Two Guns, A Toothpick, and Much 'Splodey

As is often the case, my mood-o-meter has swung from MustWatchFilms to MustPlayGames. Partly that's due to, you guessed it, Guitar Hero, an addiction-creating experience so potent that, if the US late night talk shows are anything to go by, would have already jeopardised their existence even if the writers had not balloted to strike. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both commented on its hold over the staff this week, David Letterman interviewed Slash and the Guitar Hero digression they went on ended up derailing the show, and last week Conan joyously gatecrashed a Rock Band session to play a real guitar and then sing Sabotage in the style of Edith Bunker. It was the TV highlight of the past few weeks.


Add to that Canyon's amazing Christmas coup; defying a Nintendo drought and buying a Wii for both of us to play Wii Sports (possibly the best free game ever offered with a new console) and Super Mario Galaxy, which is a hellishly addictive and scarily vertiginous masterpiece. It dominated Christmas almost totally. We only stopped playing so we could watch films (many of which were brilliant), or the Doctor Who Christmas special (which was anything but brilliant, and smelt like fried sewage). There's not many other Wii games I'm that interested in right now, but those two games (plus WarioWare: Smooth Moves) are plenty to go with for now. So yeah, with a controller glued to my hands, it's that much harder to blog, and the medium rarely lends itself to introspection. It's much easier to write about films, TV, or books (or magazines, as our new contributor Masticator will undoubtedly find). How can you write about a game? "I played Gears of War for five hours today and I totally shot a bunch of aliens in the face!" is a valid enough statement, but it's a more immersive and less nuanced experience, which makes commentary harder.

Still, let's try. This week has been devoted to John Woo's Stranglehold, a semi-sequel to Woo's bullet-ridden extravaganza Hard Boiled, which came out a few months ago. Thanks to the miracle of sales, I got it last week, along with Zhang Yimou's underrated courtly soap opera Curse of the Golden Flower, in a Chow Yun Fat double-bill. The game was received with a muted welcome, mostly because it's a pretty unambitious shooter released at around the same time as Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy, The Orange Box, and many other big event games. However, I'm a sucker for shooters (I've lost count of the hours I've spent replaying Black), and this has a very big draw; Woo-style action, which is, of course, the best and sexiest kind.


With Chow Yun Fat onboard to recreate his toothpick chewing gun expert Tequila, you control him through an increasingly frenetic series of chaotic battles, using a variety of weapons to destroy everything in your path. As in Max Payne and the Matrix games you can enter a slo-mo mode called Tequila Time, but the fun comes when you use the left trigger to dive or interact with objects in the environment, such as sliding down bannisters. If a villain is in range, Tequila Time begins automatically, and killing your enemies at that moment gives you points for style, which are translated into special attacks, including Precision Aim, which triggers some gory cutscenes of guys staggering backwards with blood shooting out of their throats, and the room clearing Spin Attack, unleashing a slow-motion cut scene filled with death and doves and a manically shouting Tequila. It's awesome.

Perfect for fans of Woo; Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright would love it. That said, it triggered a burst of nostalgia for that wonderful period at the start of the 90s when Woo became known to Western audiences with The Killer and Bullet in the Head, something that I can imagine happened to many people when this game and the recent Dragon Dynasty Hard Boiled reissue came out. I had to have yet another copy of this amazing film! So I went internet shopping, and sadly found that despite its iconic status, its treatment on DVD is simultaneously reverent and appalling.


Criterion adapted their old Laserdisc, which included commentaries from Woo and others, along with documentaries and an old student film. Great stuff, but apparently the screen is not a proper anamorphic transfer, and the subtitles are actually dubtitles, meaning we're still getting the terrible translation of the dialogue that plagued the original releases. I hoped it would have a better treatment by Dragon Dynasty, a DVD distributor owned by the evil, callous Weinsteins, who have a terrible track record of delaying the release of edited versions of acclaimed Hong Kong films and then bitching about people in the West trying to find the originals. (For film distributors, they sure don't like people actually watching movies, do they?) This time the transfer is better, but not perfect, and still it has dubtitles. Plus, the extras aren't as good as the Criterion ones.

Though it's good to know the reputation of the film is such that it keeps getting reissued in new packages, why can't it get done 100% right? Here is a comparison of the many versions released, showing no one disc has the whole package. Dragon Dynasty seem to have done a fairly good job with it, though many of the other films in their library seem to be getting an even better treatment. As for Criterion, why they dropped the ball is beyond me. Every other set they've released is exceptional. Don't they realise it's a bad idea to piss off millions of John Woo fans who do nothing but rewatch his expertly edited and hyper-violent scenes over and over again?


So which DVD did I end up buying from Amazon Marketplace at a ridiculous price mark-up from some dodgy geezer with a 81% feedback rating over the past 12 months? Neither of them. What, am I made of money? Besides, my Woo-love was reignited to such a crazed extent that I couldn't wait another second to see it, and ended up in HMV just an hour after completing the game, where I bought the cheap-as-chips Tartan UK version with the proper anamorphic transfer, proper subtitles, and not even a single extra.

Who cares? I rewatched the teahouse scene last night, and it was as jawdropping as I remembered. Canyon was similarly impressed. During the lulls in the action she gasped, "Is it done yet?", and "No really, is it done yet?", not to mention, "Why does anyone consider Chow Yun Fat cool? All he does is jump through the air with two guns. Anyone can do that." [It's true!!!! -- Canyon] (I'm being a big meanie. She's looking forward to seeing the whole thing, especially as a big fan of Face/Off. Perhaps I shouldn't have hassled her moments after returning home from a nasty commute with, "Look at the 'splodey two-gun crazy!!!" Sorry Canyon! [I'd had enough of crazy on my commute, it's true. I do want to watch it, though. Btw, if Stranglehold really is a sequel to Hard Boiled, it should have been called Over Easy. No, I never get sick of saying that. -- Canyon])

One of the things I love most about his style is the way he is willing to move the camera right into the carnage. At times you get the feeling that the battle isn't just raging in front of the camera, but all around as well. Especially in Hard Boiled, which looks like a war has broken out and Woo happened to have ten cameras under his command. Also, they're not always ground-level, point-of-view shots. In the warehouse fight the omniscient camera cranes over the characters and follows them into fire and shrapnel and clouds of smoke. It's wonderfully effective. The shot below is one of my favourites. Tony Leung leaps through an exploding car to escape certain death at the hands of Tequila, and the camera tracks with him (well, his stuntman). It's a two-second shot, but it is more exciting than most movies in their entirety.


To anyone who has only seen his American movies, you really have seen nothing yet. Face/Off came fairly close, though it was on a thematic level that the movie worked so well as a John Woo film (not saying the action wasn't incredible too, but it still lacked that berserker edge his Hong Kong movies had). Broken Arrow and Hard Target are a guilty pleasure. Though they're not that great, at least John Travolta in the former and Lance Henriksen and Arnold Vosloo in the latter seem to be having fun. Worst of all, Mission Impossible II was a disaster. Whoever made the decision to hand the film over to Stuart Baird for re-editing at the end of the shoot knows nothing about filmmmaking. Okay, so apparently Woo's original cut of the movie was about 210 minutes long (that's a lot of doves), and even I would baulk at that, but getting Baird in is an insane move.

It's like hiring a modelmaker to construct a beautiful piece of art, getting as far as allowing him or her to sculpt all of the individual pieces, all of which, while beautiful, mean nothing without the other pieces attached to it, and then handing the project over to someone else who doesn't know how it was meant to be put together, but has his own ideas and just jams them together willy-nilly. And then goes on to direct Star Trek: Nemesis. I think you catch my drift.


Woo's action scenes have a very specific rhythm, and he shoots knowing how the editing will go when he gets there. If you look at his raw footage you'll wonder why on earth he has some minor shots in slow-motion instead of just focusing on the big dramatic shots, but that's because the rhythm of the scene would only work with certain shots moving at a certain speed. It's hard to explain, but look at a scene from one of Woo's other movies, such as the shootout in Gina Gershon's flat in Face/Off (couldn't find a good enough YouTube clip, so you'll have to watch your own copy, and if you don't have one, then I weep for you). The action flips from fast to slow in an unorthodox pattern that hits every correct emotional beat without drawing attention to what is being accomplished. Then look at any action scene from Mission Impossible II. They seem to be randomly cobbled together with no relation between shots, and any momentum that might have been generated keeps being interrupted. Oh man, I know what I'm talking about, even if I can't explain it. It's like that dancing about architecture thing. Just go and compare the two. His style works well in one film and not the other because Baird. The End.

Weirdly, one of the things I liked most about Stranglehold was that during the battle scenes, I could click on the right button and activate Tequila Time manually, adding slow-motion moments whenever I thought the action needed it. It is a useful addition to your game, but more than that it's an aesthetic one. Obviously I'm not saying I'm a better editor than Baird (who is usually excellent, when not asked to mess around with material by someone with so precise a vision as Woo), but I felt that the game replicated the experience of watching a Woo movie more effectively than watching Mission Impossible II even though it actually is a John Woo movie. Hell, I even liked Paycheck more than that. I've not seen Windtalkers, as a good friend has told me on several occasions it's the worst and most laughable film ever, but even if it's John Woo's worst movie, I doubt it is Nicolas Cage's.

If you're new to Woo, check out the clip below, from the beginning of Hard Boiled. As has been said many times, when it came out many Western action movies ended like this. Hard Boiled starts this big, gets bigger, and ends with a 30 minute action scene with babies peeing, buildings exploding, a duel with one of the best movie villains ever (the incredible Mad Dog), and a five minute unbroken shot in the middle of the carnage that should be taught at film schools.



Hardcore!

Glad Mags And The Sad Rags

I've been invited to contribute to Shades of Caruso by Admiral Neck and Canyon, and I thought I'd post a few brief words about what I'm going to be doing here. Apart from hanging around making the place look untidy etc and so on.

I used to read a lot of magazines. I had a subscription to Empire for ten years, I bought Melody Maker faithfully every week in my late teens and early twenties, and I would regularly read other titles such as FHM, Total Film, NME, Neon, GQ -- pretty much anything culture-related, really.

In the late 1990s I began working in the magazine industry and some time later I realised that, apart from the title I worked on, I didn't read a single mag any more. Some of my previous favourites had folded, some had just gone rubbish, but there were still plenty of mags on the shelves -- surely at least one of them should be of interest to me? After all, I still consumed a great deal of cultural material, and the magazines still covered that material. But I rarely found anything to induce me to buy.

There are all sorts of reasons for this, of course -- the main one being the rise and rise of this here interweb, which is increasingly the first port of call (for news, reviews and suchlike) for the sort of people who used to be magazine readers. Apart from that, working in magazines has inevitably made me more knowledgeable and, yes, cynical about the medium and the reasons for its existence. Also, while it would be facile to say, "Oh, I read a magazine all day at work, I don't want to read them in my spare time", I do find it hard to read them without scouring the pages for mistakes or imagining how I might have done something differently.

So I'm putting that hyper-critical eye to semi-productive use -- hence my appearance on this blog. I'll take an issue of a random carefully chosen magazine and "review" it, analysing what it's doing right and wrong, whether it's serving its desired audience or not, and what it's doing to stave off the apparently unavoidable obsolescence that awaits traditional paper-based magazines. Especially what it's doing wrong, naturally, because that'll be funnier.

Oh, I also hope to annoy Admiral Neck on occasion by posting things that have a vague and tenuous connection to something or someone that he hates, such as the title of this post.

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!

Worst Movies of 2007 Face/Off! (D-War)

It's been a good year for dragon-lovers. Naomi Novik published the fourth book in the Temeraire series (I've yet to read it, but Canyon seemed to like it a lot), Beowulf ended with a superb fight between the Cockney/Geat warrior and an awesome firebreathing beast, and Enchanted featured an endearingly camp purple dragon voiced by Susan Sarandon and designed by genius monster-mind Crash McCreery.

Oddly, though, the big draw for us was a big-budget Korean fantasy-action flick starring a guy off Roswell, Robert "Alligator" Forster, and Daryl from The Office. It promised huge battle scenes, a plethora of dragons, and city-wide destruction on a similar scale to Transformers. Though early word was horribly negative, I was still intrigued and psyched. Come on! Wicked awesome dragons, powered by Korean ingenuity and let loose on LA! That sounded like a perfect movie, but that's assuming that film is made by someone who understands how to write a coherent screenplay, or how to block actors, or how to direct them, or how to pace a movie, or...


Basically, I'm saying dragon mayhem only works when you've got someone behind the camera who knows more about directing than that the words "action" and "cut" make the actors start and stop reciting heavy-handed, overly-complicated and incomprehensible exposition. Hyung-Rae Shim is most definitely not that man.

We should have taken as a warning the tagline on the poster above and on the D-War homepage: "Since THE DAWN of LEGEND, Absolutely UNIMAGINABLE affair OCCURS on THE HUMAN RACE. They are LOOKING for SOMEONE. SOMEONE WHO has been CHOSEN by HEAVEN..." If they're not bothering to translate something properly, we're in for a pretty haphazardly made film. That's not to say Shim doesn't have some faith in his own ability. According to this SciFi Japan review, when bragging about the scale and ambition of D-War, Shim said, "LORD OF THE RINGS was made in a field, but we’ve shot in the heart of LA.” Somewhere in New Zealand, Peter Jackson is humbled.

As if possessed by the Satanic ghost of Dr. Uwe Boll, director of the maddeningly complex Alone In The Dark, D-War opens with an animated crawl explaining the story of a race of serpent things, and the birth of a magical woman every 500 years who contains a spirit power sent from heaven that will transform creatures called Imugis into Celestial Dragons. If a good Imugi gets hold of this power, then everything is fine, but if an evil Imugi wins out, we're screwed. This is apparently taken from Korean myth, though from the complexity of it, and the fact that it so often contradicts itself, it seems to be taken from all of Korean myth at the same time. I spent a long time trying to make out what the hell was being conveyed to me, and it was time wasted. I don't think Shim understands what it means either.

We then cut to modern day L.A., to find an enormous gouge in the landscape. Just to confuse matters more, a Native American is shouting about how we have awakened "them". Hey, Native American dude, stop claiming incomprehensible Korean myths as your own! Chris Mulkey and a fellow FBI flunky are investigating this disaster, at which point our journalist hero Ethan, played by blank slate Jason Behr, and his cameraman Bruce (a much livelier Craig Robinson), appear and harangue the Feds. After Mulkey and the Mulkey-Flunky rudely tell Ethan to get lost he sees a weird object being unearthed which later turns out to be a dragon scale.


After returning to his office, where he seems to be under the impression it's a Bad Taste Fashion day for charity, Behr mulls over the events of the morning (in echoey voiceover), and suddenly remembers a visit to an antiques store he made as a kid, where he is blasted with magical energy by a similar dragon scale and then treated to a long expositional lecture from Robert Forster. Then he remembers being given a large magical amulet, even though he's actually wearing it at the time. Is he Guy Pearce in Memento? Who forgets these kinds of things? I mean, it's twice as big as an iPod and has pointy bits on it.


The flashback to his childhood contains even more exposition than the opening crawl, with Forster going into immensely confusing detail about the Imugi and the spirit power called the Yu I Joo, which is a gift from heaven for good Imugi, but there is a bad Imuji called Buraki who wants the Yu I Joo. Heaven sends down two guys, a warrior (called Haram) and a magician, to save the day. That's all? Forster makes it sound like it would be a bad thing if Baraki gets the Yu I Joo, but Heaven only sends two guys, one of whom (the warrior) is next to useless? What's worse, the Yu I Joo manifests within a woman (Narin) on her twentieth birthday, and then she has to find a good Imugi before a bad Imugi gets her. Even Royal Mail has a more reliable system that that.

Just to make things more complicated, the flashback flashes back again, to ancient Korea, where a village is destroyed by evil forces looking for Narin, the possessor of the Yu I Joo. It's very dramatic, very silly, and very badly filmed, except for the bravura effects moments. In that respect it reminds me of Return of the Jedi. During non-effects sequences, Richard Marquand seems unable to inject any life or pace into the movie, but as soon as ILM take over, the film turns into a rollercoaster. Same here. When Shim's effects team are responsible for what's onscreen, the film is enormous fun for all the right reasons. When Shim is behind the camera directing actors, it all goes horribly, hilariously wrong.


Also, it's a pointless scene. The village might be much larger than I would expect a village to be, but it's surrounded by a flimsy wall and has a couple of cannons to protect the inhabitants. Buraki sends his evil general (who according to the press notes, goes by the name of Evil General) to retrieve the Yu I Joo, and his army comprises about 50000 soldiers and monsters who raze the village to the ground with ease. There's some memorable carnage, but what made me laugh most was that in the middle of the explosions and villager-crushings and infantry stampedes, there's a dramatic shot of one of the large creatures (called a Dawdler) knocking over a two foot high wall that serves no purpose, except perhaps to keep a couple of chickens from running off. It gets the same treatment as the genocide. Perhaps they're the monarchs of the chicken kingdom.


Sadly, while that scene is very big and silly and satisfying, for the first two thirds of the movie we have to contend with numerous stilted dialogue scenes, repetitive deus ex machinas, poorly staged fight scenes and, I'm not kidding, yet more exposition. My God, at times it feels like we're watching The Silmarillion as filmed by a teenager obsessed with Rampage and Age of Empire.

What's worse is that the in-world rules make no sense. Why has Heaven come up with this incredibly complicated Yu I Joo delivery system? Put it in a hott girl, bake for twenty years, and then watch as the bad "guy" swoops in and eats her? What's worse is they don't take into account the inevitable love affair between Haram and Narin, which makes Narin not want to serve up the Yu I Joo to the good Imugi, choosing instead to kill herself (and Haram) before either Buraki or the good Imugi can get to her, meaning the whole ridiculous ordeal gets repeated 500 years later, with a girl called Sarah becoming the new holder of the Yu I Joo, and Ethan becoming the new protector thanks to some handy reincarnation, though he doesn't inherit any combat skills or dress sense.


Basically, what Shim must have written down when he started this project is, "Find reason for big monsters to chase young couple around city so I can destroy it." Unfortunately, he went crazy trying to make it seem like there was more plot there, and a lot of time is spent while he adds layer upon layer of exposition on the core. Seriously, if Forster had just said, "Heaven made this hott chick all powerful so she could promote a monster but another monster wants the job more so you've got to get her out of here otherwise we're screwed now go and run around and get into lots of destructive scrapes!" I would have respected it a lot more.

If you think I've spent too long talking about a flashback scene, please bear in mind that this scene is fifteen minutes long. I'm not exaggerating; I just timed it. The only other movie I've seen do that is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and this movie is not Crouching Tiger (though the dragons do miraculously remain hidden for the majority of the movie, and in the middle of L.A., no less).


For all the time spent explaining the identity of main characters (for instance, Forster turns out to be the wizard, who has been hanging around for 500 years waiting for Behr to appear, which is a massively depressing prospect), and the backstory of the dragons, none is spent explaining why the Feds hate Behr on sight, or what the gouge is (the viewer can figure it's Buraki's work, but you'd have to take a leap of logic to figure it), and what effect it has had on the populace. Also, as in I Know Who Killed Me, for the majority of the movie the police characters appear to have been included only because Shim thinks they have to be included, though he doesn't know what to do with them other than have them say, "You mean it's organic?" or "We have to find this girl!" They do nothing to further the plot and remain clueless throughout. At least, that's what happens for the majority of the movie (see below).


When the flashback finally ends and Ethan begins to act on his memories (i.e. he tells Bruce to use his amazing Google skills to search for all of the Sarahs in LA), we're introduced to the correct Sarah, played by Amanda Brooks. She is the reincarnation of Narin, though has also seemingly forgotten her heritage until this moment. Or perhaps she knows all about it, which is equally odd. If I knew I was the container into which Heaven has poured a mighty mystical force that must be used to give an enormous ancient serpent an upgrade, I'd probably base my whole life around it and probably try to make some money off it. Instead she just appears to be a moody valley girl who hangs out at the gym.

Maybe her relentlessly dour expression is her way of dealing with her responsibility. She doesn't smile once during the movie, and barely registers any effort in the role. Maybe that was a direction from Shim, but how unappealing does this make her? Inexplicably she has a friend who tries to cheer her up, but all she does in return is whine about wanting to stay at home and sulk. What with Behr's blandness and her misery, the only reason they could ever find each other attractive is by being the reincarnated spirits of two doomed losers from 16th Century Korea.

Not long after being introduced and realising she is in great danger from attack by Buraki's forces, Sarah does the safest thing possible; going drinking with her friend to drown her seemingly epic sorrows. After leaving early with an attack of the Whiny Dullness, she's assaulted by some random fratty muggers, and is in serious trouble until out of the blue Robert Forster appears and rescues her with some effortless (i.e. lazily filmed) martial arts moments. After saving her ass, he slopes off into the night, probably so he can listen to The Delfonics in his car.


She ends up reporting the event to the police, and while she does it a random photographer walks through the station, takes a photo of her, and is chased off. Peculiar, I thought, but then a couple of scenes later, while Ethan is moaning to Bruce that he's a jerk for not being able to find the right Sarah out of several thousand with only the description of a Yu I Joo-brand birthmark to go on, the photographer (who works there, of course), walks past them and mentions that he just met a Sarah who got into a fight and hey, here's a photo of her! Was the photographer called Mr. P. Lotdevice?

For various reasons too illogical to try to parse here, Sarah gets committed to a hospital (for having bad dreams about Evil General, it seems), and goes berserk with a plastic knife. Or as berserk as someone who is unable to act can get. Before she can hurt anyone Ethan arrives, but his path is blocked by an officious nurse. Fortunately a kindly doctor sneaks him into the room, meaning he and Sarah finally meet again after 500 years (romance!), just as Buraki attacks the hospital. They flee, again with the help of the kindly doctor, who waits until they've gone and morphs into Robert Forster! I have no idea why he hides his identity from them in this way. Maybe 500 years of waiting around has made him playful. Or shy. There follows another funky effects sequence, with Buraki chasing Sarah, Ethan, and Bruce through an underground car park, though they manage to outrun it. This happens several times; a small car outruns a 300 foot long snake. There's asking the audience to suspend disbelief, and then there's not giving a damn what the audience thinks.


Upon eluding Buraki, Bruce's car slams into Evil General, who looks like he's going for a stroll down the centre of the road. Cloaked in magical armour, he knocks Bruce around for a bit and then electrocutes him (Craig Robinson's high-pitched yelp of pain is the only moment of actual comedy in the entire film). Ethan ineffectually stands around, allowing Evil General to almost grab Sarah and do terribly obscure magical things to her when, hilariously, another car comes out of nowhere and runs him over again.


At first I thought that this scene would go on for a few hours, with a succession of cars taking turns knocking the guy over, but no, Ethan and Sarah just get into it (leaving the electrified Bruce behind), and drive off. A bit later they are randomly dropped off near a beach (because lovers like to walk along beaches, right?), and as they walk away, the woman driving the car turns into... Robert Forster! Every movie should have Robert Forster materialise whenever they can't think of a way to resolve a situation.

While the romantic leads sleepwalk through their lines, on the other side of town a bunch of FBI dudes sleepwalk through their own lines, and agree that Buraki is following Sarah, and is located in a cave nearby. They seem to arrive at this conclusion through divine intervention, because even though they act like there's proof it's following her and momentarily hiding in a cave, they don't show it. They do have one elusive thing they can be proud of finding; a picture of Sarah smiling! It's an endearingly goofy picture.


Thanks to this snake-finding breakthrough, a bunch of tooled up guys with guns go to the cave, though I wonder if anyone told them they would be going up against an enormous evil snake, as their reaction to Buraki's dramatic appearance is to freak out, fire aimlessly into the air, and then get killed. Actually, I'm not sure if I remember Buraki killing any of them. Instead they get blown up by Evil General, who seems to thrive in non-road environments.

Sarah and Ethan go visit a hypnotist neuroscientist or something (played by Holmes Osborne, completing a 2007 bad movie two-fer with Southland Tales). In an echo of John Boorman's catastrophic Exorcist II he sticks electrodes on Sarah and triggers a flashback (thankfully a short one) for no apparent reason, and Buraki finds them, for no apparent reason, before chasing them. Leaving behind Holmes Osbourne, they get away. For no apparent reason. If the overused motif of I Know Who Killed Me is making everything blue, the overused motif here is events happening because Shim has decided they have to. It's a perfect example of inept plotting, and should be shown in film schools as a warning. I Know Who Killed Me has some clumsy plotting and dimwitted flashbacks that fill up time, but nothing on this scale.

After escaping Buraki Sarah and Ethan meet up with Bruce (who isn't dead even though they left him behind with Evil General), and then go for a coffee to chat about their day. The scene ends with, yes, Buraki appearing out of nowhere. He/It crashes through some walls, stops them getting away by throwing a car at them, and then waits around instead of attacking them, giving a bunch of cops time to shoot at him (and no they don't transform into a mini-army of Robert Forster, which is a shame). Their gunfire stops Buraki in his tracks, giving Ethan and Sarah time to escape. Bruce, on the other hand, gets left behind.


Luckily this confrontation triggers the best scene in the movie, an effects tour-de-force with Bulcos, Dawdlers, Shaconnes and Atrox (Atroxes? Atroxi? Erm...) attacking L.A. en masse. It means nothing, and is only there to get the punters in, but it's great anyway.


It's on a smaller scale than the similar scenes at the end of Transformers, and doesn't work narratively (more as a sequence of cool shots), but it's still worth watching the movie just for these scenes. As before, the FX shots are much more vibrant and imaginative than the rest of the movie. I would say it's down to some second unit director's superior understanding of filmmaking, but from that SciFi Japan feature, Shim was indeed on set in LA, firing his ADs for worrying about tanks ruining the roads. Unless he was joking. The only things that let the scene down are a couple of less than perfect effect shots, and a bad bit of editing that leaves a bunch of tanks and machine-gunners firing at an empty street.


While chaos reigns, Ethan and Sarah climb to the top of a skyscraper so they can catch a helicopter out of there, only to find that snakes can climb things, a point proved by the appearance of Buraki up in their respective grills. Stupidly they hop onto the helicopter, which is promptly grabbed by Buraki. With no hesitation, Ethan and Sarah leap out, leaving the pilot behind. He dies moments later.


While Buraki is peppered with minigun shells, our undynamic heroes get back to street level and are found by Chris Mulkey and the Mulkey-Flunky, who whisk them away to a basement somewhere. Good idea, I thought, until Mulkey pulls a gun on Sarah and threatens to kill her, stating that the only way to stop Buraki is to destroy the Yu I Joo. It's an amazing moment. He knows about this shit? How? He's not mentioned any of it for the entire rest of the film, but now he knows all about it? It's... I just... Oh, what's the use. Thankfully the Mulkey-Flunky knocks him out, or shoots him, or something. I can't remember the details as I had my head in my hands for a few minutes. They get away, though. And leave the flunky behind.

So they escape! For two minutes, and then a bunch of Bulcos blow their car up, enabling them to capture our heroes. I have no idea how long they are meant to be unconscious, but when Ethan wakes up, he's on the steps of an enormous structure that looks way too much like Barad-Dur. I've never been to LA, but I think I'd know if an enormous evil-looking obsidian castle was built nearby. Still, suck on that, Jackson. He's filming in LA, not a field! Loser.


Buraki, Evil General, and thousands of Atroxesixi are in attendance, waiting for Sarah to cough up the Yu I Joo, but Ethan's having none of it. Using some wondrously inept fight moves he battles Evil General, getting thrown around like the bundle of second-hand clothes he looks like, and is about to be killed when Evil General's sword touches the amulet which had been forgotten about by everyone, and it activates, killing all of the Atroxiites and Evil General in a burst of mystical CGI whooshiness. Hooray! This seemingly summons the fashionably late good Imugi, and a battle ensues between him/her and Buraki. Taking a cue from Ethan, it is crap at fighting, and it looks bad until Sarah decides, "Fuck this, I'm bored," and burps up the Yu I Joo.


Just as Buraki is about to grab it, she moves it with magical powers so that the good Imugi can get it, in the biggest and most dramatic "psyche!" moment in film history. With that the good Imugi becomes a Celestial Dragon, complete with funky chinese-dragon-whiskers, and the battle is won easily. It's another terrific FX sequence. However, don't get thinking it's going to end well. Sarah dies in Ethan's arms, and then appears before him as, I shit you not, a glowing fairy, promising to love him forever in Heaven. At this point, Canyon and I were torn between laughing our asses off and shouting swearwords at the screen.


The best part of that is that both the good Imugi and Sarah the Dragon Fairy both float off to Heaven, leaving Ethan behind. Yeah, how does that feel, you inconsiderate asshole? If only Bruce could feel the schadenfreude.

Worst Movies of 2007 Face/Off! (I Know Who Killed Me)

I'll go out on a limb; like all film-goers, as much as we want to see classics, masterpieces, and works of genius as often as possible, they mean nothing without something to compare them to: the cinematic effluent of recent times. Our movie collection may be made up of a lot of awesome stuff, but it also contains The Punisher, The Wicker Man (Labute's version, of course), Friedkin's vile but hilarious Rules of Engagement, and Lawrence Kasdan's defecation-epic Dreamcatcher. Sometimes I wonder if we're actually more fond of a piece of crap like Glitter than we are of the good stuff. If The Godfather comes on Sky Movies we might not bother to rewatch it. If Honey turns up, it stays on. What's that about?


We actively seek out the truly abysmal, but this year we seemed to miss out on the real dreck. Georgia Rule didn't get a release over here, Bratz: The Movie has yet to appear on Sky Movies on endless repeat, and nothing is going to make me watch Daddy Day Camp. We did see Ghost Rider (a favourite of Canyon's; she loves that movie), Next (more boring than actually entertainingly bad), and The Reaping (much the same), but it wasn't until the end of the year that we saw our actual contenders for worst movie of the year: Chris Sivertson's I Know Who Killed Me, and, sadly for us as big dragon fans, Hyung-Rae Shim's D-War. Both movies are senses-picklingly dreadful, but which one will win Best Worst Movie of the Year, and which will be deemed Actual Worst Movie of the Year?


Lindsay Lohan's attempt at earning some serious critical reappraisal, I Know Who Killed Me, was released to almost total popular apathy but significant critical drubbings. I remember Ashton Kutcher getting similarly bad notices for The Butterfly Effect, and though the performances (by him and Amy Smart) were memorably bad, and the direction went too far over the top at times, I still have some residual fondness for it. The ending might be very similar to the outcome of Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, but I've sat through Butterfly twice, and cannot rewatch Darko as it annoys me too much. So kudos to Butterfly Effect for that.

Lohan's effort, on the other hand, is an unmitigated disaster. Directed by jack-of-all-trades Chris Sivertson (a one-time collaborator with horror director Lucky McKee), and written by first-timer Jeff Hammond, the movie is sleazy, pretentious, voyeuristic, grisly, dumb, and yet features a genuinely unusual twist; it reminded me of Saw in that respect. Lohan ineptly plays a precocious student, Aubrey Fleming, whose hobbies include writing bad fiction, giving up piano lessons (something that never gets mentioned again. Could it be significant somehow????), and generally being a goodie-two-shoes. She also appears to be suffering from a high-functioning version of narcolepsy. She walks and talks, but seems curiously apart from everything around her. For the first 20 minutes or so I thought it was a plot point, before realising she was just not bothering to emote like a normal actor. My memory of her performance in Mean Girls is murky, but I know she was a lot more engaging than this. Romero zombies are more lively.


So anyway, she's a good girl with a happy home life, loving parents (played by Julia Ormond and Neal McDonough, seen above in a later scene), not to mention an inexplicable fixation with the colour blue. So why do we keep seeing footage of Lohan pole-dancing in a red-lit stripper bar? If your answer is, "Because punters want to see Lohan in her smalls rolling around in a sleazy fugue state", the dreadful box office will prove you wrong. Are we seeing her as a character in one of GoodLohan's stories? I certainly thought so.

I also thought, "Please stop." She's the least committed and most indifferent stripper in movie history, her routine basically comprising some bending over backwards and lots of slow walking around the pole. At one point she crouches as if having a poo. I bet that's erotic to a minority of people; perhaps they were the ones who saw this at the cinema. Bear in mind, this was the unique selling point of the film: Lohan grinding on a pole with all the enthusiasm of a semi-conscious call-centre operative. If I'd paid to see this for that reason, I would have felt cheated.

So far so dreary, but then GoodLohan gets abducted and subjected to lots of really nasty dismemberment (losing a finger, then a hand, and then a leg). It's graphic, it's leering, it's deeply unpleasant. When I was a kid I hated hearing oldsters bitch and moan about horror movies and how they pervert the minds of the kids. I watched Carrie and The Thing and the Elm Street series with no ill effects, so it was obviously horseshit. Now, though, I'm compelled to join in the chorus of angst about the horror sub-genre of torture porn. I've heard some critics (that I respect) say that Eli Roth's Hostel films have some metaphorical depth, but I've not seen them and of his work have only enjoyed seeing him get shot mid-crap in Southland Tales. I also liked the first two Saw movies, but only as joke-fodder, as they are hysterically awful. Other than that, I've not felt the urge to watch any, other than Wolf Creek, which was nasty and sickening enough to make me hate humanity. Imagine my unhappiness as I realised this movie was heading down that route. So now Sivertson and Hammond are using a non-sexy stripping Lohan and torture porn! I was astonished at how opportunistic it had become, and this was about 25 minutes in.


Imagine my relief when, through an obscurely edited series of events, Lohan is found, bleeding and dismembered, at the side of a road. Yay no more onscreen torture! She's taken to a very blue hospital and is fixed up, but upon waking up, she maintains she is actually Dakota Moss, the stripper from GoodLohan's stories! This comes as a shock to everyone, as does NaughtyLohan's laboured profanity and suddenly rampant libido. The police (represented by a sheriff whose eye-rolling performance is one of the worst of the year) and the FBI (a trio of serious-looking individuals who are only in the film because otherwise the viewer would be thinking, why aren't the FBI involved?) attempt to get to the bottom of things, but they just appear at random intervals to deliver exposition and interrogate NaughtyLohan, who treats them like imbeciles. It's like watching a slightly grown-up Curly Sue say "Fuckbums!" at an assortment of Keystone Kops.

Now, I think I'm pretty good at spotting twists, so I was obnoxiously cocky at this point. As far as I could tell, NaughtyLohan was obviously meant to be GoodLohan after suffering immense trauma, and the twist would be that throughout the movie GoodLohan is still getting tortured, and imagining her new life as NaughtyLohan in an attempt to distance herself from the horror being perpetrated by the killer who couldn't possibly be a piano teacher. It seemed pretty obvious that that was the direction it was going in, with the garishly hyper-coloured style that made it all seem like a dream sequence instead of reality. NaughtyLohan dresses in red and everything around her in GoodLohan's world is vibrantly blue, and that's before we get to the sex scene between NaughtyLohan and GoodLohan's boyfriend, someone she sort of wanted to get with earlier in the film but wouldn't due to her goodie-two-shoeiness, seen here giving GoodLohan (in blue clothes, you'll notice) a blue flower. It made perfect sense.


Which is why the rest of the movie baffled me so much. Though I thought her dismemberment would mean no more stripping moments, Sivertson gets around that by having several flashbacks that show NaughtyLohan's inept stripper past, and the bizarre falling apart of her body. Mid-slow-affectless-pole-twirl, her hand begins to bleed, and when back in her dressing room (suddenly emptied of all of the garish, fish-eye-lensed freaks who have populated it to this point), her finger falls off.

So, GoodLohan is re-remembering her past to account for her dismemberment? But surely she should be thinking happy thoughts instead of, "Gee, I was having so much fun listlessly rotating around a pole in the reddest and sleaziest strip joint in America, and now bits of me are falling off!" Even worse, she then tries to sew it back on. All it takes is a bit of sewing and lip-biting, and then putting on a glove, after which she seems to be doing much better. Screw you, Rambo! Cauterising a wound with gunpowder is so over. Now we re-attach limbs with thread. It's the future, granddad.


By this point I had less of a clue about what was going on than the police, but that's because I was holding onto my erroneous belief that it was all a fever dream punctuated by useless flashbacks showing NaughtyLohan getting stalked (which has nothing to do with the rest of the movie). If only I'd dropped that earlier I would naturally have realised that not only was GoodLohan indeed still in the clutches of the evil dismembering serial killer who couldn't possibly be a psychotic piano teacher with abandonment issues, but also NaughtyLohan was in fact a real person who just happened to be GoodLohan's identical twin! Neal McDonough, who had seemingly been avoiding NaughtyLohan for most of the movie, shows up to reveal that through some contrivance, both Lohans were separated at birth, and they, the good family living on the blue side of town, were lucky enough to adopt GoodLohan, while NaughtyLohan ended up on the red side of town. The side with the stripclubs and whatnot.

Even more insane, NaughtyLohan's wounds are caused by twin stigmata. As GoodLohan is cut apart, NaughtyLohan suffers the same wounds, which is why she spends the last thirty minutes of the movie with a cyborg hand covered in a baggy rubber glove (thus saving on CGI) and walking around on a robotic leg which, for some inexplicable reason, becomes dead weight when the batteries run out. Hold on, it attaches below the knee, which means the joint isn't powering down, so what's the point of powering it up in the first place? What is the motorised part of it? The ankle? So the foot's dead-weight? Does it become weightless when the power is on? Does it have gyroscopes or something in it? Or is it perhaps a contrived way to create some artificial suspence at the end when she tried to elude her possibly-piano-playing nemesis with a powered-down leg? I'll leave that open for now. Here is a close-up of the extra-thick flesh covered Marigold washing-up glove she sports for the finale. Note that NaughtyLohan is wearing red. Not blue, but red.


In the final few minutes of the film, GoodLohan is buried alive which means NaughtyLohan starts to suffocate, just as she figures out where who her killer is (and yes, she does indeed declare, "I know who killed me!" like someone from a William Castle movie). Ormond stays out of this part, and it's up to heroic Neal McDonough to save the day. NaughtyLohan and McDonough drive to the evil piano teacher's house (whoops, spoiler!), and in a feeble cat and mouse scene in a badly-lit room that has lots of prosthetic limbs hanging from the ceiling like so many Christmas ornaments, McDonough gets iced. Bummer. NaughtyLohan gets into various dead ends, though by now she's breathing a lot better for some reason (I reckon that reason is that old favourite, contrivance), before killing her "killer" with one of his deadly instruments, all of which are made from blue glass. Blue, you'll note, not red. I really hope you're following this colour coding system. It's rather sophisticated.


After that she hunts down her twin, unburies her, and they live happily ever after. Until GoodLohan finds out NaughtyLohan shtupped her boyfriend, I guess. I will say this, I really didn't see that twin thing coming at all. As wretched as the movie is (and believe me, it truly is wretched), it caught me out, big-time. Okay, so it had to be bat-shit insane to do it, but still, thumbs up for that. However, there is nothing else going for the movie. If there is any merit in the honestly surprising twist or the half-hearted nature/nurture theme, they're swamped by the lurid, exploitative stripper/torture scenes earlier on. Though the violence is thankfully short-lived, the stripping scenes honestly seemed to go on forever. At one point I turned to Canyon to make some witty remark about Neal McDonough's mutant Bob Hope face, and she was fast asleep. By the time Lohan is fighting off the pianist with her rubber-glove-encased robot hand, I was splashing cold water on my face. It's momentum free, repetitive, and transparently desperate to be considered more than just an exploitation vehicle about getting Lohan semi-naked.

Jeff Hammond's screenplay is memorably poor, filled with first-draft dialogue and shoddily plugged narrative gaps, made worse by what seem to be bits of the film removed at random (the trailer features some shots that didn't make it into the film, including the arrest of a character who appears in the finished movie several times at the start and then inexplicably disappears). However, it's Sivertson's disastrously inept and pretentious direction that really strangles the film. The gap between its ambitions and its effect is gargantuan. A vaguely interesting, if unoriginal idea (separated twins growing up to be vastly different just because of the circumstances of their upbringing) is merely touched on by Hammond and ignored completely by Sivertson, who is more interested in visually signifying the difference between the Lohan twins using a clever colour coding system, where GoodLohan wears a lot of blue, and...

Okay, if you're getting sick of me making jokes about the colour scheme, watch the movie. I've not even begun to approximate how much the colour scheme figures in it. It's in almost every. goddamn. scene. Some kind soul has listed most of the instances of the symbolism overwhelming the film here, but trust me, it doesn't take a genius to spot any of it. It makes everything seem like a fantasy, when in actuality it's all meant to be real, leading to much viewer confusion. It's just the stupidest, most half-baked directorial decision possible. I used to love the colour blue but this film ruined it for me. My new favourite colour is hot magenta (because I like my magenta like I like my coffee). Thanks a lot for wrecking my brain, I Know Who Killed Me.


The cast is uniformly awful, even Ormond, who gave an award-worthy performance as Smilla in Bille August's otherwise disappointing Smilla's Feeling For Snow. I kept wondering if she was trying desperately to forget when she starred alongside Sean Connery and Harrison Ford; another distracting and depressing aspect of the movie. McDonough is an actor we're very fond of, and was great in Band of Brothers (as well as being the best thing about the dire Boomtown), but here he pitches his line deliveries at the same hysterical level as Ormond. The rest of the cast barely registers amid the garish colours and ugly compositions, trotting out exposition while waiting for the catering table to open.

Lohan is utterly out of her depth, seemingly semi-conscious for a lot of it, unconvincing as a trash-talking vamp, a good girl, a victim and a hero. Even worse, as much as it's fun to laugh at a terrible performance, her casting seems to have been motivated by playing off her public persona as the Disney girl gone horribly horribly wrong, which might have seemed clever at the time, but now seems utterly cynical and exploitative. Seeing her in "sexxy"-mode, resembling nothing more than a glassy-eyed, oblivious teenager with low self-esteem, was a dispiriting experience, making it hard to think of the movie as dumb fun.

Word is she's finally trying to give rehab a chance, and that's great news, but not soon enough for her to realise that she was getting involved with a really silly, nasty bunch of characters out to make a quick buck off her notoriety. I really hope she can recover, and at least approximate the likeable Lohan from Mean Girls, but right now she seems to be sleepwalking around a pole and into disaster, with the sleazoids of the world ready and waiting with $10 bills, hoping to film the final sordid moments.

A Large List Of Movies I Enjoyed This Year (Updated With Canyon's Picks So It's Even Larger!)

Happy New Year, denizens of the internet! The holiday season is over, unhappy workers are returning to their nasty offices, and I'm cleaning the house. But, before I get into the rest of it, here is an absurdly long list that has missed off a million things either because we've not seen certain films that stand a good chance of getting on here (Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, Tekkon Kinkreet, Rescue Dawn, etc.), and because I'm forgetful. There was a supporting actor performance this year that I loved but I can't remember who it was now. That's as annoying as later remembering that I wanted to give music of the year shout-outs to Tenacious D's Master Exploder (song of the decade) and Steven Seagal's album Mojo Priest (not the hilarious hubristic disaster people expected it to be; I actually quite like it).

Anyway, here is as complete a list as I can make. Note that the worst film winner is not yet decided. Over the next few days I intend to decide who should win this coveted prize with a Worst Film of 2007 Face/Off special! So stay tuned. Also, I'm hoping that at some point Canyon will include her best and worsts of the year. I'm not 100% sure what her list will look like, though I get the feeling it will be fairly different. I look forward to reading it.

Favourite movies of the year:


1=: Zodiac - A perfect movie about an obsessive quest made by an obsessive perfectionist.
1=: Ratatouille - A perfect movie about a perfectionist and the obsessive quest for perfection.
2: The Bourne Ultimatum - Like being beaten up by a film. But in a good way. Best threequel ever, best action film of the decade.
3: Black Book - Moral quagmires, betrayal, sex, death, twists, violence, blonde women being mistreated by the world but keeping their dignity even when doused in shit. Hitchcock would have loved it.
4: Once - My favourite romantic movie in ooooh, aeons. Lovely soundtrack too.
5: The Darjeeling Limited - Wes Anderson triumphs again! Yeah, I said it.
6: Grindhouse - Sorry to say it, but only the full version gives you the full effect. Fuck you, Weinsteins.
7: Exiled - Johnnie To's gangster masterpiece. The most unpredictable film of the year (other than I'm Not There, but who knows what the hell Todd Haynes was thinking with that).
8: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - Possibly the best ensemble cast of the year, certainly the best photographed. Hypnotic brilliance.
9: Paprika - A feast for the eyes, and featuring a heroine that I want to see return in a billion sequels.
10: The King of Kong - Best documentary I've seen since the magnificent Capturing the Friedmans. No other documentary I've seen has made me so angry and so overjoyed. Who'd have thought real life could be this interesting?

Honourable mentions:


I Am Legend
Jindabyne
Hot Fuzz
Superbad
3:10 to Yuma

Honourable honourable mentions (there were a lot of good films out this year):

Gone Baby Gone
The Mist
Sunshine
Transformers
Black Snake Moan

Honourable honourable honourable mentions (I mean, seriously, a lot):

The Lives of Others
Beowulf
Charlie Wilson's War
Knocked Up
The Lookout

Favourite movies released in the US in 2006 but then released in the UK in 2007 and were good enough to get a mention here anyway:

The Fountain, Curse of the Golden Flower

Movies that are not getting included because I need to see them a couple more times before I know whether I was crazy about them or not:

No Country For Old Men, I'm Not There

Movie that I didn't want to like because the director is an asshole but damn it's a lot of fun:


Apocalypto

Worst movie:

To be decided between I Know Who Killed Me and D-War (Runners-up: Bubble Fiction Boom or Bust, Spider-Man 3, Southland Tales, The Reaping, Next)

Most pointless movie:

Ocean's Thirteen

Best actor:

Chris Cooper - Breach / Casey Affleck - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Gone Baby Gone (Runner-up: Will Smith - I Am Legend, Kurt Russell - Death Proof, Viggo Mortenson - Eastern Promises)

Best actress:


Laura Linney - Jindabyne (Runner-up: Gong Li - Curse of the Golden Flower, Carice Van Houten - Black Book, Marketa Irglova - Once)

Best supporting actor:

John Carroll Lynch - Zodiac (Runner-up: Chris Evans - Sunshine / Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Sam Rockwell - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang - Exiled) (ETA: OMG how could I forget! James Marsden's hilarious performance in Enchanted! Easily the best thing about the movie.)

Best Supporting Actress:

Robin Wright Penn - Beowulf (Runner-up: Marcia Gay Harden - The Mist, Amara Karan - The Darjeeling Limited, Sairse Ronan - Atonement)

Most entertaining performance in a bad movie:

Nicholas Cage - Ghost Rider

Worst actor:

Patrick Dempsey - Enchanted (Runner-up: Jason Behr - D-War)

Worst actress:

Lindsay Lohan - I Know Who Killed Me (Runner-up: Amanda Brooks - D-War, Claire Danes - Stardust)

Best hero:

Remy the Rat - Ratatouille (Runner-up: Rachel Stein - Black Book, Paprika - Paprika, McLovin - Superbad, King Leonidas - 300)

Best villain:


Anton Chigurh - No Country for Old Men (Runner-up: Billy Mitchell - The King of Kong, Stuntman Mike - Death Proof, Anton Grubitz - The Lives of Others, Mrs. Carmody - The Mist)

Worst hero:

Ghost Rider - Ghost Rider (Runner-up: Elizabeth Swann - Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Ethan Kendrick - D-War, "Jack" - D-War)

Worst villain:

Thomas Gabriel - Die Hard 4.0 (Runner-up: Venom - Spider-Man 3, Doctor Doom - Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Evil General - D-War)

Biggest badass of the year:

Zoe Bell - Death Proof

Best Director:

Brad Bird - Ratatouille (Runner up: Paul Greengrass - The Bourne Ultimatum, David Fincher - Zodiac)

Worst Director:

To be decided between Chris Sivertson - I Know Who Killed Me and Hyung-Rae Shim - D-War) (Runner-up: Mark Steven Johnson - Ghost Rider, Richard Kelly - Southland Tales, Lee Tamahori - Next)

"Stop perving, Grandad!" director of the year:

Mike Nichols - Charlie Wilson's War. We get it, Mike, Charlie Wilson was a big perv, but that doesn't excuse the leering shots of boobs and butts, nor does it even begin to explain why you cast Emily Blunt and then made her sit around in next to no clothes for five minutes and then not have her appear for the rest of the film. (Runner-up: Michael Bay - Tranformers. Megan Fox is not that hot, so please stop staring at her oiled midriff, kthx)

Best cinematographer:

Roger Deakins - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country For Old Men (Runner-up: Harris Savides - Zodiac, Robert Yeoman - The Darjeeling Limited)

Best sound design:

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Runner-up: I Am Legend, Tranformers)

Best visual effects:

Transformers (Runner-up: The Fountain, Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End)

Most improved director:


Danny Boyle - Sunshine. I've always been frustrated by the lionisation of Boyle, whose movies feature pretty shots and no overall coherence or concept of how one shot has to link into another (Michael Bay gets accused of this yet I think he's much better at creating a whole movie than Boyle, and yes, I know that is considered heresy. Whatever!). Sunshine is the first film where he gets it totally right. The whole movie is an perfectly sustained audio-visual assault. He can be proud of it.

Runner-up: Len Wiseman - Die Hard 4.0. I've found Wiseman to be a hack with a bland visual style and little imagination, but even though Die Hard 4.0 shared the same monochrome look of his vampire movies, the action scenes featured some wonderfully imaginative moments, not counting the Jurassic Park 2 rip-off with the car in the elevator shaft. I was very pleasantly surprised. Still got a shit villain, though. Did Hans Gruber have no more brothers?

Most precipitous drop in directorial ability:

Sam Raimi - Spider-Man 3. Jaredan maintains Raimi purposely sabotaged the movie as a screw-you to Sony for making him include Venom, and I can't argue with him. I can't believe someone as talented and conscientious as Raimi could poop out something as dreadful as this. Let's hope he improves soon, as he's still top of the list of directors capable of pulling off The Hobbit.

Disappointment of the year:

Spider-Man 3 (Runner-up: Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End, Eastern Promises)

Most overrated film of the year:

Atonement. Stately, respectable, well-crafted, pretty. It's all of those. It's also empty, features some really dodgy acting, and makes no sense until the final twist comes into play. Then it's all very affecting, but for an hour, the movie is filled with head-scratchers and logical leaps. (Runner-up: 28 Weeks Later)

Most underrated film of the year:

Hot Fuzz. Has none of the respectable cachet of Atonement, but is possibly the most carefully crafted British film in decades. Repeat viewings unearth a wealth of detail and beautiful structure. If only critics loved Point Break and the films of Michael Bay the way they should, they would have appreciated its genius. (Runner-up: Curse of the Golden Flower)

Best comic adaptation of the year:

300. I don't even like it that much, but the competition (Spider-Man 3, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider) is pitiful. Persepolis is almost certainly going to be better, even though Marjane Satrapi is not really a comic writer/artist, more like a writer who draws the odd picture.

Best schadenfreude:

The Brothers Affleck prove to a sceptical world that they are awesome, to the massive happiness of myself.

Best comeback of the year:


Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for Charlie Wilson's War was his best in ages; smart, funny, irreverent, and only a bit pompous. It went a long way towards making up for Studio 60.

Best action scene of the year:

Jason Bourne vs. Desh - The Bourne Ultimatum (Runner-up: Autobots and humanity vs. Decepticons vs. a city - Transformers, motoring ladies vs. Stuntman Mike - Death Proof, Viggo's genitalia vs. hitmen - Eastern Promises)

Best non-action scene of the year:

Anton Ego eats a meal - Ratatouille (Runner-up: Cops interrogate John Carroll Lynch - Zodiac, every conversation between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Hot Fuzz)

Best musical moment of the year:

Marketa Irglova sings on her way back home - Once (Runner-up: Samuel L. Jackson sings Stack-O-Lee to a writhing sweaty mass of people - Black Snake Moan, Justin Timberlake lipsynchs to All These Things That I've Done by The Killers - Southland Tales)

Most WTF ending of the year:

The Mist - I cannot spoil it, and am still not sure whether I liked it or not, but I will say this: once seen, never ever forgotten.

Most bullshit death of the year:

Jazz going out like a punk in Transformers. Okay, so Megatron is five times taller, but still, that was not acceptable. (Runner-up: the various "tragic" moments at the end of Spider-Man 3)

Most wasted actors of the year:

Chow Yun Fat - Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End (Runner-up: Emily Blunt - Charlie Wilson's War, Thomas Haden Church - Spider-Man 3)

Biggest jerks of the Year:

The Weinsteins' decision to block the international release of Grindhouse may have been borne of their fears of financial ruin, but the dismissive attitude they have towards international audiences, and the lack of understanding they have of the movie itself (individually hardly anyone likes the films, but together they are perfect entertainment) is notable. Just remember, next time they push for a film to win an Oscar with their bully tactics, it's got nothing to do with championing the film. They're only in it for themselves.

Best screw-you of the year:


Kurt Russell mouthing off against the Weinsteins at the Cannes Film Festival. Just like Snake Plissken would! Now go appear in a bunch of movies next year because you are so awesome, okay?

************

Canyon's Mostly Redundant End-of-Year List

Though you might have caught on that Admiral Neck is very fond of end-of-year list-making, I myself am not. I do love reading other people's lists, I have to admit, and I appreciate the opportunity to step back, think about the year as a whole, and organize your thoughts. The problem for me is that I often don't feel there are ten movies made every year that I will remember and really love as time goes on (the same goes with books and music and tv shows -- most years will produce maybe three or four of each). With most movies I enjoy in a given year, "Oh yeah, that's a good movie" is the first thought that springs to mind when I think about them later -- not "Wow, what a haunting, life-changing masterpiece that was."

I get that it's probably the same for everybody, but I feel wrong memorializing merely good movies in a top-ten list when they probably won't matter much to me in the long run. I guess this is kind of unfair to the very good movies I leave off, but it's my list and I'll do what I want. Also, Admiral Neck and I have very similar tastes, so I mostly have the same movies on as he does, and I liked all the other movies he mentioned mostly as much as he did (except The Darjeeling Limited, because I have been burned by Wes Anderson too many times and refused to see what was by all accounts another dollhouse whimsy-fest). Okay, enough clearing-of-throat preamble: my seven favorite movies of the year (I could stretch this to ten, but I feel a bit wrong doing it, so I won't).

Top Seven

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford -- One of the most gorgeous movies I've ever seen (the visuals in the train-robbery scene will stay with me a long time); the comparisons to Terrence Malick are apt, but this film is no rip-off (as if that would even be a bad thing). The narration was moving and elegiac and wonderfully literary, the pace was perfect, many scenes were incredibly haunting (especially the fantastic ending), and Casey Affleck needs awards shoved between his tiny Chiclet teeth immediately.

Ratatouille -- I adore The Iron Giant but was disappointed with The Incredibles (apparently I was the only person on earth who was), but this movie had Admiral Neck and I sobbing like little babies. I would have cried more if we hadn't been in public. Gorgeous animation, wonderfully funny, with a turn by Peter O'Toole that made me choke up over a discourse on the role of critics. That's some writin', Brad Bird! And damn you, by the way, for making me cry more at your movies than even one of Joss Whedon's.

Zodiac -- Another one that stayed with me for weeks afterward. A meta-comment on obsession that was scary, funny, thought-provoking, and ended perfectly.

(Note: All three of the movies above are what I'd consider the haunting-masterpiece variety.)

I Am Legend -- Yeah, I said it. I think the movie was very unfairly derided as being a typical Will Smith flashy blockbuster, a sci-fi FX-extravaganza with no brain and no heart. (And it almost was -- Admiral Neck got hold of the original script, and it's absolutely terrible, and the kind of movie you can imagine would have been perfect for Michael Bay [he was previously attached to direct].) Instead, it's a quiet, thoughtful, incredibly moving meditation on isolation and loneliness, and the main character's slow descent into madness. I don't often agree with Salon's Stephanie Zacharek (though I love reading her reviews), but I think she was mostly on the mark about this one. I don't agree with the complaint I've often heard about the ending -- I think it flows very well with what came before, and while I think the God stuff and the very end were missteps, those aren't the moments that stayed with me. The shots of a deserted New York are incredible, the action set-pieces are brilliant, and I haven't been able to get some scenes out of my mind since I saw it. There might have even been more sobbing during this than during Ratatouille (though I blame Admiral Neck for being a big crier himself and dragging me down with him).

Once -- My favorite musical of the year (though who knows if Sweeney Todd would have bested it; that doesn't come out here till January, thanks distributors!!!!!). Wonderful performances, beautiful songs -- I went on about it earlier this year so won't belabor it, but it was absolutely lovely.

3:10 to Yuma -- The second-best Western of the year -- perhaps a bit too neatly wrapped up at the end, but that's kind of what I liked about the ending, that even though Russell Crowe's actions are seemingly out of character, they make perfect sense in the context of the movie. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone but me, but I loved the symmetry of it.

Grindhouse -- Planet Terror was a perfect spoof -- mocking grindhouse movies with hilarious accuracy but incredibly clever in its own right. Death Proof wasn't a grindhouse spoof by any stretch of the imagination -- it was more of a Tarantino movie badly filmed and scratched up -- but it was brilliant in its own right (people moaned about it, but would they really want two back-to-back straight spoofs?).

Black Book -- Straight up Verhoevenly goodness. In Dutch!

Best Coen brothers movie I've seen, but which still left me a bit cold: No Country for Old Men

Movie I thought I'd hate and, much to Admiral Neck's gloating joy, I really, really liked: The Bourne Ultimatum

Favorite bad movie: Ghost Rider, mostly because of the weird character quirks Nicolas Cage adds to his performance

Biggest disappointment: Eastern Promises (I loved History of Violence and consider it one of those elusive masterpieces, so it was a huge disappointment to find that this barely felt like a movie)

Movies I liked but am a bit ashamed to admit to: Music and Lyrics, Hairspray, Transformers (and potentially Dan in Real Life, as it's supposed to be a lot better than the mawkish trailer makes it seem)

Movies that would probably be on my list if they came out in the UK in %#$($# December like they should have: Walk Hard, There Will Be Blood, Juno, Sweeney Todd, Into the Wild, Away From Her, National Treasure 2: Book of Seeeeeecrets, No End in Sight