OK, let's start with today. I finally found the time and courage to watch the ultimate cut of Watchmen, and the parts during which I didn't zone out were pretty good, I guess. This movie, and especially this 215-minute cut, is a mixed bag of all kinds of crazy stuff. I absolutely adore the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, which I guess is one of the reasons why I feel so ambivalent about it. Another would be the fact that I really really liked Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead, but since then I've learned that without a solid script by James Gunn Mr. Snyder's work tends to get all over the place. I mean, 300 was on OK movie, but his next film is going to feature talking animated owls, dramatic slow motion shots included! That's just seven different kinds of lame. And then there's the acting in Watchmen, which is generally just awful. Most of the actors look right for their roles, and I know that at least some of them are actually pretty good at their job, but somehow they all manage to deliver their lines in the most boring and stupid way possible. Maybe Mr. Moore was right and some comic books should never be adapted into anything that isn't a comic book, but I'd like to think that it could have been done much better. That said, I'm the sort of person who'll watch anything with Matt Frewer, especially if he's wearing some kind of facial prosthetics, so not all the performances were a total loss. And Malin Åkerman always does a really nice job playing really hot chicks, especially ones who like to have hot naked sex in chilly hovercrafts. My biggest problem with the movie was of course its conclusion. It's like, what, they ran out of money near the end so they just decided to skip the whole monster thing? You do not skip the monster! You never ever skip the monster! Why would anyone want to take a story that ends with a cool looking giant monster and make a movie out of it that has absolutely no monsters in it?! This is completely beyond me. Aren't giant tentacle monsters the main reason why people go to the movies in the first place? Or is it just me? What a stupid, stupid thing to do. I would've happily overlooked everything else, even the cool-yet-wholly-unnecessary gore, had they just given me my beloved multicolored monster. But they chose not to. Hence, they suck. The ultimate cut is basically the 186-minute director's cut with Tales of the Black Freighter edited into it. I have to admit that I never really got the point of the Black Freighter story in the original work, but this animated version makes even less sense edited into the rest of the film like that. It's completely distracting, and it turns a ridiculously long movie into a near-unwatchable one. I still kinda like the film version of Watchmen, but it's going to be a long while before I ever go near it again, and it's definitely not going to be this cut of the film. Three and a half hours is just too long for an action movie, and if you can't tell a story in less than two hours you shouldn't be making movies. I hear they can do wonderful things with television these days.
Who watches Malin Åkerman? I have no idea, but don't they
have the awesomest job in the world?
A couple of weeks ago I went to see Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec), directed by Luc Besson and based on the French-Belgian comics by Jacques Tardi. It was pretty cool, if a bit too French for my liking. French films are known far and wide for featuring extremely unfunny humor and women with unattractive mole patterns, and this one is no different, but there was enough cool CGI in it to keep me happy, including an adorable baby pterosaur and a whole lot of reanimated mummies. Louise Bourgoin was pretty good as the pre-WWI Parisian journalist/adventurer, and she does show her boobs in the movie, so I thought that was worth mentioning. Personally, I would have preferred more screen time for the cute pterosaur instead, but I guess that's just me again.
Nice belly button, Louise Bourgoin!
I also finally watched Gentlemen Broncos, and it was totally friggin' awesome! It was written and directed by the guy who made Napoleon Dynamite, but it's so much better than that. Jemaine Clement is hilarious as usual, and the rest of the cast does an incredible job portraying characters that are sad, pathetic and utterly clueless, and yet pretty damn charming in their own various ways. It's the sort of movie that was obviously made with deep passion for classic science fiction, fans of science fiction and hopeless dorks everywhere, so really, how could I possibly not fall in love with it? The Yeast Lords sequences, starring Sam Rockwell as some sort of long haired futuristic dude who rides a flying laser-shooting deer and for some reason keeps losing his balls, are worth the price of admission alone. Which I happened to not pay. Because I was forced to download it in HD. Because they never showed it in theaters here. Because they are retarded. And probably devoid of any reproductive organs. Unless you count anuses as reproductive organs, which is just fine an a life style, but does tend to produce rather unattractive babies. Brown babies. Smelly babies. Babies so foul you can't really do anything with them except flush them right down the toilet, to live among giant sewer alligators and mutated talking turtles. Awesome.
Halley Feiffer. Dorks are totally hot!
Even before I visited Hamburg I went to see The Disappearance of Alice Creed. I guess it was a pretty good movie, but that's not really why I or anyone else with a penis would enjoy it. You want to know the real reason? I've got three words for you: Gemma. Arterton. Naked. It doesn't get much better than that. Or doesn't it? What if we'll throw in some handcuffs? Pretty hot, right? Yeah. That's the good stuff. But wait, it gets even better! How about a shiny red ball gag? That's just enough to make you cream your pants, isn't it? Which brings me to the final selling point. If you'll decide to watch The Disappearance of Alice Creed, you are going to get a chance to see Gemma Arterton pee in a bedpan. That's right. A bedpan. By now, if you still haven't started looking for a way to see the movie, you're probably some sort of chick, and for that you have my full sympathies. And hey, did you know that Ms. Arterton was born with six fingers in each hand? If that's not the hottest thing I've ever heard, then I don't know what is!
If you look closely enough, you can kinda make out the scars!
I also watched Fantastic Mr. Fox, at home, in HD, once again because they never showed it in theaters here, even though they were supposed to. Which is a big fat shame, because for a movie with lots of cute talking animals it is actually beyond great. I love stop-motion animation and I love stop-motion animation that's meant for adults, but most of all I love adult stop-motion animation that's actually good. Because the basic concept of this type of animation is so, well, basic (not to say primitive), you can see quite a bit of it out there these days, but most of it is pure crap, the main flaw being poor character design. Look for the trailer for an Israeli/Australian co-production called $9.99 and you'll know what I mean. Fantastic Mr. Fox, however, is beautiful to behold in every way, and the story is pretty cool too. Something about a talking fox who likes to get drunk on cider, I think. The only thing I didn't like about it was George Clooney's voice work, but it's not really his fault that he sounds like a smug douche, now is it?
It was either this or a photo of Meryl Streep. *shudders*
I also went to see the new Nightmare on Elm Street remake, and it was pretty boring actually. I expected much more from the guy who directed all those cool Garbage videos back in the '90s, but I guess it just goes to show you that you can't trust anybody these days. There was absolutely nothing cool or interesting or special about it, and the new Freddy makeup design was a huge disappointment. I don't care that he looks more like a real burn victim now! He just doesn't look cool anymore!!! The whole thing was a complete waste of my time, and there wasn't even any noteworthy TnA to help pass that long hour and a half. What an utter waste of a perfectly good mythology. And you just know that they're going to make a sequel in a couple of years, which I'm going to have to sit through once again, so they better wise up by then and cast a bunch of genuinely hot chicks who can actually look scared and not wear a bra at the same time.
If you poop in your dreams, you poop for real!
I also watched the original I Spit on Your Grave, and despite the plot being about a chick who gets gang raped and then kills her attackers off one by one, it was actually pretty awful. The 1978 Dumb Broad Award goes to Camille Keaton for marrying Meir Zarchi, the Israeli director of I Spit on Your Grave. Here's a tip for all you ladies out there: if some sleazy Middle Eastern dude makes you roll around naked in a forest and get pretend-raped by a bunch of rednecks for half a movie with promises of fame and fortune, it might be a good idea to not marry him. Got it? Sleazy Israeli, butt rape, no marriage. There. I just saved you a lifetime of grief and bad hummus. On the other hand, the trailer for the new remake looks pretty damn good. Let us all just hope that when the time comes I'll be able to keep my pants zipped all the way up at the theater!
This is what happens when you get involved with a creepy Israeli dude.
Finally, last week I saw Inception, but I need to see it at least one more time before I can write anything half-coherent about it. Yeah, it was that kind of awesome.
Last night I went to see Rango, and to my great surprise it was so awesome that I think it may have restored my faith in American animation! This tale of a thespian-wannabe chameleon turned small town sheriff may not be a perfect one, as it does contain numerous cheese-filled moments that feel like they belong in a freakin' Pixar movie, but it has more than enough cool and weird stuff that looks like it was written and animated under the influence of Mexican magic sawdust to make it into something that is truly special in this age of 3D eyeball grinders and poorly animated talking automobiles. I'd also like to tip my douchy Purim hat to the talented men and women at ILM, who showed us all that when they're not too busy making crap for chubby bearded dudes in plaid flannel shirts they can actually produce full length animated motion pictures with a level of CGI that's far superior to the stuff you'd see in most recent live action features. The biggest problem I could find with Rango was that being a movie that mostly features animated reptiles, rodents, birds and amphibians, it has absolutely no pretty ladies to look at whatsoever (the handful of human characters are mostly male, and the only Barbie doll is decapitated, though I'm not quite sure if that's a plus or a minus). To make up for that, here is a picture of Isla Fisher (whose character is the only one in the movie that's designed in such a boring way it makes her look like a Bug's Life reject) in a red bikini:
Earlier this week I went to see Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring a circus freak who likes to draw fat guys with no clothes on and bang dumb Israeli broads until their ears start to bleed, and I actually really liked it. Leonardo DiCaprio plays some sort of cop or something who enjoys spraying his deep pink puke all over already filthy toilet bowls, which I guess is how he manages to maintain his blubbery girlish figure, and that's exactly how he chooses to spend his time on the boat ride to Shutter Island, home to a charmingly creepy hospital for the criminally insane, which back in 1954 meant anyone who didn't think that everybody else was a goddamn Commie. The official story is that he's there to investigate the disappearance of one of the patients, some crazy dame who one day got fed up with her three little brats and decided that they'll be better off sleeping with the fishies, from her thoroughly locked room. However, the real reason why he was so desperate to take the case was because the weirdo who set the fire in which Leo's wife burned to a crisp is supposed to still be somewhere on the island, after he'd disappeared from the hospital a couple of years ago. Leo and his dago partner begin their investigation of both the staff and the hospital patients, but everybody seems to be on their utmost creepiest behaviour and none of them are particularly helpful. Things get even worse when a terrible yet awesome thunder storm causes a major power failure, which means all the patients get loose and start running around the Island, screaming and yelling and humping innocent mailboxes to a stupor. Amidst all the confusion, in the darkest corner of the most disgusting cell in the most dangerous ward on the island, he finds the guy who first told him about the secret government experiments that are being conducted in the supposedly abandoned creepy lighthouse, now a mere beaten down shell of his former self who manages to confuse him even further by suggesting that all of Leo's experiences on the island have been staged especially for him. How did the patient escape from her locked room? Why is everybody acting so goddamn weird? Who's lying here, and more importantly, who isn't? And why did the director choose to include so many poorly composited CGI shots? Watch for the pleasantly predictable twist near the ending and find out, or not. Now, I've never seen any of Martin Scorsese's films in the past, and I have absolutely no interest in watching any of his previous ones in the future, but I did find Shutter Island to be an extremely enjoyable '50s B-movie type of film. It's dark and violent and fun, and have I mentioned the word creepy? Yeah, there's tons of that too. I'm not quite sure why Leonardo DiCaprio keeps getting acting work though. Sure, he used to be beautiful as a teenager, but as an adult his face looks completely misshapen, in a way that's almost painful to look at. That being said, I guess he's not too awful here, acting wise, so I'll let it slide just this once. Shutter Island was based on a novel written by some guy who wrote another book about a bunch of kids who get molested up the butt or something that also got made into a movie, but I still really want to read it. Thank gawd for that online bookstore that was named after the sort of book you would stick up your poop chute, because there are very few phrases I like more these days than 'free worldwide delivery'.
