Ishiro Honda’s 1954 monster movie Godzilla isn’t scary any more (and maybe it never was), but it possesses a certain eerie power because of its context. You’re watching two of Japan’s deep cultural fears (the deep ocean, and nuclear weapons) collide on the screen like magnets, in the form of a huge mutated creature rising from the sea with a death wish. Some forty years later Roland Emmerich got it into his head to resurrect the franchise and shoot it full of steroids with a modern remake.
What part of this movie is most successful? CGI, baby. This film is downright pretty. White-hot tracer bullets rip at Godzilla as it sways and lurches, cars fly like dominoes, whole buildings shatter, and fishing trawlers get pulled under.
The monster itself benefits greatly from computer enhancement. The movie caught some flak for only partially showing the monster in a lot of shots. Yet this is an effective touch. It gives the impression that we’re looking at a beast of uncontainable size, a beast too big to film.
I guess this movie caught me at the right time, when I was getting into kaiju shit (Mothra, etc) in a big way, and was really keen on seeing a Westernised version of the same thing. Emmerich’s remake is far from being a kaiju movie, but I nevertheless found it entertaining and exciting.
What kneecapped Godzilla for me then and ice-picked Godzilla for me know is believability. This is not a low-budget Japanese monster movie starring a guy in a lizard suit. This is something with a genuine aspirations towards credibility.
And I don’t believe that Godzilla could shake entire city blocks when it walks, yet in some scenes nobody knows it’s there until it pokes it head around a building. I don’t believe a helicopter pilot would let Godzilla chase him all around a city, and never once think to fly up and escape into the sky. And I don’t believe that Godzilla would breath fire in one scene and never do it again. These are monster movie holdovers from a genre where nobody cares about believability, and they make no sense here.
But hey, we didn’t get a cheesy “humans are the REAL MONSTERS!” sermon a’la every other monster movie ever made, and that is a wonderful thing.
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This was the film covering Arnold’s surprise comeback at the 1980 Mr Olympia after five years in the abyss. Stories still grow about The Oak’s final contest. He broke the rules by entering, nearly started a fist-fight backstage, and caused the retirement of Mike Mentzer, who was convinced the contest was a fix.
This video covers none of that. In fact, it doesn’t cover anything much. We have some gym footage, some contest footage, and some interviews with Arnold and his compatriots, in no particular arrangement or order.
Let’s get it out of the way that if you’re expecting a riveting clash of titans like in Pumping Iron, this isn’t for you. This isn’t about a story. You should watch Total Rebuild because it’s a slice of Arnold’s life. It seems like a more honest and “real” documentary than Pumping Iron, although maybe that’s because they didn’t have time to edit it properly. Apparently, Total Rebuild was filmed by an Australian promoter, using equipment borrowed from some friends, and as a result it has a certain gritty indy quality. Unfortunately, the contest footage here is the best we have of the 1980 Mr Olympia (I’ve heard that CBS filmed the entire contest at great expense, and then threw the footage away because like Mentzer, they felt the contest was rigged).
The interviews with celebrities such as Bill Pearl and Tom Platz are fascinating. Tom hero worships Arnold, while Bill gently tries to cut him down to size. Arnold is his usual Alpha Male self. This guy could start a pretty damned successful cult. He injects some humor into the proceedings, too, such as when he sees a bodybuilder put a 10 pound plate on a barbell without making enough noise. “We’re on camera! You have to make it sound like a thousand pounds!”
The training, unfortunately, is pretty lackluster. I’ve heard that Arnold suffered a shoulder injury, which restricted his training poundages. He does some smith squats and cable rows. There’s nothing as awe-inspiring or intense as Pumping Iron’s training sequences here (in the order they appear in my mind: Ed Corney’s squats, Lou Ferrigno’s military presses, Arnold’s dumbbell flys, etc).
So…was the 1980 Mr Olympia rigged? No question, Arnold wasn’t as good as his previous contest appearances. But in my opinion, he still took down the other guys with his trademark Arnold body parts: big arms, big calves, HUGE chest. His weak points (such as quads) were his weak points in previous contests, too. The contest drives home an important lesson, Arnold at 90% shape is better than anyone else from his time period at 100% shape, weak legs and weak shoulders be damned.
So, this is very different to Pumping Iron, and mostly the bad sort of different, but it’s still well worth looking for. This is an important part of old-school bodybuilding, just like the guy who stars in it.
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Before this movie, bodybuilding was a freak show. After this movie, bodybuilding went back to being a freak show. But at the nexus where Arnold Schwarzenegger, Joe Wieder and George Butler combined their powers Captain Planet-style, a movie was born that elevated bodybuilding to the status of “reputable sport” for a few years.
Pumping Iron captures the 1975 Mr Olympia contest, but mostly weeks of intense training leading up to the contest. Arnold is preparing to defend is title for the last time, and nipping at his heels are his contemporaries Franco Columbu and Lou Ferrigno. The film isn’t a straight documentary. The training and contest footage is real, but a few scenes here and there were scripted. Fair enough. You can’t watch two straight hours of sweaty guys lifting weights. This is going to be a “docudrama.”
Watching these guys is fascinating. Arnold is arrogant and boorish, because he’s earned the right to be, while Lou Ferrigno is moody and angsty. A lot of the movie’s conflict centers around Lou and his overbearing father, who pushes him around with impunity. Straight away you realise that Lou won’t win. He doesn’t have the confidence in himself.
There’s tons of comedy in this movie. Arnold’s tireless ability to involve scantily-clad girls in his workout routine, his sledging of Lou Ferrigno before the contest (“I called my mama and told her I won Mr Olympia 1975!”), and his hilarious monologue about the similarities between lifting weights and having an orgasm. There’s some serious stuff as well, like Ferrigno’s clashes with his father and Mike Katz’s I-want-to-reach-for-the-shotgun speech after he loses the Mr Universe contest.
One might conceivably feel cheated by the obviously punched-up Hollywood drama. But to be honest, I don’t think the movie was any more fake than the contest it depicts. Face it, Arnold was the figurehead of the Wieder bodybuilding empire, and he was definitely going to win the contest. This isn’t conjecture, it’s a truth that becomes ever more inescapable given what we now know about how the Mr Olympias were run.
Want a freebie? Serge Nubret. 12 days before the 1975 Olympia, he shows up in tremendous shape. He gets barred from entering, ostensibly because he dishonoured the sport by appearing in a porn movie (I’ll refrain from making a comment) but years later he still insisted that the Wieder brothers had blocked him because he looked better than Arnold. So he lets his training regimen fall apart, loses 12 pounds of muscle in 12 days, and he’s allowed into the contest. Suddenly nobody seems to care about his porn movie. This seemed like a really damning story when Mr Nubret related it on a bodybuilding forum, complete with pictures of how he looked 12 days before the contest (the guy looked amazing, he wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Lee Haney era).
The Wieder brothers had much to gain by keeping Arnold at the top. He was charismatic, he wasn’t a black man, he personified the All-American ideal. He crushed Sergio in 1972 and Mentzer in his 1980 comeback, and most critics agree that these, also, were paper championships. It sucks, but that’s the way bodybuilding works. It’s not like powerlifting, where an 800 pound deadlift will always be an 800 pound deadlift. It’s a subjective assessment of a body’s artistic merits (or lack of such), and there’s any number of ways bias can enter the judging table and propel an undeserving man to first place.
Do I think Arnold sucks? No way. His chest and calves were some of the best ever (and his biceps were perhaps THE best ever). He was winning contests everywhere before he’d even heard of the Wieder brothers. But is he a legend because of his 7 Mr Olympia titles, or in spite of them?
Regardless of the lingering sensation that the contest might be the truly fake part of this movie, Pumping Iron is a very entertaining watch. I recommend it highly.
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You and a friend might have different opinions. You and 24 Hours Later You might also have different opinions. That happened here. I watched this movie thinking it was the best thing ever, but after I left the theater I started liking it less and less pretty much immediately.
It’s the second coming of the Matrix. Great action scenes, a strong and unified visual theme, a catchy “EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS A LIE!!!” message that apparently doesn’t extend to the money in the moviegoers’ pockets, and once you’re free of the movie’s spectacle, problems appear that you cannot ignore.
Forget about dreams and mazes and kicks and tokens, the plot itself is basically nothing. Just a guy trying to con his way to a better life. When you think about it, the heist they run is ridiculously roundabout and convoluted. They get together on a plane and knock out a businessman’s son and hook him up to a dream machine and enter the dream and fake a hijacking inside the dream and put him into a dream inside the dream and plant a seed of doubt inside his mind and then they BLAH BLAH BLAH…just to damage his business prospects? It feels like you’ve spent years discovering Newtonian physics just so you can invent the Pong videogame. There are scenes where this movie just flat-out cheats. Early in the movie they make it sound like limbo is some inescapable hell, and later in the movie two characters just casually escape at a moment’s notice. The characters live in a dreamworld where anything is possible and reality can be manipulated like play-doh, but they never take advantage of this. Okay, Arthur kills a dude with a logical paradox, and they may have magicked up some guns at one point, but that’s it.
But forget about plot holes. That’s not what’s wrong with Inception.
The movie is just a legalistic series of if/then clauses that could be solved by a computer algorithm. All the effort on the part of the viewer comes from figuring out the premise. Once you understand the premise, the movie solves itself. I was hoping for something much, much more than that.
Dreams are irrational, aren’t they? So wouldn’t a dream within a dream would be even more irrational? And yet no matter how far down they travel, the same ironclad rules still apply, the same challenges still face them. You get the feeling they could travel down through a hundred levels of the dream and STILL be fighting the same generic guys with generic 21st century firearms in a generic city environment.
Seeing them warp the environment and do incredible things in the beginning, and then the rest of the movie is lame James Bond shit…that was REALLY underwhelming. It feels like a meal where the dessert is served first.
Bur really, I rag on this movie far too much. It’s pretty good. The action scenes are solid, the premise is very original, and all the actors put in good performances. But, well…
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The band was on a massive upwards swing with Tonight the Stars Revolt, and their follow-up album Anyone for Doomsday was set to rock face. Then Spider cancelled it.
I would have said “nobody knows why”, except it’s plainly obvious why. This album is a ripoff. Holy shit, what a terrible joke of a CD. What were they thinking? You have THIRTY THREE DAMN MINUTES OF AUDIO, and I’m not talking about thirty-three minutes of high-quality, filler-free music either. The band contorts themselves into ridiculous evasions to avoid writing songs. We have three interlude tracks (“Disease of Machinery”, “I’ll Try”, and “Rise”) and two stupid joke songs (“Megatronic” and “The Future That Never Was”). This should have been an EP, people. A goddamn EP.
What can I say about the 20-25 minutes of actual music on this alleged album? Most of it sucks. There’s a pile of horrible filler tracks (obviously thrown together from bits and pieces of rejected songs) that make the Cars cover on their last album sound good. Just listen to “One and Only” and tell me I’m wrong. You have these goofy effects-driven verses, and then a mind-blowingly horrible chorus that sounds like it’s in a different key. “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and “What the World Does” are two more songs in the same vein. Horrible crap. Sounds like it was written five minutes before punch-in time.
There are glimmers here and there of what this album could have been: a decent followup to Tonight the Stars Revolt. “Bombshell” and “Danger in this Go!” are action-packed and aggressive, even though they’re a bit too “I wanna be a wrestling theme” for my taste, and they suffer from pretty repetitive choruses. Yeah, yeah, we get the message. You’re dropping the bombshell. Yeah yeah, it’s out of control. You’ve told us this several times before. Go sing about peace or weed or something.
“End of Everything” is a blatant Marilyn Manson cop-off, but it’s pretty fun. Strangely, my favorite song isn’t actually on the album. I’ve recently heard the full-version of “Rise” (only 30 seconds of it appear on the final release), and it thrashes nearly as hard as “When World’s Collide”. WHY DID THEY NOT PUT IT ON THE ALBUM?!?! “Oh, no, we can’t have too much good material on our albums. We don’t want to set unrealistic standards for ourselves. 13 minutes of good music is enough. On our next CD we might raise it to 13 and a half.”
Thank you, Spider, for waking up and realising what a turd sandwich this album is, and what a shameless mercenary you would have been had you actually foisted this on your fans. May Metallica someday inherit your good sense. But you’d have to look at it in light of the fact that Selloutica fills arenas while Powerman 5000 has vanished from the mainstream radar forever. This world depresses me. Bring on doomsday.
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This movie is so incomprehensible and confusing that it defies description. Rearrange all the scenes at random and it would lose only a little bit of coherence. Replace every fourth word with “waffle”, “spinach” or “penismobile” and the dialogue would be only slightly more impenetrable. I can’t tell what the characters are trying to do, or why. The plot seems to have been assembled via a game of Chinese Whispers.
Badness is caused by many factors, and these factors stack like energy requirements on a Pokemon trading card. If enough factors are present (shoestring budget + incompetent writer + incompetent director + horrible foreign translation) it is said that a movie will evolve to Badness Level 3, and be able to unleash a devastating Crap Vortex attack upon the world, ripping a hole in space and time.
For those just tuning in, this is a 2002 Indonesian animated feature made by a man called Joseph Lai. I doubt he knows or cares, but Lai is fast becoming a legend in the underground film community, and brain-melting, monkey-raping pieces of shit like this are the reason why!
The plot of this alleged movie is that there’s an angel who gets kicked out of heaven for falling in love with a mortal man. We think she’s the main character, but early on she vanishes from the movie and we’re left with the angel’s handmaiden, who descends down to hell (I think) and becomes queen of a couple of demons (or something). Out of nowhere we meet these two guys who are searching for a sword. One of the guys journeys down to hell and meets the angel’s handmaiden and falls in love with her, even though she sent monsters to kill him. They have sex (fully clothed, as far as I can tell), and she has a baby. I mean, literally, has it right there, only one minute’s running time after he met her. I pretty much got lost there.
The plot is inane and bizarre beyond anything I’ve seen before. And that doesn’t turn Beauty and Warrior into a “so bad it’s good” cult classic, either. Quite the contrary, the movie drags like a one-legged turtle, grossly padded out by superfluous crap that has no right to even be on a daily reel, let alone a movie. Even the fights are as boring as fuck. You know the deal, long drawn out scenes where the two fighters stare into each other’s eyes…on and on and on. Yeah, other animes do it. This one does it worse.
Production values are several steps below cut-rate. There’s a one minute sequence where the hero is flying through a rocky tunnel, and it’s just the same footage repeating over and over. Late in the movie there’s a part that isn’t even animated. It’s just a picture with voice-overs over it. Detail is acceptable, but the voice acting is horrible, with everyone speaking English in a look-ma-I’m-reading-from-a-cue-card monotone. Probably the movie makes more sense in its original language, so let’s blame the translators. God knows there’s usually no correlation between what the characters say and what actually happens on screen.
Beauty and Warrior was an experience. No doubt getting your nutsack caught in a particle accelerator is also an experience. Bottom line: don’t watch, seek out, or even think about this movie.
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Avatar’s strengths and weakness — and there’s a lot to talk about — are rendered useless under the weight of the film’s success. Combine the grosses of this movie and Titanic, and James Cameron could just flat-out buy an entire third world nation and become an actual king of somewhere. Obviously people are reacting favorably to this movie. You don’t make billions of dollars if you suck.
But despite the film’s obvious strong qualities, I can see where Avatar’s critics are coming from. The story is pretty perfunctory. It’s there. It’s nice. But it’s very similar to a bunch of other movies (Pocahontas, Dancing with Wolves) and near-identical to the Australian animated film Fern Gully. Right from the when I saw the mysterious Na’vi princess I knew she would fall in love with Jake. Right from when I saw the scowling Na’vi warrior I knew Jake would endure his bullying at first but would eventually become his friend. The hideous peace-and-love hippy themes were annoying as fuck, especially the scene where Jake first meets the princess. I was almost expecting her to break out singing “can you sing with all the voices of the mountain? Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?”
Regardless, the movie looks amazing.
Yes, liking a movie because of its visuals is an entirely valid reaction. There are countless classic movies (King Kong, Jurassic Park, even the LOTR trilogy to an extent) that emphasised special effects over storytelling, and they don’t necessarily get worse with age. In fifty years people might not be amazed by Avatar’s technology, but they will probably still appreciate how it must have looked back in the day.
And make no mistake, there is no overstating just how good looking Avatar is. The CGI is state of the art, and the third dimension takes it to the next level. In the scenes where Jake is diving down on his flying bird thing, I felt a sickening plunge in my stomach. A movie has never done that to me before. And I wasn’t thinking “wow, that’s some nice 3D!” I was thinking “wow, I hope Jake doesn’t fall off!” And forget about that crap, even the scenes with Jake walking around Pandora at night, with all the bugs buzzing around and the trees looking like they’re about to enclose and smother him are beautifully, beautifully done. Every part of the world of Pandora looks incredible. Snap a random screen capture from any of the on-planet parts of the movie and you’d have postcard material. Things don’t just look right, they move right. Everything has weight and heft and momentum.
And this was the first 3D movie I’ve seen that really took the medium places. A lot of 3D movies take the approach of “HOLY SHIT, LOOK AT THIS, IT’S 3D, WE’RE REACHING OUT AT THE SCREEN AT YOU.” Just trying to beat the viewer into submission. Avatar seems more reserved, and usually the 3D does what it’s supposed to do, blend into the movie without distracting you and thereby enhancing the movie rather than hijacking it.
So that’s Avatar, people. Very pretty. So pretty, in fact, that it’s obviously compensating for something. Your ability to enjoy the movie depends on your ability to forgive an average story. I suppose the ideal moviegoer in this case would be somebody who doesn’t go to the movies much.
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Film adaptations of classic books take all kinds of crap, but holy shit, this movie must have been hard to get right. On one hand you have the hardcore fans who will pick up on all the film’s modern touches and hate it. Then there’s the all-powerful but fairly stupid audience, whose favor you must court if you want a $50 million opening weekend. Guy Ritchie chose the second group, and I think he was right.A faithful adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes novels would have been the crappiest movie ever made.
Why do I say that? It’s because you can only cling to the past at the expense of the present. Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns was a borderline flop, and do you want to know why? It’s because the character isn’t interesting anymore. These days we have Spider-Man and Batman, superheroes with weaknesses and flaws and vulnerabilities, and they are far more interesting than some bland, square-jawed Aryan muscleman who can lift up the whole world if the plot requires him to.
In that spirit, the movie takes all kinds of liberties with Sherlock Holmes. He’s been transformed into a trendy quasi-hipster with incredible fighting abilities and a languid watching-the-world-through-glass attitude that one normally associates with stoned college students. He’s incredibly smart, able to construct chains of events in his head and establish connections instantly. Socially, he’s a disaster, but it isn’t due to ineptness. You get the feeling that he could be charming, but he doesn’t think people are worth his time.
Watson has been upgraded from “bumbling sidekick” to “smart, evenheaded man who resents how the eccentric hero keeps screwing up his life”. Irene Adler is your token female lead, and Lord Blackwood is too fucking cool for words. Every time he appears on screen, you smile, because you know you’re about to get your money’s worth. There’s a few others like a enormous foreigner who exchanges bilingual banter with Holmes in between trying to kill him.
I didn’t like the ending much. Without spoiling it, it’s like hearing an amazing classical composition and then realising out it was programmed by computers. It’s still the same song, but it just seems smaller now. Oh yeah, and there’s we’ve also got the cheapest attempt ever at bankrolling a sequel. That’s fine, I just hope future movies don’t go the Pirates of the Carribean route, trying to cram hundreds and hundreds of characters from the books on to the screen just because they can. The plots in these movies should be complex. The casts should be simple.
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This movie is about homing pigeons struggling to deliver a message during WWII. They succeed, unlike the movie they’re in, which fails to deliver entertainment in any way and is mostly boring and pathetic.
The star is a young pigeon called Valiant, who dreams of joining the Royal Homing Pigeon Service and battling the German falcons over the English Channel. He enlists, is sent over to France with a crack team of other pigeons, and must retrieve a vital message regarding the position of German troops.
OK, not a bad premise, but you know what kills it? The characters. The characters in Valiant are either unmemorable nobodies (Valiant, Toughwood, Tailfeather, and Lofty) or actively annoying douchebags (everyone else, basically) whom you learn to hate after a few scenes.
The story is kinda flat and predictable, since everyone is a walking cliche and all of the movies scenes have been rehearsed, as it were, it thousands of other movies. And did I mention it has really, really bad jokes? Like, they make contact with the French resistance (who are mice), and are introduced to Charles de Girl, yeah, like Charles de Gaulle, except she’s a girl. I laughed, but not at what I was supposed to laugh at. There’s also a mouse character with a large number of matches strapped to his body. A running gag has him whirling around with lit matches yelling “SABOTAAAAGE!” for some inexplicable reason. I guess the screenwriters were hoping it would become an internet meme.
This movie is just terrible. The story sucks, the characters are annoying as hell, the movie manages to be completely implausible (in the final showdown, it takes them all of five minutes to fly from France to England, or that’s how it looks, anyway) and lastly, the animation left me cold. A movie about birds benefits from looking realistic, but all the characters in Valiant have a plastic, cartoony look that reminds me of Chicken Run, especially in the sense that there’s no feather definition and everyone looks like they’re sculped from Play-Doh.
Once, you could have certain expectations regarding a CGI movie. They cost so much to make that only sure-fire winners made it to theaters. But as the technology became cheaper, more and more crap started piling on. Don’t watch or rent Valiant. Forget it even exists.
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This is one of those movies that watches extremely well for most of its length, and then in the last 15 minutes things just go down the crapper and you can’t escape the bad taste, even though the rest of the movie was good.
It’s about a math-whiz called Ben who needs cash for med school (why a mathematical genius like him wants to go to med school is never explained, but hey, most of the decisions I make would seem equally inexplicable to an outsider), and is offered a shady, quasi-legal opportunity by his maths professor. Professor Rosa is an expert at playing the card game 21…I don’t mean playing it, I mean playing it. He’s worked out a system where, using several people and code-words, he can predict the outcome of games and thrash Vegas for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because of Ben’s math skills, he is brought on board as official card-counter.
Things work out well for a while. Ben enjoys the high life in Los Vegas while cheating his way to a sizeable fortune. But eventually, his misdeeds catch up and sink him, and so goes the movie.
The ending in this movie flat-out sucks, there’s no escaping it. Not only does it suffer from “gotta tie up the loose ends” syndrome where the film goes into frantic crunch mode and rushes through the resolutions of all the plot points, the ending itself is about 10 contradictions and plot holes supporting each other in a fragile house of cards. Take the escape scene itself, I’m sorry, no matter how much I think about it it doesn’t make sense. Not one iota. Watch it closely and it probably won’t for you either.
The really shitty thing is, the movie was fairly good up until that point. It flowed well, Ben was sympathetic (well, not really, but you didn’t hate him), the math stuff was intriguing. The retarded ending just screws up everything, though. If you rent this, hit eject when you have 15 minutes to go and make up your own damn ending.
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This movie is the freaking holy grail of comedy musicals. I can’t praise it enough. It stars John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as the Blues Brothers, Jake and Elwood, two of the most ice-cool bastards you’d ever want to come across.
The movie’s premise is simple. Elwood has just helped his brother Jake get out of jail, and they discover the orphanage that raised them will soon be repossessed for property taxes owed. After a hilarious encounter with a not-so-friendly nun known as “The Penguin” (the best scene of the movie) they set out on a mission from God to earn the money by reuniting their old band and playing a series of gigs across the country.
The thing is, Jake and Elwood are not the most diplomatic of men and everywhere they go they cause chaos. They upstage a pissed-off country and western band in one town, they disrupt a neo-Nazi rally in another, and so on until it seems half of the US is out for their blood. The movie’s apocalytic showdown is the most go-for-broke thing you’re ever likely to see in a musical.
The jokes are gross and retarded, but if you can look past that you’ll find a very charming movie. It’s fun watching these urban characters interacting with each other, even in the rare times when nothing much is happening. If you’ve seen a Tarantino movie you’ll know the drill. The songs themselves are a very-well done collection of blues and soul standards, and the way the movie transitions into the songs is quite well.
Jake and Elwood themselves are so underacted it’s funny in itself. They never raise their voices and are dispassionate in the extreme. In one scene, the phone booth they were standing in moments ago is blown up by an RPG. They literally get blasted off their feet by a huge fireball. What are Jake’s first words? He looks at the change littering the ground and says “hey, there must by 7 dollars here.” They’re not bumbling dumbasses, but intelligent men who are seemingly disconnected from the world they live in.
Bottom line? A goofy yet stylish comedy/musical. It is a movie, simply put, for those of us who are plugged in.
“Holy shit, it’s the BLUES BROTHERS!!!”
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Poor, middle-aged mechanic Carter Chambers (played by Morgan Freeman) ends up sharing a hospital bed with billionaire tycoon Edward Cole (played by Jack Nicholson), after they have both been diagnosed with cancer and have only months left to live. The men bond, and pen a list of things they hope to do before they die (it’s called the Bucket List, because it’s what they want to do before they kick the bucket). Both of them have lived unsatisfying lives, and they decide to go all-out and experience life as much as possible. With Cole’s money, they have a blank cheque with which to do this. Skydiving, anyone?
Now we get to the middle section, where the wheels fall off the movie’s plot. The problem with The Bucket List is that it completely oversells itself. There’s a scene where the 70-year-old duo have a drag race, smashing each other’s cars at 80kph. All I could think of was “WTF? Don’t these guys have cancer?” The film goes from absurdity to absurdity, showing them climbing the Himalayas, racing motorbikes across the Great Wall of China, and hooking up with hot women. Now, I’m not one to make social commentary but would real cancer sufferers be happy with the message sent by this movie?
The Bucket List might mislead you into thinking it’s a real uplifting feelgood movie, ultimately its perceived emotional depth is nothing but smoke and mirrors. If I had only months to live (and unlimited money) I’d want to do something to better humanity, but Cole and Chambers revel in hedonism. There’s some tacked-on crap about reconciling themselves with their families, but this is the freaking last thing they do.
You’d hope that a movie this stupid would be redeemed by great characters, but here also The Bucket List takes a kick to the balls. At the start there’s a reflective intro where a voiceover of Chambers waxes poetic about (now deceased) Cole, talking about what a great man he was and how much he did in his life. Thing is, Cole as depicted in the movie is a reprehensible pig who is immature, shallow, and egotistical, to the point where we cannot find a single favorable point about his character and can’t wait for him to die already. Chambers, at least, is likeable, but horribly typecast. Morgan Freeman turns him into yet another wise black mentor figure who acts as a foil to the irrepressable Cole. Basically he’s reprising his role from Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty, except without the super powers.
The movie makes no attempt to hide the fact that the characters and their motivations are being railroaded towards a contrived and unlikely ending. Yes, of course the greedy billionaire Cole is reconciled with his daughter. And yes, Chambers reconnects with his wife (but only having months and months of fun overseas without giving his wife a second thought). Speaking of Chambers’ wife, she starts out furious with him, but when he returns home she’s suddenly a loving housewife again. Think for a second: if your spouse pretty much abandoned you to go on a pleasure cruise for a long period of time, would you welcome them back with loving arms, or would you have some harsh words for them first? Chambers’ wife is yet another unlikely character doing unlikely things for no reason.
This movie has some strong performances, but the plot is so off-kilter it’s difficult to enjoy them. If you can get over the idea of two very old men (who have terminal cancer) skydiving and trading paint on motorbikes, the schmaltzy last fifteen minutes will almost certainly kill the movie for you. It’s where they suddenly become saints and forget about all the problems they were struggling.
In closing, The Bucket List is, by turns, puzzling, unconvincing, lame, and borderline insulting. There are so many darts you can throw at this movie that it’s hard to know where to start or finish. However, if you don’t analyse it too closely I suppose it could be entertaining. And I suppose it’s a movie old people would enjoy (I saw it in theatre, and the median age of the audience was around 50-60). And hey, the cat shit coffee joke was kinda funny.
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I went and saw Batman: The Dark Knight yesterday after hearing nothing but good things about it. For the first part, I was amazed. Heath Ledger’s Joker is fantastic. But after I realised that a) 90% of the movie was about the Joker and b) there’s really nothing except the Joker, my interest level kinda dropped.
The movie’s main problem is…well…Batman is barely in it! He appears unmasked in about three scenes. He gets perhaps 20 lines in total. Most of the movie is about the Joker, with a side helping of Harvey Dent aka Two Face (who is so unlikeable you almost can’t wait for bad things to start happening to him). It’s like watching a Rocky movie where Rocky Balboa has a 10-minute cameo.
There was good stuff, of course. The scene involving the fake Batmen was quite clever (”What’s the difference between you and me?” “I’m not wearing hockey pads.”) As a bit of Bat-trivia, Batman never uses guns. Indeed, he has only pulled a gun on a criminal once (see the first episode of “Batman Beyond”), and that was enough to cause him to retire in shame. As soon as I saw a guy in a Batman suit charging forward with a machinegun, I knew he was fake. Other good parts were the scenes with Gordon’s son (whom I’m sure will grow up to become Robin) and the final clash with Two-Face.
But back to the Joker: Heath Ledger has dispensed with the silly Joker of the first movie and now plays someone who looks like a cross between Sweeney Todd and Marilyn Manson. Mere words cannot describe how effective this character is. He’s not a goofy comic-book villain, he’s a psychopathic freak who thinks of murder the same way most people think of going to the bathroom. Another piece of trivia: during the movie the Joker tells two conflicting stories about how he got his scars. This is consistant with the personality of the Joker, who invents and fabricates past lives for himself until not even he is sure what the truth is.
Sadly, while the villains were great, the main characters were anything but. You have Harvey Dent, who is supposed to be a sympathetic character but comes across as a nominee for Knob of the Year Award, and Commissioner Gordon, who is a bit more tolerable but still annoying. And then there’s Rachel, who was unmemorable and generic beyond belief. Throughout the movie I was asking myself “hey wait, have I seen her before?….ah forget it.”
Overall, this movie was pretty weak.
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