I had two long distance flights recently and I caught up on my recent releases; nearly none of them were any good…
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Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse – Yes, I saw that I had the opportunity to get all of the Twilight movies that have been released so far out of the way in one sitting, so I took it! I had read the first book and couldn’t stomach any more (Bella is… annoying), but I thought that if the movies were as boring as the books I’d at least get some sleep. As it turns out, the film is well-cast and there is some chemistry between the kids, which is good, so the films are not as icky as the good. Kristen Stewart is quite appealing, despite her slack-jawedness (blame the director, not the actor), and the James Deanedness of Robert Pattinson is sort of okay. What bugged me the most is the Cullens, these perfect posers who are like the X-Men in the comic books (who had superpowers, but always seemed to feel the need to pose) but a sort of live action version of them. Naturally, none of the characters were interesting. There is one single shot that is any good – that is the tourist group being led into the Volturi vault to feed their hunger, all while a ceremony to celebrate the victory of human over vampire. Not bad. But it still all boils down to three things: posers, posers, posers!
But of course, the involvement of the Volturi, an uber-powerful clan of ancient vampires, is all about the stupidity of Edward Cullen, and his miserable love for Bella Swan. It’s really weird. This is just delayed in the third movie, which is about fighting junior vampires in Oregon. Whooo…
Kick-Ass – A silly and ultra-violent film that is totally pointless and insane. And kinda-sorta good fun to watch. Best thing about it is seeing McLovin again, except this time as a stuffed-nose anarchist. Nicholas Cage was pretty good, even if he was acting like a robot. The appearance of bottled rage, perhaps? The mafia boss was not really that dangerous-looking, at least not until he shot that kid in cold blood in the middle of the street. Yuck.
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Wolverine – I heard that this movie was terrible, but I couldn’t believe it. “Hey, it’s Hugh Jackman, it’s Wolverine, how bad could it be?” Well, it was pretty bad. The best thing about it was the opening sequence and the credits, and it just went downhill from there. What was anybody’s motive for doing anything at all? It just didn’t make any sense. What’s all this nonsense about having a battle on the narrow concrete ledge on the top of a nuclear power plant cooling tower? Why does Scott Summers need to show up? Horrible on all counts. They are already talking about a “reboot” of the “series” only a few years in. Awful.
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Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist – I wanted to see this because it was about music, but I wish I hadn’t. Nick and Norah are the uber-cool high society wise-cracking casual detectives who are the lead characters of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Thin Man”, but the title characters of this film have only a sliver of their coolness. Nick is a loser who obsesses about the girl who broke up with him, Norah is part of that girl’s social group at school. Nick and Norah are into music, and Nick meets Norah after his band plays a gig and Norah is in the audience. They are nice to each other, they are not nie to each other, then they realise that they are in love, ho hum. There is a drunk friend to look after, and there is a quest to find an indie band “Where’s Fluffy” that likes to tease its fans with “secret gigs”. Woo hoo. Pale and immature.
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Inception – About 15 years ago, maybe more, I wrote a short story called “Language Surfing.” It was about a gang of semi-criminals and cyber-punks who engage in language surfing. I’m not even really sure what language surfing is, but it’s a bit like entering the Matrix and seeing what’s going to happen. I wrote it to be a preposterous as possible and I wrapped it up neat and nice, even if not everything made sense.
The film Inception uses the same logic, and I think that the director is taking the piss out of all of us with a preposterous tale of entering people’s dreams and influencing their thinking. I thought that this was one of the stupidest films I’ve ever seen, and the plot was so totally preposterous I simply could not suspend my disbelief any longer. Architects who create dream worlds! Dreamers who go under for 50 years! Car chases inside a man’s brain! Executives that can buy off justice! Ambushes in Tangiers! Cities that fold like slices of pizza! Wowee!!
The way it was all neatly wrapped up in a happy ending in the last two minutes, with the ironic twist of the spinning top thingy, was also hard to take. What did we just sit through for two hours? People take this film really seriously and think about what it means. I guess they’re a lot deeper than me…
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Boy – Probably the best movie/only good movie I saw on my flights. Boy lives in New Zealand with his grandmother and his demented brother Rocky. When his good-for-nothing dad drifts back into his life, Boy’s happy-go-lucky life becomes a bit more complicated, and you see him become a troubled adolescent; this troubles the viewer, to see the loss of innocence. The acting is fantastic, and the story is full of wonderful scenes of life in a rural New Zealand community, about young love, about broken families, about schooling and fantasy and Michael Jackson. If I’d taken notes I would have described more of the wonderful scenes in the film, but I’ll just have to go with the little that I can remember about what a great film this was.
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Get Him To The Greek – This should have been a funny film, instead it was a f ilm about people you don’t really care about. If it had been an over-the-top rock ‘n’ roll fantasy it would have been fine, but instead we get all sorts of mush, like Aldous Snow’s reconciliation with his dad, with his ex-wife, and Aaron Green getting the courage to stand up to his boss and to break up with his emotionally manipulative and boring girlfriend. Wooo… aaaaahhh… Some funny bits, like the pretentious “African Child” stuff, and Sean Combs was surprisingly good as a corrupt record executive (then again, maybe he was just playing himself). But I wouldn’t recommend this film to anyone, really (the MMF threesome scene, for example, is particularly unpleasant). Oh, wait, maybe I would – the cameo with Lars Ulrich is pretty funny, especially because the filmmakers are particularly unflattering, making Lars look like the dork that he is.