How We Waited Out The Election

Only now, as the smoke clears and the euphoria dies down, do I realise how much the wait for November the fourth had turned my mind into a stagnant pond, a Moebius strip of re-thought thoughts, cognition turned into a chore thanks to the insane worry over something I literally had no control over (at least Canyon could vote, an act that made her justifiably happy). Two days later, and look at me! I'm all florid and shit, like what I was previous, like.

During that interminable wait, we tried to keep ourselves occupied and not just keep reading the same four websites (though we enjoyed it all) and getting even more obsessed than usual with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Our efforts bore some pleasant fruit (the cherries and strawberries of the week) and some disappointing fruit too (mangoes, sharon fruit and unripe bananas, metaphorically speaking).

Burn After Reading

I had high hopes for this after the excellence of No Country For Old Men had erased disappointed memories of the previous four Coen Brothers movies (yes, I'm not crazy about O Brother, Where Art Thou? or The Man Who Wasn't There), but it was frustratingly slight. Being more of a fan of their hyper-weird comedies than their dramas, with The Big Lebowski at the top of my faves list and Raising Arizona close on its tail, I was hoping this would be similarly unhinged and frenetic, but instead it was like Fargo with more jokes, which is a problem considering I don't really like Fargo that much. At least, not as much as many seem to.


Of course, mid-level Coen Brothers movies still have a lot to recommend. Almost all of the performances were great (though weirdly Malkovich did my head in with. His. Stilted. Fucking. Line. Readings. And. Laboured. Fucking. Profanity.), with special kudos to the ever-wonderful Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins (who broke my heart). That said, why did they bother casting Tilda "Goddess" Swinton for a part that had about twelve lines? Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy to see her on screen in any capacity, but she seemed ill-served. Here's hoping she becomes a Coen repertory player and turns up again, except with something to do other than be annoyed with the men in her life.


Even with that cast, the film never seemed to come alive, though the central point, that of lampooning the arrogance and solipsism of a bunch of self-regarding twerps who think their pitiful lives have some greater meaning, when in fact all they are little more than a bunch of horny morons, was beautifully done, perhaps even more so than the previous times they have tried to make that point (No Country, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, etc.). I've had more fun thinking about the film than I did watching it. That said, Brad Pitt is a better comedic actor than I thought possible.


I'm grateful to the Coens for proving that.

Quantum of Solace

Casino Royale is possibly my favourite Bond movie since On Her Majesty's Secret Service, leapfrogging over The Living Daylights, The Spy Who Loved Me and Goldeneye, but poverty has delayed us going to see the latest movie. Instead I've been rewatching this over and over again.



We might still see it this week, once I've sold a kidney, following the wonderful news that Vue Cinemas have instituted over-18's only performances for people who don't want to put up with hordes of little shits treating cinemas like the local bus depot. A black man is elected President of the United States and a cinema chain (in our home town, no less) finally realises moviegoers have been staying away because of the behaviour of a bunch of oiks, all in the same week? This truly is the golden age of civilisation. Speaking of which...

Civilisation Revolution


If anything stops me blogging, it will be this game. In its previous manifestations it was already the greatest game ever made (yeah chess, thass right. What have you done for me lately?), but now it's less fussy, faster paced, and filled with endearing silliness. Canyon has been forced to put up with my wasting hours on the hellishly addictive thing, so much so that I'm now responding to her conversational gambits with a reflexive "Follum follum!" If you've played it, you know what that means.

Tropic Thunder

It's taken us way longer than we would have liked to see Ben Stiller's attack on Hollywood, and it was not even worth the wait. Despite the odd great moment, the whole ambitious exercise falls flat with upsetting regularity. Though Robert Downey Jr.'s performance is just as amazing as we had heard, he didn't actually seem have anything funny to say, and we ended up laughing at Jack Black's cold turkey shenanigans instead. Stiller's original concept for the film is hugely appealing, but the execution of it just didn't seem to click at all, with the plot drifting along from one lengthy and ultimately unfunny scene to another, seemingly without direction or purpose. It made Zoolander look like a tightly plotted Preston Sturges movie (I say that as a fan of Zoolander who thinks it sometimes ambles when it should be sprinting). While Adam McKay's movies mostly come alive in the editing room, this never takes shape, and no amount of amusing scenes with Tom Cruise dancing and swearing can save it. Dispiriting stuff, though I'm hoping to see a longer cut soon that might justify that brilliant idea, and maybe even give Jay Baruchel and Brandon T. Jackson something to do other than be straight men. Zoolander got funnier with each viewing, so maybe something similar will happen here, though I doubt it.


Compare that to Pineapple Express, which we watched again, and is now, definitely, my favourite comedy of the year. Considering it's a stoner comedy it's built with the same care that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg lavished on Superbad, progressing with logical beauty from scene to scene with only a couple of moments at the end of the second act that show they love their McKee a bit too much. It's not a deal breaker at all, though, and the Hot Fuzz-style genre mash-up of the final act is even more satisfying second time around, with kudos going to Rogen's repeated declarations of, "Nice!" whenever anything goes his way (such as the hilarious respawning machine guns in the underground lair).


In comparison, Tropic Thunder looks like a first cut mess, something you would show to a studio head to reassure them that the money is on the screen. How talented individuals like Stiller, Etan Cohen (partly responsible for the magnificent Idiocracy) and Justin Theroux could botch this is beyond me. The latter name is especially troubling. My previous excitement at his participation in Iron Man 2 has withered completely. Let's hope he's better off without the improvisational scenes between the leads that appear to have derailed the film so badly.

Justice Society of America by Geoff Johns and Dale Eaglesham

Is this the best comic on the market right now? In terms of superheroism, perhaps it is, though of course it has been great since Geoff Johns jumped onto the title early in the previous incarnation. Johns is always great value (especially lately; he's on fire), but JSA is better than ever, making me retroactively like Kingdom Come more than I originally did. However, the main reason is...





...OMG Hawkman is a TOTAL BADASS. Trust Goody-Two Shoes Jay to get in his way though.

Hunger

Turner Prize-winning director Steve McQueen's meditation on Bobby Sands' hunger strike has been damned by some of the UK press for daring to portray the Republican struggle in a noble light, which is hilariously inappropriate as that is absolutely not what the film is about at all. While, yes, it is set in The Maze and follows Sands' strike from conception to death, and while it shows in horrific detail the back-and-forth mental and physical combat between the imprisoned IRA soldiers/terrorists/politicians (delete as applicable) and the guards, it's pretty much an abstract exploration of what art is. Prisoners daub the walls of the cells with shit, flood the corridors of the prison with urine, and, eventually, stage a protest that turns their bodies, as depicted by McQueen, into a time-lapse photo of living, breathing decay. Even the poster shows one of the "paintings" by a prisoner (a nod to previous Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili?).


This is, as far as I can tell, the one reading of the movie that explains the peculiar structure. The first third of the film concerns a new prisoner (Davey, played by Brian Milligan) learning the ropes of prison life and the protests therein via his cellmate Gerry (Liam McMahon), the middle third is the much-debated conversation between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and his priest (Liam Cunningham) about mortality and politics, and the final third is an impassive, minimalist depiction of Sands' lengthy death with Davey and Gerry disappearing from the movie altogether. Bear in mind, except for the middle section, there is almost no dialogue, with only a minimal amount of verbally communicated information giving background on what is happening. There is barely any character development, but then that's not what the film is about. It's about their acts, their attempts to say something with little more than their bodies as the conduit of their emotion and rage. Much of what they do has little effect. The shit paintings are blasted away and the urine is washed up in a shot of audience-patience-defying length. Only the deaths of the hunger strikers seem to have any effect, though that is relegated to a few title cards at the end of the movie giving a few nuggets of information about the subsequent years.


Getting angry about the movie for glamourising the strike (shurely shome mishtake; it's nigh-unwatchable) or having a pro-IRA agenda seems wrong-headed, though I understand many people are never going to allow themselves to move on from those horrible years during the struggle. However, in the terms of the film, that struggle is less important than McQueen's interest in the way the prisoners and hunger strikers express themselves, with the only scene that debates the details of the Republican battles and the morality of politicised suicide being the notorious static art/anti-art shot of a drab room and Sands and his priest smoking and talking for twenty minutes, which, while hypnotic and superbly played, stands in contrast with the bleak, almost silent beauty of the rest of the movie. McQueen seems to be staring into his soul and wondering why he is an artist, and how his art compares to something as drastic as turning the place you live into a hellhole using only the waste products of your body, or allowing yourself to be brutalised just to make a statement and to psychologically affect those who torture you. Isn't art meant to affect the people who experience it? Isn't making a person beat you to a bloody pulp the most extreme way to do that? Where does that leave McQueen and the rest of the YBAs?


Can you tell that I thought it was amazing? There's a lot to digest (really, no pun intended), especially as it is attracting some fascinating debate, as in this excellent piece from Frieze magazine. It's definitely on my end of year best film list, and strongly recommended for anyone who can handle the body horror.

I'm unsure as to whether admitting that I spent the last couple of weeks doing all of that in addition to habitually checking on Obama's progress makes me look more or less sad. I could lie and say I also went sailing, if that helps. Of course, now we're waiting for his press conferences as if they were episodes of Friday Night Lights, as we tuned into CNN last night to see him talk about getting a shelter dog (which made Canyon almost swoon) and expressing condolences over a journalist's damaged arm (which almost finished me off). Compared to that slavish devotion to the President-Elect, acting like a couple of lovestruck groupies, six hour marathons of CivRev almost look cool.

Gaia Preserve Us, It's Still Happening!

Thanks to the miraculous nature of the internet, with its digital doohickeys and quantum doodads that I have no way of understanding due to being about 89 years old, a copy of the original draft of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening (at that time called The Green Effect) has fallen into my hands. I was looking for clarification on a line of dialogue from the film that I have been making fun of, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered, having heard that they were very similar and therefore there would be very little point in reading something that has already appalled and amused me earlier this week. However, I was in for a shock. The original script, and original vision of Shyamalan's, is simultaneously even more silly and yet more coherent from a storytelling standpoint, and therefore a far more satisfying project. However, instead of cheering me up, knowing that my suspicions that there was a potentially interesting approach to the story were well-founded, I'm actually angry. We were sold a lemon from a guy who had promised us a sleek supercar, and yet actually had that supercar lying around spare and ready to give us but figured we would prefer the lemon instead. No, Mr. Shyamalan, I wanted the supercar! You can keep your citrus fruits, thank you very much. Anyway, here is a description of the supercar, and why it is better than the lemon. (I'll stop with that stretched metaphor now.)

-------------More spoilers right here-----------------

In my previous post I railed against a lot of things, such as the weird negativity of some of the characters, the cutesy character quirks, the unsatisfying ending, etc. etc. I'm not kidding when I say the film just seems to stop, with the Happening coming to an end at a specific time, just as Elliot (Wahlberg) and Alma (Deschanel) walk out into a field with an innocent young girl just so they can get a hug. Such nonsense. In the sense that Shyamalan seems to be mimicking Spielberg's War of the Worlds, with global events being shown through the eyes of a bystander who gets lucky (though Tom Cruise's character still gets to be a hero at the end, one of the many things I don't like about the final act of that film), I get that ending, but it still feels like a cop-out.


Now I find that for some inexplicable reason, Shyamalan has ditched the original ending, which might have made audiences laugh, but would have at least been coherent. In The Green Effect, Elliot's ruminations on the mood ring that connects him and his wife are absent for the majority of the film, though he throws it out at the end, while talking to her through the slavepipe (I don't know what else to call it). Again they are hiding from the Gaia-toxins, but in this version of the film, in addition to the plants being triggered at first by huge groups of humans and then by smaller and smaller groups as the film progresses, it now gets triggered by other things. At one point it seems that Gaia might be angry at someone for using an electric saw, though it's unclear what Shyamalan is getting at; a shame as otherwise it's a very well-written piece of work.

Trapped in separate houses, Elliot re-woos his wife, who has been trying to divorce him throughout the film (because he feels too much and seems to be reckless whereas she is panicky and unable to open herself up), and upon mentioning the mood ring and how he can't remember the colour of love, he realises that the last trigger for the toxins is individual moods. The crazy lady - who is not as batshit in this version, sadly, though she does have a cool-sounding Room of Crazy filled with Revelations-style nonsense - has just been affected and is wandering around stabbing herself with a crucifix (seriously), and Elliot realises she was targeted as she is filled with negative energy, whereas he is filled with love, and would therefore not be targeted by the plants. He gambles on this by walking out, and Alma, now convinced by his display, walks out as well, and is not killed either. There is a suspenseful moment where Elliot seems to walk backwards, but he is just thinking, apparently, which makes me think the whole walking backwards thing is just there to make this moment work as a shock event. Unfortunately, any horror created by this moment would be utterly destroyed by the big reveal moments later, as he realises what the mood ring colour of love is; green! Gaia is love! ::hugs tree::


Okay, so that sounds increeeeedibly goofy, but if that had been included in the final film, it would explain the inclusion of a lot of weird stuff that makes no sense. The random hostility of some of the characters, Alma's isolation, Elliot's optimism, the insertion of a really horrible woman at the end, that bloody mood ring; it's all there to justify the final scene, with Elliot and Alma becoming reconciled, and that reconciliation being the thing that saves their lives. While I can imagine audiences all over the world throwing their hands up and screaming, "You've got to be kidding!", at least it's an ending. The one that got filmed is utterly unsatisfying. We get to see Alma and Elliot reconciled, but we get no idea why. Because they got lucky and she thinks they have a second chance? It just isn't convincing. The original ending, for all of its outrageous wishy-washy New Age sentiment, at least makes sense thematically. It was a huge mistake taking it out. Though really, all you need is love? That shit only passes muster in Ghostbusters II, and that's only because the Statue of Liberty walks around after being filled with Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis' lovegoop (if you'll forgive the confusing visual that conjures up). Otherwise, having your heroes prevail because Gaia likes the colour of their auras and is a bit sentimental about wuv (despite killing nearly six billion people) is pretty hard to take.

To make things worse, there are other changes that ruin the film, and suggest that despite Shyamalan's insistence on final cut, his vision was altered due to pressure from the studio. As the final budget was something like $60m, I get the sense that he had to take a big cut from what he originally wanted to spend, which would account for the localised nature of the Happening. In the original script, it happens globally, at the same time, which is far scarier. As some of the lines hinting at this are left in the film, it makes me wonder if those awful TV inserts of newscasters ineptly discussing the Happening were done later, as they are not well made and contradict some of the dialogue about the march of events (especially the train driver saying he can't contact anyone).


That also makes the finale more effective. In The Green Effect Elliot is seemingly a history teacher (or anthropology teacher; I was unsure) instead of a science teacher, but has read a paper on plants responding to the threat of nearby ant populations by releasing ant-killing toxins, which seems to be the inspiration for the whole movie. The plants stopped once the ants population had shrunk to .00006% of its original size, which suggests that the shots at the end of The Green Effect, of shiny happy people around the world venturing out into a now toxin-free environment, means that Gaia feels it is no longer threatened by humans. I guess that means there's only about a million people left on the planet. That makes a sobering kind of sense, not the vague ending with the first Happening being a warning that humans happily ignore, prior to Paris getting targeted, which leads to all sorts of confused guesses about the messgae of the movie. Perhaps Gaia thought Europeans would be more receptive to large-scale death; a comment on America being more steadfast in the face of threats, as opposed to France being more likely to surrender, according to silly insulting beliefs? I hope not. Stay classy, Shyamalan.

The Green Effect is also much more straightforward than the filmed script. No hotdogs, no "Use science, douchebag!" or whatever the line was, no calculus calculus calculus. I'm on the fence about whether that's a good thing or not. I've got nothing against quirk, but this stuff, when delivered in the super-serious Shyamalan style, just seems risible. The only real character quirks featured in the original script make the main couple more likeable, such as Elliot's insistence on carrying a guitar everywhere so he can chase his dream of becoming a musician, even though Alma thinks he's being silly (Shyamalan makes sure to paint him as a pretty bad songwriter, a touch I respected). In The Green Effect, motivations that were mysterious now make sense, such as Julian's (Leguizamo's) bitchy comments to Alma, and if it had been filmed like that, it might still have been utterly goofy, but it would have been consistent. I just cannot imagine why the finished version had to be made the way it did, removing motivation and logic and replacing it with whimsy, obfuscation, exposition, and happenstance.


I guess Shyamalan was trying to make a movie that had a mystery to it, that didn't hew so closely to potentially nuance-free McKee-style story mechanics, but what he created wasn't a 2001-style curio that inspires reappraisal and alternate interpretations. It's still pretty straightforward, but just has bits missing, bits that would add to the power of the story, not detract from it. It's bad storytelling, and the only reasons for these odd decisions that I can think of are that Shyamalan was annoyed at executive suggestions aimed at him and his vision, and decided to arbitrarily excise relevant scenes and neuter the script in order to wreck his film as a fuck you, which really doesn't sound like him, or he doesn't have a good sense of what he is doing anymore, and got too close to the film to see the error of his ways. Either suggestion saddens me.

I'm not saying The Green Effect would definitely have been a better movie than The Happening, as we would probably still have had the bizarre performances of the leads, performances so odd that I wondered if they had been hypnotised the way Bernard Rose hypnotised Virginia Madsen on the set of Candyman (as shown on the excellent documentary included on the DVD). We would still have had the unscary shots of grass swaying; the script features funny directions such as "THE GRASS OBSERVES THE HOUSE", which you just can't film without it looking like you're just filming a house in a field. We would still have the occasional outbreak of clumsy exposition. We would still have had the perplexing inability to generate suspense from a man who once seemed to be able to do it without effort. We would still have the awkward hypothesising of Elliot, which is awfully accurate considering he doesn't really have any way to evaluate his suspicions. We would still have the walking backwards, which looks dopey. We would probably not have any gore. The original script is much harsher than the finished film, with more death, and more cinematic and brutal death at that (people packing their mouths and noses with dirt, or crashing their cars on a busy expressway, for example). The original vision for the movie was obviously one of a really gruelling emotional experience, one that would really hammer home the crisis facing humanity, thus strengthening Shyamalan's message, but for some inexplicable reason he backed away from that. Studio interference? Or loss of nerve? Will we ever know?


Even after pondering it today I'm still not sure if reading the original script makes me feel better or worse about Shyamalan. I kinda liked it, and the movie that played out in my head could have been good, though with an ending that would have polarised the audience in much the same way as the end of Signs. I also don't know if I would rather have had the possibly merely average and forgettable Green Effect, or the accidentally entertaining failure that was The Happening. I'd like to think I can get more pleasure from an average movie than a ridiculous disaster, but then I think about calculus, and about hotdogs, and about Betty Buckley losing her shit right into the camera, and I think, you know, pleasure is pleasure. I'm glad The Happening exists, and I'm glad that I've seen it.

And anyway, it's not like it's the worst film of the year. Cassandra's Dream wins that particular award. Compared to that, The Happening is just fine. What's more worrying is that Shyamalan had something promising in his hands, and squandered it. Will there ever be a moment where he takes stock of himself, listens to the advice of those around him, and sees that perhaps he can profit from the experience of others? I truly hope so, and look forward to a great Shyamalan movie further down the line or something even more bonkers and misjudged, just to be a dick.

Worst Movies of 2007 Face/Off! (Results)

If you're wondering why the slight delay in this, it's not that I'm really crappy with numbers, but that I've spent the past two days playing Guitar Hero III (until I got as far as Cherub Rock on Hard and gave up, weeping), Super Mario Galaxy (a masterpiece), and John Woo's Stranglehold, which is not the best game ever made, but is the best gaming sequel to a legendary action movie masterpiece featuring Chow Yun Fat and cameo appearances by John Woo ever made, and as such is fully deserving of my time. As for the two movies, the scoring is as arbitrary as before, but with them I hope to give a sense of what watching both movies was like. Both movies are glossy and dumb, but only one will end up in my collection of bad movies.

I Know Who Killed Me

Cast: Lindsay Lohan: -7
Neal McDonough: -2
Julia Ormond: 1
Brian Geraghty: -4
Donovan Scott: -9
Paula Marshall: 4
Total: -17

A justifiably crappy score, with the professionals doing their best to keep things afloat while the director fiddles, and the amateurs running around putting even bigger holes in the boat. The filmboat. ::sigh:: Darn metaphors! All that said, bonus points for casting the likeable Paula Marshall in a smaller role. She's been notoriously bad at getting a job on shows that don't get cancelled mid-season or earlier, and I'm hoping that turning up in crud like this is the bottom of a curve and now her prospects will improve. Donovan Scott plays the sheriff of Bluetown, and though he's only in a couple of scenes, he's appalling, like a benevolent, Santa-like version of the sheriff in The Blair Witch Project 2: Post-Modernism Go Boom. Thank Crom Sivertson and Hammond had no idea what to do with the police, otherwise he would have been in it more.

Plot elements specific to these films:
Unintentional humour unsullied by nasty taste from subject matter: -4
Coherence: -1
Economical use of flashbacks: -1
Delivery of big audience-baiting moments: -6
Subtle use of motifs: -8
Avoidance of deus ex machina: 4

Total: -16

If you see this film, or have seen this film, then you know that that -8 for motifs is more than justified. There's no need to go on about the colour scheme any more, or the fact that I found it hard to laugh at due to the sleaziness (though the robot bits of Lohan certainly kept us entertained, but I will add that for all the incompetence on show, at least the film had an interesting internal logic (when it eschewed the nonsensical flashbacks). It was a definitely interesting idea, and had been worked out fairly well, at least at the script stage. Can you tell I'm trying to find something good to say about it? Erm, the strip club seemed like it was run fairly efficiently?

Miscellaneous:
Originality: 2
Liveliness: -3
Enthusiasm for project: 5
Avoidance of cliche: -7
Unique Selling Points: 3
Production values: 3
Total: 3

Finally, some positive numbers! A particularly good one for enthusiasm, because I believe Sivertson thought this was the big ticket, the stepping stone into the big time, and tried very hard to make an impression, throwing in semi-nudity and torture and colour and sex and look at me look at me I'm making a big movie bigger than anything Lucky McKee ever did! Unfortunately, it's crap. Still, again I have to take my hat off for the surprising payoff to the mystery.

I Know Who Killed Me overall total = -30

While Sivertson has managed to create a slasher thriller that has some kind of ambition, the sheer cynicism of it wrecks the project entirely. Who knows if Hammond's script could have been salvaged if given to someone who knows how to hold back on the symbolism, not to mention thinking twice about casting someone whose real life does not bear up well to comparisons with the main character's life. I just couldn't get past the sleaziness of the project; casting Lohan might have seemed like a great idea at the time, but in retrospect it's as if Sivertson and his cohorts were picking the last bits of dignity from the corpse of Lohan's career. As I said before, I really do hope this is not the case, and she can make a comeback. And not wear blue. With her pale skin, it really isn't her colour.

D-War

Cast: Jason Behr: -7
Amanda Brooks: -8
Robert Forster: 2
Chris Mulkey: -4
Craig Robinson: 1
Michael Shamus Wiles: -5
Total: -21

Dear God, where to begin? Only Craig Robinson and Robert Forster stand out at all here, and even then it's a close call. Forster in particular is asked to do some pretty silly things (meditating in mid-air, comedically faking a heart attack, pretending to be a martial-arts wizard), and phones it in pretty badly. Behr and Brooks, however, don't even manage that. Behr has zero charisma, and Brooks looks somnabulent, angry, frustrated, and disgusted with herself for getting the part. It's a monumentally feeble performance. I guess she has very little to work with, and might have been directed to act like someone who had just woken up whenever Shim said action, but I don't see why. As for Michael Shamus Wiles as Evil General, he was passably evil, in a pantomimey way. He was also okay at pretending to be in charge of a bunch of people. However, if the antagonist of your film is a big serpent, you really need to have a interesting human character to boo and hiss at, but he had no chemistry. You know, this film is so false and so empty it seems weird to judge it in this way. Did the actors hit their marks? I guess so. Did they fluff their lines? Not on the takes they used. That's as much as you could hope for.

Plot elements specific to these films:
Unintentional humour unsullied by nasty taste from subject matter: 8
Coherence: -7
Economical use of flashbacks: -5
Delivery of big audience-baiting moments: 6
Subtle use of motifs: 0
Avoidance of deus ex machina: -9

Total = -7

I think it was fairly obvious from the fact that I wrote twice as much about this film that I enjoyed it much more than I Know Who Killed Me. I laughed from beginning to end, mostly because I couldn't believe how inept it was. In a normal studio situation surely someone would have realised that the script was unusable, and have other writers come in. Here Shim was fully in charge with no oversight, and the result has to be seen to be believed. Robert McKee's theories of storytelling annoy as many people as they delight, but this is proof that he's onto something. Shim breaks almost all of McKee's rules, not because he has mastered them, but because he has no idea what they are, and has merely cobbled together bits from other films and stuck them together in some kind of order that resembles the movies he's stolen them from. As much as any writer should watch Chinatown or Casablanca (and my personal choice, Midnight Run), they should also see something like this, because it's a total failure, primarily because of the non-plot. Still, the big action scenes, the wow moments he built everything around, are wonderful. I may have hated most of the plotting and acting, but when a pilot pulled out a gun and started shooting at the dragon hanging off the side of his helicopter, I went a little crazy with excitement. Only some poor effects and filming ruin it, but still, for a dragon fan, it's the nuts.

Miscellaneous:
Originality: 0
Liveliness: 3
Enthusiasm for project: 5
Avoidance of cliche: -6
Unique Selling Points: 4
Production values: 6
Total = 12

For all of his ineptitude, Shim (seen here impersonating Ricky Gervais) knows how to cover his back with some actual talent. He hired Bruckheimer/Bay regular Steve Jablonsky to handle the soundtrack, and Mark Mangini to work on sound design (he did some great work on The Mist this year, in a monster movie two-fer). They do good work here, and it definitely helps Shim create the illusion that he knows what he's doing, but even a little attention to what's going on shows him up as a chancer. His previous movie, Yonggary, was such a catastrophic flop and disaster (after he promised to turn the Korean film industry into a powerhouse to rival Hollywood) that he had to get it right this time. Seems he figured he could do that by filming in L.A. with an American crew, which is a hell of a screw-you to Korean filmmakers. Anyone who has seen recent Korean movies knows there are some incredibly talented people there, and Shim should have been alerted to the fact that even when you take a holiday, you can't take a holiday from yourself. Or something. What I'm trying to say is, Hyung-Rae Shim, your movies are always going to be shit until you fire yourself. Don't blame the caterers. We can tell who messed up.

D-War overall total = -16

So there you go. I Know Who Killed Me gets the lowest score, so can be safely filed in the Awful Bad Movie file. It's silly, it's pretentious, it's dreary, and it features some horrible performances from people who have a horrible aura of desperation around them that would sour you on the movie even if it wasn't so nasty. D-War, on the other hand, is a big silly disaster, with film-student errors, egregious plotholes, Saturday-morning-serial acting, and a huge FX blowout featuring monsters fighting the military. If you watch it in the wrong frame of mind you might think I'm mad for recommending it, but watch it with a bunch of friends knowing full well you're going to be watching a big turd of a movie, and it's up there with Dreamcatcher and Albert Pyun's Ticker. I hated it so much I loved it. And now, I'm going to see if I can find an Evil General action figure online. Wish me luck!

Holding Out For Some Heroics

If you've had a look at the Heroes talkbacks on pretty much most blogs and nerdsites throughout the internet, massive concern is being expressed about the second season. For my part, I think this season started off from a bad position, continued that lacklustreness, added some really really bad plots (Peter Petrelli and The Hoirish Ghangsterrs of Ineptitude is this show's menacing mountain cougar plot, though sadly it's been going on much longer than that memorable misstep) and has seemingly settled into a not very exciting groove. This week was okay, in that it's neither getting better or worse, though the odd moment struck a nerve. Nathan's SuperPhantom of the Opera moment with his mirror was great, but otherwise things were set to Uninspiring. (Man, Pasdar really should have kept the Beard of Depression. This shit is just wack.)


I've figured out part of what bugs me about the second season. In the first, even when the show was bumbling along with scene after scene of set up, there was some little moment each episode that was fricking cool. Nathan eluding Noah and The Haitian by rocketing into the sky, Peter and Matt's telepathy setting up a painful feedback loop, Claire's autopsy, Niki and DL fighting in Jessica's bedroom; all of it was TV gold. This season, hardly anything has happened that has grabbed the audience by the genitalia like that. West flying a lot? Seen it. What else you got? A painting featuring a major character lying dead on the ground? Yawn! The only thing I can think of is Ma Petrelli putting the shouty brain zap on Matt. That made me laugh. Other than that, nothing.

Another thing has been bugging me, but it's as much a criticism of all superhero movies and TV shows as it is about Heroes specifically. Tim Kring said he started this series thinking about making something about people who are heroes, and using the superhero genre to explore that made sense. But what heroic things are they doing? It's all a bunch of internecine squabbling and assassinations between ill-defined factions within the superpowered community. Last year they saved New York, and I gather this year will be about saving New York from Maya's DoomGoop, but other than that, these chumps are the opposite of heroic. By the way, Kring? Your Not-Wonder Twins? Brian Michael Bendis called. He wants the plot from Ultimate X-Men #41 back, thanks.

There were a few little heroic moments last year: Hiro and DL teaming up to save a car crash victim from an explosion; Hiro pulling someone out of the way of a crashing car; Claire saving someone from a burning train (in the first episode; you'd have thought that would have been part of the show template). Now it's a bunch of secretive stuff about shadowy organisations, with the odd burst of power-usage. I get that it might be due to budgetary restraints, not just because of the effects stuff but just because having the heroes outed would lead to bigger stories involving a larger cast of non-heroes, but it still chafes.

It's the same with other superhero shows or films. Some of them get it right, most notably Spidey's nerve-wracking battle to save the train in Spider-Man 2, but also, for example, the Fantastic Four saving the London Eye (good work, Fantastic Four!) in Rise of the Silver Surfer, and Superman vs. the San Andreas Fault in Superman (or Superman vs. an underwater earthquake threatening to destroy Metropolis in Superman Returns). Superhero stories should revolve around more than just heroes battling villains. I mean, I love that, but if all you've done in creating an superhero world is have a hero/villain dynamic (because that's the classic antagonist/protagonist struggle taught in writing classes), then the whole thing seems pointless, even if the villain has a plan to endanger the populace. It's insular and dull, even if you occasionally have someone flying his girlfriend around the Hollywood sign (a pointless scene, but nicely done).


Daredevil, Elektra and Ghost Rider are all about the hero battling the villains, and you rarely, if ever, see them helping the common man. Even Batman Begins skimps on that. It's not disastrous for the movie to lack this; Batman Begins and the first two X-Men movies are still great despite that flaw. It's just something that seems to get ignored when writing superhero tales, perhaps because McKee says we're supposed to focus on the antagonist and not extraneous miscellaneous characters. Sadly, those extraneous characters serve a specific purpose in superhero stories, and losing them because you've decided to slavishly follow the detail of a manual and not the spirit, (or you have no time left in your script to add this important detail) will just damage your movie.

As much as we like watching the uber-mensch beating the shit out of each other, it's also nice to see heroes doing heroic things for others. The Spider-Man 2 scene is one of my all-time favourite film moments precisely because it does two things really well. It has Doc Ock and Spidey kicking the crap out of each other and using their powers creatively, and Spidey doing everything in his power to save the bystanders. Man, I choke up thinking about that scene.


Heroes, however, has totally lost sight of that. I'm sure the season arc will involve a threat so large that thwarting it will save many many people, but other than that the show is mostly about the plague threatening the heroes. I like some of the characters, and yes, a threat to the next stage of evolution is serious, but I'm more concerned with humanity. The masterstroke of X-Men 2 (possibly my favourite superhero movie, along with Batman Begins and The Incredibles) is that for the majority of the movie the threat is against the mutants, and a lot of energy is spent explaining what a bad thing that would be. Then, right at the end, the plot twist kicks in, and Magneto grabs the opportunity to try to wipe out humanity. It just comes out of nowhere and yet is totally in character. Awesome. I <3 Magneto.

The main arc in Heroes is about the heroes being threatened, and while that's engaging, it's not enough (see also X-Men 3, until the added-on peril of Dark Phoenix kicks in). We need to see more than just an arc where a minority of humans are in trouble, or a season-long arc where humanity is tangentially in peril due to out of control powers such as Peter's, Ted Sprague's, or Maya's; we need our heroes to be heroes on a regular basis. Right now they're just superheroes sitting around fretting about themselves and moping. That doesn't sound like what Kring had in mind, and though it's absolutely not a showkilling problem now, it will be eventually. And no, I'm not one of those people who complains that post-Watchmen superheroes are too dark. If they're dark, let them be dark. That's fine by me, but at least let them do some good while they're feeling all Emo.


Still, I'm not going anywhere yet. Even a malfunctioning Heroes has its charms. Plus, this week did introduce the most entertaining new hero yet; Micah's cousin Monica, plagued by Katrina montages and looked after by Uhuru, who has a seriously crappy family if the whiny nonsense she has to put up with in this episode is anything to go by. "Grandma, you're stupid!" "Grandma, give me money!" "Grandma, open a com-channel to the Romulan vessel!" Poor Nichelle Nichols. Nevertheless, I remain psyched to see a living nerd legend onscreen again, just as I was when George Takei was on, and hey, it's better than being stuck on Babylon 5, eh, Walter Koenig?