2009

dir: Jonathan Mostow

Huh? Is Bruce Willis so desperate for beer money that he’ll take practically any role in any piece de resistance of shit? He can’t possibly still owe Demi Moore alimony, can he?

The thing that’s weirdest about this flick is that I’m not entirely sure why it’s so weird. It’s weird in that it’s so brief, harmless and plastic. The plasticity of it all is part of the point, but it really does feel like half the film is missing somewhere, perhaps on either the editing suite’s floor or Bruce Willis’s bathroom, whichever.

It’s disturbing as well to see this strangely hilarious fantasy version of Bruce Willis, though I guess there’s some real reason for it.

This flick is a pointless and thinly-veiled allegory for the abdication of reality by pale, sweaty people who’ve ceased living real lives and who now live almost exclusively through the tubes of the internets. It’s utterly simplistic and, dare I say it, stupid, but even worse than that, there’s no real validity to the premise. It’s nonsense.

Set at some arbitrary time in the future, a new application of technology has resulted in the good people of America receding to the darkness of their own bedrooms, in order to send their consciousnesses forth into the world through robotic surrogates. All these surrogates are, of course, mostly young and hot looking. Except for the fact that there are no children, old people or ugly people around except for Bruce Willis, life mostly goes along like it always did.

The fact that people now almost exclusively run around in these mannequin bodies means there’s no murder or violent crime like there used to be, because they’re all robots. The only people who don’t partake of these bodies are, apparently, all white trash luddites called Dreads who live on surrogate-free zones called reservations, and are led by The Prophet (Ving Rhames), who’s really anti these surrogates, boy howdy.

dir: Armando Iannucci

2009

So many swears! This movie has more swearing in it than Scarface! Think of any sweary film you can think of, and this movie has five times the amount of swearing. And that’s a lot.

It’s almost too much. It’s almost embarrassing to admit such a thing, but I was exhausted at the end of this. Partly from having laughed so much, but also from having to concentrate for so long to separate the sometimes quite inventive swearing from the actual dialogue, and then trying to remember how it all fits together, despite or because of the swearing.

Ultimately, this is a comedy. A quite funny comedy. It’s shot in that mockumentary style that has become ubiquitous since the original The Office series, and now is replicated in every corner of the medium. If you don’t know what I mean, I can simplify it quite easily: shakily filmed video mostly of people in office spaces.

The premise is a little bit more complicated than the setting. Even though the setting itself could be any office anywhere, what with its water coolers, fax machines and cups of coffee, the characters, most of whom were playing the same or similar roles in the series these same characters were in, are mostly British apparatchiks (that’s bureaucrats to the rest of you), ministers and minister’s advisers, who are all flailing about in the lead up to some seemingly unavoidable war.

Clearly it’s all fiction. A particularly ineffectual and silly minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) makes the comment during a boring interview when asked, as rumours of war circulate, that he believes war to be “unforeseeable”. This ambiguous word somehow unleashes a shit storm of international proportions, as people across both sides of the pond, try to use the ensuing drama to their advantage.

dir: Kathryn Bigelow

2009

There hasn’t really yet been an overwhelmingly great film set during and about the current Iraqi adventure. The ones I recall that at least have war footage of brave marines and army grunts fighting the cowardly Iraqi civilian menace, being Home of the Brave, Stop-Loss, um, the Transformers flicks, In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom (yes, I know it’s set in Saudi Arabia) um, and that’s about it. None of these really worked. If you’re a war booster, or chickenhawk, they failed because they weren’t gung-ho enough, and were all focussed on issues like post-traumatic-stress disorders and feeling bad about killing civilians, instead of being all rah-rah patriotic, manly and superheroically heroic. You know, like Rambo.

The documentaries have fared a bit better, but until now, Iraq War II has been poorly represented in the feature film category. The Hurt Locker, by one of America’s only well known mainstream female directors, corrects the imbalance, and is both a good film and a good war film. It’s not great, because it has a quarter of the flick that doesn’t really cohere (I would say being the third quarter of a two hour flick), and the very end is at odds with the beginning and the end, but it's still pretty damn good.

Despite the mixed opinions regarding the other flicks, and the reasons for their failures, what this gets right is the focus on the actual day to day activities of a bomb disposal unit that’s recently lost its main guy (played briefly by Australia’s Own Guy Pearce). Their new guy is very different in both manner and attitude from their recently departed one, and this leads to confusion, yelling, hurt feelings, and an explosive shitload of tension. These guys, after all, are tasked with defusing unexploded ordinance and the far more pernicious and deadly IEDs that insurgents resourcefully cobble together with the intention of killing their occupying overlords and masters.

dir: Ruben Fleischer

2009

You might not have noticed, but there’s been this plague outbreak recently. It didn’t all happen at once. It’s been a gradual progression, until more recently where it seems like it’s overwhelming everything and everyone.

It’s a plague of zombie movies, visited upon the planet as a prelude presumably to the actual apocalypse. It’s a benevolent but capricious God’s way of getting us ready for when the dead finally do walk the earth.

Either that, or there’s just no original ideas under the sun anymore.

Still, if you’re going to do something unoriginal, at least do it well and make it entertaining. You don’t even have to put that much of a spin on it: just make us smile.

Someone came up with the bright idea (many times, in many different forms, from World War Z to Shaun of the Dead to Pride & Prejudice & Zombies) that if you don’t take it seriously, a zombie plague could be pretty funny. What if you make your main character a college age kid who’s a bit of a dick and a nebbish, and actually have your characters enjoy themselves along the way?

Jesse Eisenberg has carved out a little niche for himself as this kind of compulsive/obsessive nerdy young Woody Allen type guy who’s smart but ill-suited to the social complexities of the big bad world. In that sense, he’s probably more of a Jewish Michael Cera. He’s also terrified of clowns, and germs, probably. Some genius decided taking this nice young chap and dropping him into an America overrun by unholy hordes, paired up with Woody Harrelson at his redneck-y best, would be a winning combination.

They’re probably right. I didn’t think the flick was anywhere near as funny as had been claimed by rapturous audiences and delirious critics, but I did find it entertaining enough. It’s no Shaun of the Dead, but then what is, apart from the legions of imitators that mention Shaun of the Dead in their marketing?

Columbus (Eisenberg), named after his hometown in Ohio, since most everyone in the flick is referred to by their point of origin rather than their actual name, is not only our protagonist but the perpetual fly in our ear, buzzing out a whole bunch of narration for your presumed benefit. Usually this much narration is a sign of a lack of confidence in your own movie, meaning you think people aren’t going to think it’s funny enough without someone else talking over a scene or some footage punching up the overall funniness. Columbus’s voiceovers are important, I guess, in the sense that without them we wouldn’t understand what was going on. I mean, these zombie flicks can get pretty complicated.