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Surrogates (2009, Jonathan Mostow)
So they take Bruce Willis and de-age him, but then they put Rosamund Pike in old age make-up? That one doesn’t make much sense. Surrogates is another modern future concept movie–like iRobot or Minority Report–the future comes crashing down because of the movie star hero, there’s some kind of conspiracy involving the new technology, on… 📖
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Mindhunters (2004, Renny Harlin)
Want to see an amazing, can’t-believe-I-haven’t-heard-of-him performance by Eion Bailey? See Mindhunters. Want to see a goofy, affable Val Kilmer performance (maybe the first of its kind since Real Genius)? See Mindhunters. Want to see Christian Slater’s possibly best performance since Pump Up the Volume? See Mindhunters. Want to see a terrible Jonny Lee Miller… 📖
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Commando (1985, Mark L. Lester), the director’s cut
There are a couple good things about Commando–the opening titles and James Horner’s score. Otherwise, I suppose Schwarzenegger isn’t bad in the film, which takes his being Austrian into account, something the majority of his blockbuster roles do not. What’s interesting about the film–and it’s hard to find anything to keep the brain occupied for… 📖
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Land of the Lost (2009, Brad Silberling)
I kind of remember the “Land of the Lost” theme song, but don’t remember ever watching the show. I watched the movie because of an interview Elvis Mitchell did with Silberling, but have no idea what he said in that interview to make me interested in seeing it. Land of the Lost was a box… 📖
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The Lost Boys (1987, Joel Schumacher)
Not being a girl, I never really got The Lost Boys. I didn’t even see it until I was in my late teens, hunting down Jeffrey Boam’s screenwriting credits. Seeing it now, it’s not just clear how much the film wastes wasted Michael Chapman’s cinematography or how Schumacher makes Corey Haim the only gay leading… 📖
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Blood: The Last Vampire (2009, Chris Nahon)
What a disaster. It seems like it should be a good idea… wait, no, it doesn’t. The only time Blood: The Last Vampire works is when it’s a homoerotic romance between Jun Ji-hyun and Allison Miller. The film never recognizes this element, but there’s so much of it, it must have occurred to someone. Jun… 📖
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Fifty/Fifty (1992, Charles Martin Smith)
Fifty/Fifty is the last film where crap-master screenwriters Dennis Shryack and Michael Butler worked together, though it appears they wrote the script in the mid-eighties. It’s one of their best films, which isn’t difficult, only because the film occasionally batters its viewer with man’s inhumanity to his fellow man (in this film’s case, it’s when… 📖
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The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009, Tony Scott)
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 might be the worst directed film I’ve ever liked. I haven’t seen a Tony Scott effort in eight years and he just gets more and more obnoxious with the post production effects. It’s like he’s competing with himself to affect more style and be more visually incoherent than… 📖
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The Thaw (2009, Mark A. Lewis)
There’s a lot to mock about The Thaw. It’s shot on some kind of cheap DV and framed Panavision–the cheap DV isn’t even consistent–and the cinematography is atrocious. It’s also a global warming horror film–indestructible bugs from earth’s past threaten our future unless we stop with the global warming business. Director Lewis misses the humorous… 📖
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The Informant! (2009, Steven Soderbergh)
How does Steven Soderbergh pick projects–more, what kind of artist’s statement would he make? The Informant! is his best film–among all his other rather good films–in a while and it owes more to what he learned on Ocean’s Eleven 12 and 13 than on any of his other films. It’s a great time, but it’s… 📖
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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009, Michael Bay)
I thought I could watch Transformers 2, or whatever it’s called, but I can’t. I made it through the first one, maybe because it followed some kind of traditional narrative structure, but the second one is unbearable. It’s just incompetently told. I’ll read plot details and they seem interesting, but there’s no way I’d ever… 📖
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Near Dark (1987, Kathryn Bigelow)
The last time I tried to watch Near Dark, I failed miserably. This time I suppose I made it through the running time–I think that still image at the end is supposed to be some profound statement–but not all of my brain cells made it with me. They abandoned ship as the film progressed. The… 📖
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Superman/Batman: Public Enemies (2009, Sam Liu)
I’m sure there are some hardcore gay comics less homoerotic than Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman, so the prospect of seeing it as a cartoon was irresistible. While Warner Premiere ostensibly intends their latest line of animated DC Comics adaptations for “adults” (i.e. men in their twenties and thirties with the discretionary income to waste it on… 📖
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Shaun of the Dead (2004, Edgar Wright)
So, people told me Shaun of the Dead was good, but they kept describing it as something akin to Hot Fuzz and whatnot. It’s not a spoof of a zombie movie though. It’s a zombie movie with a couple losers discovering their skill sets make them good at surviving a zombie holocaust, if not excelling… 📖
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The Fountain (2006, Darren Aronofsky)
If you were to tell me I was going to react the way I did to The Fountain, Aronofsky’s dream project, I wouldn’t have believed you. While The Wrestler succeeded, Aronofsky didn’t write it. All my experience with his screenplays is negative. In terms of how the film works, The Fountain is somewhat singular. It’s… 📖
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Thief (1981, Michael Mann)
With Thief, Mann leaves plain an American standard–the gangster movie. Halfway through the film, I wondered how it fit, as the energy the film opens with is gone. The film moves these awkwardly handled scenes without much flare. These scenes are presented as the standard dramatic scenes, but with something not quite right about the… 📖
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Streets of Blood (2009, Charles Winkler)
Of all the crap Millennium Films has released theatrically, it’s shameful they let Streets of Blood go straight to DVD. Sure, there’s an absolutely ludicrous Sharon Stone (playing a faded Southern belle Ph.D., the worst Ph.D. casting since Will Smith), but it’s a solid cop thriller slash character study slash Katrina exploitation film. It’s even… 📖
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Moscow Zero (2006, María Lidón)
Someone read the script to Moscow Zero and wanted to direct it? I guess given the director goes by an alias (Luna) instead of her name–she’s like the female, Spanish McG or something–it should be a surprise. What is a surprise is the presence of Val Kilmer and Rade Serbedzija in this piece of nonsense.… 📖
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Whiteout (2009, Dominic Sena)
I spent a lot of Whiteout wondering why Dominic Sena, whose first film is Kalifornia, didn’t go crazy stylizing the film. It’s relatively stylized as thrillers go, but it’s not at all extreme. And it didn’t even occur to me until the last shot of the film, which lots of people probably don’t have the… 📖
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The Transporter (2002, Corey Yuen)
Matt Schulze worked again? Wow, I’m a little surprised. Schulze’s performance in The Transporter–wait, hold on, physical presence might be a more accurate description–is one of the worst things about the film. There really aren’t very many good things about it, though, to be fair to Schulze (is he worse than leading lady Shu Qi,… 📖
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Transporter 3 (2008, Olivier Megaton)
When an action movie franchise hits the third one (X-Men, Lethal Weapon), they generally know what they’re doing and who they’re making the movie for and instead of producing some wonted exercise, members of this illustrious group of sequels are assured, affable and a lot of fun. The Transporter series is a constant disappointment, since… 📖
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The Tomb of Dracula (1980, Okazaki Minoru), the English dubbed version
I read somewhere the Japanese started producing anime because there was no way to combat live action American imports. With its narration and lame plotting (it somehow isn’t epical–maybe because Tomb of Dracula was produced for television, complete with convenient commercial breaks), it’s an awful way spend ninety minutes. Unfortunately the entire cast isn’t credited,… 📖
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Tomb of Dracula (1980, Okazaki Minoru), the English dubbed version
I read somewhere the Japanese started producing anime because there was no way to combat live action American imports. With its narration and lame plotting (it somehow isn’t epical–maybe because Tomb of Dracula was produced for television, complete with convenient commercial breaks), it’s an awful way spend ninety minutes. Unfortunately the entire cast isn’t credited,… 📖
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Wing Commander (1999, Chris Roberts)
Watching Freddie Prinze Jr. court Saffron Burrows feels like some kind of archaic punishment. It’s the filmic equivalent of the rack. Thankfully, not all of Wing Commander concentrates on the courtship, which might very well be the anti-Christ of screen romances–trying to decide if it’s Prinze or Burrows who gives a worse performance (Prinze through… 📖
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G-Force (2009, Hoyt Yeatman)
I’m not a fan of the popcorn movie argument–it’s the one where people tell you you’re just supposed to enjoy the movie and not think about it–Stephen Sommers uses it in his defense and so does, somewhat more interestingly, Cameron Crowe (I think he called it populist to prove he’d been to college). Except if… 📖
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Green Lantern: First Flight (2009, Lauren Montgomery)
There’s a certain amount of competence to the plotting in Green Lantern: First Flight. It’s too bad the filmmakers didn’t pay the same attention to the characters. The film basically lifts the plot structure from any number of established sources–Star Wars, The Matrix, a little Superman here and there–to tell this origin story about a… 📖
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Wonder Woman (2009, Lauren Montgomery)
They really should have cast Rosario Dawson as Wonder Woman. Never thought I’d be typing those words–even if it is just voice casting–but Dawson is so much better than Keri Russell, whose Wonder Woman comes off as dependent on Nathan Fillion’s male for everything down to pseudo-feminist banter. Russell’s voice defers and doesn’t suggest any… 📖
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Screamers (1995, Christian Duguay)
Sometimes competency is a bad thing. Screamers is a fairly well-made–Duguay’s composition isn’t spectacular, mostly because the sets were all CG embellished so there was only so much he was actually shooting–but there are some excellent effects sequences. There’s some nice stop motion and then a great shuttlecraft liftoff. Duguay knows how to spend his… 📖
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Starship Troopers (1997, Paul Verhoeven)
The only “real” pro-war movie I can think of is The Green Berets. But Starship Troopers is also pro-war, even if it’s, well, startlingly so. I mean, the scene where Casper Van Dien grins after getting his battlefield promotion, following a colleague’s horrific death, is a fine example. What Verhoeven does here, in Starship Troopers,… 📖
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The Hurt Locker (2008, Kathryn Bigelow)
When The Hurt Locker gets predictable, it gets into trouble. Of the super predictable events, there was only one thing I didn’t get right. The Hurt Locker, which uses its recognizable faces in bit parts better than any film in a while (I don’t know the last time Ralph Fiennes was so good–he ought to… 📖
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Screamers: The Hunting (2009, Sheldon Wilson)
If it weren’t for the painfully Canadian cast–I’m thinking mostly of Greg Byrk and Gina Holden, Holden because a recognizable, down on her luck American actress would be playing her character and Byrk because he’s so bland he’s got to be Canadian–Screamers: The Hunting would probably be a little better. There are some decent actors… 📖
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District 9 (2009, Neill Blomkamp)
I’ve never seen a movie before where the vanity producer (Peter Jackson) came before the studio who put up the money for said vanity producer. Wait, this movie is supposed to be about apartheid? Director and co-writer Neill Blomkamp is from South Africa and adoring critics can’t stop making the comparison. It starts in 1982.… 📖
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Step Brothers (2008, Adam McKay), the unrated version
I guess I feel bad John C. Reilly isn’t taking more… intellectual roles, but they probably don’t pay as well. He’s essentially playing his character from Boogie Nights here, only a little stupider but also a little more self-aware. He’s still great and he’s hilarious, but there is definitely something missing. But Step Brothers is… 📖
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The Deep (1977, Peter Yates)
I’m a little surprised Donna Summer did the theme song for The Deep, seeing as how she’s black and, according to The Deep, every black person is a villain of some kind or another. Even with his blond locks, I’ve never thought of Nick Nolte as particularly aryan (maybe because his eyes are so brown),… 📖
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Phone Booth (2002, Joel Schumacher)
IMDb doesn’t mention it, but I thought one of the problems with getting Phone Booth made (it went through countless potential leading men) was the script and screenwriter Larry Cohen’s contract–i.e. no one could be brought in to make it, you know, good. The film’s a piece of crap and it’s too bad because some… 📖
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Layer Cake (2004, Matthew Vaughn)
I tried. I really did try. It’s absurd, in a lot of ways, to even give Layer Cake any kind of chance at all. It’s one of these hipster British crime movies. I don’t remember why I thought it might be all right–there was no empirical evidence to influence that thinking. The direction is CG… 📖
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Lethal Weapon 2 (1989, Richard Donner)
Lethal Weapon 2 opens with the Looney Tunes music. It’s appropriate. I don’t think any other film series has so successfully adapted the sitcom to the big screen. The whole point of Lethal Weapon 2 is not to think–maybe as a ten year-old, I believed the South Africans could get away with all their crimes… 📖
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Lethal Weapon (1987, Richard Donner)
One of the more impressive things about Lethal Weapon is Danny Glover convincingly playing a fifty year-old at, approximately, the age of forty. It’s never a problem in a film rife with problems. First, Lethal Weapon‘s plot doesn’t really make any sense. There are huge jumps in logic as Glover and Mel Gibson’s “investigation” proceeds.… 📖
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Demolition Man (1993, Marco Brambilla)
Umm. Yeah. Where to start with Demolition Man. Stallone’s really personable in it. It might be his most personable, because the viewer automatically identifies with him as the modern (mostly modern) guy in the strange future. The real star is Sandra Bullock, whose performance is far from perfect and her character is poorly written, but… 📖
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Judge Dredd (1995, Danny Cannon)
I saw Judge Dredd at a sneak preview. It was the first time I ever saw anyone walk on a movie. It fits into a rather interesting category of disastrous would-be blockbusters–joining Flash Gordon, The Black Hole and Dune–where there’s this largely international cast–why are Jürgen Prochnow and Max von Sydow playing, basically, New Yorkers–and… 📖
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V for Vendetta (2005, James McTeigue)
V for Vendetta is a film made by Americans about London. I mean, I can see how it’s all right, given it’s a big budget nonsense blockbuster, but there’s something so incredibly lame in the last scene of the film–I’m going to ruin it for you–the dead people, those murdered by the evil British state,… 📖