I am infinite Bad Ass existing in an impenetrable Shell of Victory.
Current mood: intense
Category: Blogging
I have had a grand total of five hours sleep this week.
Last night (right down to the freaking five minute wire, because of formatting issues, weeee!) I managed to just barely reach a deadline for a script I was working on. Which included me editing the one hundred and eighteen page beast that took me sixteen hours to finish the previous fucking day (gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhahahahahaha!) down to one hundred and three in a single, excruciating twelve hour, sitting.
Now if you are a blogger you will say: 'Hmmm! That sounds like it might have been a little bit of work.'
However, if you're actually a writer or someone of creative skill with dedication to their craft, you know that I have been spending the entire week BLEEDING into my computer. That I have opened my ribcage like some creaky old wrought iron gate, tore my still-beating heart out of the squirming jiggly pink bits that make up my guts and fed it directly into the motherfucking DVD-DRIVE.
'TAKE IT! TAKE IT YOU BITCH!! IT'S YOURS!!!! I DON'T NEED IT!!!!!'
I spent this week dancing on the fine line in-between total awareness and third-person peyote Johnny Cash-narrating walking R-E-M.
I was seeing more fucked up shit than Shelly Duvall running through the halls of the Overlook Hotel.
My head was full of sugar plums and Six-Eyed Goat-Headed Men with broken jaws masturbating bukkake-style onto a slithering horde of eyeless senior citizens dressed like Little Orphan Annie.
I found Schrödinger's cat; it was inside my head smoking six packs of Monte Carlo a day and chewing on my Neo Cortex for sustenance.
My mind lives in a perpetual hell of artificial sweeteners.
My Subconscious is a HAPPY PLACE!!!
It protects me from the world! I want to stay forever. And ever. AND EVER. *Cue Micheal Jackson's Thriller* *Cue Dance Number* *Cue Tar Zombie*
He put me on a month-long Kurosawa film-watching kick.
In the post-MTV music video era, motion pictures have become odes to over-indulgence and over-stimulation. Filmmakers copying grandiose stylistic shots and editing, but using them as filler to take up time, instead of using them to tell a story. Visuals are dragged out or executed superfluously to try and make hollow scenes appear important and artistic. A lot of television and filmmaking has become a vacancy of ideas hiding behind a superficial glamor.
The polar opposite of this self-important and oblivious style of film-making are the filmmakers who rarely waste a single frame; who's individual vision is so distinctive it's impossible to watch one of their movies and not realize who's behind the camera. Directors like Howard Hawks, Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola, Álex de la Iglesia, John Carpenter, Park-chan Wook, Hal Hartley, Stanley Kubrick, Wong Kar Wai, Joel and Ethan Coen, Joon Ho-Bong, Bigas Luna, Kim Ki-Duk and Martin Scorsese, to name just a few.
And of course, Akira Kurosawa.
Akira Kurosawa's films are devoid of the superfluous; he is the Auteur of Auteurs, his obsessive desire to control every single detail of his movies down to the weather and random movements of extras in the background is legendary. Kurosawa is an unmitigated world builder; nothing is wasted in a Kurosawa movie, every scene feels lived in, every set has a history and personality, every thing is defined and characterized, from the houses to the horses to the weapons. Kurosawa's in-frame (and out of frame) mastery of the action captured by his camera is unparalleled in cinema; there has never been a director with such an unyielding dedication to the importance of detail.
Seven Samurai is well over two hundred minutes long...and none of it is filler.
The story of Seven Samurai deals with a small farming village in feudal Japan who have come under attack by a rogue collection of bandits. Desperate for a way to save themselves and their crops, the farmers pool what little resources they can muster and set out to hire Samurai to fight the invaders. Eventually the village obtains the services of a master-less ronin Kambei who enlists the aid of the curious Gorobei, the deadly archer Shichiroji, the friendly Heihachi, the young and inexperienced Katsushiro, the master swordsman Kyãuzo and the overcompensating braggart (who might not be a Samurai at all) Kikuchiyo. The samurai join together to defend the village from the bandits; but what hope does a group of farmers and seven misfit warriors have against forty well-trained enemies, armed with guns? More importantly, can the village overcome its own insecurities which threaten to tear it apart before the bandits even arrive? In the end, the small farming town becomes the playing field for a massive intricate drama, as heroes die, young love blooms, unlikely champions rise up, cultural and class prejudices boil over and a final fight begins for the future of the villagers and the honor of the Seven Samurai.
Seven Samurai is not just a sword-fighting movie; Kurosawa stripped the conventional action movie of his era down to the bare studs and set a standard that still acts as a wellspring for inspiration for modern film-makers. Seven Samurai has not just influenced Samurai and Japanese cinema, but North American crime movies, heist movies, action films, fantasy, science fiction, westerns, video games, comic books, tv shows, novels, kid's cartoons, you name it. I could easily make a list of top ten movies that were inspired by Seven Samurai, and we'd be talking about everything from Reservoir Dogs to Aliens to Star Wars. The massive (and lasting) appeal of Samurai is not just because of the stylistic choices of the director, but in the writing and the characterization. Kurosawa's movies always appear so huge, because there is so much depth to be found in the scripts. Every minute he spends in the film is dedicated to nothing but flushing out the characters and telling their story. He doesn't sit back and let the 'action sequence' take over, or let the editing montage act as a simple 'passing of time', everything is dedicated to the plot and the characters. Kurosawa's directing and storytelling style can make a film that is already epic to begin with, feel positively stratospheric.
In Seven Samurai, the vast density that lies simmering beneath the superficial veneer of the main characters is astonishing.
Kambei, the leader of the Seven Samurai is introduced while getting his head shaved; which in Japan, at the time, historically meant he was renouncing the world and everything in it. In reality Kambei is trying to take the appearance of a monk to save a young child's life; but at the same time Kambei's haircut is a literal truth of his character which is explored throughout the film's narrative. Kambei is a ronin, he is master-less, disgraced and hunted; the only meaning he can give to his existence is the meaning he can find through his code and that only serves the will of others. Kambei has no sense of self anymore, he is fallen, everything he ever trained for, everything he believed in, has turned to ash. So when Kambei accepts the farmer's deal to help them fight the bandits, he's not just doing it because he is (deep down) a caring individual, he's doing it because he has a death wish.
This important element of Kambei's characterization is mirrored (and emphasized) in his former comrade in battle Shichiroji; who quickly agrees to help Kambei fight the bandits without even acknowledging the danger of the situation. On a superficial level this scene is suppose to give the audience a sense that Shichiroji is a 'straight-shooter', someone you can rely on when the chips are down; but on a deeper level it reveals the tragic nature of both ronin. Shichiroji is in the same boat as Kambei; master-less, without a path, an outcast of a dying age with nothing to lose and nothing to gain. All Kambei and Shichiroji have left is the prospect of an honorable end; a fate Kambei wishes to spare the young, inexperienced Katsushiro who asks him to be his teacher.
In contrast the film's main character Kikuchiyo is an ode to overcompensation. A bragging and often drunken ass with fake credentials and a sword at least twice as large as any of his comrade's; Kikuchiyo is immortalized on the Samurai flag as the odd man out, the triangle amongst the circles, the Seventh Samurai. Kikuchiyo doesn't really fit in with either the Samurai or the farmers, he is the individual in the community, the loner; who because he is separated from both sides, has a perspective that benefits all. Kikuchiyo's status as the odd man out allows him to connect with both the Samurai and the villagers like a bridge and help the two classes reach a mutually beneficial social harmony to face the coming storm. In the end, during the climatic fight for the fate of the village, motivated by the connections he has made with both the farmers and the Samurai, the drunken, comedic, loud-mouth is revealed to be the most fierce warrior of them all. Finally finding his place in the world the eternal outcast becomes an unstoppable berserker; a wild-eyed hurricane of violence, ignoring pain, fear and even death to defend his friends.
In a normal movie, that would be it for characterization; Kambei and his interaction with Katsushiro and Kikuchiyo would be seen as an eloquent dynamic, a robust play of opposites.
In Seven Samurai it is barely the tip of the iceberg.
Almost every character who gets screen-time, is paid off with a deeper sense of significance by the finale. Characters that are throw-aways in most genre movies in Seven Samurai are well-developed and introspective. A good example is the character of Manzo.
Manzo is a walking cliche; in most actions movies Manzo would be the role of the stereotypical killjoy. Manzo is the pouting naysayer, the dissenting prick who gets his nose out of joint because of some superficial bias. This character has appeared in everything from Ghostbusters to Lethal Weapon and normally exists as a human speed-bump, to either betray the heroes later on, or to be comically proven wrong.
In Seven Samurai, Manzo is like something out of American literature. The arrival of the Samurai gives birth to a mounting paranoia for Manzo; a fear born from a guilty conscience. Manzo hunted and killed disgraced Samurai in the past. Manzo hates the dashing image of the ronin and portrays them to others as womanizers and hedonists and portrays himself as a protective father attempting to shield his family from corruption. In truth Manzo is not motivated by his family at all; this becomes self-evident when he brutally disrespects his daughter in public on multiple occasions. Manzo is motivated by his perceived role, by the position he is suppose to perform; he carries his status with a self-centered sense of duty and he is as bound to his status as any of the Samurai. Which is exactly why Manzo simultaneously fears the ronin and loathes them; because Manzo identifies with their situation, perhaps better than anybody else in the entire village. When Manzo inevitably fails to protect his daughter and perform the role society expects of him, he essentially loses his honor, he becomes, in his own way, a ronin as well. The outburst of violence and self-hatred in response to this failure is like a dam breaking. The pressure and fear built up inside of Manzo is at a fever pitch for most of the movie, and when it is finally given an outlet, the whole facade of the character shatters, leaving nothing behind but tragedy and regret.
Seven Samurai upon its first release was met with massive box office success, and many negative reviews from Japanese critics. Kurosawa had taken traditional settings of beloved Japanese historical chambara and jidaigeki and in the eyes of his critics, he 'Western-ized' them. Kurosawa's love for Western writers and storytellers with their realism, in particular Russian writers like the legendary Maxim Gorky, blended in with his own deep respect for the storytelling linage and traditions of Japan. That mixture of elements, along with Kurosawa's incredible talent and drive to make great films, garnered him worldwide acclaim. It also made him an outcast.
In many ways, one can see the story of Seven Samurai as the story of Kurosawa himself. Kurosawa is as much of a ronin as the haunted Kambei who's responsibility to his honor and respect for tradition weigh heavily on his shoulders. The cultural pundits like Manzo, criticized Kurosawa for the same reason they feared him. They were bound to a traditionalism that defined their perspective and their lives and Kurosawa represented a reality that terrified them.
In the end, though, Kurosawa is most like Kikuchiyo. Kurosawa was the seventh samurai, the odd man out. Kurosawa was divided between the nation he loved and his own obsessive desire to express his unique style of storytelling. He could never belong to one camp or the other, so he was split right down the center; a true outcast. Like Kikuchiyo, that status of being an outcast allowed Kurosawa to see both sides from a perspective that could benefit all.
It took years for the scope of Kurosawa's impact on worldwide culture and cinema to be understood. Kurosawa's films are more than just a great accomplishment in his art form; they have become a bridge between two cultures. Kurosawa's individualism has shown two distinctively different societies, the worth and value of one another, and helped them close a gap born out of xenophobia and ignorance.
In his films Kurosawa consistently approached the idea that a single person, through the act of defining their perspective, can help to define us all.
In real life, by sticking stalwart and steadfast to his artistic vision, Kurosawa proved that idea to be true.
"Well I let their teeny minds think That they're dealing with someone who is over the brink And I dress this way just to keep them at bay Cuz Halloween is everyday It's everyday
O, why can't I live a life for me? Why should I take the abuse that's served? Why can't they see they're just like me It's the same, it's the same in the whole wide world." - "Everyday is Halloween", Ministry
Christopher Nolan's (Memento) Dark Knight picks up over a year after the events of Batman Begins. Gotham is a little bit cleaner, a little bit safer and the criminals are on the run; not just from the legendary Batman, but from District Attorney Harvey Dent, the police and a host of wannabe copycat Batmen who have followed the Caped Crusader's glowing example. The criminals and the mobs that control them are under siege from all fronts, physical, psychological and political and they require a radical solution to their problems.
Enter The Joker.
That's the set-up for The Dark Knight, the best Batman movie yet, and one of the best films of the year. It's also one of the most ambitious and intelligent comic book movies in history. The Dark Knight takes the whole concept of Batman and the Joker to another level; it's much more serious than any incarnation of the Batman that we've ever been exposed to, and it transcends the modern superhero movie.
Movie Summary: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
Current mood: blah
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
"The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name." - Lao Tzu
Religion is a hot-button issue that a lot of people dodge online. No matter what stance you take, pro, against, or middle of the road, you're inevitably going to end up pissing off someone.
When George Carlin died and I mourned his passing on my Myspace page, I got several hateful letters and angry jabs from religious people (due to Carlin's own commentary on religion) who decided to make it their mission to mock the man, his family, his friends and his fans after his death.
When I announced the other night that I was going to write a negative review for EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED, I got hate mail telling me that my Mother's bone degeneration was an act of God as punishment towards me.
Punishment eh? I didn't realize celestial beings were into S&M. Oh God, or should I call you...Master; my safe word is "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" your holy majesty, and I've been a very bad boy!
That being said, I'm not an atheist.
Not that the universe hasn't made a solid attempt to pound me into absolute cynicism throughout my life; still, I believe in the unknown and the unknowable.
I'm a Taoist. The only way to disprove the existence of Tao is to know everything, and if you know everything, you are by definition TAO. So skepticism is irrelevant. Taoism is an often annoying and mischievous system of beliefs, and it promotes confusing questions, great sex and good eating. Please don't convert.
I'm also not religious or 'spiritual', by any stretch of the imagination; I am skeptical towards any and all scripture because I have yet to see a document that could not be edited. God may have spoken the word, but human beings heard it, and human beings (myself included) tend to have an awfully selective memory and are sometimes full of shit.
Being a good Taoist, I'm more interested in the question "Is there a God", than the answer. As far as I'm concerned trying to quantify an omnipotent force, and asking for evidence for the existence of the unknowable is like trying to harvest SUVs from apple trees.
Ben Stein has been quoted as saying that there is a mountain of evidence in favor of intelligent design; and his new documentary EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED is suppose to be a controversial film with forbidden and groundbreaking revelations. EXPELLED believes that it will shed the light of truth on the cruel world of science's elite intellectuals who refuse to acknowledge any theories regarding the possibility of an 'intelligent design' just so they can protect that grandiose lie of all lies: Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
Now evolution is a hell of an opponent to debunk. I mean we're not talking about UFOs or alien abductions here. Evolution is like the Muhammad Ali of scientific theories; it's one of the greatest and strongest of all time with a history of people saying they're going to defeat it, only to end up getting their asses kicked inside out.
Why is evolution such a tough customer? Well lets take a look at the tale of the tape.
EVOLUTION is universally accepted in scientific circles as a fact, because the evidence in favor of it is staggering. Signs of evolution exist in literally every single ecosystem on the planet, every animal, every insect, every fish, plant and fossil. There are no exceptions to this rule. None. Nada. Zip. The fossil record is a giant smorgasbord of evidence for the case of evolution. There are no examples of fossils from different strata coexisting in the fossil records. No evidence of T-Rexes hanging with the Hebrews. The vast consistency of the sequence of fossils from early to recent era, and the clear development one can see in each strata from unicellular to multicellular to invertebrates to vertebrates draws a single, powerful conclusion. And that's just the fossil record; which as Creationists often like to point out is evolution's "weakest argument".
Well with a weakness like that, who needs strengths?
So lets look at some of the harder arguments shall we?
That the species alive on the planet right now are descendants of the species from millions of years ago is a fact; easily verifiable by simple observation. You have babies. Where do babies come from? Do babies come from storks? Do babies come from leprechauns? No, babies come from you.
OK, I came from space, but that's totally beside the point.
The much-debated theory of evolution is that random genetic variance is culled by the environment, producing generational changes in the genome. Which is why you might have a hard time finding Arctic Polar Bears in Haiti. This idea is what made Darwin such a scientific 'celebrity'. This theory has been proven a thousand times over. You hear about this all the time in the real world, insects adapting to pesticides, diseases become 'super' resistant, the evidence is abundant, it is everywhere and it is absolutely, one hundred percent, UNDENIABLE.
Yes ladies and gentlemen, Evolution is 'just a theory'. But so is gravity. And the last time I checked? I'M NOT FLOATING.
So debunking evolution isn't exactly a simple task, or arguably possible. Ben Stein and friends are going to have to submit evidence that doesn't just refute billions of years worth of Fossil Records, they're going to have to make a revolutionary discovery that completely re-invents the way we look at the entire world and everything in it.
EXPELLED falls quite a bit short of the task, in that its criticisms are mostly debunked creationist arguments (in some cases the arguments date back to writings from fifty years ago) and were generally conceived by people who don't comprehend evolution or are basing their criticisms on outdated information. When it becomes clear that the documentary doesn't have a scientific leg to stand on, it begins to actively attempt to misrepresent the theory of evolution through snide commentary, while ignoring, editing or simply lying about the facts and freely taking quotes out of context. Instead of showing their mountain of evidence that Ben Stein promises, EXPELLED remains vague about Creationist theory while comparing the plight of Creationists being kept out of schools to the building of the Berlin Wall, and trying to draw flimsy connections between Darwin's theory of evolution and Nazi Germany.
EXPELLED also tries to make the case that there is a great, vast, secular conspiracy of scientists that envelops the globe, who are collectively holding back Creationists, who are on the verge of making ground-breaking discoveries. Why? So that people working in Big Science with their cushy jobs, can lazily rely on Darwin's outdated theories, while they sit back and spin their wheels.
A good example of Big Science spinning its wheels in this case would be the Green Revolution. Fronted by Nobel-Prize winner Norman Borlaug, who used modern genetic science to save literally over a BILLION lives and feed entire nations of starving people. And don't forget that the advancements in genetic science are leading to cures for blindness, paralysis, nerve damage, almost any genetic disorder you can name, as well as being leading fighters against third world starvation, mental disorders, pollution and cancer. Truly, the unimaginable evil festering in the collective hearts of this modern scientific cabal is beyond our comprehension.
And really? A vast 'secular conspiracy'? COME ON.
It's like Joe Rogan talking about BIG DICK pills. You really think if they invented some pill that could give you a big dick, it would just be some secret that only a bunch of email spammers would know about? Think for a second, people.
THINK!
For an intelligent design study to be proved scientific, it would require evidence of an 'intelligence'. These ID guys are claiming, REALLY CLAIMING, that they have found SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR THE POSSIBLE EXISTENCE OF GOD.
Sit back and think about the ramifications of that kind of a discovery.
If this research was even close to being legitimate it would be on every single news channel across the globe. Secular conspiracy be damned! There would be billions of dollars going into this study, from private investors alone. You got people spending millions of dollars funding guys who like to get on stage and play Dragonball Z with their audience, blasting them down with waves of spiritual energy that they pretend to throw from the palms of their hands! Why? People are looking for a reason to believe. Not just poor people, or people in dire straits either, but rich people, millionaires and billionaires, celebrities and business leaders! If there was any, even remotely provable evidence for the existence of a creator, it would be attracting an ocean of cash. We're not talking about something as trivial as flying to the moon here; we're talking about the origins of life and the meaning of our existence. Think about what that discovery would mean for the whole species and life as we know it. Every country in the world would be using all of their resources to be the first to prove it. The space race would look like a game of marbles in comparison!
EXPELLED expects us to believe (with no evidence whatsoever) that one of the most important discoveries in human history, is just some super secret that only Ben Stein and a couple of his buddies know.
And the reason why they can't tell you? It's a CONSPIRACY.
Sorry folks, but my Occam's Razor is tingling.
Ultimately Intelligent Design's defenders can't even define what "Intelligent Design" is suppose to mean. EXPELLED claims that since machines are complex and needed a human hand to assemble their parts, it would be only logical that cellular structures need an intelligent hand in their assembly as well. Wait a second though; spiders create massively intricate webs, ants develop waste disposal chambers, bees create complex hives, beavers make dams, birds make nests, all of these things needed to be 'assembled', are they intelligently designed? NO. They are formed from millions of years worth of instinct.
On a more philosophical note: can anybody, anywhere give me a single example of anything that was exclusively created through the use of sheer intelligence with no outside influences? There is a hint of chaos, chance, dumb luck and trial and error in every invention. There is nothing contrary to that process in the human experience.
Except with a 'God' designing life (and the universe itself), you have to claim that God 'designed' everything, including chaos and instinct. So there is no outside influences whatsoever in God's design. What would that 'design' look like? How does one recognize an absolute intelligent design, when no human being in history has ever had any experience with such a phenomena existing? Can any of these ID folks actually tell me how to define what they're looking for in animal biology; because their current definition doesn't CUT THE MUSTARD.
Taking for granted that the assembly of cells and organs and eyes would be similar to the assembly of machines is a logical fallacy. Even if there is an intelligent design, Ben Stein and friends might be looking in all the wrong places for its evidence, and that's if you accept the idea that they would be able to even recognize the evidence if they ever found it. And they probably wouldn't.
Which ultimately leads us right back to square one. Where God is unknowable, unprovable, beyond measurement, scientific reasoning and human comprehension.
"Why haven’t you reviewed Hancock yet?"
Current mood: mad
Because my Mom has stage three bone degeneration in her neck and I'm not in a very good mood. I don't feel I can give a sincere opinion regarding the film at the moment. I'll wait until later.
I will however review Ben Stein's EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED.
WANTED is like a male version of one of those romantic comedies where the obviously good-looking girl wearing the stereotypical nerdy clothes is given a make-over and becomes the Prom Queen while the Hot (but sensitive) Guy loves her for herself.
In WANTED we have the 'every-guy' who sucks at life, works at a terrible job, is put down by everybody (including Google and the ATM) and has a girlfriend that's screwing around with his supposed best friend. Enter Angelina Jolie, hot, gun-totting super assassin who has the key to the guy's 'real past' which turns out to be a lifetime of freedom from debt, transforming his panic attacks into super-powers that allow him to defy gravity and physics and becoming an uber-bad ass guided by fate (and Morgan Freeman) to avenge his father's death and look totally AWESOME.
WANTED is what would happen if you crossed REMO WILLIAMS with FIGHT CLUB; it's very loosely based on the comic book by Mark Millar (The Authority, The Ultimates) but manages to stay true to Millar's trademark jet-black gallows humor and wacky over-the-top hyper-violent action sequences. WANTED is full to the brim with Gunkata and Gun-Fu and Gymkata and knife-fu and other things John Woo made famous with his 90s action suspense film THE KILLER; but it's missing one key element, TONS OF NUDITY AND SEX.
Really, these male-bonding, hyper-violent movies are becoming a bit too much of a sausage-fest for my tastes. I don't know about any other guy out there, but in my hyper-stylized, uber-violent, male power fantasy, I'm getting LAID.
James McAvoy (The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe) gets to be the hero of WANTED and gets all "male empowered" and freed from the chains of society and conventional relationships, only to spend the majority of the movie playing whimpering Mama's Boy to Angelina Jolie. So the relationships in the film remain painfully juvenile, even when there were moments when the two protagonists should have justifiably been getting it on like a couple of wild cats in the jungle. Even the one big make-out scene between Jolie and McAvoy is almost devoid of chemistry and done more as charity by Jolie who wants to make McAvoy's girlfriend jealous and undermine her attempts to emasculate him.
A lot of the movie approaches the themes of being 'tough' and learning to be an assassin from the perspective of a 12 year old child. For example 'The Repairman' supposedly helps the hero become tougher by tying him to a chair and beating the shit out of his face. Now having your face beaten into a bloody smear over and over might eventually lead to Wolf's Law, where your jaw and facial bones become stronger and more dense; however, the damage done to your brain due to the multiple beatings will leave you a space-case who drools on the floor and calls himself "Slappy". I knew a fighter who was knocked out in August and woke up thirty seconds later thinking it was April; TV and movies might make massive brain damage look glamorous, but trust me kids, do not try this at home. If you really want to train yourself to take a punch you should be working on your neck and shoulder muscles; so that when you take a hit to the skull, the impact doesn't snap your head around (or back) so your brain doesn't bounce too much. And of course the best way to be able to deal with a strike to the head, is to not get hit. It would be nice to see one of these ninja training academies in one of these movies actually teach something as basic as head movement in a fight. Giving your opponent a nice stable target in a boxing, MMA or street-fight is like sending yourself a free invitation to go directly to the head-trauma ward of your local hospital.
Similarly the Knife-Trainer teaches our hero how to fight with knives by cutting him to pieces. Now I know that immersion is the best way to learn a language, but when it comes to blades, even the legendary Samurai and famed Escrima knife-fighters trained with wooden weapons before they moved on to the real deal. This was for a very good reason; I've seen a man open up a cooked ham like it was Christmas with nothing but a sharpened credit card. Real, deadly blades are meant to go through skin, muscle and bone like butter; you don't want to have some yahoo practice them out on your epidermis.
Finally the hero trains to shoot 'curved bullets' which I'm sure had firearms specialists smiling, as most bullets when fired from a distance, do in-fact curve (although they usually curve down as opposed to the side). Bullets typically follow a complex corkscrew motion due to air resistance, recoil, gravity and the gyroscopic rotation a bullet makes in flight. So the hero trains for six months to learn that his gun works. Although the bullet ballet is taken to a 'magical' extreme where you're half-way expecting Lee Harvey Oswald to show up as the main boss in the end.
The visually ambitious director Timur Bekmambetov (Nightwatch, Daywatch) brings his usual imaginative, self-aware and silly action set pieces to WANTED; which swing wildly from being incredibly cool to utterly preposterous in a matter of frames. Whether or not you embrace this silliness is going to measure how much you enjoy WANTED as a movie. If a flick full of flying business men, flipping cars, bullets shot from a mile away through donut holes, talking ATMs, dueling hand-guns, exploding rats, peanut butter-fu, keyboard-fu, Morgan Freeman-fu and Angelina Jolie doing the limbo on a subway train is your idea of cinema heaven; WANTED is the ambrosia of the gods.
If all of the above doesn't sound like it's up your alley; you might want to go see WALL-E instead.
Movie Review: One Missed Call (remake)
Current mood: annoyed
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
ONE MISSED CALL was originally directed by Takashi Miike (Ichi the Killer, Audition) an avant-garde filmmaker known as much for his outlandishness as for being prolific; and ONE MISSED CALL is easily his most commercial film.
One Missed Call deals with a group of friends who begin to get bewildering phone messages from moments before their death, and as the messages come true, it leads the entire group on a chase to find the origin of the cursed phone call in the hopes of stopping it. ONE MISSED CALL is pretty derivative, despite Miike's stylish influence and the ending for the original is very much in the vein of RINGU and its countless copycats.
It would be a compliment to say that ONE MISSED CALL the America remake is a derivative of a derivative.
It's not. It's a cash grab.
The stylistic choices for the remake aren't just bad, they're insidious. Every single thing this movie could have done wrong, it does worse. Not only does the remake cut out all of the subtext, remove the single best scene in the original film (for a PG-13 rating), and fill the movie to the rafters with exhibition; it completely screws the finale.
One Missed Call The Remake is such an obvious paint by the numbers experience in the mundane, that it makes Friday the 13 part V look like an Alejandro Jodorowsky masterpiece. One Missed Call the remake, is demographic research masquerading as a movie. It's insulting to horror fans because it treats horror trends and the distinctive vision of directors and writers as nothing more than molds to exploit an audience. The copycats assimilate the style, but not the substance; they translate the words, but not the story. The remake of One Missed Call is the business model of taking something original and unique and bleeding it for cash and profit.
Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, but mass production is a slap in the face. The exact thing that makes Asian Horror work, its cultural distinctiveness, is what the North American remakes seem bound and determined to eliminate for the sake of appealing to a wider audience. The studios are locked in a Catch 22; the appeal of Asian Horror is that it's not a traditional ghost or horror story from North America, but the studio's demographic research tells them that Asian films are a niche market, and that the best way to recoup a film's budget is by making it PG-13. So the studios take films that have a reputation for being different and turn them into traditional horror movies; it's a lose-lose situation because it undermines the whole genre and it isn't fooling anybody.
I see a lot of xenophobia online and off in regards to Asian films and foreign films in general. People who will happily race into the arms of a terrible movie rather than read subtitles, or accept a film with protagonists that are from different countries. I see these fans calling for horror movies to go back to the 'good old days' of traditional horror; yet those same people seem to be forgetting that it was the homage-rich, creative-bankruptcy of the 90s and that genre of self-aware horror that drove fans by the thousands into the arms of Takashi Miike in the first place. It was that same self-aware worshiping of the 'good old days' of the 1980s, that convinced Hollywood that people would be more interested in seeing remakes of movies like Nightmare on Elmstreet and The Evil Dead, than take the chance on making new movies instead. Fans of genre fiction and cinema should be less frightened of cultural barriers, subtitles and the surreal; and be more frightened of complacency and stagnation.
In that light, ONE MISSED CALL the remake, may just be the scariest film of the year.
Thanks to Postal I am now positive that Uwe Boll is brilliant; just not a brilliant filmmaker.
The real genius of Postal wasn't in the film at all; it was in Uwe Boll's advertising campaign. Leading up to the release of his latest movie infamous director Uwe Boll unleashed a reign of terror on the online community that may go down in history alongside The Tingler as one of the most outrageous promotional ideas in cinema. Boll has done everything except biting the heads off of live chickens to promote Postal; including calling out Transformers director Michael Bay for a fight at Mandalay Bay, insulting Hostel director Eli Roth as well as Stephen Spielberg and actor George Clooney. Boll even declared that he would retire from filmmaking if over a million fans signed an online petition protesting his work.
Over two hundred thousand people signed the petition to ban the Boll; which garnered mainstream media coverage from all over the world.
Think about that folks; Uwe Boll managed to organize over two hundred thousand of his biggest online detractors into a massive grassroots advertising campaign to promote his latest movie. Even more outrageous, Uwe Boll managed to convince a score of his harshest critics, some of whom had never fought a day in their lives, to get in the ring for a boxing match with Boll, who just so happens to be a PROFESSIONAL FIGHTER.
"WE WANT TRIFFIDS!" - Shouted from the audience by random viewer during my screening of The Happening.
The world has ended thousands of times in movies.
Zombies, plagues, death from above, ancient entities, nuclear war, mankind's stupidity, science, magic, liberal politics, conservative politics, religion, atheism, Satan, God, birds, worms, frogs, sharks, cars, aliens, ghosts, aliens that are ghosts, clowns, stay-puff marshmallow men and killer ice-cream from space; has all come at one time or another to do the human race in on the silver screen.
But no finale for mankind has ever been so lazy and detached as M. Night Shyamalan's THE HAPPENING.
The Happening is the latest installment in everyone's favorite sub-genre of apocalyptic movies; nature has gone run amok. This time around Nature is not possessed by comets, or genetically mutated, it's just really, really ticked off. Apparently mankind has gone 'too far' and Nature has had enough; and can you really blame her? Combine the last season of Heroes with that Caveman show, along with a winter season of Big Brother and one too many episodes of Bret Michaels Rock of Love; and that's all Gaia can stands and she can't stands no more. So Nature has finally decided to do something about us; namely cut down our population via neuro-toxins released through all forms of plant-life. Oh yes, the CORN will have its sweet revenge; you have covered it in tasty, artery-clogging trans-fats for the very last time.
Mark Wahlberg stars as a school teacher Elliot Moore who spends his time generally misquoting Albert Einstein and teaching biology wrong; yes kids bees aren't disappearing because of Colony Collapse Disorder, infections from foreign fungi or the varro mite parasite, its just because NATURE WANTS THEM TO DISAPPEAR. And according to The Happening, we're next! Nature has put out a botanical hit on the human race (or at least a portion of them) and now we must fear the trees that we once hugged!! So now Marky Mark along with his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), fellow teacher Julian (John Leguizamo) and cast of potential victims must evacuate from the terrible threat as it spreads across the United States.
And that's about it for the plot.
Here's the irony; for a movie called "The Happening", well...not a lot happens. Director M. Night Shyamalan revises the old quote about the human race ending; only this time it's "This is how the world will end. Not with a bang; but a yawn." It's like a less violent, less interesting version of Sion Sono's Suicide Circle, and the pacing is so slow it feels like it has the running time of Sátántangó. And by god the acting and the dialog wasn't helping. Not even a little! Call it a hunch but I don't think audiences are suppose to be falling over in fits of hysterical laughter during the mass suicide scenes. And as my friend Chris pointed out to me, trees just can't act; it doesn't matter how you shoot them!!
Now some of the deaths in The Happening are pretty gruesome and the concept of plants killing people, while certainly not new, is one I find particularly intriguing because of the monstrous nature of real plants in the wild. The idea of plants cutting down overrun animal populations is not without a basis in fact; many fungus and spores keep a healthy balance in nature in particular in the insect community, keeping everyone on their toes so no species can clearly dominate. Contrary to what The Happening would have you believe, this is not because plants are looking to balance-out over-population, or because nature is sentient and aware. As many David Attenborough documentaries will tell you, plants are simply the single most war-like species on the planet. They live in a constant state of hyper-aggressive never-ending conquest and will settle for nothing less than the absolute annihilation of all living things that are not them. So if plants are going after humans it's not because of something we've done; it's just because they're plants and that's what plants do.
Unlike many people it's not the idea I had a problem with, it's the execution that was lacking. It would be simple to actually sell this concept as a horrific one to the movie-going populace and to really milk the idea in a Hitchcock BIRDS type atmosphere; but The Happening is content to just float lazily along on the superficial concept. The plot is completely braced with a leisurely and lacking social drama and terrible (sometimes laugh out loud) dialog and performances. It gets to the point where you feel like nobody is trying anymore, that nobody cares about the plot and like there's no work or effort in the film. I already mentioned that The Happening echoes Suicide Circle at times, but it also shares similarities with the recent incarnation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Nicole Kidman, and the hero's choice in the final moments feels like a rip off of Stephen King's Mist and there's certainly parallels with Spielberg's recent War of the Worlds, heck even the finale is similar to the end of 28 Weeks Later from last year. It's so derivative of other far superior End of the World films that The Happening feels like you've already watched it a dozen times over by the time you finish one screening.
The worst part of all is that the movie just doesn't care about its content; there's no spark in The Happening, there's no interest in the characters or the drama or even the event itself. Everything just acts as an excuse to get to the next scene, so that you can get to the ending. It's a very depressing and disappointing film.
The Happening may be the worst movie of the year. It's certainly the worst movie M. Night Shyamalan has ever directed.
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