Quick Thoughts - Urban Legend (1998)

12/18/13: I was eleven years-old in 1998, young enough for my dad to tell me Urban Legend would probably be too scary for me to see. He was wrong, for it lacks the modicum of quality necessary to engage viewers enough to potentially scare them. Scream fooled filmmakers and audiences alike into thinking that asinine premises involving douchy teenagers could be interesting again, and so set off a horde of imitators like this, which took this set-up seriously rather than poke fun at it, resulting in a witless bore of a film. 1/2*

Quick Thoughts - Upside Down (2013)

12/1/13: Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst earn our sympathies, stuck in this asinine excuse for a movie. Clearly writer/director Juan Solanas crafted this film as a reason to play with its premise, which involves two planets on top of each other, which are obviously separated by class, and again, obviously the one above is wealthy while the one below is poor, and they're not allowed to interact. But... when considering the physics of it, which is really above and which is below? How does this system actually work? It's one of those high concept movies in which the first ten minutes feature expository narration that explains the film's rules, which barely make sense, even if you really want them to. Lacking the character development to make its love story truly compelling, Upside Down is an exercise in stylistic futility, failing on every front, producing a film that puts cool conceptual visuals ahead of storytelling, resulting in a thoroughly stupid cinematic experience... Fortunately I was drunk. 1/2*

Sucker Punch - 1/2*

There is a scene late in Sucker Punch in which a guy running a fancy whorehouse/dance studio/prison describes what it's like to save virgins for the "High Roller"..."It's like I'm in the corner of the sandbox watching everyone else play with my toys." Watching Sucker Punch, a live-action manga nightmare, one can't help but think of writer/director Zack Snyder seeing his actresses in much the same way, as dolls to accessorize and play dress-up with, outfitting them with crazy weapons, and contorting them into sexy poses. I wouldn't really have a problem with that if there were a payoff, but Snyder keeps all of the fun for himself while boring the rest of us with a poorly-conceived story of a fight for freedom inside of a girl's head... inside of a girl's head.

Secretariat - 1/2*

Secretariat features three different types of dialogue: 1) Obviously Expository: "I've got a meeting with Ogden Phipps." "Ogden Phipps... the richest man in America?" "Yes." 2) Expressions of Doubt Right Before Secretariat Wins a Race: "Why is he hanging back so long?" "I can't watch this." "We're done." 3) Trite Qualifiers for How Fast Secretariat is Running Instead of Just Showing It: "No horse can go that fast!" "Have you ever seen a horse run that fast?" "That's impossible!" "Unbelievable!" "I don't believe it!" And when the audience dozes off for a couple of minutes and misses the dialogue, the generic score will tell them exactly what's happening, like when Secretariat is making a move to win, or when somebody dies. So don't worry, you'll never be lost. If someone drags you to this thing, kill the popcorn and volunteer to get more, or take an extra long doodie and play some games on your phone, or better yet, YouTube the videos of the actual Triple Crown races that Secretariat won... I assure you you'll find a lot more excitement in those videos, and maybe even better cinematography, and Secretariat will definitely not cross the finish line to the tune of a Gospel hymn and a scripture reading.

Secretariat packs enough drama into any scene to launch a spin-off film, and when things aren't really that dramatic, they're made dramatic, like when Diane Lane's character, Penny receives a phone call with news that her (at least) seventy-five year-old mother passed away (peacefully), the news is shocking enough for director Randall Wallace to end the scene with a shot of her dropping the bowl of pancake batter she was mixing. They're not afraid to radically condense details, either, like when Penny sits down for breakfast in a diner, and someone comes in with a newspaper declaring Secretariat "Horse of the Year" and everybody stands up and cheers (Yay!), only to be followed by a friend informing Penny that her father just died (Aw, shucks). You'd think that Disney would have mastered the annual inspirational sports movie by now... They haven't. Not by a long shot.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole - 1/2*

Crises pop up everywhere in Legend of the Guardians, crises that are solved almost immediately. It's actually astonishing that the film made it to feature length. Honestly it's surprising. There is about three minutes of character introduction and development: two young owl brothers who can't fly yet practice floating between a few branches. One can do it, the other can't. Guess who the jealous one is... bingo. One night he pushes his brother out of the tree and they land on the ground and are swept up by mean owls bent on owl-world domination and flown to a mountain where a "pure" army is being assembled and slaves are being "moon-blinked" into a zombie-like state after staring at the moon before they go to sleep. Or something like that. Bad Brother betrays Good Brother and joins the evil army, while Good Brother avoids a moon-blinking and vows in a rousing inspirational monologue to spend every unwatched minute learning to fly, even if it takes him the rest of his life, so that he can escape and bring help to the others. Luckily this happens the next day.

Nonsense this pure and narrative convenience this extreme are rare, especially in combination, but poorly thought-out easy plot resolutions permeate the entirety of Clumsily-Titled Owl Movie. In addition, the human expressions put on the owls' faces are creepy, the movie is pretty ugly to look at, all of the voices sound exactly the same, and the soundtrack is obnoxious to its core.

And when I wasn't preoccupied with any of that, all I could do was wonder why this story was told with owls. There is no reason I can come up with to explain it. I don't even understand the world in which it is set. There are no natural predators of owls, just other owls, who have somehow fashioned helmets and sword-claws for themselves. It lacks creativity of any kind, not to mention cinematic craftsmanship, coherence, and fun. It's an epic adventure story that completely skips over the journey, or characters bonding, or even characters at all. And other than talking animals, there's really nothing in it that even a kid would enjoy. Anything positive that I may have taken from this film I have already forgotten. Hopefully I can do the same for the rest of this bullshit.

You Again - 1/2*

The lazy writing in You Again produces bad jokes, boring characters whose motivations are largely unclear, rich people who can be bribed into doing things they do not want to do for twenty dollars, tired cliches, silly coincidences, the expected unexpected reconciliation between characters who hate each other, poor narrative devices, and characters with apparent on-and-off memory loss that are all very convenient for the film. Unfortunately it's inconvenient for anyone that has to watch it all in one sitting.

Nanny McPhee Returns - 1/2*

The only thing in Nanny McPhee Returns that is more of an eye-sore than Emma Thompson's make-up is the rest of the movie. The whole thing. The color palette; the scenery; the props; the action going on inside the frame, like the scene in which Nanny McPhee is trying to teach five little shits to stop fighting by tapping her magic stick on the floor, causing the kids to start hitting themselves, pulling their own hair, and banging their heads against the walls. All of it. It's all bad, painful even. Like the magical child abuse scene, almost every other comedic attempt fails two-fold, not only missing completely on the humor, but also on the tone. The weirdest example of this is when Maggie Smith's character mistakes a pile of cow shit for a cushion at a picnic, is corrected, but sits in it anyway because it looks comfortable, which is followed immediately by the arrival of a telegram from the War Office saying that the kids' father has been killed, which it turns out was forged by their uncle, who has a gambling problem and is trying to convince their mother to sell the farm so that silly-serious hit-women do not remove his kidneys, which they almost do later on, but are stopped when they are literally blown away by an enormous bird-fart that also harvests a field of barley. Wholesome family entertainment, written by Academy-Award winning screenwriter, Emma Thompson.

Step Up 3D - 1/2*

Step Up 3D banks just about everything on the assumption that team-choreographed-street-break-dancing is, like, pretty much the coolest thing ever. It's not. Not really. Not even in 3D. In fact, 3D might even make it worse, especially considering the rest of the movie gives absolutely no reason to utilize the technology; it opens with, and features throughout, a montage of footage that a guy is shooting on a handheld camera and any of the non-dancing is shot in close-ups.

There is one good scene, a Singin' in the Rain-like dance sequence set to a remixed ice-cream truck jingle that took me by surprise, but it's probably the only part of Step Up 3D that even approaches any real style or quality. The rest is indescribably abysmal, revolving around a dance-feud between the good guys, who inhabit a house for awesome break-dancers that is about to be repossessed by the bank, and the bad guys, who are led by a former good guy bent on revenge against them after getting kicked out of the house due to gambling problems which motivated him to throw a major dance competition. It all plays out like a series of last-minute revisions and improvisations, with no attention paid to how moment impacts a scene, or how that scene impacts the movie as a whole. Characters say exactly what they're feeling, and seem to only be able to think in cliche: "What are you doing up on the roof this late?" "I like to come up here, and just listen to the sounds of the city, you know..." Though I will give someone credit because I would have sworn he was going to say that he goes up there sometimes... to think. Bravo, though it's probably safe to assume that the actor just botched the line. Another thing I would almost describe as impressively obnoxious is the tendency for characters to react to anything they see. There is a subplot that is started after the Camera Guy shows his footage to his Future Girlfriend... they're walking down the street the next day and she sees a poster on a telephone pole for California Film School and says he should apply: "You need to take risks! That film school sounds amazing!" Apparently that's all it takes to make a decision... "I saw a poster so it must be good!" I call this impressive because it actually makes me want to see more of these characters' daily lives and how they go about being influenced by every goddamn sign they see as they walk down the street in fucking New York City. But that's what the movie's all about: creating nonsensical feel-good moments in between epic dance battles. Oh, and later on, after the good guys win the world championship, Future Girlfriend leaves Camera Guy a package which turns out to be an acceptance letter from that film school. She applied for him and they sent the letter to her, apparently. Not to spoil it or anything.

Predators - 1/2*

The most interesting part of the Predators trailer was the shot of Adrian Brody stopping in his tracks to look down at his torso as a dozen or so predators have their laser targets on him. Unfortunately this isn't the way it plays in the film; instead it is just one predator targeting him, much less thrilling than a dozen. That's pretty much the way the rest of the film is: a lot less thrilling than it should be, failing to deliver the action and excitement that it promises, giving the audience no evidence that it even needs to exist at all.

The original Predator got down to business pretty quickly... there was a little expository sequence, and then a bunch of guys get thrown into the jungle and start shooting up the place. Predators begins more like an episode of the Twilight Zone, where six or seven random people wake up while parachuting down to a strange planet and have to figure out how and why they got there. Of course, we know why they're there, but for some reason director Nimrod Antal decided to amp up the suspense aspect of the story rather than the action, of which there is very little. I bring up the original film not to argue that a re-make has to be exactly like the original, but because it seems odd that what made the original great is left out, and because we know exactly where the film is going before it even starts, the pleasure of discovery is removed, making the attempted suspense irrelevant. So we're left waiting and waiting for something that never comes.

Though there are more predators this time around, as the title suggests, Antal for some reason decided to focus more on his boring human characters, a group of the world's greatest mercenaries and killers. They're given a unique assortment of weapons, which they barely use, to very little effect, both on the predators and on the audience. The writing is awful, the direction is flat, and the acting is pretty dry, which makes for a very, very boring film. But something tells me that's not going to stop someone from making the inevitable spin-off, Aliens vs. Predators.

The Last Song -1/2*

Greg Kinnear stars along Miley Cyrus in The Last Song, the latest too-sappy-for-its-own-or-anyone-else's-good Nicolas Sparks adaptation, playing the guilt-ridden estranged Dad, keeping cancer a secret from the kids. While watching the film one thing is clear, and that is that Kinnear must have a daughter between the ages of maybe seven and fourteen, and she is surely a Hannah Montana fan. Why the Hell else would he be involved with this awful schlock? There is almost nothing else good about the film other than Mr. Kinnear, who makes about a quarter of the film almost bearable, but it's all muddled by the intolerable little asshole who plays his son and Miley's approach to acting, which is speaking with perpetually clenched teeth and casting dirty looks at the pretty boy she will later fall in love with as Dad withers away. I guess it's a coming-of-age story, only it depicts a rebellious seventeen year-old girl mature into a calm fifteen year-old.

Robin Hood - 1/2*

It seems that Russel Crowe feels indebted to Ridley Scott for directing the movie that won him an Oscar... why else would he agree to star in the three-hour dark origin story of Robin Hood after being in three subsequent Ridley Scott duds? This triumph of tedium is like an amalgamation of all of the boring political power struggle subplot scenes from Gladiator interrupted by confusing battle scenes with no context. The movie takes place in about forty-six different locations that all look exactly the same, making it even more difficult to decipher which characters come from where, whose side they're on, where they're going, why they're going, or what's awaiting them at the destination, especially when you're just looking for some recognizable Robin Hood in all of the mess. I'm not one to push for strict adaptations, but I appreciate a little help from the filmmakers in the form of anything remotely similar to the source material. The film should have been called Medieval Serf, because even after "The legend begins!" flashes on the screen at the very end, I'm still not sure how the events depicted in the film lead to this character becoming Robin Hood. To be honest, if common sense hadn't told me that the biggest star would play the title character, I'm not sure if, after watching this film, I would be able to say who actually played Robin Hood.

What's even more annoying is how the film relies on the audience's prior knowledge of the character that it is trying to redefine. Medieval Serf shoots maybe three arrows in the entire film and we're supposed to believe and take seriously in the end that, after fighting in a huge battle in the midst of which he finds his arch-enemy, some bald guy whose name I never caught, and fights him one-on-one on the shore of some Indecipherable European Body of Water, getting momentarily knocked out, plunging him under that water while Bald Guy gets away on a horse, that he could rise out of said water with blood in his eyes, and shoot an arrow some two-hundred yards and put it square in the back of Bald Guy's head. That I could accept in a lighter context, or if the character I was watching was actually Robin Hood. Not only would I accept it, but I would enjoy it.

With every great idea there follows a dozen inferior impostors trying to capitalize on its success, and here it feels like Ridley Scott is trying to do with Robin Hood what Christopher Nolan did with Batman. But does every iconic hero need a dark origin story? What Scott gets wrong is that he doesn't show us why this character was iconic in the first place, and what's worse is that he doesn't even give us the thrill of seeing an actual hero on the screen. Nolan gave us a reason to take Batman seriously, and if that didn't work for you, at least Bruce Wayne donned the costume and hit the streets for the last hour of the film. All we get in Robin Hood are muddled arguments between unfamiliar characters and flashbacks to Robin's father telling him to "Rise, and rise again until lambs become lions." Whatever that means. Maybe we'll find out in Medieval Outlaw in 2013.

Babies - 1/2*

If raising babies is anything like watching Babies, I'm never having children. This wordless, pretentious-as-Hell documentary chronicles the first year of four new-born babies. For the first year, babies are really only interesting to the people that made them. We watch them come out, come home, stare at things, wriggle around, and take their first steps... for ninety minutes. It's assembled in no particular order, and shots last up to three or four minutes, sometimes showing absolutely nothing at all... a baby crawling around, playing with a wooden block, staring at a cat (though the cats are particularly adorable). The film follows four babies in four separate parts of the world, but has nothing to say about any of them, the babies or the countries, or raising a child in one of the countries, and it seems to bank on the assumption that all people gush and melt when they see an infant... I'm not one of those people.

Aside from some interesting music cues and some nice camera-work, the best thing I can say about this film is that the filmmakers seem to have opted to keep the crying to a minimum (many thanks), but it's all for nought, because there is absolutely no point. It's essentially a ninety-minute YouTube video... It should have been called "David Plays with the Cat!!1" or "ZoE HaTeS BaNaNaS!" Though maybe the title refers less to the subject matter, and more to the audience. I certainly felt treated like a baby, and that the filmmakers assumed that I would be entertained by anything. It's about as exciting as a set of keys being dangled over your head. But maybe the point was to make the viewer feel like a baby, staring blankly at a screen with all sorts of colors on it. I can't believe that someone found this worthy of theatrical release... must have been a new parent.

The Black Waters of Echo's Pond - 1/2*

I'm not really sure what to say about The Black Waters of Echo's Pond. It's a low-budget horror film with Robert Patrick, the dad from Kindergarten Cop, and the guy that played Frank in Donnie Darko, so of course it was absolute trash. But is it fair to beat up on a campy horror film? It probably is, but is it worthwhile? I don't know about that. You already know it sucks. You already know that there is no story, or what story there is amounts to rubbish. You already know that it is cheesy as Hell. You know that Robert Patrick was ashamed to be in it and probably stipulated in his contract that he only wanted to be on the set for one day, so his part consists of a bunch of shots of him walking around in the woods with a shotgun that are peppered throughout the entire film to make it seem like he actually serves a purpose. Sure, you know all of that, but what you don't know? It has the best line of the year so far: "I wasn't going to punch you, I was just raising my fist!" Okay, it's probably the worst, but the worst in the best way. And the crowd that it was made for sit alone in their seats, mumble to themselves and then chant, "Show me your boobs! Show me your boobs!" whenever a girl is shown wearing a bra. Pathetic? Sure. Hilarious? Absolutely. So thank you, Black Something of Edmond's Porch for assuring me that no matter how bad my life gets, it will always be better than the lives of your fans, and of your cast.

Hot Tub Time Machine - 1/2*

Hot Tub Time Machine is an inverted comedy. You know how a lot of throw-away comedies are funny for about 80 minutes and then for the last 15 minutes or so they stop being funny and wrap up the story that you didn't care about? Well Hot Tub is funny for about 15 minutes, and then has about 80 minutes of boring plot, mostly of the annoying late third-act melodrama type, so most of the movie plays out something like this, "But we used to be such good friends, and now we never see each other anymore and sometimes it just makes me feel alone, you know?" Stuff like that might have been good in a movie with actual characters and development, but Hot Tub is admittedly just Back to the Future meets 80s John Cusack movies minus the charm.

Now, I am not above stupid comedy; in fact I laughed pretty hard when Rob Corddry projectile-vomits at a squirrel, which is about 15 minutes into the movie, but I don't think I laughed again until the car ride home. Okay, that's not exactly true; there is a subplot with a one-armed Crispen Glover that is pretty funny, but other than that it's a somber John Cusack lamenting lost love (embarrassing), Craig Robinson singing the Black-Eyed Peas in the 80s (very embarrassing), and Rob Corddry saying things like, "We could combine Twitter with Viagra... Twittagra!" (lacks the minimum amount of effort required to be embarrassing). That leaves Clark Duke with nothing to do, essentially playing Marty McFly without the charismatic personality, walking around making sure the other guys repeat the past so he can be born in the future. It's boring. I never thought I'd have to beg for a couple of dick and fart jokes from a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine, but there it is.

You might think that a half star is a little harsh for this movie, but it was just such an awful experience to watch it. I originally had it lined up for zero, but there are a few moments that are pretty good, too good to be in a zero-star film, like the low-brow scene referenced earlier, or simply the line, "It's called male bonding... have you even seen Wild Hogs?" No matter how much I hated anything else in the movie, that line is still funny. And maybe that's just it: on paper, it's not like this is a tough sell: a silly premise and four actors that are actually funny. And in practice it actually showed potential for a little while, but it just gradually grows worse and worse. It wasn't even entertaining to make fun of it. I noticed that even my posture grew more slumped as I grew more discouraged with what I was watching; by the end, I was somehow sitting on the small of my back and my body was turned away from the screen. If only my eyes and ears could have been.

Creation - 1/2*

I'm not sure if it is intentional or not, but Creation succeeds in doing what most biopics, or film adaptations in general, cannot: it makes you forget the source material and focus on what is actually on the screen. In this case, you forget that this is a movie about Charles Darwin and focus on the fucking idiot portrayed on-screen. I guess it's probably unintentional.

The makers of the film seem to think that viewers need a background on who Charles Darwin is, so the opening text reads something like, "The arguments put forth in Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species are among the most important ideas in the history of thought." I believe that anyone who wasn't aware of Charles Darwin before the film would think that statement is a lie, because Darwin the character never says or does anything intelligent in the film, or anything very interesting either.

The opening text continues with, "This is the story of how he wrote it," which is misleading, to say the least. One would think that that statement means that the film will be about how Darwin the man came up with his ideas-- what he observed or what experiments he used to test his theories. But what you get is Darwin the character brooding over his dead daughter and his cold, distant wife. When it opens he has already formulated his theories, but refuses to write them down, because he doesn't want to offend his wife by publishing ideas that oppose the church's teachings. The whole time I was watching it, the only thing I could think was, "Why is this a film about Charles Darwin?

The opening text should read, "This is the story of how he decided to publish it." That story involves a series of dreams or delusions or fantasies, hallucinations, whatever, who cares involving the dead daughter mixed with a series of scenes in which Darwin the character has a spiritual crisis, thinking that he would be a bad person for publishing his theories. I hope that this was a fabrication created with the hope that it would imbue a boring, nonsensical, confusing film with some drama, because why would a brilliant scientist worry that he would go to Hell for exposing belief in a lie? I don't know, and I don't think the film has the answer. The tagline for the film is "Faith evolves," but I'm not really sure what that means. I don't have any idea what the film's stance on faith is at all, but if Darwin the man is as foolish and illogical as Darwin the character, then maybe we should reconsider the theory of evolution.

To Save a Life - 1/2*

High school douche-bag Jake Taylor attends his former best friend Roger's funeral. Let the over-zealous, somewhat hypocritical Christian moralizing begin. Jake has a flashback to the last time he had a conversation with Roger: Freshman year after his basketball game some hot babes invite Jake to a party. Whether it's because Roger's not on the basketball team, because he's black, or he's disabled, Roger isn't invited, so Jake leaves him on the street. Cut to four years later Roger is depressed and takes a gun to school and shoots himself in a crowded hallway. Jake wonders why nobody saw the signs; he does some Ganoogle searches about teen suicide and realizes he can help. He teams up with the local pastor at the church and starts preaching acceptance to his bros at school.

To Save a Life is basically a theatrical after-school special. It's plot is bogus, nonsensical, bullshit, pick a word. Things happen without logic or consequence, and the only reason things happen at all is to dispense some kind of moral, and that's really what the film boils down to: a series of vignette-like sequences that are aimed at some troubling issue. Nothing in the film seems at all genuine, none of the characters do anything that real people do and, like the plot points, exist more as conduits for Christian messages.

The only thing that saves this from being one of the worst experiences of my life is how much awkwardness there is in it, like the scene when a loser-friend of Roger's who Jake has taken under his wing, goes out on a date with a girl and they start to bond over the fact that they used to be wrist-cutters, before the kid drops his ice-cream into her lap, which ruins the moment. Better still is he picks it up and puts it back on his cone, tries to brush the melted remnants off her skirt and licks his fingers afterward. Scenes like this, and anticipating the drinking game people will play when this comes out on DVD, taking a drink every time there is a blatantly fake version of a real product or service the producers couldn't get the rights to (When was the last time Coca-Cola said no?) make this film kind of entertaining in the most unintentional way possible.

I saw this film on opening night at 7:00 with an almost sold-out crowd (I got there 5 minutes late and the only accessible seats were in the front row, off to the side) of Christians (I'm assuming they were Christians because who the Hell else would see this thing?) and the film didn't even work on them, at least not in the way it was intended to. Nobody was responding to the messages, and they all seemed to be laughing at the parts when the jocks make fun of the losers which, by the film's logic, is one of the causes of suicide.

The film has a happy moral ending, I guess: Jake's loser club is a big hit, his girlfriend doesn't get the abortion, he resolves some daddy issues, and the OurSpace page he creates about teen suicide gets some positive feedback. But who was changed by it? Judging by the crowd I was with I'd say it almost reinforces how much fun it is to make fun of people.