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Reviews
The Blacklist (2013)
Starts off extremely well, then crashes and burns.
James Spader adds fantastic snark and verve to an interesting role, but there's only so much he can do with the repetitive writing (after awhile, every episode is the same) and eventually he must... take it away with one of the most blatantly absurd character-breaking moments in television history where the hardened sociopathic killer channels Alan Shore from Boston Legal and spouts off a silly anti-gun talking point. This brings us to the season finale, which tried to cram too many deeply improbable plot twists into two episodes and left us rolling our eyes at the inanity of it.
It's a great concept for a mini-series (or BBC-style series), but the writing is too weak to sustain this many episodes and how they'll get multiple seasons to work is simply unimaginable at this point. It gets six stars overall only because the first dozen or so episodes were a lot of fun (maybe seven or eight stars for them). The next 8 episodes would only get four stars, and one star only for the finale.
Couples Retreat (2009)
A few smirks, but that's it.
A bunch of characters that aren't really sympathetic - they're all basically self-absorbed jerks - go to a resort for therapy. There a bunch of horribly contrived events occur that make them realize ... I'm not sure what they heck they realized. Fixing plastic, one-dimensional characters is sort of an exercise in futility to begin with. There are some mildly funny moments, but no huge laughs.
Here's what's really messed up, though. We watched this on Blu Ray and thought "what the heck, let's look at the deleted scenes." Guess what? They were good. They actually shot a funny movie... and then edited the funny out of it. Unbelievable.
District 9 (2009)
Most overrated film of 2009.
After hitting 9.0 for the weekend, I broke down and saw it. There are certainly some things to recommend it - excellent CGI, and some fantastic acting by Sharlto Copley in the lead role. It's possible worth seeing if you don't mind watching some splatter-happy violence.
That being said - the story is a complete and utter mess. If you've seen the trailers or viral marketing pieces you know that it's about a bunch of aliens "refugees" stuck in a ghetto called District 9. Basically, it's a thinly-veiled apartheid movie with aliens. Expect to be beaten over the head by this through the entire length of the film. You see, it's about how evil people are and how much they hate people errr... things (remember... thinly veiled) that are different from them. People are especially evil if the get together and form large paramilitary corporations that are inexplicably allowed to flaunt every known or imagined law, ethic, and moral code with complete impunity. People are so evil and stupid that they'll concentrate all of their efforts into beating down "the others" and completely give up on deciphering the massive amounts of technology the others happen to have. There's no point in trying to integrate them into society, no National Geographic teams in there studying them. Nope, nope, nope, we're just too busy, as a species, being evil. Even though the aliens are very easily bribed into doing whatever, we don't even try to persuade them to use their technology for us. We don't even want to use them as slaves. Target practice, maybe. We're just too darned committed to being evil. The politicians are in on it. The media's in on it. The father-in-law's in on it. It's serious work being this evil.
Does this sound like a ridiculous and over-the-top description? It's not. There's no human in this movie who's not a complete jerk. The hero? He's really a jerk. Everyone around him is an even bigger jerk. There's no human character in this movie that doesn't deserve to be fed through a wood chipper (the alien characters that get any development are, of course, noble, peaceful, and loving). Let's just be honest. There's a certain mindset that just gets off on this mentality - these people will see this movie and say "Oh yes! yes! yes! We're all jerks! Show us how bad we are!" It's species-level self-flagellation at its finest if you're into that sort of thing. Otherwise you'll spend quite a bit of time rolling your eyes.
One final word - shakeycam. Yes, it's supposed to be "documentary-style," but this is was just overboard. Think "camera being held by a person with an inner ear infection having a seizure." 6 / 10 stars
Hitch (2005)
Good movie right up to the end!
I don't know if it's possible to spoil a movie with an ending this bad. It's impossible to describe in just a few lines how bad the ending is. I wanted to slam my head against the wall repeatedly for hours to get the steady hum of this garbage to stop. My fiancée hated it too. Too keep it brief without being a complete spoiler - one of the characters who makes it through to the end and lives "happily ever after" actually deserved to be tortured to death slowly. Or at least fed through a tree shredder. That she should be treated with sympathy or even affection is such an incredibly bad decision on the part of the screenwriter that I hope his or her fingers develop severe arthritis so that they can never write again. If (s)he should need to become mute as well, than so be it. Oh god, it's so bad. I need to go watch "Gigli" so that I slowly work my way back up the movie intelligence scale...
Hudson Hawk (1991)
Misunderstood...
This movie is a classic farce (something Hollywood hasn't done much of in a while - at least, not intentionally). Situations and characters are so far over the top it's amazing they don't just float off into space. Bruce Willis is in cute smile / sarcastic wisecrack mode - more like his 'Moonlighting' days as opposed to his current action hero motif - he gets to deal with psychotic billionaires, the "MTV-IA", (somewhat) organized crime, and attractive nun from the Vatican. They play this one on cable quite a bit lately, and I still get a kick every time I channel-surf to it - it's good for a good chuckle several times a minute. Watch it, sit back, have fun, but don't try to take anything even remotely seriously!
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
About what you would expect.
Fine, mindless summer entertainment. Never mind that it must have taken two rolls of duct tape to keep the other female lead's top from popping off about three minutes into the flick (and the guns in the garters made it seem like they were trying to so hard to make her Lara Croft it must have been causing them physical pain). The paper-thin plot was just enough to keep you expecting zombies to jump out from every dark spot. The acting was just good enough to not be distracting (with the exception of some ridiculously bad Russian accents - they had a trio of Russian guards there for no reason whatsoever).
Anyway, if you show up expecting to see the next Shindler's List, please don't post your whining here because you got exactly what you deserved. If you simply want to have a few good laughs and watch zombies get blown away, then this is just the ticket... (6/10, which is about as good as a zombie flic gets these days).
The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
Solid story, solid actors, HORRIBLE DIRECTING
It seems to be that these days the most difficult thing in Hollywood is to produce a movie based on a decent script. This movie had the script, it had the actors, it had the franchise to sell it. Doug Liman (who directed The Bourne Identity) turned down the opportunity to helm this picture (and somehow earned an Executive Producer credit instead) and it wound up in the hands of Paul Greengrass. Let me be frank: Mr. Greengrass created possibly the most poorly-directed action movie I've seen in my life (and I see a lot of movies).
Mr. Greengrass is incapable of showing us action. What he does instead is instruct the DP shake the camera horribly whenever there is any high-speed movement being captured. This technique has been used extensively in a minimalist way by other filmmakers to convey the force of an impact; I've never been a big fan of it, but it isn't overly distracting either. Usually. In this case, think "The Bourne Supremacy, photographed by the crew that brought us The Blair Witch Project."
I'm not kidding about this. Bourne runs, the image jumps all over the place - not the usually hand-held camera that is sometimes used to convey the sensation of running, but a hand-held camera held by a crack addict with a severe inner-ear problem. Bourne swings his fist, and the camera swings wildly everywhere. Bourne actually hits something, and you might as well close your eyes or find someplace convenient to vomit (my girlfriend actually was getting motion sickness after awhile).
About 30 or 40 minutes into the film, we were completely sick (figuratively and literally) of this. Basically what is happening is that Mr. Greengrass couldn't cleanly capture an action scene (fistfight, car chase, foot chase, etc) if his life depended on it. The thought process must have been along the lines of "I can't choreograph a fight, so... look like you're fighting, I'll tackle the cameraman, and hopefully the audience will see something other than the ceiling."
Too bad; this movie had everything else going for it. The plot was decent (we figured it out a bit before we were supposed to, but it was still enjoyable), the dialogue credible, and the acting above-average. In the hands of a competent director, this movie could have been a 7 or an 8, but in the shaky hands of Mr. Greengrass and crew, I give it a very annoying 4/10.
Hellboy (2004)
Poorly directed, insults viewer's intelligence
This is an extremely promising concept, badly executed. The first third of the movie forces too many unexplained facts on us - the only character that's given any background is Hellboy (coincidentally - he's the only major character that "works"). We have no clue as to the motivation of any of the other people, which makes it difficult to accept or understand their behavior later. And why the heck was the head of the military squad in the opening sequence being briefed during their last few steps through the rain on the way to their objective? I mean, it's a comic book movie, and we expect to suspend a dump truck-full of disbelief, but this is just flat-out stupid. Unfortunately, this sort of stupidity permeates the rest of the picture.
The middle third of the picture flows better - Hellboy is facing some monsters in various locations and continues to establish his character. The rest of the characters plod along through their actions with no obvious motivation, etc. The action sequences are garden-variety. Hellboy's one super-attribute, his "fist of doom", is underutilized (IMHO), but that's a minor quibble. A not-so-minor gripe is that during one sequence one of the monsters - which at that point had been resolutely quadrupedal (walking on four legs) - walks on his find legs for no reason whatsoever. This caused me a horrible flashback to cheezy 70's movies with people walking around in rubber suits. It looked completely ridiculous. There is also some glaring inconsistency in the amount of "damage" suffered by Hellboy in various circumstances - at one point a moderate cut on his arm causes him to lose enough blood to cause him to eventually collapse, however his being impaled with dozens of pieces of glass later is shrugged off as inconsequential. He gets up slowly after being thrown against the wall, yet gets up easily later on after directly absorbing the blast of half a dozen grenades. At one point he is engulfed in a room full of fire (to which he is supposed to be impervious) and it's the only thing in the film that knocks him unconscious. As I mentioned earlier, we expect to suspend a lot of disbelief, but the director makes it extremely difficult.
Despite the glimmer of promise shown in the second act, the final third of the movie drags you back into the intellectual gutter. We have the caricatured head of the FBI leading this mission - how the hell did this guy lead the FBI? This moron couldn't lead cub scouts on a day hike. The pronunciation of Russian words is so bad that my girlfriend (who speaks Russian as her first language) couldn't understand their words without the subtitles. I don't want to spoil the climactic (or anticlimactic, as it was for me) confrontation, but it frankly made no sense whatsoever. The evil Rasputin is given so many powers ?(for no obvious reason) it reminds me of playing superheros as a small child where you had that one friend that kept making up new "powers" whenever it was convenient (or when he/she was in "trouble") that you wanted to pummel them into the dirt. And despite that Hellboy deals with him so easily at the end that it's almost a joke.
I can see that a lot of people liked this movie so maybe I was in a harsh mood or something when I saw it (I wanted to like it), but I just couldn't get over the inconsistencies, the lazy scriptwriting, and the "beat you over the head with some information, then don't explain everything else" direction. Aside from Ron Perlman, the acting was mediocre at best (of course, it's hard to act a role that's more or less undefined). My suggestion - don't waste your time or money on this one.
4/10