Change Your Image
bowwowguy
Reviews
Armageddon (1998)
Idiocracy Triumphs
It's a truism that there's no accounting for taste, but the fact that this backed-up sewage could get a higher rating than the flawed but several-orders-of-magnitude superior Deep Impact really stretches that point. Of course, there are people who think Two and a Half Men is funnier than the the late lamented 30 Rock, so go figure.
Sad to say, it's films like this that give popcorn blockbusters a bad name: screechy, empty, stupid. I don't mind checking my brain at the door of the local cineplex for a couple of hours, but I do mind when it's clear the screenwriters checked their brains even before they sat down at their Macs. That's probably a prerequisite for anyone who works with "director" Michael Bay, whose idea of entertainment is to trap the audience's collective head inside the cinematic equivalent of a pinball machine and then proceed to batter it into a coma. I guess that's someone's idea of good time. Hey, if you're that someone, knock yourself out, or rather have Bay do the job for you. It's part of his contract.
Like most Bay atrocities, this damn thing is excruciating to watch. I found myself gripping the armrests of my seat,not because of the growing suspense unfolding on the screen but because of the sheer cynical crassness of the whole enterprise. There are the mechanically orchestrated "beats," the paint-by-numbers characters, the flat dialogue, the cheesy jokes. Oh, well, at least one of the writers, J.J. Abrams, went on to do really great, imaginative stuff, so put this down to someone just looking for a nice fat paycheck. Which he got.
Yeah, the special effects were OK, and if I were still 5, that would probably be enough. But it's not because I have this problem: I grew up. Clearly that's a problem that Michael Bay and the overtestosteroned, arrested-development demographic this crapfest is marketed to will never have to worry about.
Leave (2011)
Builds to an emotionally powerful climax
***This review may contain spoilers***
The direction and performances in Leave are terrific, even though the underlying premise of the film isn't particularly original. More seasoned viewers may recognize elements from such films as An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge or Jacob's Ladder, where the entire narrative is essentially a waking dream/nightmare or hallucination in the mind of a character who is dying or about to die.
But the issue here isn't one of originality. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion famously said. But we can also tell ourselves stories in order to learn how to die. It may be a story we've heard before, but that doesn't necessarily make it any less powerful.
So while I suspected Leave was moving in a (to me) somewhat familiar direction, I found the cumulative effect of the film overwhelming. As both a medical professional and as a private person, I have had to deal with the reality of losing patients and loved ones. But each passing is its own unique journey. Even through great suffering, some do not want to let go---they cling fiercely to what's left of their lives. Who can blame them? But there comes a time when all of us must say goodbye, yet when and how we finally choose to say it is a process as complex as it is unpredictable. Leave asks us to bear witness to one man's coming to terms with this inevitability.
I suppose there are people who are made angry or afraid by films that touch them at this primal, emotionally raw level, but essentially they're cutting themselves off from some of the greatest dramas ever written. They should probably stick with safe, unchallenging fare--loud, empty toys like the latest Transformers iteration or paint-by-numbers rom-com. Some can live on a diet of popcorn and little else.
Meanwhile, some of us will continue seeking out films such as Leave, which aren't afraid to ask the (literally) ultimate questions that all of us as human beings will eventually have to face.
1313: Cougar Cult (2012)
Funny/awful but mostly just awful
***This review may contain spoilers***
No one watches a David Decoteau film for its brilliant artistry, but he's really stretching the point here. Of course the "plot," dialogue, acting, and special effects are all predictably subpar, but who cares about that stuff when all you're really looking for is a chance to check out some half-naked studs?
Still, while I get that Decoteau needs to churn this stuff out at warp speed 10 in order to turn a fast buck, maybe he'd like to add an extra minute or two to his wham-bam shoots to achieve a level of passable cheesiness. You'd think he'd at least want to rise to the level of bad camp. If he keeps up this rate of nonstop hackery, he's going to make Ed Wood look like Martin Scorsese.
Anyway, this mess--"film" is too strong a word---features the usual stable of cute guys wandering around a SoCal manse in their tighty whities, showering, spraying themselves with a garden hose, or writhing on the bed in the throes of a semi-wet dream induced by the cougar coven. (No full on nudity, alas.) Then the girls perform some kind of ritual on their victim de jour before turning him into meaty Meow Mix, big cat division. (No worries for the gore-averse: we're shown nothing.) Scenes with these images are repeated endlessly. That's about it for dramatic action.
On the plus side, there are many LOL moments. The line readings are invariably (if often inadvertently) hilarious, the feline growls on the sound track are straight off one of those Halloween FX CD's you can buy at WalMart, and what passes for visual effects---especially scenes where a still of an open-jawed cougar head is superimposed on the witches' faces---would have been laughable even in an early 50's sci-fi/horror flick.
Nazis at the Center of the Earth (2012)
Awful...Yet Some Kind of Classic
This film should join Plan 9 from Outer Space and Troll 2 on the Top Ten list of worst-and-therefore-funniest films of all time. While the first two films were products of sincere incompetence, this picture is much more calculated. It knows exactly how awful it is. That makes it somewhat less entertaining than Plan 9 or Troll 2, because deliberate camp is never as good as the unconscious kind.
Still, the cast and crew were clearly in on the joke, and at the wrap party they probably got as drunk as possible because (1.) they knew they were making a crap masterpiece that might eventually become a midnight-movie cult fave or (2.) they wanted to forget the whole experience as fast as possible. Maybe both. Not that you can blame them.
Anyway, there are so many scenes here that are fall-out-of-your-chair ludicrous that you'd need a heart of stone to not respond to the world- class wackness.
***SPOILER ALERT***
Dr. Mengele, the Nazi surgeon who conducted horrible experiments in WWII concentration camps, is apparently alive if not so well and living/experimenting in an underground lab deep under Antarctica(!), where he and his zombie Nazi cohorts are preparing to usher in the Fourth Reich. Yup, all the ingredients for comedy are here! And sure enough, an unsuspecting team of South Pole researchers stumbles onto this secret and mayhem (plus many laughs) ensues.
Faces ripped off. Cute girls manhandled by living-dead Wehrmacht types. Some stuff about a flesh-eating virus as a tool of world conquest. Does it matter? You can tune in and out of the dialog (or whole scenes) and not miss anything that matters. It doesn't get any better (i.e., worse) than this.
Apart from the fire-sale CGI and overmugging that passes for acting, the high point of the flick is surely the scenes involving a reanimated Hitler encased in what looks like a junkyard reboot of the psychopathic cyborg Cain in Robocop 2. Today Antarctica, Tomorrow the World. Ja wohl, Mein Fuhrer! For sheer looniness (and technical ineptitude), the shots of him tramping over the ice in pursuit of the heroine/hero at film's end will have your eyes doing slot-machine rolls.
A good bad move like this isn't for lovers of cinematic art, or even well-engineered trash like Transformers 2, but it's fine for a slow night when there's not much else on the tube and you need a few cheap giggles.
I have a high tolerance for over-the-top garbage that doesn't take itself too seriously, so this gets 5 stars from me. But of course I get why people who may not share my tolerance would be baffled by that relatively high rating.
The Divide (2011)
Promising Concept, Failed Execution
As if more proof were needed that the post-apocalyptic genre has pretty much shot its wad, here comes Xavier Gens' doomsday opus to confirm that fact. The film takes that ancient saw about human depravity ("Man is a wolf to man")and treats it as if it were some fresh insight into how extreme situations sometimes don't exactly bring out the best in us. The big reveal: people trapped together in confined spaces with limited resources can turn into real a-holes. Wow: who knew?
Of course, a movie doesn't need original ideas to hold our attention; some of the most entertaining films get by on premises that Homer would have found dated. But those films also throw in a dash of cayenne pepper to wake up a bland dish---quirky dialog, an actor who does something unexpected with an otherwise conventional role.
There's not much of that here. The look of the film (mostly variants of grunge brown) mostly works: the director clearly got what he could within a limited budget. But two hours within this cramped palette is too much of a bad thing: claustrophobia may be having a good time but the audience...not so much.
The script (which incorporates the actors' improvisations) caroms off the sides of the plot like a roided-out cue ball. Plot lines wander away from the main narrative like memory-challenged patients and never find their way home, poor things. As a story like this unfolds, no one should expect scattered details to click together like a Yale lock (that's the job of crapfests like the Transformers series), but an occasional nod in the direction of coherence sometimes helps.
A few performances are intermittently interesting. Rosanna Arquette, often most expressive when she seems to be doing the least, has some memorable moments; it's unfortunate that younger viewers, many of whom may not have seen her in, say, The Executioner's Song, may not know how good she can be. Her gift for conveying feeling in a brief look is a refreshing change from a scenario which seems to believe its characters are most "real" when they're raging at 100+ decibels. Yes, we know: they're "stressed." Milo Ventimiglia torques some of his line readings into surprising directions, and Michael Eklund has a nice creepy edge as he sinks further into, you know, the the lower depths of kinkdom. (He and Ventimiglia have a "pec-off" in the last part of the film that I'm gong to call a draw.)
But as a kitsch-as-kitsch-can mash-up of more interesting efforts in this vein (ranging from Lord of the Flies to Roger Corman's classic schlockfest The Day the World Ended), the film clearly suffers from an identity crisis that it never manages to resolve.