred of tension or drama.

So we're set for the final confrontation, the climax of Twilight, the showdown between the Good Cullens and the Evil People-Eating Vampires (never mind that the Cullens' allies also eat people) to close out the THE TWILIGHT SAGA. But it's Twilight, so people have to yack first. Carlisle offers Aro his witnesses. Aro's special vampire power is to look into the minds of those he touches, so he says forget the witnesses and asks to touch the child. Of course he discovers the kid isn't an immortal child. Well, she is immortal, and a child, but what she's not is an immortal child. He then declares she is to be destroyed anyway, since they don't know exactly what she is and that makes her dangerous. The Cullens react as if this is some big betrayal, but Carlisle earlier said the whole thing was just a pretext to get to Alice. What did you expect Aro to do? Say "Oops, our mistake!" and turn around and go home? What's surprising is that he's even talking about this, and that he doesn't lie after working the mind-mojo on the kid. But we have to pad, pad, pad, so now Alice shows up and says that she's seen the future and the child isn't dangerous, allowing Aro to touch her and see her visions for himself as proof. He does and sees she's right, but now he does lie about it and declares the child is to be destroyed because the whole thing is a pretext. God, this is so dumb.

The big fight begins, and something impressive happens. No, really. The fight begins with Carlisle charging Aro, and Aro kills him. That's right, in this series in which nothing bad has happened to any of the Cullens, in which no one is ever really in danger, in which none of the good guys has even been hurt except the time Bella was bitten by James in the first movie, the Cullen patriarch gets kacked. This doesn't happen in the Breaking Down novel, and let me tell you, there were gasps in the audience. This film series has so far proceeded more or less in lockstep with the books--changing minor details but forbidden from tinkering with anything important--but Part 4, Part 2 threw the Twihards a curveball, and they didn't know what to do. I myself couldn't believe it was happening (for good reason, as it turned out). Meyer produced this film, so she had to approve Carlisle's death. Not only that, they kill Harpo and some of the werewolves in the ensuing bloodbath, before finally Aro himself falls and the Volturi retreat. Finally, some actual stakes. Finally, genuine consequences. Finally, triumph at least tinged with sadness and loss. Finally, everything doesn't turn out all right in the end, not totally. Even though the good guys won, there was a cost. A price to be paid.

The entire fight was just Alice's vision, showing Aro what would happen if he fights the battle. Since the result is his own death, Aro takes his army and goes home.

Fuck. This. Movie.

The old "it was all a dream" is the cheapest and laziest way to manufacture drama in the hack writer's handbook. No artistic work has ever been improved by it. All it does is piss off the audience because it means everything we just saw wasn't real and so nothing was ever really at stake. That's what infuriates me the most about Twilight. It's lazy. It doesn't even try to be any good. It doesn't put any effort into being believable or memorable or effective in any way. All it does is pander to the fantasies of a particular demographic to rake in the cash. It's the gender-reverse of the Michael Bay Transformers series. And people buy into it. As long as your product works my fetish, I'll pay you for it, no matter how cheap and lazy and sloppy it is. People, I don't hate romantic films. I don't hate action films. I don't hate superhero films. I hate lazy films. And I hate people who don't hate lazy films. Have some goddamned standards, ya heathens! Make 'em earn it!

Some critics are praising the film for its climax, even as they also criticize it for chickening out in the end. But by making it all just a vision, the filmmakers destroy all the interest they've crassly manufactured. In the end, it's the same old Twilight: toothless, neutered, non-threatening, status quo-affirming, consequence-free.

Still, the Twihards' reactions were damn fun. I mean, they even killed Harpo!

Southland Tales

Last night, I saw the worst movie I've ever seen in my life.

I don't say that lightly. I don't have a new "worst movie ever" every other week. The worst movie I ever saw was for fifteen or so years Peter Jackson (yes, that Peter Jackson)'s Bad Taste. It wasn't until 2005 that I saw the execrable Princess Aurora, a well-shot film that made me want to smack its writer/director upside the head for its depraved moral message and ludicrous ending. Now, five years later, we have a new world champion of suck.

My readers, I give you Southland Tales (2006).

This movie earned a whopping $350,000 worldwide, on a budget of about $17 million. One would hope this would be enough to ensure writer/director Richard Kelly will never work again, but if his previous pretentious sewage Donnie Darko is any indication, this film is bound to be seized upon as a work of genius by pseudo-intellectual hipster halfwits on DVD. The film is anti-government, filled with cryptic dialogue, and doesn't make any sense, the perfect movie for anyone who wants to maintain the illusion of deep thought without all that bothersome thinking. If a film is impossible to understand, every interpretation of it can be 'deep'.

I'm no stranger to bad movies. I've seen two and a half films by Uwe Boll. (In the Name of the King was putting me to sleep halfway through so I turned it off and played with my guinea pigs for an hour.) Three by Ed Wood. Two by Michael Bay. I'm sorry to tell you this, Kim Ki-duk, but you have been dethroned as the most godawful director in the history of human civilization. Mr. Kelly has taken your crown.

It's bad, folks. Shockingly bad. Not bad in a way that's fun or entertaining. Not bad in a way that's fascinating and impossible to look away from, like the aftermath of a terrible automobile accident or an unbelievable terrorist nuclear attack on Texas. No, it's bad in a way that makes you long for the directorial mastery of Coleman Francis. Whenever I hear the song "My Humps", I shed a single tear as a tiny piece of my soul dies. After ten minutes of this movie, I searched for a straight razor to run across my jugular. After watching the whole movie, I was ready to blanket the planet in nuclear weapons, rendering it uninhabitable to remove the danger of anyone else's ever seeing it.

What's it about? Don't ask me, I only watched it. I can't give you a plot synopsis. I can't even confirm that the film has a plot. All I can tell you is the background, which the film takes great pains to explain since it doesn't have any impact on the events about to unfold. Two cities in Texas have been nuked by terrorists...I guess. The narrator claims this started World War III against the Axis of Evil, but the two cities aren't strategic targets or even population centers and seem more like the kind of place a terrorist group would choose to bomb because they can't reach anywhere vital.

In the wake of these attacks, the government goes full on fascist with an even Patrioty-er Patriot Act. Well, kind of. "Clinton" is running for president (Barack who?) against guy-who-isn't-named-Bush-but-is-still-Republican-and-therefore-the-fascist-guy-we-don't-want-to-win-the-election. So apparently we aren't fascist yet, but we will be if Hilary doesn't win. So the Neo-Marxists want Clinton to beat the fascist candidate, even though we already appear to be fascist, what with the new Orwellian government agency USIDent keeping tabs on everyone and cops gunning down unarmed people in their own homes in front of witnesses. Or maybe not. Resisting the fascism of the not-yet-fascist government are the "Neo-Marxists", who also operate as terrorists. No, really. Because Marxist terrorism is a grave threat in today's world. How prescient this film is! The Neo-Marxists don't kill people, though. Instead, they blackmail the fascists by taking pictures of an actor who supports the fascist candidate making out with a porn star instead of his wife, which will cause them to lose the election. Clever, eh? How could the fascist guy win if a famous guy who supports his campaign cheated on his wife? Brilliant! Writer/director Kelly, my hat's off to you, sir. You have your finger on the pulse of current events.

What else has this dastardly fascist government been doing? Anyone faint of heart had better leave the room....okay, ready? They've invented environmentally-safe perpetual motion technology. Those bastards! This technology, dubbed "Liquid Karma", uses the movements of the ocean to power the country in a way that doesn't cause any harm to the surrounding environment and removes the need to use any other natural resource to generate energy. Now you see why the Neo-Marxists simply must bring this government down! Viva la revolution! Vote Clinton '08!

If you think this synopsis is confusing, try watching the film. Better yet, don't.

The performances are terrible, with only one exception: Wallace Shawn, in full Christopher Walken mode. (Meaning, he either didn't get any direction from Kelly or recognized the direction he got as the codswallop it was, so he just fell back on his default quirky performance.) Fortunately, Wallace Shawn is extremely good at doing Wallace Shawn, and his every appearance on screen lifted me up just a little from the morass of crap I was drowning in. Everyone else is either terrible or forgettable. The Rock is a capable actor, but he either didn't realize that Kelly's direction would make him look like an ass on camera or he didn't have the decency to give Kelly a People's Elbow instead of listening to him. Cheri Oteri reminds me why Saturday Night Live hasn't been relevant in 15 years. Stifler looks lost, whether because the script is a half-baked collection of ideas stolen from actual artists or because he himself is a cretinous sub-human with no more sense than God gave a turnip, I couldn't tell you. Sarah Michelle Gellar is convincing as a skanky pornstar until she attempts to act. Jon Lovitz is as expressive as a wax dummy of Keanu Reeves. Mandy Moore is unrecognizable and Not In This Film anyway. Christopher Lambert (seriously?) is along for the paycheck. Bai Ling is dressed in a sexy outfit and given a disastrous hair and make-up job that nullifies her sexiness entirely. John Larroquette gamely tries to give a performance but is constantly sabotaged by how inconsistently dopey his character is. I didn't know Miranda Richardson played the film's antagonist until I read its Wikipedia page; certainly the film itself gives no such indication.

No piece of overlong, pretentious tripe would be complete without a dream sequence that comes out of nowhere, has nothing to do with anything, and has no effect on subsequent events. Because God hates me, Kelly's got us covered: Justin Timberlake's inexplicable musical number that is somehow "the film's heart and soul", according to Kelly. Timberlake also narrates the film, but nothing he says helps us understand it. He is a soldier who mans a giant gun turret on the southern California beach. Yep, if the North Korean navy evades our entire Pacific fleet, bypasses Japan, and chooses a crowded public beach as the focal point of its amphibious invasion of America, by gum, we've got soldiers there to defend it! Timberlake's character is also a user of Substance D--err, I mean, Liquid Karma. Wait, what's that you said? Liquid Karma is the technology that allows the movement of the tides to power the country, so how can it be a narcotic? Because drug use was a big part of some of Philip K. Dick's great works, so Kelly shoehorns it into his Dickwankery whether it makes sense or not. Actually, Kelly does anything whether it makes sense or not.

Now, I don't quibble when people say something is the best or the worst in the world. I don't say to them, "Don't you mean, the worst movie that you've seen?" It's a silly thing to say. Of course I mean the worst movie I've seen. That doesn't even need to be stated. In this case, however, I did specifically start off this rant by saying it was the worst movie I've seen rather than the worst movie ever made. Why?

This movie seemed tailor-made to piss me off.

First, it's post-apocalyptic, one of my favorite genres and a genre that's very hard to do well (Zardoz, Waterworld) but can be very powerful when it is (The Road Warrior, Wall-E). This one isn't.

Second, it's a storytelling mess. Nothing makes any sense. Scenes begin and end at random. Some characters speak entirely in non sequiturs. The rest speak in circles. There's no identifiable protagonist or main story thread. Characters enter and exit the film without rhyme or reason. There's an annoying narrator who adds nothing and is not involved in the story. There is no sense the film is building to anything. The scenes could be reshuffled in any order and I don't see how it would make a difference. The ending implies (I think, I'm just guessing here) that everything that came before it was pointless.

Third, it's nothing but a pastiche of better stories. The dialogue is yet more tiresome aping of Tarentino, all discursive ramblings about nothing or discursive ramblings that appear to be about nothing but are really about something. (Christ, people, Pulp Fiction came out sixteen years ago!) Two of the characters (Taverner, Luft) have names from Dick's works, and then the Jon Lovitz character actually quotes half the title of one of Dick's books (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said). The whole style and feel of the film--the drug use, the multiple people, the anti-government paranoia--are all imitation Dick. The non-linear nature is very faux-Gilliam. There are a few halfhearted attempts to rip-off Blade Runner, but Kelly can't even figure out Ridley Scott's film, much less figure out how to copy it. Ah, Ridley Scott, before he caught Oliver Stone-itis and starting making big, dumb Braveheart clones....

Wait, where was I? Oh yes--fourth, Kelly profanes two of my personal greats by invoking them in a vain attempt to salvage this trash. The embarrassing attempts to ape Dick have already been noted. Then, just to pile on the insults, Kelly includes a snippet of my favourite piece of music. That's right, he pisses on Beethoven's grave by including a bit of the Ninth Symphony, Second Movement. Not just my favorite symphony, but my favorite movement of that symphony.

I about lost it at that point. I don't remember much of the last ten minutes of this absurdly long film. (Two hours and twenty-four minutes, really?) I can tell you that it's badly-acted, nonsensical, and doesn't resolve anything. So, in keeping with the rest of the film. Oh, and it included an out-of-nowhere dance sequence and an explosion that meant...something.

Or nothing, if I understood the ending. I wouldn't bet on it.