fresh movie reviews and human wordsmithing while you wait

dir: Jon Favreau

It’s not even Cowboys VERSUS Aliens. It’s Cowboys AND Aliens, as if pitting them against each other in the title would be too aggressive and off-putting to audiences who just want to see them together on the screen at the same time, peacefully co-existing, standing nonchalantly side by side.

Well, they’ll still be disappointed, because the Aliens attack the Cowboys, so all hope of gentle understanding and interspecies acceptance fly right out the fucking window.

However, in the flick’s greatest conceit, rugged outlaws, cattle men, Mexicans and Apaches fight together to conquer the alien menace, which transcends the genre bounds of science fiction and enters into the realms of purest fantasy.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not an example of my natural contrariness when I say that I actually enjoyed this flick. Nor have I suffered a stroke, or a fruity outburst of dementia, nor was I on film-enhancing drugs whilst watching, or receiving passionate head for the duration.

More’s the pity. Still, I somewhat enjoyed this strange flick despite the lack of the aforementioned, or any tangible reason as to why.

dir: Will Gluck

Two attractive people. A fast-talking banal screenplay. The very barest of mocking derision aimed at romantic comedies within the text and the subtext. What could go wrong?

Nothing, nothing at all.

I find it very hard to buy Justin Timberlake as anything or anyone else apart from Justin Timberlake. It’s hard for me to buy him playing a character, any character. It doesn’t adversely impact on one’s potential enjoyment of this flick, I guess, if enjoyment is what you’re hoping for from a flick with Justin Timberlake in it.

It’s an effervescent trifle, a virtually forgettable flick forgotten as it is being watched, of such an incredible level of shallowness that it barely registers within human let alone goldfish memory consciousness.

I guess that’s not a bad thing. It’s not like they’re trying to teach us anything of great importance, like that tolerance is nice, and that racism is bad, or something similarly controversial. It’s just something people, presumably youngish people, could take someone to on a date, presumably to convince that someone, being a female, to have sex with you, being a male, afterwards.

dir: Rupert Wyatt

Never has humanity’s downfall been so enjoyable or well-deserved.

Really, could it be a spoiler? Does anyone whose interest perks up at the elaboration on the title not know that, at some point, there’s this Planet, and it’s going to be Of The Apes? That there was a book about it, and a film about it with Charlton “My Hands Are Cold and Dead Now” Heston, and a bunch of other films to lesser success, and then Mark Wahlberg appeared on the scene to fuck things up?

And he wasn’t even playing an ape? How inexplicable is that?

Otherwise, the title wouldn’t resonate, and presumably, the multitudes wouldn’t care. Nah, what we craved, without knowing it, is an explanation; a grounded, believable explanation as to how the Apes came to ‘own’ our Planet, and what ‘we’, being arrogant, hubristic humans, did to allow them to take over.

dir: David Yates

2010 & 2011

I’m going to review both of them together. I don’t think it really matters either way. They don’t work separately, and together they’re just a big old mess of convenient moments, slavish fan service and muggle muddling.

This will not be a good review. This will provide none of the fulfillment that you're looking for. The only thing worse than reading this review would be sitting down and watching both films back to back.

But they are, in their various parts and pieces, the culmination of a bunch of books and the films they were translated into, and an endpoint in a long-running series, and, at least the second part, is the third highest grossing film of all time, at least for another week or so.

And thus it deserves our special attention. It’s impossible to discuss anything that happens in these films without spoiling the events of the previous ones as well, so there’s virtually no point in issuing a spoiler warning. How else could you talk about the seventh (and eighth) instalments in a series?

(Jusannin no Shikaku)
dir: Takashi Miike

2010

Whenever I hear that Takashi Miike has a new film out, I wonder out loud to myself, especially when I’m on public transport, “Well, what new piece of fucked-upedness has he come up with now?” I mean, after all, this is the demented Japanese director responsible for, in a criminal sense, films like Audition, Ichi the Killer, the yakuza Dead or Alive trilogy, Visitor Q and a whole host of other flicks so vicious I don’t even want to quote scenes from them, because it’s too traumatic to remember.

Suffice to say, there’s never, apparently, been a moment where he’s thought of depicting something on screen that is vile, horrifying, obscene or demented and thought, “Nah, that’s too fucked up, even for me.”

Whatever depravity he’s previously been responsible for, he still remains a completely flexible director with the ability to make any kind of Japanese flick in any kind of Japanese genre, which, to use an overused phrase, ranges from the sublime to the truly, hideously ridiculous.

Instead of spending time talking about the truly horrifying and nightmare-inducing stuff I’ve seen in all his other films, which is tempting in the extreme, I’ll just talk about this film, which is surprisingly solid.

dir: Cary Fukunaga

Jane Eyre, eh? Prestige costume drama Oscar bait, eh?

Just imagine all the doilies and lace trimmings and bustles akimbo all over the place.

This just screams of potential audiences climbing over each other’s corpses, desperately trying to get to the box office in order to get tickets to the latest Brontean Blockbuster.

Despite the fact that the book presumably is still all over those high school reading lists for English or English Lit or whatever classes haven’t been cancelled and replaced with Glee-like activities (proudly sponsored by some repellent lip gloss), I’ve never read it, and never seen the dozens and dozens of versions of it that have been expelled onto an unwilling public.

I’d always lumped it in with all that Regency-era frippery like all of Jane Austen’s pap, and always assumed it to be on a par. You know, attractive and spirited but somewhat impoverished young ladies desperate to get married to someone who seems to treat them mean initially, but turns out to be more rad than cad, and who welcomes their spiritedness instead of having them incarcerated in a sanatorium for being hysterical.

dir: James Gunn

It’s almost time enough to get sick of all these goddamn superhero flicks. One’s coming out every week or so. I’m also starting to tire of the slightly sarcastic flicks that comment on those flicks by having some doofus with no powers, skills or abilities, decide to mimic the best and worst of Marvel and DC et al, by donning a costume and fighting crime on their own terms.

I didn’t like Kick-Ass that much. I also don’t think much of Super is that brilliant, which similarly has some mentally ill subhuman dress up and ‘fight’ crime. It’s probably a better flick than Kick-Ass, mostly because it wasn’t such a shallow wish-fulfilment pandering piece of shit. Of course Super’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t have an unhinged Nic Cage performance in it.

In his place is Ellen Page, bringing the crazy in an entirely different way. She’s not the main character, though. She’s just the demented sidekick.

dir: Joe Johnston

This makes up for enduring Green Lantern, but not by too much.

Captain America, despite being Captain America, was enjoyable enough. The film, especially the back end, doesn’t entirely satisfy, but it was so much more enjoyable an experience, and not as actively irritating as the aforementioned shitheap masquerading as just another franchise, that it could not help but look better.

I am aware that Captain America is a relatively ancient comic book property, dating back to the World War II era, famous for a cover that showed Cap punching out Hitler. The fact that this was drawn and published during the war makes it all the more important that, thankfully, Cap’s origin story (which most of the flick is) occurs during that vital time.

dir: Jake Kasdan

Look, I find it strange that people keep equating or comparing this flick with the Terry Zwigoff flick Bad Santa. As far as I can tell, having watched both, the only thing they have in common is the same adjective in the title. Other than that, there’s no connection.

I mean, does Cameron Diaz piss her pants at any stage? Does she sodomise a plus-size woman in the change rooms at a mall? Does she generally indulge in behaviour that would get most people arrested, let alone fired from their job as an educator of young minds?

Well, actually, on that last point…

Maybe they’re linked in spirit, but Bad Santa was such a singular act of misanthropy that it seems churlish to compare anything to it, even despite the ridiculous ‘happy’ ending the Weinsteins forced onto the end of the flick. Bad Teacher’s trading on something less radioactive, but probably more enjoyable.

As well, as opposed to any flick by Terry Zwigoff, the main purpose of Bad Teacher is to be a funny, and a funny workplace comedy at that. And I found it pretty goddamn funny, truth be told.

dir: Martin Campbell

Well, this was a bad idea.

I know the people at DC Comics must be deeply envious of all the tainted money Marvel is earning through the morass of movies it’s been putting out lately (Iron Men, Thor, Captain America, et bloody cetera), but that’s no reason to try and convert every hero on its roster into a Hollywood product. This was, just… fuck… bad all the way through.

Imagine peering off a ledge into an abyss, and feeling the fear it naturally engenders. Step back, but then realise that it’s not an abyss, because it’s filled with shit, shit all the way down.

That’s kind of how I felt watching most of this flick. In a year which has already seen the release of a terrible flick with Green Something as the title, this terrible property wasn’t going to get an easy run. It doesn’t help that it’s such a dumb premise.

I will admit that I’ve never read word one of a Lantern comic, nor am I ever likely to. I don’t doubt that there’s possibly abundant wonderfulness to be found therein, but I’ve just got no goddamn interest. You could rightly wonder why, in that case, I would go out of my way to watch a film about a character and a storyline I have no interest in. Also, considering the poor reviews, I should have known that there wasn’t going to be much of worth to latch onto.

dir: Terrence Malick

It’s a beautiful film, trying to encompass in its scope, the entire world, the entire human experience, the entire universe. With such mighty ambitions, how can Malick not fall short? How could any of us not fall short?

The fact that the scope of his reach and the magnitude of his grasp are so close to each other means that when one exceeds the other, it doesn’t represent the failure that it would for other filmmakers. There are very few filmmakers (with money) like Malick, and his films are their own genre. As such they’re only really comparable to each other, not as much with other films.

You can only really know if you can enjoy a Malick film by having watched a few, and having immersed yourself in them, know what to expect. They are not conventional, they don’t follow a pattern, they don’t unfold in a conventional manner, and, mostly, they’re overflowing with beautiful cinematography, and the vast majority of the thoughts and intentions of the characters are delivered through internal monologues (voiceover).

dir: Ed Gass-Donnelly

No, it’s got nothing to do with Nick Cave, and it’s not an album. But it is a Canadian film, about a murder, in a small town, and there are some songs.

The songs are great. They’re Great. Genuinely bracing songs, mixing elements of church spirituals, violent percussion, very dark bluegrass (I guess?), and probably a bunch of other influences as well. Imagine the bastard love child of Steve Earle and Nick Cave, sitting in some muddy weeds, crying while toking on a meth pipe.

So the soundtrack, I think we’ve painfully established, is pretty amazing. The Canadian film itself? Perhaps not so much.

The setting is rural Ontario, and the small town is so very, very small. They never mention the population specifically, but it’s probably in the hundreds. It’s such a small town that the last murder was before the time of the current town police chief, being Walter (Peter Stormare).

It sounds, from my description, and that pesky title, that this is a crime movie, a police procedural about a murder, that someone has to solve. It would be a mistake to believe that. It’s a mistake I made. Sure, there are elements of that, but the flick is aiming for something very different.

dir: Michael Bay

Michael Bay returns to fuck the proverbial metallic donkey again for fun and profit…

The last time I reviewed a Michael Bay – Transformers film, I made the point that Michael Bay is a donkeyfucker of long standing, who delivers exactly what he promises: 2 and a half hours of shiny, shiny donkeyfucking. As such, considering the vitriol his directorial abominations garner, I was simply stating the obvious that, whatever Bay’s actual intentions, pretentions and beliefs regarding the quality of the donkeyfucking he delivers on demand, he delivers exactly what he promises to the great unwashed texting, tweeting masses.

No-one expects either the Spanish Inquisition or decent acting performances from anyone in these flicks. No-one especially expects Shia La Fucking Beouf to act any better than he’s ever managed to in the past, because he’s always been terrible, and will always be terrible, unless they somehow mutate him in a lab or a meteorite crashes into his hideous head.

So what do people expect from a Transformers / Michael Bay donkeyfuckfest (I promise this will be the second-last time I use that phrase)? They expect a stupid plot that a child would feel insulted by, they expect an unnecessarily-elongated running time, and they expect big shiny robots transforming into other stuff, and then transforming back into robots in order to fuck shit up. And explosions, lots of explosions.

dir: Matthew Vaughn

Saying this is one of the best X-Men flicks is sort of like claiming some guy is the richest corpse in the graveyard, or that a particular stripper is the biggest drug addict at her strip club. A better competition that First Class wins is being one of the better, if not the best, of the flicks based on comic book properties that have come out this year thus far.

To be honest, it’s been pretty slim pickings, so it doesn’t mean the flick is that great. Just that it’s okay.

American summers result in the biggest blockbusteriest shitpiles being shat out upon the world, which is why most of the ‘best’ bets, like comic book flicks, come out at this time. Are audiences at their most pliable, most docile, most leotarded? Whatever it is, here we are, and here it is, a gift to those of us who usually have to grit out teeth and endure these types of ‘events’.

It also serves as something of a history lesson for the less well informed. As an example, you thought that the Cuban Missile Crisis (if you thought of it at all, which is unlikely, considering how long ago it was) arose from the US and the USSR waving their dicks at each other, casting long shadows over the happy totalitarian nation of Cuba, and leading the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. What you didn’t realise is that it happened because of a bunch of goddamn mutants.

dir: J. J. Abrams

Homage to the 70s, homage to old cameras, homage to Steven Spielberg? Do any of these things really need to be honoured and celebrated? The 70s isn’t exactly the forgotten decade, the Super 8 camera is missed by no-one with a half decent mobile, and Steven Spielberg has made more money at the box office than Jesus and is plenty celebrated by Hollywood and all its legions of sycophants.

So what worthy thing is J.J. Abrams really bringing to the table? He’s made a summer blockbuster aping elements of Spielberg’s early blockbusters, except he has access to a whole bunch of CGI and a cast of people pretending to be characters from ET and That 70s Show. And in which gentle world worth living in is any of that necessary or ever desirable?

None. When younger directors honour the most well rewarded and celebrated directors of all time, it’s kind of like having a fund raising pass-the-hat around in honour of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett: like they’ve not had enough payola and praise already over the decades?

dir: Miguel Arteta

I have never been to Cedar Rapids. It’s very unlikely that I’m ever going to go to Cedar Rapids. It is in Iowa, in the States, after all. It’s not like anyone should ever go to Cedar Rapids, because it seems to be the city equivalent of the colour beige.

But I very much enjoyed watching this flick called Cedar Rapids.

Deceptive title. It’s not about Cedar Rapids. It’s about a somewhat strange but mostly harmless chap called Tim (Ed Helms), who’s led a very sheltered life thus far. He’s not a manchild like the majority of the manchild arrested development shitbirds who populate the majority of movies these days. But he is someone who has lived a fairly quiet life, who has never travelled and who has never wanted to.

In some ways he’s like the main character from The Truman Show except without thousands of conspiring people and millions of dollars worth of artifice keeping him ground down and in place for ratings and product placement opportunities.

dir: Gore Verbinski

I guess it was inevitable, but it still comes as something of a surprise. Considering the extra cost slapped on tickets for 3D flicks at the cinema, one day a studio was going to decide that it was a safe bet to make a CGI animated flick for adults.

I don’t mean like a 3D porno CGI animated flick for the cinemas, which would probably be as eye-gouging as it sounds. I mean a flick that has all the cutting edge visual effects stuff, but a screenplay no kid on this planet could give a fuck about.

Rango is as much Western homage as it is a testament to the power of Johnny Depp. To a lesser extent, it’s also a testament to Gore Verbinski’s sway, being able to convince a studio to sink a shitload of money into something kids would find duller than vegetables and algebra.

dir: Edward Zwick

It tries, oh it tries. Yes, I know it’s an old flick. I feel the obligation to review it all the same.

Why? Well, it’s not very clear to me either, but maybe I’ll stumble over a few reasons as we go along.

Love and Other Drugs sets itself firmly in the 1990s by opening to a montage set to the rocking tones of Two Princes, that fucking wretched song by no-hit-wonders The Spin Doctors. That song alone already put me in a bad mood as the flick began.

This is, somewhat perversely, based on someone’s actual life and experiences. Jaime Reidy, an actual human, apparently, worked in the pharmaceutical industry and experienced many of the experiences such an individual has to have in order to need a yuppie redemption story to be made about them.

Human history, for those either working in the drug industry, who suffer from erectile dysfunction or who are trying to have sex with someone with erectile dysfunction, is divided sharply into BV and AV: Before Viagra and After Viagra. This flick follows suit, because clearly nothing in human history has ever been as important as that single invention.

Yeah, Fuck You, Galileo, Edison, Einstein, Tesla, Newton, Curie, Franklin, Wilkins, Watson, Crick and Hawking! What have any of you achieved compared to the magnificence of a four-hour erection? Your collective discoveries amount to Nothing. Less than Nothing!

dir: Kenneth Branagh

More comic book movies. More Marvel comic book movies! See, the waddling Comic Book Guys of the world don’t have enough to entertain themselves with and bitch about across the vast expanse of the tubes of the internets already.

There weren’t enough goddamn Spider-Men, Supermen, X-Men, Iron Men, Batmen, Hulk Men, Man Men flicks out there stinking up the joint as it was?

Of course it’s never going to end because the golden age continues. They make billions of dollars, and they convince grown adults to buy merchandise for themselves to put on their desks at work, without the least amount of shame or reluctance. That’s a fucking money spinner, that is. Comic book franchises make money rain from the skies, so it makes sense that the Microsoft of the comics world, being Marvel, invested a shitload of money setting up their own studio to make these delightful and delicious flicks themselves with greater regularity and with more direct profits to themselves.

And thus, Marvel Studios brings us The Mighty Thor!

As tempted as I am to keep ripping the shit out of them and this flick just for the mere fact of their lazy existence, I’m not going to. Mostly, I’m not going to because I actually enjoyed Thor, ridiculous as that seems. Embarrassing as it might be.

dir: Justin Lin

Wow, five movies in, this series must have some serious foundations to it. It must have deep and complex dramatic character trajectories, resonant symbolism and references extending back over the collective 10 hours or so of Fast and the Furious mythology that audiences have come to crave and demand. People don’t just want Fast Furious flicks, they’re threatening to overthrow the Empire if they don’t get their Fast Furious fix every few years.

Or maybe, just like any bad thing that keeps coming back like a brain craving zombie, they just keep coming back because they are tremendously, inexplicably liked by audiences and they want to eat our delicious brains.

I can’t really say whether this is a good Fast Furious flick, better than the others, or worse. I’ve seen them all but can recall very little about any of their plots or what the point of any of it was apart from having people race cars very fast and yell at each other loudly in moments where men in love with each other can’t express their emotions in positive ways, so they bump each other’s chests and threaten each other.

dir: Wes Craven

There doesn’t need to be a Scream 4. It doesn’t need to exist. Then again, you could argue that any number of things don’t need to exist, that do exist. Instant coffee. Pancake hotdogs. The Royal Family. Syphilitic chancres. Syphilitic Royals.

Scream 4 has as much right to exist as any other crappy flick trading on a franchise’s name to justify its own existence. Look, we live in a world where there are seven or eight Saw films, five Superman flicks. Hell, Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants got a sequel. Alvin and the Chipmunks got a sequel, called The Squeakquel. People keep making them, people keep watching them, they keep making money, I keep reviewing them, and the Circle of Crapulence rolls on.

I watched Scream 4 with the same jaded eye that I watched any of the preceding flicks in the series. They’re all as good or as bad as each other (in that they’re all pretty crap, except perhaps for the first one, which was slightly less crap) and as such even a horror fan has difficulty differentiating them from any of the other flicks where people are killed in order of annoyingness over the course of 90 minutes, until one person survives, and the status of a sequel is left open in some way.

dir: Joe Wright

This is an odd film, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad film. Far from it. It’s actually much better than it has any right to be.

The oddest thing about it is that I was sure it must have been directed by Tom Tykwer, the German director responsible for the decent flick Run Lola Run, and the tremendous flick Perfume. But, no. It’s Joe Wright, responsible for the ordinary version of Pride and Prejudice with that bony hag Keira Knightley, and that great version of Atonement with all those other good actors including that bony hag Keira Knightley.

Hanna has him venturing into unknown, yet ultimately familiar territory. The real point of the flick doesn’t become obvious until the Brothers Grimm fairy tale allusions start piling up like a sink full of stinky dishes until you can’t ignore them anymore.

The Hanna of the title, Saoirse Ronan, is a very young, alien looking creature. She either looks like an Aryan superchild, or one of the more grown up children from the Village of the Damned. She hunts and survives in the icy wilds of some place. Out of goddamn nowhere, some bearded lunatic (Eric Bana) starts trying to kill her dead. She’s pretty well trained in lethal hand-to-hand combat, though, and she holds her own.

dir: Jason Eisener
[
We see a lot of films that were filmed in Canada. It’s cheaper for nearly every single goddamn American tv series and movie to be filmed there. We don’t see that many Canadian films, though. They’re rare. Rare as teeth in Saskatoon.

What are even rarer are Canadian films from Halifax, Nova Scotia. When was the last time you heard of a flick filmed in Halifax or Dartmouth?

Never, that’s when. And from the looks of this film, there’s a very good reason for it.

At first I thought the setting of the flick was some post-apocalyptic wasteland. Then I realised that that’s what Halifax must look like all the time.

In the flick it’s called Hope Town, but, in a stunning example of irony, there’s barely any hope at all for the good citizens of Hope Town. Ruled as they are by a strange man who calls himself The Drake who seems not to do much apart from kill people randomly in the streets, their town has degenerated into an ugly cesspool. Or, alternatively, it is raising itself up to the status of an ugly cesspool.

He has two annoying sons called Slick and Ivan, actors so bad I refuse to look their names up, who yell every line of dialogue they have, and who also kill random people in the street. The police, for reasons never really explained, not only turn a blind eye to the excesses of these morons, they actively help them in their endeavours, because, I guess, they’re deranged morons as well.

dir: Greg Mottola

This flick is a perfect storm of nerd signposts and signifiers so nerdish in their nerdishness that it’s akin to watching a table full of Comic-Book Guys playing with their Magic the Gathering cards, drinking Pepsi Max straight from the bottle for an hour and a half.

However, before you suspect that I’m going to go for cheap and easy laughs mocking the indefensible, and an easy pop cultural target at that, let me just say that I am a fairly nerdy person myself (as are all people who obsessively watch movies and complain about them on the tubes of the internets, let’s be honest about it), so the question for me is whether Paul is a tolerable movie because of its nerdiness or in spite of it.

Well, the two are inseparable, really. Since its two lead characters are nerds playing nerds (quite deftly, I might add), and it’s a homage to the science fiction flicks of the 1980s (mostly, though Close Encounters was earlier), and one of its main characters is a CGI alien, you can’t really grade it on its Shakespearean qualities or its Byronic pathos.

Clive and Graeme (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg) are two British nerds who’ve achieved the dream of a lifetime by travelling to the States and going to the Comic-Con event in San Diego. Some people aim high in their dreams, others aim low, but the important thing is to have a dream, I guess, no matter how achievable.

dir: Glenn Ficara and John Requa

Gee, I wonder why this flick, which has somehow only now reached Australian cinemas (Cinema Nova in Melbourne), nearly three years after its production, never really got a decent release at the cinemas in the States.

Could it be because of the subject matter: a con artist in love who perpetrates stacks of scams in order to keep himself and the object of his affections in the comfort they have become accustomed to? Is it because it’s based on a true story? Hollywood hates that. Is it because of where much of the flick is set, being prison? Is it because Jim Carrey is the lead actor, and no-one’s heard of this young up-and-comer, or Ewan McGregor in a supporting role, and studios are reluctant to release flicks with such unknowns in the lead?

Or is it because it’s the gayest flick this side of one of those Sex In the City movies?

Brokeback Mountain didn’t really break down that many barriers or walls of prejudice in terms of changing the dynamic that dictates what flicks get out there into the intellectual marketplace or the cinematic marketplace. Sure, a casual stroll through one of those dinosaur DVD stores might grace you with the vision of a section devoted to movies considered to be representatives of the Gay and Lesbian genre (a ghetto that resides next to the world movies and ‘special’ interest documentaries and such.

dir: Duncan Jones

Singer and national treasure Paul Kelly had the violent alcoholic’s lament If I Could Start Today Again, reincarnation-believers base their whole religious-spiritual existence on the allowance of do-overs, and computer game players long have known the joy of getting another chance (depending on how many lives you have left) to make things right.

They all come from the same source, they all appeal to the same part of us that wishes the universe could allow for multiple chances to get things right. If we could just have one more shot, if we could only have replayed some moment from our lives, and done something right, then everything else would have worked out right. If only…

Well, our universe doesn’t work like that, but our art does, so when a science fiction flick comes along based around that very idea, then we’re supposed to be throwing our hands up in hallelujahs at the chance to bask in the warming glow of wish fulfilment with Jake goddamn Gyllenhaal as our stand-in.

dir: Patrick Lussier

Drive Angry. Drive Angry 3D, no less. A film that, in any just universe, would have been the last 3D flick ever made, because it finally displayed in a definitive form just how wretched and pointless the format is.

This isn’t a just universe we live in, though, as you should well know by now. According to this flick, however, there is some kind of eternal balance sheet at work, with debits and credits just itching to be calculated.

If you want to know whether it’s possible for you to enjoy this flick, this is the litmus test for you: the premise of the flick is that a bad, bad man called John Milton (Nicolas Cage) breaks out of Hell in order to save his granddaughter from some loathsome cultists. They never explain how, but they just explained why.

If you’re the kind of person who then sits there in the cinema muttering under your breath “Well, how the fuck did he get out?”, perpetually dissatisfied and disgruntled because of that lack of crucial explanation, then nothing that comes after will seem at all tolerable. No manner of shootings or blood spattered breasts will satisfy that niggling voice in your head with such a mindset.

dir: Jonathan Liebesman

Finally, Shakycam has come of age. It’s been a long, agonising adolescence, but this most painful of weapons in the director’s / cinematographer’s arsenal is now constituting the entire running length of goddamn movies. Even the opening titles get to squiggle and spaz around like a meth addict with no meth, money or people to blow for money.

Eh, it’s not so bad. Depending on the venue, I find that if I sit far enough back from the screen, instead of being actively aggravating, it’s just a mild irritant at worst and a confusing blur at best. Far enough in this context is right up the back against the goddamn wall.

World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles is the full title of the flick, apparently, which seems to imply that if it’s successful enough, an entire series of World Invasion flicks will ensue. World Invasion: Battle Morwell, World Invasion: Battle Ulan Bator and World Invasion: Battle Yackandandah are doubtless on the cards if the right return on investment is achieved. Considering the fact that much of the flick looks like it was filmed on someone’s mobile phone, and that the aliens themselves look like they were created on a Commodore 64 computer, it shouldn’t be too hard for them to break even.

dir: Neil Burger

My memory still works fairly well, even at my tender age. It’s not eidetic (photographic), but it’s not porous or sieve-like either, especially since I scaled back on the drinking after becoming a dad. Somewhat. Relatively.

I recall seeing, in some magazine, some kind of ad for something. See how great my memory is? In the ad, which was black and white, there was an image of a brain at the top of the page, and the fairly famous trope expressed as Einstein saying something about how humans only use ten percent of their brains, and imagine what potential we could unlock if we could get the rest of it working? Narrowing down the likely publications, it was either a science magazine like Omni, a comic book or Playboy.

I have remembered the diabolical claim all my life, since I was but a callow child when I first read it. I heard the concept repeated continuously throughout the 1980s, mostly by types of people with certainty about how they had psychic powers or some other supernatural / spiritual bullshit. I even remember a science teacher in school repeating the claim as truth. Honestly, I really should have gone to a better school.

dir: Catherine Hardwicke

So, chicks dig this stuff, huh? Tame mixtures of the supernatural and the melodramatic, and the direct competition of two hunky lunkheads wanting to kill each other over you, and that’s the ticket for fiddly remembrances in the bath?

Surely women have higher standards than that? Surely it takes more to satisfy them than that?

I’m going to quote famous dead film critic Pauline Kael for a second, but not in a filmic capacity. She once expressed surprise and shock that Nixon won re-election, because she didn’t know a single person who voted for him. Of course, this quote has been used more to show how self-selecting her circle of acquaintances was, rather than the validity of her knowing what a likely political outcome would be.

In that spirit of same insular cluelessness, I don’t know a single girl or woman who likes this kind of supernatural – romantic bullshit, whether it’s explicitly Twilight or not, or ersatz Twilight like this movie. Not a one. Sure, most of the women I’ve ever known are too intelligent for this bullshit, but can I really use them as my sample size for judging the population of women?

Surely not, since someone has to buy those mentally defective celeb magazines, and those products promising eternal youth, eternal desirability and bras more torture device than structural support. And it’s not me.