2008

Role Models

Jerks jerks jerks jerks jerks jerks there's not a person
in this flick who isn't a jerk. They're not Role Models,
they're... they're Jerk Muddles!

dir: David Wain

2008

I really do wonder how some flicks get made. This isn’t a bad flick, but when I think about the performances, the plot and its success, I wonder who thought it was a good idea in the first place.

For a flick without a single likable character in it, it does manage to generate several laughs, at least several more laughs than another recent comedy that inflicted itself upon our eyeballs called Observe and Report. The difference is that this flick is nowhere near as vile, and does have some pretty funny moments. Not many, but enough.

This one, unfortunately, has Seann William Scott in a lead role, and that never helps anybody. As I’ve said in other reviews, I think it’s great that retarded people not be excluded from working in Hollywood, and that Scott continuing to get work gives hope to all the other Downs Syndrome sufferers out there. But good God is he dumb. Even knowing that he’s supposed to be dumb doesn’t change the fact that he consistently gives the impression that he’s only a few seconds away from crapping his own pants.

Paul Rudd is a bit better, but he’s really only playing a minor variation on most of the characters he ever plays. Actually, scratch that, he remains unchanged from movie to movie. The difference is that I actually find him likable even if his characters are obnoxious.

Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott) are two shmucks joined by a common work purpose, that being working for one of those loathsome energy drink companies. Their task in life is visiting schools, delivering speeches about how kids should stay off hard illegal drugs and instead get addicted to legal substances like the contents of their energy drink Minotaur. Wheeler, being a moron, loves the fuck out of his job. Danny hates the fact that he’s been stuck in a job he hates for so long, and hates pretty much everything else in the world as well. When his long-suffering lawyer girlfriend starts getting tired of his bullshit, sensing this, he proposes, with apposite results ensuing.

After a nonsensical binge that only makes sense if the contents of energy drinks actually contain half the crap the producers contend, Danny and Wheeler end up in trouble with the law, and are both looking at jail time. Of course, the legal system being what it is, these middle class white guys get screwed, and end up having to do community service in the form of a Big Brother program.

Rating:

6 stars

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Hunger

Fancy a bite to eat? Maybe some crackers or something?

dir: Steve McQueen

When I heard that there was this apparently really cool film that was going to come out, and that it was directed by Steve McQueen, my first question was: “Isn’t he dead?” My next question was “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck had nothing better to do with its fucking time?”

The answers to both questions, surprisingly enough, are “Yes” and “Not much.” Steve McQueen is some artist, not the classic actor from Great Escape, The Getaway and Bullit. The car did most of the acting in Bullit, I admit, but no, McQueen is some other guy which doesn’t mean that the original McQueen is doing a Tupac Shakur from beyond the grave, releasing stuff despite the minor inconvenience of being dead.

The one thing I’ve never heard or seen in any of the reviews of this flick, which have been uniformly positive, is that the film would actually make me sick. I’m not, as is my wont, exaggerating or embellishing like I usually do. In the last fifteen or so minutes of the flick, when Michael Fassbender, who plays Bobby Sands, really earns his keep, the image of his emaciated and lesion/sore covered body comes up on the screen.

Rating:

9 stars

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Doubt

They're not Amish, oh no, they're just penguins

dir: John Patrick Shanley

I have doubts about this film. It’s well made, there’s no doubt about it. It’s an interesting story. My doubts stem from the fact that Meryl Streep, for all her sheer wonderfulness, doesn’t always hit it out of the park, as an American might say. Being an Australian, I guess I’m obligated to say that she should be hitting it for six, but the truth is I like cricket even less than baseball, if it’s even possible.

My problems with the whole wide world of sport shouldn’t bleed into the quality time you spend reading my reviews, so I should back down, I guess. The fact is, Meryl’s performance in this was so off-putting that I could barely appreciate the flick at some points. Every time she spoke or overdid some physical mannerism or affectation, it would kick me out of the film and remind me that I was watching some of the alleged prime thespians of their day battle it out in a no holds barred Battle Royale.

Again with the sport, though wrestling is hardly a sport in the real sense. She plays a nun, Sister Aloysius, with the fierceness and demeanour of some kind of treasure-hoarding troll. I appreciate that she’s meant to be this fearsome personage at the school where she rules/teaches, but c’mon Meryl, don’t you think you took it a bit too far? She looked and acted like she was auditioning for the part of Gollum in a Lord of the Rings remake.

And don’t think it’s too soon. Give it a few years.

Rating:

8 stars

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Sky Crawlers (Sukai kurora)

Huh? Wuh? Buh? Zuh? Kuh? Muh?

dir: Mamuro Oshii

Now, I’ve watched some weird and slow things in my time, but this, this here Japanese animated movie is by far the most recent.

I can’t pretend that I am in any way even remotely an expert on the Japanese art form known as anime. I’ve watched some of it, I know there’s plenty more of it out there, but I can’t even pretend that I’m an authority. Very far from it. And though I’ve also watched a lot (and by a lot I mean hundreds at least) of Japanese films, again, I can’t pretend to be some sort of smartypants pontificating scholar on the Japanese visual arts.

The main reason isn’t because of any special, new-found caution on my part, or a reluctance to sound like an arrogant jerk. If you’ve read any of my reviews thus far then you know I have no qualms and zero problems with that. The truth is I simply don’t get, most of the time, the Japanese.

This is not going to be some anti-Japanese tirade, so those of you who might have come here through some ill-advised linkages on some Blood & Honour or Stormfront White Power pages will most likely be deeply disappointed, you dumb fucking racist crackers. Remember, White Power is pronounced “Waaah-eeet Paaaarrr”. And stop fucking your sisters as well. It does no good for your gene pool.

Rating:

6 stars

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RocknRolla

dir: Guy Ritchie
[img_assist|nid=158|title=Guy Ritchie: bad director, rejected even by Madonna|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=469|height=344]
I wish I could say that RocknRolla is a return to form, finally, for the guy who hasn’t made a decent flick since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. And, in fact, I can say it. It is a return to form. The problem is, the movie is still a total fucking mess. The difference is that compared to his other recent movies, it’s an entertaining mess.

Lock, Stock’s supreme virtue is that it was Ritchie’s first flick, so it was the first time we saw him do his shtick, and, on the most part, we liked it. Everything he’s done since then has either been a dull retread or a painful revelation of how little he brings to the directorial table. Don’t ever watch his stupid flick called Revolver. You’ll kill someone afterwards if you do. Possibly even a puppy.

Rating:

6 stars

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Choke

dir: Clark Gregg
[img_assist|nid=155|title=Would you have sex with this douchebag?|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=300|height=300]
I have respect, much respect, big respect for Chuck Palahniuk, but I’m starting to think that maybe he is the American literary equivalent of Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Sure, Come on Eileen was a wonderful little pop ditty that still stinks up greatest hits radio decades after its use-by date, and it probably resulted in a lot of laundry for a lot of women called Eileen, but what else have the musical impresarios and master storytellers of Dexy’s Midnight Runners done for us lately? I’m not going to go so far as to say that Chuck is a one-hit wonder for Fight Club, which I still think is a great book and a great film (a great, great film in the hands of David Fincher). The problem is that I just don’t know what else he has to offer either the book or the film worlds anymore.

Choke is a premise without much of a meaningful plot and without a character worth following for 90 minutes. I’m not sure if it’s Sam Rockwell’s fault as the lacklustre main character, because he seems okay for the first half of the film. What I can’t tell is whether the problem is that the flick doesn’t know where to go, or whether Rockwell decided he no longer wanted to be in the flick.

Rating:

4 stars

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Australia

In a way they were right, in that Australia is a disaster, a tragedy and a testament to man’s arrogance and eternal hubris.

To say that this film is awful doesn’t really capture what is achieved in the opening half hour or so of this flick. I’m not sure if the film embarrasses me more simply by dint of my being Australian, or because I feel deep shame that people overseas watched this flick thinking it had something to do with Australia the country, as opposed to Australia, the Baz Luhrmann opium-suffused candy-coloured, brain dead fantasy.

That every living Australian actor is in this flick would seem to be a good thing, and doubtless it was for their bank balances. I do so enjoy it when the locals get paid work. It keeps them off the streets and lets them pay back the people they owe money to, if only for a while. But to say that they actually get to earn their tax-payer funded salaries would be stretching the truth even more than this travesty stretches the truth regarding our fair country’s history over the last century or so.

Rating:

0 stars

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Twilight

Stop the night terrors, the images of atrocious acting that march through my nightmares each night since subjecting myself to this awful, awful movie. I know I’m prone to exaggeration, but this truly is a flick so atrocious that it almost seems like a parody of itself, a parody of teen vampire romances, and a parody of filmmaking in general. This film uniquely captures, the way dogcatchers uniquely capture stray and rabid dogs, a collection of actors giving performances so terrible that if they were racehorses, you would surround the cast and crew with screens, load up the shotguns, and put them all out of our misery.

Rating:

5 stars

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Frozen River

dir: Courtney Hunt
[img_assist|nid=157|title=Oh, the woe and suffering of the noble underclass!|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=300|height=300]
It’s funny when I tell you that this flick deals with illegal immigrants, white trash, Mohawks, people smuggling and desperation, and you immediately think it must be set somewhere on the US-Mexican border and star Tommy Lee Jones.

Funny in the sense that it’s odd, not funny as in hilarious.

It’s funny in the sense that of course this flick is instead set on the border with Canada, and instead of the main character being a noble immigrant sorrowfully leaving behind their dirt farming existence in order to come to the States to enjoy its bounty in the form of hamburgers and novelty toilet seats, it’s about one of the people smugglers.

In no sense does the story bother with the refugees as characters. Its focus is entirely on a white trash woman living in a trailer home with her two kids, who kind of falls into people smuggling as the only way to look after her kids after being abandoned again by her worthless Mohawk husband.

Rating:

4 stars

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Valkyrie

dir: Bryan Singer
[img_assist|nid=164|title=I know he's evil, but the film's still watchable. Honest|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=300|height=435]
A fair few nerds were angry and dispirited when youngish director Bryan Singer, famous for directing the criminal mindfuck that was The Usual Suspects, and powerful after directing the first two X-Men films, chose not to make the third X-Men flick, and instead wanted to make a pouty-faced serious flick about some Nazis who failed to kill Hitler. I certainly count myself amongst those pitchfork-toting nerds after watching that dire 3rd X-Men flick, which left me angry and unfulfilled, but it wasn’t because I felt Singer had some kind of personal obligation to entertain me.

It’s just that I hated that third movie so goddamn much. It seemed strange at the time that Singer, whose baby the X-Men movies were considered to be, would voluntarily choose to neglect his responsibilities and go off to make a flick with Tom Cruise playing a ‘good’ Nazi with an eyepatch. In fact, it seemed downright comical.

Rating:

8 stars

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3622 reads

2008

Role Models

Hunger

Doubt

Sky Crawlers (Sukai kurora)

RocknRolla

Choke

Australia

Twilight

Frozen River

Valkyrie

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2008

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