10. Hitchcock
There’s nothing worse than that sinking feeling you get
when, a half hour into a movie, you realize that they aren’t joking. That the
embrace of cheap artifice and glib laughs is actually meant to be sincere, and
it’s not some sort of elaborate conceptual joke or spoof. Consider me stunned
that we were supposed to take this dime-store psychology approach to Alfred
Hitchcock seriously, give or take a few laughs, usually at the expense of how
gay Anthony Perkins is. Even the jowly, dubious makeup on Anthony Hopkins is a
misfire, as he delivers all his lines by quite obviously arching his back, growling
and bearing his teeth, which further emphasizes a poor impersonation as substitute
for performance. That may be a fitting metaphor for this howlingly-obvious
attempt to plumb Hitchcock’s psyche during the making of “Psycho,” which boils
down to the fact that he didn’t appreciate his wife (Helen Mirren, animal wig),
letting her stray into the hands of an oily writer (Danny Huston, always
awful). “Hitchcock” is tone-deaf, a tacky disaster with nary a single solid
performance or clever line, and zero insight into the actual making of “Psycho,”
which no longer seems like the work of an artist at the top of his game, but
according to “Hitchcock” was more or less a self-directed accident.
9. Red Dawn
The bulk of “Red Dawn” feels overly conceptual, like an
avant-guarde filmmaker attempting to boil an action movie down to its very
essence. The problem is that “Red Dawn” is the debut of skilled second-unit
action director Dan Bradley, who previously concerned himself with bodies in
motion, cars, cranes, planes and trains. And Bradley reveals his notable
shortcomings not only by shooting the action incomprehensibly, assuming sound
and fury will do all the work, but he’s a non-starter when the momentum slows –
poor guy just isn’t used to dealing with people. As such, this overtly racist
narrative falters on its own when we’re forced to care for the characters,
particularly braindead Josh Peck, who looks like he’s just filling the screen
until someone more exciting comes along. Credit Bradley for an audacious
passage-of-time montage that conveys absolutely no sense of time passing,
however: as the Wolverines head to the woods to learn self-defense and weapon
skills, it could be days, weeks or even months in which these Central Casting
teens (complete with blacks and Hispanics, quietly pushed to the back of the
group) train to fight the villainous interlopers. Who seem Chinese, but are
actually North Korean. With help from Russia. Or something. Whatever.
8. This Is Forty
7. People Like Us
I want to say this has nothing to do with race, but that
would be a lot easier if these films had less-definitive titles, like “Insufferable
L.A. Couple” or “Terrible Dickhead Has Lame Secret.” But since they insisted on
being inclusive, I can only recognize how exclusive they really are. The
former, the worst of Judd Apatow’s “joints” thus far, uses our familiarity with
Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann’s semi-unhappy couple (and it’s not a strong
familiarity for most of us) to skip the usual Apatow-esque charming-screwup
introductions, landing us right in the middle of a series of yelling matches
between shrill, obnoxious Mann and spineless, apathetic Rudd. It’s the sort of
movie that someone only makes when they’re rich with fuck-you money, when they
expect you to see a fluctuating mortgage onscreen and assume that the solution
isn’t to eliminate spending freely, but to tighten up their diets, which
involves tossing perfectly good food into the garbage instead of taking it to a
shelter or perhaps even a less-fortunate loved one (does anyone think Lena
Dunham’s record company employee is paying her rent with any ease?). More
importantly, several of Apatow’s ringers aren’t here to improv their way out of
here: for a supposed comedy legend, Apatow’s fourth directorial effort simply
isn’t funny in the least, attempting to wiggle out of poorly-written corners
with some Charleyne Yi schtick, or bumbling Jason Segel gag, or even some
roundabout discussion of “Lost” that gives absolutely no insight as to why the
show is popular and/or hated (though John Lithgow’s furrowed brow accidentally
speaks volumes).
From those terrible assholes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci
comes “People Like Us,” which is meant to be their atonement for penning “Transformers”
and “Star Trek” variants all over Hollywood. Here, the duo reveal their
knowledge of real people comes exclusively from movies, with insufferable Chris
Pine as a rich boy who inherits a large sum from his dead father, but who can’t
bring himself to tell his secretly estranged sister. Of course, he’ll still
introduce himself, non-romantically entering her life under the aegis of just
being some friendly stranger that only exists in movies. Poor Elizabeth Banks,
who has to perform this hoodwinked character with every shred of her dignity –
there may be no better actress stuck in worse movies right now. I made a crack
on Twitter about how co-star Mark Duplass probably hung out on set bragging about
using the budget to make twenty movies exactly like this, and just as crummy,
and he went after me. Telling that he expected me and him to be able to join
forces in an “indie brotherhood” of sorts; this is the sort of movie that
assholes make in their off-hours.
6. Battleship
It takes a lot of guts to go full retard as Peter Berg did
with “Battleship,” a honest-to-God adaptation of the board game that I still
can’t believe exists. This naval warfare movie, which wouldn’t even leave the
pitch meeting as a joke on “The Critic,” suggests that a little bit of military
might goes a long way, even for such a screwup as tail-chasing Taylor Kitsch,
still infatuated with the general’s daughter even after ending up falling
ass-backwards into the Naval Academy. It’s snobs vs. slobs on the high seas for
a while, until aliens land, getting pissy when we decide to strike the first
blow. What follows is CGI nonsense of the highest order, with absolutely no
point of view, no perspective, and no thrills. The aliens are completely
indistinct characters with opaque motivations, and our heroes are
vengeance-driven jerks out to measure their dicks instead of save the world.
The first half manages to hit some candy-colored sweet spot as far as
incompetent, grisly sci-fi action, showing that Berg, for all his blank
machismo, knows what he’s doing behind the camera. But soon the plot gets
bogged down in logistics and MacGuffin-chasing, leaving poor Taylor Kitsch to
yell coordinates at other soldiers (including Rihanna, because of course) in a
large scale version of the game. If you’re going to be that ridiculous (ending
the film with “Fortunate Son”!), maybe you should have had the balls to have
SOMEONE say “You sank my Battleship.”
5. The Campaign
How do you screw this up? The new media marketplace seems to
suggest that funny people be funny all the time – it’s not enough to do some
amusing movies, you have to also provide yuks on YouTube, Twitter, television
specials, and cameos in other peoples’ movies. So, I suppose, there’s a
built-in excuse for why Funny Or Die regulars Will Ferrell and Zack
Galifianakis didn’t even bring their D-game to this attempt at shooting fish in
a barrel. Despite being separated by Democrat and Republican party lines, there’s
not much that distinguishes Ferrell’s brassy lout from Galifianakis’ dimwit
rube politically, which pushes all the “smart stuff” to the side in favor of
these two goofballs openly mocking and thrashing at each other, while the Motch
brothers (a toothless parody of the Koch’s) pull the strings from the
sidelines. “The Campaign” is one of the few comedies that would benefit from a
PG-13 rating instead of an R, as most of the gags seem to hinge on a
not-particularly-well-timed “F” word, the film employing vulgarity as a crutch
to the point where it’s just boring. And being released in the midst of a
ludicrous election cycle which saw several candidates make a mockery of the
Republican party, it couldn’t even measure up to what we were seeing on our
television every night.
4. This Means War
Distinctly desperate-to-please and succeeding in absolutely
zero ways, the stupefying failure “This Means War” tries to be something for
everyone, not understanding how exactly it’s insulting each specific
demographic. By trying to be female friendly with a lady “player” at its center
(Reese Witherspoon, lost), it only makes her oblivious to the fact that she’s
actually a pawn in a dick-measuring contest. By trying to be an action picture,
there’s very little combat, with villain Til Schwieger only emerging as a
threat in the last ten minutes. As a workplace comedy, it looks as if CIA
agents Chris Pine (obnoxious) and Tom Hardy (uncomfortable) work inside a
goddamned IPod and do almost nothing all day. As a slapstick comedy, it’s
impossible to note that, in both of them pursuing this woman, they’re using
sitcom techniques (oh no, the sprinklers!) in an absolutely absurd abuse of
taxpayer money. As a romance, it turns its lead female into an object to be “won”
by two jerks who lie to her, with the assumption that audiences will root for
her to end up with one of them despite Pine and Hardy having more chemistry
with each other. But if this were a Target commercial, I suppose it would be
alright.
3. Act Of Valor
The best thing about “Act Of Valor” is that it’s really only
a few degrees removed from a parody. Maybe it’s the heroes with devoted wives
at home, descending onto a terrorist’s yacht populated by supermodels in
bikinis, who literally vanish when bullets start flying – do they evaporate?
Perhaps it’s the terrorists, members of Al Queda, working with Mexican drug
cartels, with ties to the Russian mafia, who probably tried but couldn’t also
get the Yakuza involved as well. Or maybe it’s the horrifying
supposed-to-be-awesome visual of a couple of “bad guys” turning a corner, only to
be greeted with a relentless hail of gunfire, the type of brute force that
separates our state-of-the-art heroes from the peasants with shotguns they’re
literally dismantling. “Act Of Valor” isn’t a movie, it’s a showreel: for the
military, for the War on Terror, and for the directing team the Bandito Brothers,
who must have flipped a coin to determine whether they’d make “Act Of Valor” or
shoot hardcore porn.
2. American Animal
Writer-director-star Matt D’Elia is the one-man wrecking
crew behind this, one of the year’s most defiantly obnoxious pictures of the
year, a towering tribute to egotism which D’Elia would likely argue was “beside
the point.” In this claustrophobic comedy/drama/torture chamber, D’Elia plays a
rich young man who inherited a fortune and has spent it staying inside his
roomy two-floor studio apartment, doing whatever he pleases under the auspice
of “puttin’ on the ritz.” Each moment is an opportunity for him to perform to a
nonexistent audience, via costumes, “funny” voices and absurd proclamations,
regardless of how anyone reacts. The assumption is that this has finally reached
a head when similarly wealthy roommate Brendan Fletcher announces he’s got a
job that starts the next day, prompting D’Elia’s newfound aggression and
antagonism. Except that Fletcher’s performance suggests that he did not forsee
this: the film’s attitude seems to be that D’Elia is the world’s most obnoxious
man all the time, but Fletcher’s dialogue and actions make it appear as if D’Elia’s
behavior is some sort of out-of-the-blue surprise. Which makes perfect sense,
given that “American Animal” is a beyond-intolerable performance film dedicated
to seeing D’Elia romp around in his underwear, tell jokes without punchlines,
and generally act like a foul wart of a human being, logic be damned. The
saddest part of it all is that three other actors had to witness this bullshit
in person.
1. The Hunger Games
Absolutely dunderheaded in every way, Gary Ross’ disastrous
adaption of the YA novel pussyfoots around literalizing the horrors of violence
at the heart of the story, which is weird because everything else feels so
obvious and spelled-out as to become redundant. Each scene in “The Hunger Games”
slogs forward with almost no purpose, few with any payoff, as characters vacillate
between extremes – Haymitch is an unclean, drunken jerk who is also sometimes a
super ninja, and excellent at politics! Meanwhile, Ross’ world-building falters
immensely, as he fails to show how life in the Districts is any different from
a CMT music video, nevermind how impoverished representative Katniss (a too-old
Jennifer Lawrence) doesn’t even bat an eyelid at the improbable food spread in
front of her once she volunteers for the Games. The cities themselves seem
populated only by fashion rejects from a Lady Gaga concert, all CGI in the
background while we’re stuck inside endless marble rooms to witness the
pathetic politics of the game play out, particularly within the unconvincing
romance between Katniss and dwarfy camouflage-master Peeta. Oh, and let’s pick
your favorite minority character: is it the black fashion designer who boosts
Katniss’ confidence and fits her for a terribly-unconvincing CGI fire dress? Is
it the black little girl who breaks the rules of the competition to save
Katniss for almost no reason whatsoever, paying for her kindness with her life?
Or maybe it’s the male black teenager who vows not to harm Katniss because of
the kindness the girl showed towards her, only to quickly meet death himself?
Man, black people sure love Katniss Everdeen.
(Danny Huston, always awful)
ReplyDelete*shrugs* I've always though Danny Huston was great, ever since "The Constant Gardener". What caused you to dislike him BEFORE you saw this film that hasn't been released in my country yet?
more or less a self-directed accident
A self-directed accident? How can something be both a personal accident and personally directed? Isn't that an oxymoron? *scratches head*
What did you think of the HBO movie "The Girl" about Hitchcock's sexual harrassment of Tippi Hedren, starring Toby Jones?
As in, "Psycho" directed itself, essentially. By accident.
ReplyDeleteI did not see "The Girl."
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