But this is the story of this particular Priest finding out his daughter got kidnapped by vampires. He tries to get the Vatican (Christopher Plummer) to put together a team or call James Woods or somebody, but they refuse to authorize it because their official stance is that there are no vampires left to worry about. Priest goes by himself, even though he’s told “To go against the church is to go against God.”

“Then I go against God,” he says.

On his rescue mission he takes the young sheriff who told him about the kidnapping (Cam Gigandet, bad guy from NEVER BACK DOWN 1) and is later joined by Maggie Q (LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD) as another Priest who gets sent to stop him, but chooses not to. I like how they have what would be a love type relationship in most movies, but they’re priests so there’s no scene of them surrounded by candles making gentle no-boobs-showing love. Instead they consummate their love with motorcycle action.

There’s alot of cool shots of these long, futuristic motorcycles hauling ass through the desert, that’s probly my favorite imagery in this one. And the best action involves Maggie Q on her motorcycle chasing a train or off her motorcycle fighting some guys who are still on theirs. There’s a little part I dug where Gigandet jumps from his motorcycle onto a train, and before he continues with his mission he takes a second to look over his shoulder and watch his motorcycle crash and flip around.

At its best it’s a western, a story about a quiet killer in a lawless land trying to do the right thing. And it’s got all the western trappings besides horses. Little gas-powered towns with sheriffs trying to stop outlaws. I wonder how long it has to be after a nuclear apocalypse or vampire plague before everybody agrees hey guys, let’s live old west style again. We’ll wear cowboy hats and other old timey clothes, we’ll have a train, we’ll have Brad Dourif as a snake oil salesman. It’ll be awesome.

Most of the vampires are naked digital bugaboos, but the main villain gets to be live action and wear a black hat. Karl Urban plays a Daywalker responsible for the kidnapping, a new step in the evolution of vampires (like they always have in these things). The vampires also have Marilyn Mansony “familiars” to do their work. (It’s illegal to be a familiar, but the law goes unenforced. Probly unconstitutional anyway.) Having these humans around is useful to the movie, but whenever they’re fighting the vampires proper it has that old CGI problem – they look pretty good, but they don’t feel right. They constantly jump and flip, they do everything fast, agile and light, while roaring into the camera. Eventually CGI characters gotta be about what’s best for them to do, not what’s possible. Listen to Jeff Goldblum, whatever that was he said about you shouldn’t make dinosaurs.

I don’t know, maybe that extra weight and grit of fighting actual on screen humans is what this movie is missing. I feel like it’s almost there. We’ve seen similar ideas in other movies, but I like this configuration. It’s simple enough in plot and dialogue, it has pretty good iconic characters, a very dramatic score by Christopher HELLRAISER Young, a serious tone, a short and sweet running time. And yet it mostly doesn’t work. It feels too dull and lifeless at the center.

The director is named Scott Stewart, an effects guy (not surprising) who previously directed LEGION. Here’s everything I remember about that movie: creepy crawly CGI demons, Lucas Black, a diner, Paul Bettany was a heavily armed angel, I think God might’ve been the bad guy. My overall impression was a muddled and stupid movie with occasional bits of “that was kinda cool.” If I had to guess I would say this one is probly closer to working because it’s more focused and streamlined. And Bettany’s character looks cooler, maybe. But that one might’ve been a little more original, I don’t know.

I’ll say this for PRIEST: the last time I tried to watch a movie because Maggie Q was in it it was just a couple weeks ago and it was called KING OF FIGHTERS. It had Ray Park as the bad guy and it was about some kind of fighting tournament where they put in ear pieces that bring them to another dimension to compete in battle. And somebody’s trying to steal a magic sword or something. As soon as it started I realized it must’ve been based on a video game, and soon after I realized it was the exact same premise as MORTAL KOMBAT except with every single entertaining or somewhat entertaining aspect removed entirely. It was just too boring. I didn’t even make it halfway through.

In PRIEST Maggie Q has a smaller role, but I watched the whole thing. Congratulations to PRIEST and Maggie Q. You earned it.

But in context all that stuff is fine. What the trailers underemphasize are two somewhat important elements: the story and the characters. James Franco (General Hospital) is the human lead, and he’s only pretty good, I think he’s a better character actor than generic summer movie hero. But the co-lead or main character is his ape, Caesar (Serkis, computers) and he’s a truly interesting character, a sympathetic animal who you feel for and root for, but who also is flawed and at times scary. Having a chimp in your house is a great time until he grows big enough to hurt you, this is kind of the same thing. Having a super-intelligent chimp is a great time until he grows smart enough to start a revolution.

Franco plays a scientist on the verge of a breakthrough in treating Alzheimer’s patients. His experimental drug has apparently increased the intelligence of a test chimp, and he’s anxious to move on to human testing because his own father (John Lithgow, RICOCHET) suffers from Alzheimer’s. But a disastrous (and awesome) chimp attack shuts down the program and through accident and desperation Franco ends up secretly bringing home the test chimp’s baby, Caesar, who seems to have inherited his mother’s advanced intelligence.

As the years go by it brings to mind that PROJECT NIM documentary that’s out now (or at least the trailer, since I haven’t seen it), and Michael Jackson raising that chimp Bubbles, and also that crazy Richard Franklin movie that I loved, LINK . In all these cases people were raising apes in their homes, treating them as humans, not realistically taking into account the inevitable dangers of the apes as they grow bigger and stronger, or the troubles they would have integrating with other animals or humans. Caesar is a tragic character. At home he sits in the attic staring longingly out the window at children playing. Later, locked up in a home for apes, he draws a chalk window outline on his wall so he can imagine staring longingly out the window. It’s lonely being an ape on the planet of the men.

My favorite section of the movie is when it turns into a prison movie. That’s when Caesar really comes into his own because he’s abandoned, he’s lonely, he’s bullied, but he figures out what to do. He outsmarts the other apes and his human abusers. An ape named Rocket makes fun of him and steals his shirt, so he creates and executes a plan to free and befriend the gorilla named Buck and use him to make Rocket his bitch. Soon after that he becomes a leader.

Caesar is kind of Machiavellian, or even Caesarian, I guess. He does good things for the other apes, but is he doing it out of genuine caring and brotherhood? The way he explains his philosophy in one of the movie’s most memorable scenes it seems more like strategy. He knows there’s strength in unity, but I think it’s the strength he cares about most, not the unity. But maybe that’s okay when his goal truly is freedom. If he wanted to be a tyrant he could stay in the zoo and be the cookie master, and that’s not what he does. He’s ambitious, but I don’t think he foresees a Planet of the Apes. He just wants to climb around in the Redwoods and be left alone, please.

Or that’s how I read him, but there’s some ambiguity there. I guess it can be more dramatic when a character can’t fully explain himself.

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The advertising emphasizes the climax of the movie, where the apes are starting a revolution against man. That part is fun, at times thrilling, but it never feels like the point of the movie. It’s just part of the pay off. It’s the intimate parts that work best, the emotional parts. The scene where Franco has to leave Caesar in a zoo is painful like the scene in A.I. where the mom ditches the kid in the woods. And there’s a sad discomfort in the relationship between the human and the ape. This guy obviously loves Caesar like a son, but he has to keep him on a leash when he brings him out in public, and even that scares the shit out of people. You’ve grown to accept Caesar as a man but his keeper can’t ignore that he’s still a beast.

Sometimes the emotional scenes are kind of subversive in the way they manipulate us. There’s a part where some of the apes attack the villainous owner of the drug company, and have a choice of either showing him some mercy or letting him die. I was hoping they’d choose the nice one, but understood why they might go the other route.

Then, immediately after we’ve sympathized with animals killing a human, we’re asked to mourn the death of the gorilla that did it. And we oblige. Poor big fella. For some reason Caesar thinks to push the ape’s eyes closed after he dies. Must be all that TV they watched while they were locked up.

If I got one complaint about the movie it’s that the bad guys are too one-dimensional. This includes Draco Malfoy as evil animal-abusing assistant primate keeper, but the worst offender is the asshole neighbor who gets mad when Caesar runs into his yard and when Lithgow crashes his car. In both cases he has legitimate reasons to be upset, and still makes you want a chimp to bite his face off. It would be very easy to have all these same situations but with a believable and nuanced response where he’s upset but he’s not the bad guy.

When the rising started happening I realized that might’ve been an intentional choice to make some of the humans one-dimensional so it’s easier to root for a bunch of escaped zoo animals to kill them. But I think if it let us be a little more torn, a little more sympathetic toward our fellow humans, it would be even better.

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There are plenty of silly aspects to this movie. Are there really that many apes in San Francisco? How did they get the regular-intelligence zoo apes to, uh, rise with them? How did Franco date Frieda Pinto for five years without telling him why Caesar was so smart? Why did he still have the experimental drug in the refrigerator when Caesar needed it? How did Franco never get in trouble for having a chimp in the middle of the suburbs? This is not “hard sci-fi,” but because it focuses on a pretty simple character story none of that seems like too much to swallow. The only part that made me groan was when they crowbarred “get your paws off of me you damn dirty ape” into it. Also the scene after the credits where all the apes are shoveling sand onto the Statue of Liberty.

I’m no James Goodall, but in my opinion the science of this movie is not 110% accurate. If there was a way to make apes smarter it probly wouldn’t be instant, or in gas form. And if it affects apes how do we know it doesn’t affect other animals? What about that horse Caesar rode in that one (incredibly awesome) part? What if that horse turned super-intelligent? Would a planet of the horses be possible?

What makes this a real good summer movie is that all of that stuff occurred to me while watching it and none of it bothered me. I never felt like I was being forgiving or “turning off my brain.” It’s just some poetic license. I am a poet, I get that license renewed every four years or whatever. In, say, a Roland Emmerich movie, the characters are so dumb and obnoxious that I don’t think about them, I just laugh at the stupid shit that happens to or around them. In this I’m focused on Caesar’s journey and if he happens to become involved in a full scale ape riot then that’s even better.

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You guys thought I made up the idea of a “prebootquel,” but it’s a real thing now. Even more than X-MEN: FIRST CLASS this one takes an existing series, tells a story before the series started (or honestly needed to start), but also re-establishes things so by the time it gets to the time period of the movie that’s being prequeled it would be a totally different version of those events and characters. This is probly the purest prebootquel yet, but the term would also work for STAR TREK and even BATMAN BEGINS. Prebootquels are the future, man. By which I mean they’re the past. They don’t have to be as lazy as remakes and if done right they can mess with the storyline a little instead of just trying to lead up to what happened in some other movie. I mean technically this is a new telling of what led to a planet of the apes (the story of Caesar sort of comes from CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES) but it doesn’t really feel like that’s the whole point. To me it never once feels like a set up, it just feels like a new story.

I gotta say, the ending does not have quite as much of a shock as the original, though. I figured out at least 20 minutes before the end that it was taking place on earth.

But now it’s a big hit and everybody likes it so I’m sure they’ll do a next episode. Do you think it’ll be BENEATH THE RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES or more of a RISE OF THE BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES? I’m interested to see where they’ll go with it. We know from TV broadcasts that some astronauts went up to Mars and got stranded – that could be to set up for a sequel, or it could just be a little homage to what happened in the original. We also know from some interview with director Rupert Wyatt that he’d like to do “FULL METAL JACKET with apes.” I don’t know what that is, but I like it.

I do think they’ve painted themselves into a hell of a corner, though. A big part of the appeal of this movie is watching the apes communicate through posture, facial expressions and subtitled sign language. It’s nice that they can’t talk. But by the end they can. Especially if they’re gonna skip forward a bit like “FULL METAL JACKET with apes” seems to imply, it’s gonna be a bunch of apes talking to each other. Possibly with recognizable celebrity voices. Unless they evolve the apes to a more human form like in the original movies it might seem pretty silly. It’s a little hard to swallow in this one, but I think it works because it’s minimal.

But you know what, I liked the Bruce Wayne parts of BATMAN BEGINS better than the Batman and worried about how they would deal with that in a part 2. They did fine. So I shouldn’t write it off yet.

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One aspect of the movie I’ll have to give more thought over time is the politics. If I ask what the movie is about, you might say it’s the old “man cannot play God” deal, they caused this by messing with things they weren’t supposed to mess with. I’d prefer to think it’s not about that because that’s just stupid. Superstitious anti-science bullshit. I got people in my family with Alzheimer’s, and it sucks. I don’t think we should stop trying to cure it because we’re afraid it might cause monkeys to talk and knock down helicopters.

I mean I guess “hey scientists, don’t rush it” is okay. They should’ve done more testing first.

But the apes movies have always had parallels to what was going on in our culture at the time. They’re not about animal rights – the apes, obviously, represent people. Does this version of the Caesar story say something that is unique to our time, or is it an age old story of rebelling against your oppressors? CONQUEST of course had more humanized apes, and different political factions. Some just wanted to go along with the status quo, some were militant. There were ape protesters and ape sellouts. Does the lack of those aspects in RISE reflect a more politically apathetic time, or just a logical extension of a movie where the apes are more animal and less human? Probly the second one. I’ll have to reflect on this.

There’s a book I liked when I read it years ago called Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture. I was wondering what that book’s author, Eric Greene, thought about RISE. I found this video where he brings it up a little and seems to be at about the same place as me on that question. “It’ll be interesting to see.”

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I think we can now say officially that this was a pretty weak movie summer. We had some fun ones, but very few classics. I think RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES is my favorite “popcorn movie” since FAST FIVE a couple months ago. Maybe this and ATTACK THE BLOCK. None of these are T2, but they give the Summer of 2011 enough dignity that it should be able to look itself in the mirror briefly tomorrow morning.

Long live Caesar.

chapter 12

One thing about JOHN CARPENTER’S GHOSTS OF MARS: it’s definitely John Carpenter’s GHOSTS OF MARS.

It has plenty of elements that could be perfect for one of his movies. It’s kind of a siege movie like ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, although the simplicity of that type of setup is mired in flashbacks and narration. It’s got a western motif – even though it’s in the future and on Mars there’s a train, and colonists possessed by angry Martian spirits take the place of the Natives defending their land. It’s got a ready-made anti-hero – Ice Cube as the bad-but-not-guilty-of-the-specific-crime-he’s-accused-of prisoner-in-transfer Desolation Williams. It has a pretty good soundtrack where Carpenter melds his style with a bunch of rock n roll dudes with electric guitars and drums, playing Martian tribal rock. It has Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Joanna Cassidy and Pam Grier in the cast! This shit should be great.
In the opening scene a train shows up in the human Martian settlement. It’s supposed to have a prisoner and a bunch of cops on it, instead it only has Lieutenant Ballard (Natasha Henstridge), who is high on space pills. They bring her in to explain what happened to a space magistrate or something, and the movie is her flashback (with flashbacks within it, and sometimes flashbacks within those flashbacks within flashbacks). As far as I can tell this is not making any kind of statement about storytelling or memory or nothin, it’s just… a bunch of flashbacks. Complete with slow, old-timey dissolves and wipes, like when somebody comes out of a dream on a soap opera.

I want to like Natasha Henstridge, and obviously she’s real easy on the eyes, but she’s pretty stiff in what really needed to be a tough, charismatic lead. So it’s not surprising to read that she was cast about a week before filming, recommended by her boyfriend who was already in the movie. She apparently was exhausted from doing too many movies in a row, and at one point collapsed on set. If you look at her IMDb page she’s credited with six movies in 2000 and another two besides this in 2001. Give that lady a vacation.

Originally the character was gonna be played by Courtney Love – I’m not sure how that would’ve gone. Officially she had to drop out because her ankle got run over by a car (you know how that is), but Drew McWeeny reported at the time that the studio forced her out after “the rehearsal and pre-production period [were] wrought with tension as it became clear the casting wasn’t going to work.” It’s anybody’s guess if that refers to unreliability due to drug problems or just being horribly miscast. She had done some good performances in a couple of Milos Forman movies, but it’s hard to picture her wearing leather and running around on Mars with Ice Cube. Or hopping around if it was true about her ankle. Shit, even if she would’ve been worse than Henstridge I kind of wish it happened.

Anyway, it’s too bad Henstridge didn’t get more time to prepare. She does some tough things, like punching a guy and putting him in an armbar when he says “I’ll cut your fuckin titties off.” But she doesn’t sell it like a real action hero. I don’t believe she’s the toughest one on this train. Pam Grier is on there.

John Carpenter in-joke: at one point Pam Grier asks “Who goes there?” Get it, ’cause that’s the title of the story that THE THING was based on. But also it’s just funny to hear somebody say “Who goes there?”

GHOSTS OF MARS is the story of some members of the Mars Police Force (the futuristic equivalent to our own Earth Police Force) who come to pick up a dangerous prisoner, but they find the town where the jail is located nearly deserted, and most of the people left behind have gone crazy, given themselves a bunch of piercings and are roaming around in a big army going CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST on a motherfucker, chopping off heads and putting them on stakes, roaring, etc. So they can tell that something is wrong.

“It was almost like she was… possessed,” Ballard explains in her testimony when describing a particular incident. “Like there was some kind of force inside her.”

No Ballard, it wasn’t almost like she was possessed. She was possessed, not just by “some kind of force inside her” but specifically by the ghost of a dead Martian, transferred via breathing the red dust of Mars. You know this for sure, because you personally breathed in the dust and became possessed, even saw Martian history flash through your brain. You should say “She was possessed by Martian ghosts, and here’s how I know this,” instead it’s this “It was almost like she was… possessed” shit.

She wants it to be an entertaining story I guess. That’s also why she includes parts where she gets high and where she almost gets laid. Most people would skip over that stuff in their sworn testimony.

Ice Cube’s prisoner character is called “Desolation” Williams, which in my opinion is in the lower percentile of good nicknames, although better than some rapper names including Flo Rida, Chamillionaire and Rappin 4-Tay. It would’ve been a routine prison transfer, except “there’s nothing routine about this prisoner.” He gets a decent introduction, with Cube sitting dramatically shadowed in his cell, refusing to talk. But like all the characters in the movie he doesn’t get anything non-cliche to do or say ever. I guess he gets to talk a little more like Ice Cube than Snake Plissken does. He says “Drop the weapon before I cut this dyke bitch head off!” (The Martians do it instead. Off screen.)

One weird aspect is Ballard’s pill addiction. It ends up saving her from getting her body taken over by Martians, so it’s one of the healthier addictions you could have. At one point Desolation says “Look at you. You look high right now,” and it’s funny because she doesn’t look high at all. I figure Carpenter must’ve wrote that in there because he assumed Courtney Love would look high the whole time. But it’s weird that he left it in.

Man, the dialogue that’s supposed to set up a John Woo type relationship between cop and criminal is so fuckin lazy:

BALLARD: See, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m a cop, not a crook.

DESOLATION WILLIAMS: There’s a thin line between a cop and a crook these days. You think it’s a big difference between you and me? You just got The Woman behind your bullshit.

Oh, by the way, he says “The Woman” ’cause the Martian colonists are a matriarchy. That’s one unique touch. They got assigned a rookie named Jericho, and even though it’s Jason Statham they’re disappointed, saying “I was hoping we’d get a good solid woman we could count on.” Kind of like how Dirty Harry would act when he finds out his new partner is a woman.

One scene that threw me in both 2001 and 2011 is the one where Jericho tells her he wants to show her something, brings her into a room and explains that there’s only one door and no windows, so they could “dance.” Even in a matriarchy dudes are always hitting on chicks, I guess. The two characters have been completely hostile toward each other so she justifiably gets pissed off, but then suddenly says “Okay” and starts to go for it.

It’s a completely what-the-fuck? moment, but after thinking about it some I decided it must’ve been intended as a play on this matriarchal society. Most male action heroes wouldn’t go for an out-of-the-blue blowjob offer from some ho, unless it was a scene where they get seduced as part of a trap and they fall for it. But if he did do it in a non-trap situation it probly wouldn’t seem as weird as it does here, it would show that he’s awesome because the ladies throw themselves at him. I guess James Bond or Shaft would go for it. Or Machete. Maybe if Henstridge’s character had that kind of charisma it would come across better. I thought this scene made her seem weak, but now I realize it’s supposed to make her a “pimp.”

But it took me a while to decode that because the gender roles and their reversal don’t seem to really have any meaning in here, it’s just kind of a novel idea that doesn’t get fleshed out. Women are in charge, but it doesn’t really mean anything. Desolation can still get Ballard’s attention by grunting “Hey lady!,” so I don’t think society has changed that drastically.

The colonization theme doesn’t amount to much either. Obviously there’s a parallel here to what my European ancestors did to the Natives. Now the Earthlings are building trains and shit on holy Martian lands, and they’re paying for it. But you don’t get any sense of “oh shit, we reap what we sow” or anything like that. I think the Martians were already wiped out before the humans got there. And if not they’re still hard to sympathize with because they’re cruel, self-mutilating, Pam-Grier-decapitating beasts. They seem like they deserve to be colonized. They deserve to be turned into ghosts of ghosts of Mars.

By the way, although the Martians are represented by humans with crazy piercings and face paint those are only their avatars. There’s one part where you see a flash of a corny big-eyed alien puppet guy so you know what they used to look like in pre-ghost form. I forgot about that.

Way too many aspects of this seem half-assed. Maybe if the performances were better it could sell the dialogue better. Maybe if the dialogue was better it could sell the world better – the uniforms they wear, the goggles that help them breathe the Mars atmosphere, the fucking Martian Police Force. Maybe if the world was better it would sell the phony looking soundstage Martian ghost town. But no, it didn’t happen.

This movie bums me out. In the summer of 2001, especially for a guy like me who liked VAMPIRES, John Carpenter was still a great, working director. Then he made this.

FLASH FORWARD TEN YEARS: It took Carpenter this long to make another movie, and it’s THE WARD, which came out on video last week. It’s about a girl who’s found burning down a house, doesn’t remember how she got there, and they put her in an asylum. She befriends some other girls there, they think some force is trying to kill them so they start hatching an escape plan. I guess nobody told them they could imagine they were in a brothel where they do sexy dances and imagine that they’re in WWI flying around in a robot blowing the shit out of steam-powered re-animated soldier corpses. Isn’t that the best way to deal with asylum life? Maybe next time.

I wanted to do a full-on review for THE WARD but to be honest the movie’s kind of left my head already so I don’t have much to say about it. So I’ll say that it’s a well made, completely solid movie, way more competent, slick and stylish than GHOSTS OF MARS. But like I said, forgettable. The thing is that after GHOSTS OF MARS and all this time it’s a relief that it doesn’t suck. It’s like if you had a cat that disappeared into the woods one night and you didn’t see it for months and figured it got killed by a raccoon or something. And then it shows up and holy shit, it’s still alive. If it’s just walking around normal you’ll be proud of it because you never thought you’d see it again. Okay, the cat seems a little off, not quite what it used to be, but generally healthy. That’s THE WARD. It can walk. Give it a treat.

I mean it’s actually decent, it’s pretty good. But if I saw it without any idea of what it was I would never guess it was made by John Carpenter. It doesn’t feel like something that comes from his brain. Maybe it’s partly because he decided he’s too old to do the scores anymore, so it doesn’t sound like one of his movies. A crucial element of the JC style is completely missing. They call it JOHN CARPENTER’S THE WARD because otherwise you wouldn’t know it was his.

So what’s better, a pure but shitty John Carpenter movie like GHOSTS OF MARS, or a solid but anonymous one like THE WARD? Flip a coin, I guess. Or pick THE WARD, I don’t care. Either way GHOSTS OF MARS is not a happy way to wind down the summer of ‘01.

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legacy: John Carpenter retired from the big screen for 10 years after this. Supporting player Jason Statham went on to become one of the biggest action stars of the current era.

datedness: the whole look and tone of the movie already seemed hokey in 2001.

would they make a movie like this today: of course not

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I seem to remember back in 2001 being dumbfounded by a rave review in some overseas auteurist magazine like Cahiers du Cinema or something, but I couldn’t find it. The best I could do was this open-minded piece calling it “an interesting failure.”

Here’s my original review, written when I didn’t know who Jason Statham was, but I still suggested Natasha Henstridge’s character should’ve gone at him with a strap-on.

Despite my fascination with Nic Cage, NEXT never caught my attention before. I actually wasn’t clear what it was about, and the shitty DTV-style cover doesn’t help. Maybe it’s partly the title. Not only does it not give you an indication of the movie’s content, it practically dismisses itself. Next!

I don’t think there’s any way around saying that NEXT is a bad movie, and Cage doesn’t do any mega-acting or any other impressive type of acting in it. But I absolutely recommend watching it. It’s some funny shit, never boring, constantly befuddling. I don’t know how those guys did it but they wrote a movie that’s almost ingenious in the way it breaks every common sense rule about how a story like this is supposed to work. I want to say it’s subversive, but I think that would be pushing it. I’m pretty sure it’s just stupid.

“Based” on a Philip K. Dick story about an animalistic, gold-skinned mutant in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, NEXT is the story of a Las Vegas magician named Frank Cadillac (Nicolas Cage) who has the ability to see two minutes into his future. Chased by casino security after using his powers for small-time gambling, he’s found by an FBI special agent (Julianne Moore) who knows about his skills and needs his help to track down a group of terrorists who stole a nuclear bomb and plan to detonate it in Los Angeles (a plan you know they fuckin got from BLACK DAWN).

The way his powers work is he can see up to 2 minutes into the future, and then based on what he sees he can change his mind about what he’s gonna do and then see 2 minutes into the new future created by that different decision. So the movie will have something happen and then skip back and re-do it a bunch of times in a row until he’s satisfied with the results.

Because of this gimmick the Cage and Moore characters don’t actually meet each other the first time. He only imagines them meeting and then decides not to do it. Later when they encounter each other they act like they already met, but they didn’t. That was just a possible 2-minute future that he rejected.

The other thing about seeing into the extremely near future is that, let’s say a bird is gonna shit on you, well you’ll know it and you’ll move out of the way. That doesn’t happen in the movie but it’s an example of the type of incredible power this character wields. In my opinion the movie should be called THE DODGER, because that’s mainly what he does. He dodges a whole lot of punches, bullets, rolling cars, flying objects. He uses it to weave through a casino evading all of the security guards, to walk through traffic without getting hit, to lead a SWAT team move-by-move so they can take out the bad guys without being harmed.

That’s fun and everything, but the uniquely crazy part of the movie is he’s not only dodging flying objects, he’s also dodging being a hero. When you first learn that he has this power and then learn about these terrorists you think okay, so he’s gonna use this power to stop these terrorists. No! Instead of helping he makes a run for it. Instead of coming up with a new plan for stopping the terrorists, Moore chases after him. The guy who doesn’t want to help stop the terrorists.

Moore’s superior officer points out that her plan is terrible. Her partner seems skeptical too. Her S.W.A.T. team seems annoyed. Still, all of these highly trained and experienced adult professionals spend days on a comprehensive manhunt for a 2-minute psychic instead of trying to track down the people with the nuclear god damn warhead. Since they haven’t bothered to track the terrorists they don’t notice that the fucking guys are right near them the whole time, also following Nic Cage. Why are they following him? Because they saw that the FBI was following him. So even the bad guys in this movie can’t keep their eye on the ball. All they gotta do is set off a bomb, but they get distracted chasing a small time Vegas magician, and they don’t even know why.

Usually if a movie hero has an opportunity to save millions of lives he’ll either go for it or (if he’s Snake Plissken) be forced into doing it. This guy doesn’t get forced until the last act. He passes on heroism, and instead tries to meet the hot girl he’s had visions of (Jessica Biel), then when he sees her he imagines the different ways he could hit on her and how they would all go wrong. So basically this is a movie about a psychic who won’t stop a nuclear attack and is trying to get laid.

Biel is the most innocent character. All we know about her is that she has a stalker ex-boyfriend, she doesn’t believe in fate, she teaches Native American children (probly remnants from an earlier script where those scenes had a purpose), and for some reason she’s willing to give the weirdo who got punched by her ex a ride to Flagstaff. And stay in a hotel room with him. And then sleep with him. So I gotta assume she’s an idiot too, but I kinda feel sorry for her. But it might be mainly because she’s real good looking. I apologize. But she doesn’t have the asskicking powers she had in BLADE TRINITY or even THE A-TEAM, so she spends most of the last act tied up and gagged.

Before that, 56 minutes into the movie, the poor girl finally finds out about the psychic powers and the FBI manhunt. She speaks for the audience when she says, “I don’t understand. If you can help, then why don’t you?” (His answer: “Because I can’t. I can only give them a two-minute head start.” Well then tell them that, dude! Do you realize you’re leading them on a cross country manhunt when there’s a nuclear bomb out there they should be looking for instead of your dumb ass?)

So let’s go through that again real quick. The main factions in this movie are:

1. A man with very limited psychic powers who refuses to help stop a nuclear attack on Los Angeles

2. An FBI team who know there are terrorists about to launch a nuclear attack on Los Angeles who instead choose to focus their efforts on chasing a dude who one lady believes can see two minutes into the future.

3. Psychotic terrorists on the verge of detonating a nuclear bomb who decide to first chase after a guy because they saw the FBI chasing after him

4. A lady who gives a ride to the unheroic psychic, has sex with him and then gets tied up

I think it’s also important that we discuss Julianne Moore’s plan here. Once she finally gets him late in the movie they strap him to a chair, give him some of those CLOCKWORK ORANGE eyelid holders and force him to watch the news. ‘Cause he can watch news 2 minutes in the future and then if they report a nuclear bomb going off he’ll have a 2-minute window to go find the guys I guess. Shitty plan, right?

Never fear! They have more than two minutes. See, she tells him to push his 2 minutes as far as he can, so then he’s able to see a day or so into the future. So actually it was a really good plan, to tell him to do that, and have it turn out that he never realized that yes, he can do that.

I know what you’re thinking: this sounds fucking ridiculous. But I can explain. Frank Cadillac is only his stage name, because he’s a magician. His real name is Cris Johnson. So you see, it’s all perfectly reasonable, although admittedly an unusual spelling of ‘Chris’.

At the beginning Cris narrates that he’s a magician and does some magic tricks to hide his real abilities, but why does he need to hide his abilities? Just to avoid the responsibility of helping the FBI save millions of lives? He makes his money with small bets in the casino, avoiding large bets so that he’s not detected. But why doesn’t he just get a real job? Wouldn’t being able to see the outcome of every possible action help him in pretty much any high paying job? In fact, couldn’t it help him to get the high paying job in the first place? Get him past the interview, anyway.

The movie is pretty out in the open about being stupid as shit, but then all the sudden at the end it gets lofty and (SPOILER)  let’s you imagine whether or not he’s able to stop the bomb, and how he does it. Like hey man, it’s not really about stopping the nuclear bomb, it never was. It’s about the people, man. That’s what matters. Frank Cadillac and that girl.

One part I like is when a nuclear bomb is about to go off he grabs Jessica Biel as if he’s gonna shield her from it. I don’t know man, I guess I kinda believe it though, that a man would have that instinct to grab her and protect her. I guess I would do that too. It’s still funny to see Nic Cage do it, though.

In conclusion, don’t be a loser like me and sit around for years failing to watch NEXT. Make NEXT next on your list!

the end

appendix: birth years
Nicolas Cage: 1964
Julianne Moore: 1960
Jessica Biel: 1982

That influence is all over the surface of SUPER 8, but ATTACK THE BLOCK has a completely different style. Even though it takes place in modern day London it really makes me think of late ’70s, early ’80s movies about young people in New York City – BEAT STREET, THE WARRIORS, the “Beat It” video. It also put me in mind a little bit of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 over here on the west coast. The score by a gentleman named Basement Jaxx is a hell of alot closer to John Carpenter than John Williams.
SUPER 8 is about middle class, small town kids in the the ’80s, they deal with losing their mothers or not getting along with their fathers, they spend their days working together to make a monster movie. ATTACK THE BLOCK is about poorer kids in a housing project in modern South London, their parents mostly aren’t around if they have them, they spend their nights working together to rob people or work for drug dealers.

Okay, so technically that makes them bad kids, but they’re sympathetic. They do things you hate but you still like them, or you learn to. They’re funny little bastards. In the opening of the movie, when they see an alien, they chase it, kill it and carry the corpse around the neighborhood like it’s something they found and wanted to show everybody. A unicycle, or a box of Playboys. Later, when they’re inside and see more alien meteors crashing around the neighborhood they don’t get scared and hide, they get excited and rush outside to kill some more of them. First they have a mad scramble to their own apartments to get whatever weapons they can find: firecrackers, bats, swords. Not in a panic – it’s more like it started snowing and they’re rushing to get their snow gear so they can go have a snowball fight.

They kind of remind me of the kids in FRESH, actually. Remember Fresh had that friend that was so obsessed with the Punisher? If you were there you’d laugh at some of the things they say and also shake your head because they need to straighten out. But you’d still be laughing.

That’s another thing: I was a little skeptical because people had called this a “horror comedy” and compared it to SHAUN OF THE DEAD. Edgar Wright is executive producer, Cornish is his buddy, and SHAUN co-star Nick Frost is in the cast. SHAUN is a good movie, but this one is more my speed because in my opinion it’s not a comedy, it doesn’t have jokes. It’s a serious story, but the characters are funny, so there are parts where you laugh. But all the laughs come naturally out of the characters and the dramatic situations, they don’t just set up the scenes to get to the jokes.

In the town in SUPER 8 they had the cops trying to help people, they had the military coming in and shutting the place down, trying to take control. In ATTACK it’s more of a Hurricane Katrina situation, they’re on their fuckin own. In fact they gotta worry about the cops coming after them as much as the aliens. And an angry drug dealer too.

Of course, the suburban kids get their story told with a relatively big budget of $50 million, slick visuals and special effects by ILM. ATTACK was done for about $13 million. It intelligently takes advantage of its limitations, confining the story and creating the most unique aliens we’ve seen in forever (furry silhouettes with glowing teeth).

There’s also a difference in the small town vs. projects approach to handling aliens. In SUPER 8 they ultimately decide to understand and relate to the alien even though it’s biting off heads. They realize their people fucked over the alien in the first place. In ATTACK THE BLOCK they sort of started it by accident too, and the guilty party takes responsibility for his actions, but that doesn’t stop our guys from killing the fuckers. (”Gorilla wolf motherfuckers” they call them a couple times. GWMs.) It’s a more brutal approach but more successful. In SUPER 8 I think the filmatists failed to sell the alien as a sympathetic character, here they go the easier route of just making them hungry monsters, so they succeed.

I don’t want to oversell it, it’s not gonna do your laundry for you or pack you a lunch, but I really liked this movie. It’s good, charismatic performances from fresh faces, it’s a unique combination of elements (”Inner City vs. Outer Space,” as the poster says), it’s got some good laughs, some tense moments, some well-staged action, some good atmosphere, good music, clever monster effects. It doesn’t feel like any of the other movies coming out these days – it has its own personality. It leaves some things refreshingly unresolved, not starting or ending in complete safety. I think it even has a little substance in the middle, if you like that sort of thing.

* * *

This movie got me wondering about something in American culture. This is gonna be sort of a tangent but fuck it, nobody’s paying me, or printing me on paper. I got no word limit to worry about.

I got to wondering, what is it about American nerd/geek culture that causes so many of its practicioners to be fascinated by everything British? Right now it’s Dr. Who, Torchwood, Simon Pegg, Ricky Gervais, Sherlock, maybe some other stuff. I’m not saying that’s not good stuff or that they don’t genuinely love it, but I believe there’s more to it than that. I mean, these same people aren’t digging up French sci-fi or Swedish comedy, it’s specifically a fascination with the U.K. And if you’re around them long enough they’ll dabble in accents and slang. They’ll even say “shite” sometimes, even though obviously the word is “shit.” Or they’ll say “wankers” or “cunt” even though in America “cunt” is a horrible thing to say. But “fannypack” is okay.

I don’t know if you guys in other countries know this, and maybe I’m not supposed to reveal it, but we Americans have a thing about British accents. We tend to think any British person is smarter than us just because of the accent. Anybody. Even Jason Statham. Maybe not Vinnie Jones. But maybe Vinnie Jones. So I think that adds an extra cache for some of these people, they think British shit = smart shit. And if by chance it really is smart then they think it’s double-smart because of the accent. Geeks/nerds are smart people, or they believe they are smart people. Since the British shit isn’t playing on NBC they feel like it’s some special smart shit they had to search for, those dumb people around them would never appreciate it even if they knew about it, which they don’t. The wankers.

But what I was thinking was meanwhile there’s this completely separate phenomenon of the white kids from the suburbs who are fascinated by black, inner city culture. When you say that it usually it has a bad connotation, like the white kids in question are phonies, but that’s not what I’m saying. I think it’s natural. These kids grew up on E.T. and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK like everybody else, but also breakdancing movies and Michael Jackson and then graduated to Run DMC and then Ice-T and on from there. To a white middle class kid in the late ’80s there was an exoticness to N.W.A. like there is now to Doctor Who. You are now about to witness that strength of Brit knowledge.

There’s even kind of a joke about this in ATTACK THE BLOCK. You hear KRS-One’s “Sound of the Police” on the soundtrack. You see these boots walking along. You see headphones, you realize this guy is listening to the song on his iPod. Then you see the guy and he’s a dorky white kid, and he’s enthusiastically rapping along to this song that compares “officers” to “overseers” in the days of slavery.

But why not? Of course he loves that song. It’s a great song! True, his reason to hate cops is because he’s carrying weed, not because of hundreds of years of racist institutions. But he hears what it’s saying, maybe he understands it, maybe he learns from it. It’s a funny moment in the movie but I saw it as kind of affectionate toward this kid’s passion, not ridiculing him.

There’s no racial divide in ATTACK THE BLOCK, only a class one. The white kids use the same slang as the black kids because they grew up together, are currently growing up together, go to the same school. There’s no border between them. The breakdancing and graffiti movies in the ’80s were the same, they had black kids and Hispanic kids and white kids together, there was no reason not to. If suburban kids showed up they may or may not be accepted. They might try too hard. They might fake an accent. It’s hard to say. They’d probly do okay, like the KRS-One kid in this one. They just have to get to know each other and everything will be fine.

The white lady in the movie is targeted not because she’s a white lady, but because they thought she was an upper class lady from somewhere else. They regret what they did to her after they realize she’s a nurse and probly doesn’t make much money, and after they get to know her. Moses tells her he wouldn’t have robbed her if he knew she lived in the neighborhood. It’s a terrible excuse but also an acknowledgment that by living there she’s one of them.

But back to the suburban kid’s fascination with black people from the city. It’s not that different from the nerd wanting to dress up like Doctor Who. (Who wears a scarf, I believe. I’m against it, unless it’s really cold. Not sure what’s up with men today and their delicate necks.) Both are looking to a place that seems far away, that they know from TV and movies, a place where they didn’t grow up but that seems interesting to them. So they’re kind of the same sort of interest. But there’s not much overlap between those groups, is there? How many people are really into both Red Dwarf and Wu-Tang Clan? There’s gotta be people, because this is a big fuckin world, and people can’t always be put into boxes. But I never met somebody like that and don’t expect to soon.

White hip hop kids, with the exception of the character McLovin, are not generally seen as “geeks.” Of course there’s the stereotype of the “guy who thinks he’s a black,” a common type of buffoon in comedies. But if you’re geeky about hip hop history, if you compile a blog about every sample or reference used by Mobb Deep or whatever, you’re not gonna be called a nerd, are you? You’re pretty cool. There is a whole world out there of hip hop academics and encyclopedic crate diggers. Their passion is every bit as detail oriented and niche as what any nerds are into, but in my brain I can not possibly see it as being the same as live action role playing or building your own costumes of your favorite video game characters. One is cool, one is dorky. Why is that?

If you accept my premise of these as two different categories, the American Obsessed With British Shit and the White Suburban Kid Fascinated By Black Culture, would you agree with me that ATTACK THE BLOCK is the first movie that strongly appeals to both groups? It’s a hood movie, a non-judgmental, fairly authentic feeling portrait of kids in the projects. It has that KRS-One song (I wonder if the kid actually had Return of the Boom-Bap on his iPod, or did he get it from the COP OUT soundtrack?) and reggae, none of your usual sad/angry white people playing guitar. It has some girls singing a Lauryn Hill song (I mean I’m guessing it’s the Lauryn Hill version they know it from, not the Delfonics).

It’s got all that, but also it’s British, it’s got the guy from SHAUN OF THE DEAD in it, it’s produced by Edgar Wright, it’s science fiction, and all the same “movie geek” writers on the web who lost their shit over SCOTT PILGRIM and KICK ASS are weaving a thick cocoon of hyberbole around this one too, trying to promote it like it’s a cause, telling people to support its theatrical release.

And I think that might be groundbreaking, because when have “geeks” ever worshiped a movie with a black hero, or even an urban one? I can’t think of a single one. I’m not saying they’re racist, I’m just saying they tend to relate to certain types of characters and it’s not the ones in MENACE II SOCIETY or even ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, it’s super heroes or quiet underdog kids or put-upon wisecracking dudes. Many of them are suspicious of rappers or black comedians the way they are of “hipsters.” Like Republican pundits they’re so clueless about it that when Common (from the Gap commercials) was cast in the never-made JUSTICE LEAGUE movie the Ain’t It Cool talkbackers criticized him as a “gangster.” It’s partly a race issue, partly just a social one. They hang onto these dumb categories from high school to stereotype people by their primary music interests or the type of clothes they wear, shitting all over a movie if they detect “hipster” or “emo” or “gangster” on it.

You could argue that these guys loving ATTACK THE BLOCK is not progress, because why not show them “positive” black characters, ones who are not criminals, who do not fit into a stereotype? It’s more white filmatists telling black kids to be cool stay in school. “Hey guys, you need to straighten out your community. Your actions are only hurting you.” Yeah, it’s that, but I don’t see any preachiness or condescension in it. It’s all empathy. The audience is clearly with the kids. Maybe some of us are closer to the white lady in our own lives, but we see the movie through the eyes of the kids and we see her slowly come to understand where they’re coming from at the same time they start to understand her.

I mean this. If some of the people who have that limited white “geek” world view fall in love with a movie where they have to sympathize with kids from the projects, kids who have resorted to petty crime, kids who have very different background and experiences from them, that is a good thing. Through the miracle of British accents they’re tricked into experiencing the identification those other kids had while watching JUICE and BOYZ N THE HOOD and FRIDAY. They get to see things from a different perspective, from inside the apartment with the scary bass vibrating out of it. That’s sort of what the movie’s all about, I think: the muggers getting to know the victim, the victim getting to know the muggers, both of them making peace and becoming better people in some way. And killing GWMs.

If the movie really works that way it could expand some minds and help inch us ever so slightly toward a better world where people care about each other. I really believe that. If not, it’s still a cool alien invasion movie.

chapter 10

released July 27, 2001

Well, so far this summer of 2001 we’ve been having hasn’t been too hot. But at least we got that new Tim Burton movie coming out, right? I don’t know why they gotta remake PLANET OF THE APES but it’s a great cast and that guy knows what he’s doing, I’m sure he’ll do something interesting with it.

Nope. 10 years later I’m not sure I need to explain why the PLANET OF THE APES remake is no good. I don’t remember there being an argument about it at the time, or ever encountering anybody that liked it in the decade since. It was a bad idea, it was not good, let’s all pretend it never happened. The end.

But I’m doing this thing so let’s do it.
I got one nice thing I can say: the makeup by Rick Baker is really good, at least on the male apes. Tim Roth’s villainous chimpanzee general and Paul Giamatti’s sleazy orangutan salesman (man, Clyde would hate that asshole) look so real, but allow the actors to express through them. Michael Clarke Duncan is a gorilla warrior, and somehow his eyes make him recognizable (okay, the voice helps).

Luckily there are only a couple of female ape characters. They look ridiculous. On a real ape you don’t really see recognizable “female” characteristics on their face, but for some reason in the movie they thought that was important. So instead of giving them realistic animal faces like on the males they make them closer to human and give them thin, painted-on type eyebrows, the kind that don’t even grow naturally on humans. The hair on the top of their heads is fashionably styled and they seem to be wearing lipstick and mascara. Which I guess makes sense for an advanced race of apes, but they don’t look like males with makeup on, they look much closer to human.

Are they trying to make them look attractive? Kind of attractive? I’m not sure. I don’t think anyone could really say what they were trying to do. They had a release date to meet, no time to think this shit through.

The original PLANET OF THE APES of course holds up as a stone cold classic, and the makeup was a breakthrough at the time. But that’s the only thing that made it a classic that carried over to the new version. The original, written by Rod Serling, had a great story, a human finding himself in a crazy world where he’s considered such a low life form that everybody flips out when he talks and thinks it must be some kind of a hoax. And he has to go to court.

The remake ditches that whole setup. Mark Wahlberg plays a U.S. Air Force space pilot in the near future whose little space pod deal gets sucked into a space storm and he crash lands on the Planet of the Apes. He finds himself in some woods with some humans (dressed like cavemen) and they all get chased and rounded up by gorilla warriors wearing armor, and sold to Giamatti.

For maybe 10 minutes the humans don’t talk, and Wahlberg doesn’t talk to them. Then it turns out they do talk. Huh.

Bonham Carter’s character is the daughter of a senator (David Warner) and she’s some kind of an ape-liberal who’s a human rights activist, but not in a cool way. She sneaks into the place where the humans are gonna be branded like cattle, then hops and swings around and knocks the brand away and then says a bunch of righteous stuff. Although I am a liberal and although I appreciate people who stand up for what they believe in and although I am a human I still found her annoying. It’s a real bummer. Gonna turn me into an apepublican.

She’s kind of dumb too in my opinion because she makes a big deal about being an atheist, and making it clear that she doesn’t believe in it when she explains the ape prophecies and shit to Wahlberg, but when one of the apes jokes about “next thing she’s gonna be telling us the humans have souls” she says “Of course they do!” Oh yeah, scientist through and through… until spirituality is convenient for shocking dad’s friends at the dinner table.

Although none of the other characters are as annoying as hers none of them have much to offer. Wahlberg is just gung-ho soldier guy going through the motions that have to happen for the plot, doesn’t ever show any personality. Estella Warren, the model seen earlier in the summer in DRIVEN, plays a human girl, and that’s pretty much the extent of her characterization. A former synchronized swimmer, Warren does not get to do any water dancing like in DRIVEN, but does have some extensive underwater shots. So that’s good.

Kris Kristofferson plays her dad, doesn’t do anything either. Roth gets really into moving like a chimp, and has at least four or five parts where he gets to bash somebody over and over again like he’s trying to break open an oyster with a rock. But his character is less than one-dimensional. He’s openly evil. His eyebrows are always slanted villainously, even when his face is translated into statue form, and his voice always sounds like he’s threatening to destroy the world, even when conversing with polite company at the dinner table.

And what the hell is he trying to do, anyway? If people are just like animals why is he so concerned about them? From the beginning he fixates on Wahlberg. It’s like if Donald Rumsfeld suspected that a really smart dog he came across was gonna ruin American society and spent 24 hours a day brooding about it, even talking to other human adults about it. But it’s not played like it’s supposed to be silly or funny, the movie just acts like it’s reasonable.

I guess if I had to choose a best character it would be Duncan’s, because he just kind of tries to do his job and then at the end has a change of heart and tries to do the right thing. Too late though, he already killed a good gorilla. It’s nice that he wants to bury humans and apes in unmarked graves so they’ll be mourned equally, but it’s kinda too little too late in my opinion. (SPOILER. I just ruined it. Better not see the movie now. Sorry about that everybody.)

One thing they intentionally did to make it different from the good PLANET OF THE APES was to have the actors move like animals. They hunch over, swing around, pound their chests, that kinda shit. I’m fine with that. What I don’t like is their magic jumping powers. I guess some monkeys can leap, but I can’t get with Tim Roth constantly jumping 15-20 feet in the air, especially since it’s clearly just him being slowly lifted up on a cable. It looks dumb every time it happens.

But you can ignore all the above complaints, none of them really matter that much in the face of the terrible script by William Broyles Jr. (FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS), Lawrence Konner (SUPERMAN IV, THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE) and Mark Rosenthal (same as last guy). It just has no purpose to it. Here’s the plot: he crashes, he gets caught, they escape (well, more like just leave), they travel, there is a battle, then it’s the end part.

There’s not really a plan, he’s just kind of making it up as he goes along, maybe as a commentary on the script. He’s just trying to go back to where he crashed, thinking his people will rescue him there. There’s not some dangerous path or series of obstacles to get through, there’s not some items he has to get, there’s not some plot or scheme he has to stop, there’s not a character he has to convince of something, or a piece of information he has to learn, or training he needs to have, or even something to avenge. He’s just trying to go from the city to the other place. And yet there’s no beautiful simplicity there. It’s big and sloppy and crowded. It’s a textbook example of the project developed over years and years and instead of getting it perfect they just give up at some point and choose a release date and start filming with the stitched together remains of 25 different unrelated, not good enough scripts.

There are approximately two parts of the movie that are semi-interesting. One is the special guest appearance by Charlton Heston as the villain’s father-on-his-deathbed. He reveals to his son the secret of the gun – they found one in the ancient ruins or somewhere, and he explains how it’s this powerful device that changes everything. It’s weird because it’s Heston’s pro-gun politics, and the movie seems to not just endorse them but go a little overboard, treating the invention of the gun like the most important thing that ever happened. That wouldn’t be that surprising in a John Milius movie, but Tim Burton doesn’t strike me as the gun lover type. He’s barely even had them in his movies before.

I think the way they deal with it though is the scene where Roth gets the gun but he fires it inside a plexiglass room where it just ricochets around. It doesn’t hit him in the ass or anything but it turns out not to help him as advertised.

The climax is kind of amusing, when Wahlberg’s not-human chimp from back on the space ship predictably shows up through the time portal or whatever and is interpreted as the prophesized return of the ape god Semus. The mob of angry apes all bow to him, so it’s just a great “fuck you” when Wahlberg walks over and the monkey holds his hand. YOU SEE THIS, APE MEN? YOUR GOD HOLDS MY HAND LIKE A LITTLE BOY!

I’m kinda surprised that they let the human approach Semus, they don’t seem to care at all. But maybe they figure their god can’t be hurt. And maybe that explains why nobody gets mad at Tim Roth for punching their god.

Also I get a kick out of how his space ship has become thousands-of-years-old ruins, but some of the machinery still works and he can just chip a layer of rock off of the monitors.

The very end of the movie is the most absurd and crazy part, so of course that’s the part I like best… and the part most people point to as the reason why the movie is bad. As if the two hours of boring bullshit before it would’ve been improved by not ending on a strange and unexpected note. It ends with Wahlberg crashing back in what appears to be present day Washington DC, but then it turns out to be Present Day Washington DC of the Apes, and he’s surrounded by ape cops, media, tourists, etc.

I guess the part that bothered people is the way this switch is revealed, when he looks at the Lincoln Monument and it’s now the General Thade Monument. This is a timeline where somehow Tim-Roth-chimp saved the planet and is a great hero of the past. How did this happen? I do not know. Would it be better if I understood the specifics of how Thade travelled through time, what he did to save the planet and why the space-time-continuum would cause a great ape hero to be memorialized in the same way that our timeline’s Great Emancipator was? In my opinion fuck no, you silly people. Anyway if you hate Aperaham Lincoln you support slavery.

Ten years of distance didn’t help this one at all. I guess it didn’t look as ugly as I remembered it. I remember really hating the ape village back in 2001, everything is so close together and sound-stagey looking I thought it looked like a Universal Studios stunt show. Didn’t really bother me this time, maybe because we’re so used to everything being CGI now that you don’t see big sets like that as much. Otherwise nothing improved.

But you know I am a positive individual so I’m proud to say that I thought of another nice thing to say about the movie that I actually didn’t pick up on ten years ago. I realized this time that the good guy gorilla that helps the humans is played by renowned b-movie villain Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. Who would’ve ever thought mean old Shang Tsung would put up with several hours a day in the makeup chair? It really is good to see him play a good guy, even if you gotta really look close to tell it’s him.

2001-2011 connections: This movie prevented PLANET OF THE APES from being revived until this summer, when it finally got a chance to be a liability to the unrelated rebootquel RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES.

legacy: See above

datedness: Paul Giamatti says “Can’t we all just get along?” in part of it. That was already an old reference when it came out, now I bet the youths don’t even know what the fuck it is. Which is kind of sad as far as knowledge of modern history but positive as far as corny jokes.

Visual-effects-wise it’s up-to-date, because the space ship stuff looks good and the monkeys are all done without the computers and therefore don’t look obsolete.

chapter 9

Let me tell you man, I’m not trying to commemorate the tenth anniversary of this movie. There’s no celebration here at all. It’s just analysis, I swear.

I saw FINAL FANTASY in the theater when it came out, found it incredibly boring, and really didn’t want to ever watch it again. Here is my review from back then. But I thought it was important to revisit for this study because, despite being a huge financial and artistic failure this movie did break alot of new ground that has turned out to be relevant to the movies of the decade since.

If you don’t remember what this thing is, it was the first computer animated movie to attempt realistic humans. Back then I fixated on the creepiness of too-real-but-not-real-enough characters. Having seen more of that since then it didn’t bother me as much this time, but I couldn’t help still being distracted by the celebrity voices. The male lead looks like an idealized Ben Affleck, but his voice is clearly Alec Baldwin (what is this, a composite Jack Ryan?) and Steve Buscemi’s voice comes out of a good looking young man that I still think looks kind of like Jason Priestley. James Woods is the villain, who looks like a STARSHIP TROOPERS All Stars mix of Michael Ironside and Casper Van Dien. In one scene we learn that his family were killed and that’s why he does what he does, but that doesn’t explain why he had evil eyebrows the whole time. How are you supposed to feel bad for him when he’s always making a bad guy face?

When Robert Zemeckis did his trilogy of creepily-realistic computer animated human movies he increasingly found ways to make it work better. He still used celebrity voices, but visually modeled the characters after the actors. For example multiple characters in POLAR EXPRESS resemble Tom Hanks, so it’s not weird to recognize his voice coming out of them. Zemeckis also made the characters a little more stylized, especially by the time of movie #3, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, where they have exaggerated, cartoonish shapes but just happen to be ridiculously detailed in their textures and eyes.

Zemeckis’s movies are usually referred to as “mocap” for their use of “motion capture” technology, the thing where the actors’ movements are recorded and used to control the computery characters instead of frame-by-frame animation. People think they hate mocap, but I think FINAL FANTASY shows why it’s good if you’re using realistic characters like this. I believe this was mostly done with animation (although a small motion capture department is listed on the credits) and at times it’s noticeable that these people move more like animated characters than actual humans. So it makes them look even more like Real Dolls.

Zemeckis had the advantage of 3D, too. That was a good idea ’cause then it seems more like a ride or a diorama. So you feel like your riding Pirates of the Caribbean or something. FINAL FANTASY doesn’t feel like a ride or a movie.

Technologically speaking, FINAL FANTASY is still impressive. It looks real nice on the blu ray. But the story just isn’t involving at all. It’s all about these soldiers going around shooting ghostly alien monsters on a post-apocalyptic earth. Meanwhile the hero, Aki, is trying to prove that they need to go around and find 8 “spirits” that have something to do with “Gaea,” the soul of Mother Earth, and then they can heal the earth or whatever. It’s a very dull and repetitive set of goals, taking place in dull locations, with stakes that are difficult to care about. These creepy things don’t quite seem human enough to worry about their safety, the battles are mostly the same thing over and over, and since we never see any people besides these soldiers and a couple council members it’s not clear what they’re even trying to accomplish. If the ghosts go away then there will be, like, 10 soldiers on a wrecked planet and they won’t have anything to shoot at anymore. That doesn’t seem like a happy ending.

I complained about this in my original review, but it bears repeating: this movie is all about fighting transparent monsters that they call “phantoms” and “spirits,” then 52 minutes in everybody’s minds are blown when they figure out that these aren’t alien monsters, they’re actually ghosts. They’re surprised by the revelation that these things are ghosts and we’re surprised by the revelation that they didn’t realize before that these things were ghosts. For the most part though the storytelling isn’t that dumb. It’s just that it’s really lacking in excitement.

Maybe all it would need would be a great lead character. I can see some gung-ho appeal in the Alec Baldwin soldier guy, but the lead is Aki (voiced by Ming-Na, also Disney’s Mulan). From what I’ve read they went all out to try to make her look real, and planned to re-use her in other movies as different characters, as if she was an actress. They carefully tweaked her to not be overly sexualized, not giving her big boobs or exposed skin like Lara Croft, removing makeup from an earlier version so you’d believe her as a scientist. (But also they had her wearing a bikini in Maxim.)

So she’s pretty but not ridiculous, capable but not awesome, heroic but not cool. She doesn’t have humor or weaknesses or quirks. If she has a personality I sure couldn’t describe it. I bet there weren’t many people who wanted to see her in another adventure or find out where she came from or dress up like her at a nerd convention.

Sometimes with these movies you gotta question why it should even be made with the realistic animation as opposed to live action. I don’t think I’d want to see a live action POLAR EXPRESS, BEOWFULF I can see working in live action but maybe not as well, A CHRISTMAS CAROL definitely used the technology in ways that made it distinct from the many great live action versions of the same story. This one I don’t feel like it takes advantage of being animated at all. They’re trying so hard to make it look real so there’s not much exaggeration or stylization. The characters don’t move in cool ways that humans couldn’t. There’s not much action. There’s pretty much nothing that couldn’t be done in live action with the humans and all the other stuff would be CGI effects in a live action movie anyway.

Yet I can’t imagine preferring a live action version of this either, I wouldn’t want to watch that. So I’m left with the conclusion that this is a movie that only exists for the novelty of being the first movie using this technology.

So that’s why nobody gave a shit. You gotta come up with a reason to make a movie before somebody has a reason to watch it.

* * *
datedness: this type of animation has been improved in the 10 years since and used for much better stories
would they make a movie like this now? No.
legacy: a film production wing of a video game company was created just to make this movie. Afterwards they did one short for The Animatrix and then closed up shop. But the movie itself does have a legacy because it made mistakes that other filmatists such as Zemeckis were able to learn from and build off of.

note: this review is excessively long and convoluted and takes forever to get to the point, but only as a clever form-is-an-extension-of-content type reference to the movie it describes, in my opinion. Unfortunately I could never match the feel of the movie no matter how hard I tried. It’s like when some asshole reviews a Dr. Seuss movie in rhymes or some shit like that.

introductory remarks/overture

My friends, we have lost. Michael Bay has defeated us. First he invaded the shores of the genre we hold most dear. He brought us gifts of explosions, while behind our backs he robbed us of the very language of geography and context we use to communicate what is exploding and who or what is endangered by said explosion. Then he confiscated our property, buying up our favorite low budget horror classics to rebuild as slick, soul-less product – just to crush our spirits. And now he has completely subjugated us.

At first we sought to make peace. I tried to enjoy THE ROCK, but I couldn’t make it work. After ARMAGEDDON we resisted and openly rebelled. We stopped going to his movies, stopped paying for his remakes. But all these years later we’ve lost our fight. We’ve grown used to the occupation, learned to accept it as a fact of life. We’ve gotten curious, wanted a taste of the other side. So we gave them $12.50 for a ticket plus $2.00 for 3D plus $1.25 internet convenience surcharge. Right? Didn’t we guys?

Well, I did. I cracked. But they said the most horrible things. They threatened to remake my family.

I’ve said more than my piece about why these TRANSFORMERS movies are awful. This is the third one, there’s no surprise and nothing to prove here. Michael Bay movies haven’t changed, but I have. I can admit I’ve gone from hating them to loving to hate them. I might even watch ARMAGEDDON again some day. You never know.

Of course, if Platinum Dunes starts announcing more remakes I might get bitter again. And I definitely reserve the right to go off when people make that “it’s only entertainment, so you can’t criticize it for doing a shitty job of that” argument, or the “this is what action movies are meant to be: badly made action movies,” or the “if you haven’t personally directed a $200 million robot movie then you don’t have the right to point out that one could theoretically be made that was actually pretty good,” or the “I know it seems like it’s shitty when you watch it but actually it’s not, because here is the number of dollars it has made and it is a high number,” or of course the “what did you expect, it’s based on a toy commercial, of course it’s ineptly made, moronic horse shit designed by and for drooling, tasteless, subhuman imbeciles. That said, it was right up my alley! I loved it!”

If you claim he’s making the modern equivalent of TERMINATOR 2 then I’m gonna react on primal instinct like you just spit on my grandma. But I can appreciate him as a hilariously overblown and uniquely inept (but also talented in some superficial ways) weirdo. We can use a couple of those as long as they’re the exception to the rule. There have been great Summer Movies made since TRANSFORMERS, and there will be more of them some day I’m sure. (Maybe next summer.) Unlike Autobots and Decepticons I have come to believe that high quality Summer Movies and hilariously shitty ones can co-exist peacefully. After all, ALIENS came out the same summer that HOWARD THE DUCK did, and I don’t got a problem if some people get their jollies putting on the duck movie every once in a while and trying to figure out what the hell that was all about. We have the capacity to enjoy both. Humans are complicated machines.

So I cannot lie, I was really excited to see TRANSFORMERS’S DARK OF THE MOON. I come to it not as a so-called hater or as an insurgent, but as someone who has made peace with the terribleness of this series and now enjoys watching them to see just how far they will go, just what they will feel is a good thing to put on screen, just how intimate a portrait of Bay’s subconscious can be concocted within the confines of the budget, shooting schedule and needs of advertising partners (Hasbro, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, the U.S. military).

the action

If somebody likes this movie they’ll say it’s because of the action. TRANSFORMERS sequels are more like software upgrades than sequels. They’re about advancements in computer technology, not in story or character. In each one they wreck more stuff than in the last and since that’s all most people care about each new sequel has to be by definition the best one.

To its credit part 3 does have some spectacular spectacle. It does seem more impressive than, to name one recent example, 2012, even though technically it doesn’t destroy nearly as much of the earth. Although the robots can barely count as characters they do get to smash lots of things and flip around and shoot lasers, occasionally saying moronic comedy dialogue in a variety of ethnic accents, like the dogs in Walt Disney’s LADY AND THE TRAMP. So by that definition there’s alot of action.

There’s a part where a building is slowly tipping over and a bunch of humans are (for some reason) running up it and climbing around in it. There’s some real footage of some guys base jumping. Chicago gets destroyed (in a short montage). PEARL HARBOR has better put-together action sequences in my opinion, but (despite intentionally evoking imagery from 9-11 and the Challenger explosion) this is more tasteful so it might be Bay’s most enjoyable action. And for reasons explained in the next section I was able to mostly follow what was going on.

So for once I know for sure that it’s not just fast editing that keeps me at a distance from Bay’s action. It’s that these characters are so stupid and unlikable, their predicament is so ridiculous and the specific goals of each sequence are so poorly explained that it’s hard to really give a shit about an hour straight of bang bang bang bang bang scream bang complain bang. There’s an impressive amount of “cool” stuff in there that’s nice to look at, but it’s all so hollow. When John McClane is so desperate to avoid an explosion he decides he has no choice but to tie a firehose around his waist and jump over the side you’re right there with him, you feel it in your gut. But the dickheads in this movie run around beneath an epic intergalactic war of massive destruction and you barely ever bother to think “oh shit, you better duck.”

I was thinking Tyrese was gonna return (he was in parts 1-2) and when he hadn’t shown for a good 2+ hours I thought “Tyrese was smart to choose FAST FIVE over this.” Then he shows up and brings some authentic-looking military hard-asses to fight the robots and I thought “Jesus, why has the movie been about whiny fucking Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) when these guys were around?” Then for some reason Witwicky gets to lead their team against the Decepticons. Every once in a while a good guy robot shows up to murder somebody or get murdered. There’s not that much interaction between the robots and humans except when the bad guys vaporize people leaving just skulls.

I guess you don’t always have to connect with the characters, but you do have to believe in them on some level for it to be effective. The opening kidnapping/car chase/shootout in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION is fucking exhilarating, and you have no idea who those people are when it happens. But there’s a story arc to the scenes, there’s escalation, there’s a climax, there’s a constant sense of danger. That’s the more important part of a great fight or chase: it’s not just bombast, it’s a story within the story. The much discussed last act of DARK OF THE MOON is like a white guy, it doesn’t have any rhythm. Optimus or Bumblee Bee will show up for a second and do something and then be gone for a while and you don’t know where they are. They aren’t really anywhere I guess, until they’re needed for a shot. As is traditional in the TRANSFORMERS series the villain just stands on a tall building for the last half hour or so, occasionally yelling something evil.

I really believe you could chop out almost any of the scenes and mix them up in any order at all and it wouldn’t make any more or less sense.

stereoscopics

The tone and style of DARK OF THE MOON is not all that different from the preposterous last installment. The one major difference is that it’s shot/animated in the 3D. There has been alot of hype and complaints from Bay that he was forced into shooting competent action scenes because the cameras are too heavy to jerk around like he normally does and the 3D is too hard to read if you edit it in his usual eyeball torture style. I was convinced that somebody would be blinded by this combination.

It doesn’t seem to me like he toned down his style much from the previous two, and the quick cuts in a few scenes actually did hurt my eyes (mostly the opening montage, which jarringly cuts between 3D and 2D and stock footage and grainy fake stock footage because the president JFK is featured so the style of the movie JFK has to be mimicked). But I have to admit that I assumed wrong, the 3D really is more helpful to a Bay movie than hurtful. In 2D the big-pile-of-garbage character design style of the robots blends together so you can’t tell where one ugly robot ends and the other begins. In 3D your eye can easily distinguish between the different piles of garbage because one is in the foreground and one is further back. You still don’t necessarily know who the different robots are or what they’re supposed to be doing, but you definitely have a better idea of where they’re situated within the smashed buildings, which is a major breakthrough for this series. I know I’m being condescending but I mean it honestly that for me anyway the 3D was a handy tool to understand what in fuck’s name was going on.

I guess Bay was right, there was no reason to learn how to stage clear, crisp action scenes. He was waiting for mankind to develop a system of cameras, projector lenses and glasses that would help people’s eyeballs to partly decipher the wiggly pile of bullshit he slops in front of them.

What’s new in Transformers 3.0?

So I agree with any praise people have for the 3D here, but not the other conventional wisdom that Bay toned down all the horrible parts of the previous TRANSFORMERSes, like how George Lucas had less Jar Jar Binks after everybody hated him in Star Wars part 1. It is different in a few respects:

1. Racism. As far as I noticed Bay made good on his promise that the jive talking gold-toothed “gangsta” robots with the monkey faces were not in this one. And you know what, how dare you imply that those racist caricatures that he created and publicly defended would be in this movie? What kind of person do you think he is, to continue doing that? You make me sick, smearing a good man’s name like that. Shame on you. Shame.

My prediction that Bay would have a WWII flashback featuring buck-toothed Zero-bots has not come to pass. The most racist stereotype in the movie is Ken Jeong as a guy named “Wang,” but that’s his usual shtick so I blame him as much as Bay.

note: Bay fills the hole left by the missing racism with a couple of his old standbys, the Gay Stereotype Character (Alan Tudyk) and The Scene Where Two Guys Are Doing Something That Is Misinterpreted As Them Buttfucking.

2. “”One thing we’re getting rid of is what I call the dorky comedy.” –Bay, to USA TODAY

That’s another one, I wonder how they got that “dorky comedy” into all of Bay’s previous movies. It’s weird that they could slip that past him so many times, but I’m glad he was finally able to put a stop to it. Except not really. This is not the gritty, serious version of talking car robots.

DARK OF THE MOON does show a small amount of restraint. He doesn’t undermine every attempt at drama with lame jokes, just some of them. It’s not the constant groaner-fest that the other two TRANSFORMERSes and BAD BOYS 2 are. But there’s still alot of the actors riffing and never connecting, plus wacky flashbacks and entire scenes to introduce “funny” tangental characters. (John Malkovich for example has a big scene where he’s kind of funny, and it seems like he’s gonna be a character in the movie, and then he disappears. Doesn’t even get his head bit off by a robot I don’t think.)

3. No peeing, farting or robo-balls. And John Turturro keeps his pants on. He’s still talking and acting like an idiot, but he wears a suit. Very professional. I guess the dick and butt stuff must’ve been all Bay meant when he said “dorky comedy,” but if he’s going to continue making comedies I think he might want to re-examine the dorkiness levels of the rest of his work.

I guess these fixes have made a difference for some people, but in my opinion that is not a drastic course correction. It’s like if Joel Schumacher had made another Batman movie and said “this one has less puns, and we got rid of those stupid nipples! Who put those fucking things in there?” Okay, I see you’re trying to please me, but that isn’t enough to make it into an actual good movie. Maybe you should’ve just kept following your heart.

I believe a good movie could be made about this subject matter. I don’t believe a good movie could be made about it by Michael Bay, so the fucker might as well just get naked and go buckwild like he did last time.

And he kind of did. It’s not that different. It kind of makes me sad that Bay and LaBeouf are distancing themselves from part 2 now. It’s a terrible movie, but it’s obviously Bay’s movie, so he should stand by it. You can’t convince me that that wasn’t the movie those guys wanted to make at the time. Back then they were so high on it that Bay wrote a letter to some dinky newspaper nobody ever heard of to imply the critic should be fired for writing a negative review of a movie that made lots of money. But after a couple years of hearing how it’s the worst fucking shit ever they started to get embarrassed and blame it on the writer’s strike. (Joel Schumacher wishes he had that excuse.)

the plot

Don’t worry though, the claims that the new script by Ehren Kruger (SCREAM 3, THE RING, BROTHERS GRIMM) is relatively sensible and well written are an utter fabrication. There is no evidence of that in the movie anyway. The convoluted plot involves an Autobot  or good guy robot (Leonard Nimoy) that was carrying a technology that “would’ve won the war” on the Transformer home planet of Cybertron, except he crash-landed on our moon and died so now Optimus Prime finds out about him decades later and brings him back to life but it turns out he was lured into doing that because actually the guy made a deal (hundreds of years ago?) with the bad guys, the Decepticons, to use the technology to transport the planet of Cybertron to Earth (?) and turn all humans into slaves or something. (I hope this means the humans would have to work as the robots’ household appliances, like the dinosaurs in The Flintstones.) Meanwhile sellout humans conspire to make it happen and a robotic bird is murdering NASA scientists and our hero Sam is worried that his new girlfriend is gonna fall for her handsome boss (Patrick Dempsey) and also he’s pissed because “it’s not fair” that the Autobots get to go on secret missions in the Middle East (I believe they are American citizens now) but he doesn’t get to go and the National Secretary of Intelligence (Academy Award winner Frances McDormand) is finding out secrets even she didn’t know about and Optimus is really pissed that he didn’t know about it either. Also Sam goes on a bunch of job interviews and his dad is disappointed in him that he hasn’t found a job yet but he did get a medal from Obama but nobody’s impressed. This all ties in to the moon landing and the Chernobyl meltdown, and then Congress votes that the Autobots have to leave Earth so they fly away on a secret space shuttle they had and then Chicago is destroyed and taken over by the Decepticon party (in a brief montage, it’s worth repeating that) so Sam and Tyrese lead a team of badass Navy SEAL type dudes to climb around on destroyed buildings and try to shoot the one rocket they have at a space thing or whatever, and it turns out the Autobots were faking it they didn’t leave so Optimus kills some of the Decepticons and makes one of his little speeches, so everything should be okay now. God bless America.

I might have done a better job summarizing that than I did with part 2, but in my opinion it’s not a well constructed story. Fortunately that’s the charm of these movies, if you can call it that. While not as out-and-out insane as the last one this one has a respectable collection of incredulous laughs:

-Megatron (I didn’t realize it was him at first) drives through an African Savannah, scares the zebras, tells the elephants to hail him and feeds “my frag-ile ones,” baby Garbage Pail Kid robots

-an Autobot is described as “the Albert Einstein of his civilization” even though another Autobot is designed to look like a cartoony Albert Einstein type (with glasses)

-a weird Decepticon goblin/Slimer guy occasionally wobbles past the camera making odd noises and then disappears

-for some reason Sam lives with two gremlin-sized asshole robots, one that I’m pretty sure was a bad guy in the last episode and one with hair that I thought I forgot about but I am told he was new

-a printer, a TV monitor and various other devices turn into robots and murder people

-Megatron blows up the Lincoln Memorial statue and sits in its chair (probly my favorite part of the movie)

-Optimus Prime occasionally chimes in out of the blue with corny narration (I kinda wish it was Werner Herzog)

-there’s a mournful procession of Autobots driving to the secret giant Space Shuttle to abandon the Earth, and sad music plays but you can’t help but laugh because they’re all shiny candy-colored hot rods with flames painted on them and shit

-”The honor is all mine”: Optimus meets Buzz Aldrin (playing himself!) and melts with patriotic goo, as if a robot who can fly into space without a vehicle gives a shit which puny humans landed on their moon years after his personal friend Sentinel Prime already had

etc.

With no investment in the story or characters it’s these type of unexpected bits that you have to latch onto to be able to enjoy it. If the movie’s inane, you must have insane. And there’s enough of it to keep me amused through a good percentage of the film’s seven hour, forty-two minutes not including credits running time.

empowerment or exploitation?

The love of Sam’s life from parts 1 and 2 is gone (his mom says she dumped him, one of the little asshole robots says “She was mean!”). You probly read that the original piece-of-actress Megan Fox allegedly got fired and allegedly for saying in an interview that Bay “wants to be like Hitler on his sets.” In that recent piece in GQ Bay said that Spielberg told him to fire her, so in that sense he is like Hitler, because he blamed it on the Jew.

(that’s a joke, I don’t really believe that, don’t fire me. Also I looked it up and apparently he’s Jewish too. More importantly if I was gonna unfairly compare him to a dictator I’d say he’s more of a Muammar Gaddafi)

The replacement model, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as Carly, comes courtesy of Victoria Secret, where Bay has alot of connections. To her and Bay’s credit she’s fine, her acting performance is more natural than Fox in the other two movies. But her giant man-made lips (on her face) are more distracting. Seriously, it made me yearn for the down-to-earth girl-next-door looks of Megan Fox. Huntington-Whiteley is even more in the Playboy/Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue/Person You Would Never See Or Be Allowed To Talk To In Real Life neighborhood, which to be fair is where Bay has one of his summer homes.

Carly is introduced ass-first, walking up stairs in her panties holding a stuffed bunny. Later there’s a 3D upskirt shot as she gets out of her Mercedes (a new model that Sam looks up on the internet so it can show all the specs on screen).

She’s already Sam’s girlfriend at the beginning of the movie, but Sam is humiliated that he can’t find a job and has to live off of the money she gets from a high paying job organizing a valuable art collection for Patrick Dempsey. You’ll notice that Sam regains his manhood late in the movie when it turns out Dempsey is a Decepticon collaborator and explicitly states that he really gave Carly the job because of her connection to Sam and not based on her actual talents. So don’t worry everybody, she actually didn’t do a good job or achieve any success separate of her boyfriend. Women are still in their place. It’s kind of like if in part 1 it turned out that Megan Fox wasn’t actually good at fixing cars, Sam had actually done it all while sleepwalking.

Dempsey also waxes poetic about the curves of his prize car while the camera ogles Carla’s body, because your car and your women are pretty much the same thing. Yeah, he’s supposed to be kind of a sleazebag, but I think these movies share his point of view on that one.

Bay doesn’t seem like a political guy, but he’s trying so hard to be “politically incorrect” that his movies end up having subtext anyway. I just can’t figure a coherent world view from it. He tries to ridicule any government figure but lionize any soldier, astronaut, or robot that stands in front of a flag. There are some Obama references, but I think it’s up to debate whether they’re derogatory like in part 2. Maybe the worst is a mention that he has some kind of surveillance on members of Congress so he can get dirt on his political enemies. It doesn’t come across like the smear it ought to, though. I’m not sure Bay is against it.

But Bill O’Reilly does appear in the movie as himself. You don’t put Bill O’Reilly into a movie unless you’re into him.

There was another part that I took as an anti-so-called-socialism message, when the character Sentinel Prime sinisterly yells something about “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few!” But then somebody explained to me that it was what Spock said in WRATH OF KHAN. Still kinda weird though that they would get Leonard Nimoy himself to portray Spock’s philosophy as evil. I bet it was scripted to be an understandable motivation for the character, but the way it’s delivered it might as well be “We evil robots will conquer your puny human world! HAHAHAHAHA!”

I’m scoffing at those parts because I disagree with them, but I think they belong in the movie. I think even big expensive bullshit like this should have an element of personal expression, so I encourage Bay to put whatever he believes in his movies. And you know how hard it is to be a conservative in liberal Hollywood, it’s obviously a huge struggle for him every single day. Never once given a fair shake in the business or allowed to do what he wants. It’s a crying shame.

the douchebag’s journey

I think the most interesting new development (and maybe the part that makes it a personal expression for Bay) is that Sam has transformed (get it?) from a likable, self-deprecating reluctant hero to a condescending asshole with an out-of-control sense of douchey entitlement. He spends the first 2/3 of the movie yelling at and sarcastically insulting people. It oughta be called TRANSFORMERS: DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!? For example he chews out some soldiers for the crime of not just letting him drive into the world’s most top secret military base. He insults his girlfriend, his parents, his robot friends, several potential employers, and even the National Secretary of Intelligence, who gets it for asking him who his girlfriend is that he has let into the world’s most top secret military base. There are heroes, and then there are pricks who throw a tantrum at the new security guard in their office building for not recognizing them without their required ID. I guess the idea is that Sam is supposed to be both.

I guarantee you this Sam Witwicky does not tip well, if at all.

Not only is he a prick, but as soon as he berates his way past national security procedures he proceeds to shit all over that trust. After complaining about being questioned and swearing to keep everything secret he goes straight to the fired/pissed-on-by-a-robot guy from the other two movies (John Turturro), that guy’s new gay stereotype assistant, and some Russians they never met before, and he tells all of them something that had been secret even from the intelligence community and the Transformers for 50 years. Later he has an evil robot watch attached to his wrist so the bad guys can find out the good guy’s plan, and if he tries to tell them about it it will kill him and his girlfriend. So he goes to another super top secret nobody-knows-about-it place and pumps his side for the details of their plan… meanwhile complaining some more about how nobody trusts him!

What makes it interesting is that I don’t think he’s supposed to be some kind of an anti-hero or even a funny asshole like an ’80s Bruce Willis role. That’s just what you do, right, you complain and insult everybody constantly? Everybody is stupider than you, and you always tell them that. Right? (if you say no you’re a loser, my friend Steven Spielberg knows a few things about movies, etc.)

Sam’s parents are annoying, but they don’t seem like they’d raise such a despicable little shit. I can only guess that he gets it from Optimus. Sure, Optimus makes some nice speeches and everything, but he’s a whiner in this one too. He also turns into a big baby and gives the humans the silent treatment, refusing to speak to them because he’s mad that they didn’t tell him about the moon landing. Maybe we should give him the silent treatment ’cause we’re mad at him for bringing his robot civil war to Earth and causing the deaths of probly hundreds of thousands of innocent people, not only indirectly but also through his numerous wreckless battles in populated cities.

Man, Autobots are the worst. Maybe they’re not as blatantly evil as the Decepticons, but they’re not doing us Organicons any favors. In the first movie all they had to do was fuckin leave and they would’ve saved us from getting killed. At this point it’s like Afghanistan, they’ve started this cycle of violence and they don’t know if it’s gonna get worse if they leave. Megatron might stay and keep trying to turn us into slaves. Like his little robot brain spiders and pet bird and shit aren’t good enough for him.

At one point in the movie Congress passes landmark Tell The Fucking Autobots To Leave Already legislation. Sam talks about it with them as if nobody understands how legislation works, which is too bad because it would be awesome if there was a scene where Optimus gives a speech to Congress urging them to vote no. Anyway the Autobots comply and fly into space, leaving the Decepticons to destroy Chicago, but it turns out the Autobots were just hiding (giggling the whole time, I bet) and waiting until everybody gets killed to “show your leaders why we’re needed here.”

Dear Optimus Prime,

Thanks for making such a good point.

signed,
dead Chicagoans

Then at the end he has the wrecking balls to tell Sam “We shall never forsake you.” A little late for that, one-arm. Why don’t you make like E.T. and leave. Land on that asteroid from part 2 and have your war with the robot babies.

Optimus isn’t as obnoxious as Sam, and he does still have that great voice, but it’s hard to remember what it is that’s supposed to be so good about him. He keeps complaining about how the spaceship that crashed on the moon contained the technology “that would’ve won the war.” Yeah, coulda woulda shoulda. He’s like Rambo complaining about how the bureaucrats wouldn’t let him win Vietnam. But here he is fighting and he’s doing a terrible job, getting humans and robots alike killed. He’s not a particularly good military leader and he makes huge mistakes like, to name one example, resurrecting the guy who’s trying to enslave all of humanity. Whoops.

He’s even more bloodthirsty than before. I’m surprised they didn’t throw in a secret Autobot prison where they enhanced-interrogate wacky comic relief Decepticons and disrespect their religious beliefs (didn’t they worship that guy “The Fallen”?). Or they could have him kidnap Megatron’s babies and use them against him. Optimus comes from a culture where you don’t try to give somebody a fair chance, you just chase them around and then when you catch them you say something mean and execute them on the spot. In this uncomfortably humorless interview with Drew McWeeny, LaBeouf explains that part 3 is the best because Optimus is “essentially a murdering monster.”

wrapup

If this sounds like a negative review it’s not really. I find all this stuff hilarious. I got what I wanted out of the movie and I keep thinking about it days later, suddenly remembering parts I had forgotten about. “Holy shit, I forgot about that part where the elephant opened his mouth and it seemed like he was talking!”

Do not go to this hoping for a legitimately good movie on any level, but if you like ludicrous bullshit (and I do) this is top shelf stuff. Not as charming as GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA, but even more head-scratchingly crazy and way more expensive looking, if that matters to you. And 3D. I’d feel better about the world if it had the August stupid-Rob-Cohen-type-movie slot instead of the July 4th “this is what this summer has to offer,” but I’ll take it.

Some day Bay’s kingdom will probly crumble. He wants to keep going bigger and more expensive, but he’s not James Cameron. The sun will eventually melt his wax wings. A couple of his movies in a row flop, the studios are gonna at least have to shrink his budgets a little.

“I don’t change my style for anybody. Pussies do that.” –Michael Bay on changing his mind about trying to hold shots longer on Pearl Harbor, to GQ

I know he’s saying he’s gonna do a $20 million “dark comedy like PULP FICTION” next, but I can’t imagine doing those for now on would keep him happy. I’m not sure he could persevere – more likely he’d just do commercials, or retire and live off the checks from the Lamborghini Collectors Union. Tastes will change, movies will evolve, interesting new people and styles will appear. Until that day Bay will sit on his throne and we can either stay out of his way or try to get in on the orgies.

See, Megan Fox? He’s not Hitler. He’s Caligula. (not sure if you got that metaphor there)

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bonus questions:

1. Were Megatron’s “frag-ile ones” the Deceptitot babies from part 2, and what was he feeding them? Do adult robots have to eat? What would happen if Megatron fucked Lightning McQueen’s girlfriend?

2. What the fuck was that robotic goblin dude?

3. Was it my imagination or did the two little asshole-bots die heroically in a crashing something or other? And if so why didn’t they get a dramatic slow motion death, because that would’ve been awesome?

4. Explain Sentinel Prime and Megatron’s plan. What were they trying to do and what is the chronology of their truce in relation to when they separately crash-landed, the whole thing with the pyramid that was gonna destroy the earth in part 2, etc. (seriously, if anybody feels they understand this clearly I would love to know)

answers: I honestly have no idea, that’s why I’m asking you guys

chapter 8

released June 29th, 2001
(ten years ago today!)

Today, as we celebrate the opening of the third Steven Spielberg produced Hasbro adaptation about overly detailed space robots with different accents wiggling around and smashing buildings, let’s also take a moment to note the tenth anniversary of that one time when Spielberg tried to make a thoughtful robot movie.

I always liked A.I. Not perfect, but ambitious, and the stuff I really liked – which was most of it – I really liked alot. I always thought it got a bum rap. Now I’m watching it ten years later, the parts I had a problem with don’t seem as bad, the parts I loved seem as good or better than ever. And watching all these movies from the time right in a row… CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES, DRIVEN, THE MUMMY RETURNS, PEARL HARBOR, EVOLUTION, LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER… it really makes me wonder what the fuck is wrong with people? In the middle of that all-you-can-eat-dog-shit-buffet this is the one people complained about! Too much mood and think. Me need more bang and joke!

Rotten Tomatoes audience ratings: A.I.: 58%. Tomb Raider: 60%. Mummy Returns: 69%. Pearl Harbor: 73%. It boggles the fuckin mind.

Director Steveley Spielbrick tells us the heartbreaking tale of David (an eerily dead-on Haley Joel Osment), a robot designed to seem like a little boy and programmed to love his mommy. A couple grieving over their terminally ill son brings him into their family, at first with hesitation, then being horribly creeped out by him, then becoming emotionally attached, then considering him a “toy.”  When their real son is miraculously healed, David’s shortcomings become more obvious, and he becomes increasingly scary when the other kid turns out to be a total bastard who gets off on tricking and tormenting him into acting out and making mistakes.

One of this little futuristic prick’s schemes is to get mommy to read them the story of Pinocchio, so that David will realize he’s not a “real boy” and feel bad about himself. The plan works out so well that David is still on a quest to find the Blue Fairy 2,000 years later, long after the extinction of all human life. Great job, kid. You did it. You win.

Like some of the other Kubrick pictures (I’m thinking 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and FULL METAL JACKET: A ‘NAM ODYSSEY) A.I. is divided into very distinct sections, in this case basically three (at home with the family, out in the world with Gigolo Joe, in frozen Manhattan with the futuristic super-robots). I really dig that about it, it’s three stories within one story and I especially like that it spans more than two millenniums.

My least favorite was always the “Flesh Fair” part in the middle, after David leaves the house but before he makes it to the city. He gets rounded up with a bunch of broken down robots and brought to this sort of out door carnival where humans who morally oppose the use of robotics listen to Ministry and watch stuff get shot at the robots. It’s this bloodthirsty audience but even they get upset when they see David out there and it looks like a little boy getting tormented. And people in the audience stand up and speak out on his behalf. I think Kubrberg was trying to give anti-robot bigots a fair portrayal, but it seems forced. The modern day Tea Party movement aside I don’t buy it, either that Flesh Fairs would be a thing or that if they were a thing that there would be normal, reasonable people in the audience who would turn on the ringleaders and try to appeal to their sense of decency.

I remember it always bothered me that there was a robot that looked like Chris Rock and had his voice. I was surprised to see how brief that part of the movie actually he is – he only has one line. I still don’t think it works but this time I decided he was supposed to be a comedy robot, that’s why he makes a joke before having his head crushed. It’s like having a robot of Groucho Marx or Charlie Chaplin, they sell Chris Rock robots in the future.

But there are aspects of the Flesh Fair that do ring true to me. They have a sign that says “Celebration of Life” – it strikes me kind of like groups who say they’re “protecting marriage” by being against other people getting married. They think they’re celebrating humans by helping them to get off on the pain and mutilation of robots. But you keep seeing examples of why this is bullshit. Even the life-celebraters have a hard time knowing what’s “life” and what’s not. A little girl sees David locked up and convinces everybody that a human boy got in there by mistake. And in fact it seems there was a time in the past where somebody confused a real guy for a robot.”You’re sure he’s not a man?” one of the workers asks. “I wouldn’t want a repeat of the Trenton incident.”

One part I loved this time, not sure if I forgot about it or just never properly appreciated it, is the nanny robot that David meets at the Flesh Fair (she’s the disembodied-face lady on the poster). She starts saying kind things to David and trying to make him feel safe as soon as she sees him, but it’s not entirely comforting. It’s partly creepy because it’s obvious that she’s programmed to respond that way to kids just like David is programmed to love his mommy. It seems kind of desperate, even. While being dragged off to be publicly executed she gives David a warm, reassuring “Goodbye.” Then she smiles at him as acid is dumped on her head and her face melts away. Following her programming to the bitter end.

That part is heartbreaking, but not half as much as the earlier scene when mommy Monica ditches David in the woods. She’s actually supposed to return him to the manufacturer to be dismantled, but she can’t stand the thought of it. It’s kind of like a woman leaving her baby in front of a church or at least abandoning a dog. She can’t bring herself to have him deactivated so it’s actually somewhat an act of compassion to dump him like this with Teddy to guide him and maybe he can survive. But of course he doesn’t understand that and he freaks out, trying to figure out what he can do to stop mommy from leaving him there. “Please mommy! Please mommy!” It’s rough.

And Monica’s crying too and she says “I’m sorry for not telling you about the world.” And if this is the first time you see it you think Oh shit, what did he need to know about the world? What’s out there, anyway?

What kind of world is it? One where there’s guys dressed like a combination of TRON and the Leathermen from BARBARELLA driving around on motorcycles with metal dog’s heads on the front. You sort of see it from the naive boy robot’s perspective. It’s dark and you don’t know where you are and there’s crazy shit going on all around you. A fuckin nightmare.

My favorite character is still Teddy, the “supertoy” teddy bear that becomes Jiminy Cricket to David’s Pinocchio. He sounds and moves like a weary old man. He’s long since outgrown his novelty status and is resigned to accept the cruelty of his life, or whatever it is he lives. Just like all the more advanced robots he has a programming, it is to be loyal, so when David gets snatched for the Flesh Fair he holds onto the net and comes along even though he could get away. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading this wrong but I think this is somewhat of a choice for Teddy, because there’s a scene where the dickhead brother tries to make Teddy choose between him and David. He should still be programmed to be loyal to his original owner, shouldn’t he?

When David and Teddy make it to Rouge City they meet Gigolo Joe (Whaddaya know?), played by Jude Law. You kind of expect Joe to be a little wiser about the world. He’s an adult, after all. He works in the big city. He’s experienced alot more. But he’s kind of like a little boy too. He only knows what he knows. He follows along on David’s quest just as naively. David’s gonna find the Blue Fairy to “make me a real live boy” and Joe’s gonna “make a real woman out of her.” He’s programmed to give women pleasure, so that’s what he’s always looking for.

The last section of the movie seems to be the least popular, and I never got that. Judging from the comments I’ve heard I think some of that is because people misunderstood what was going on. The shape of the robots made them think they were supposed to be aliens, even though they explain who they are. And even though they have TVs in their heads.

I love that section because it’s an imaginative portrayal of a future we can’t understand. It’s a future past humans, so civilization isn’t entirely based on human concepts. Vehicles are strange, shifting geometric puzzles. The ruling robots have a technology far beyond our understanding, but tragically the best they can do is use it to give David one night of what humans programmed him to want two thousand years ago.

Or is that all? I suppose the last shot could mean many things. William Hurt, as David’s creator, believes he is special and human-like because he has the ability to chase down dreams. Maybe he’s done that. Shit, I’m still trying to do some of that. I hope it doesn’t take me that long.

I love A.I. because it’s a summer event type movie full of great sci-fi concepts and special effects, but it leans much more heavily into somberness and making me ponder my own life than you’re really supposed to do in a movie like this. It hits me in the emotional balls because I feel like we’re just like these fuckin machines. The first mecha we see in the movie is shown putting on makeup, and then it cuts to human Monica doing the same damn thing. Both of them need to be loved.

At the Flesh Fair people are surprised to see David, because “No one builds children. No one ever has. What would be the point?” Well, the point is that somebody like Monica needs to be loved by a child, and needs a child to love. The doctor built David to look like his own son, because he lost his son too, and he needed to fill that hole. We all have these holes, the machines are an imprecise way to fill those holes. It kinda works for a while but then it leaves mommy and son both tragically unfulfilled.

How much of us is in our programming? How much of it is just us? How much of it can we overcome, or do we even want to?

A.I. is not just thought-provoking for a movie that came out in fucking Summer of 2001, it’s thought-provoking for a Summer Popcorn Movie in general. It does lean heavier into the cerebral and emotional side than the thrills and excitement side, so I can see how that might violate the rules for some people. But it’s exactly the awkward but amazing offspring I want out of a Spielberg-Kubrick marriage.

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datedness: the World Trade Center is shown in the post-apocalyptic future. I don’t know about Ministry being in the Flesh Fair scene, or Chris Rock. But the opening section has a perfect late ’70s/early ’80s Kubrick look that makes it feel timeless.

would they make a movie like this today? No, this is pretty much a one-time-only type of movie

Summer of ‘01-’11 connections: Spielberg has his name on a pretty different type of robot movie this summer

chapter 5

released June 8th, 2001

I skipped EVOLUTION in the summer of 2001 because it didn’t look very good. Hey, what do you know, it turns out me-of-ten-years-ago knew what he was doing. But for this important scholarly work it was crucial that I not just view the 2001 movies people remember. To truly get a feel for the period I had to watch at least one movie that came out that summer and then nobody ever thought about it again.

Even EVOLUTION deserves better than this crappy poster

In case you never thought about it in the first place, EVOLUTION is a sci-fi comedy by Ivan Reitman, accurately described on the DVD cover as “the director of Ghostbusters and Road Trip.” (I would’ve gone for “the producer of Shivers and Space Jam.”) David Duchovny and Orlando Jones play fuck-up community college professors who discover rapidly evolving microscopic alien life on a meteor. Seann William Scott plays the wacky hyperactive weirdo whose truck gets smashed by the meteor and who manages to somehow stay around for the rest of the movie. Julianne Moore plays the government scientist/passive love interest. Of course we all agree that she’s a great actress for both drama and comedy, but I fucking guarantee you she was cast only because she’s the Hollywood movie actress who most resembles Gillian Anderson.

This is a real half-assed attempt to do a “GHOSTBUSTERS but with aliens.” I thought MEN IN BLACK was just above mediocre, but this makes that one look like an elegant labor of love. At least I can give this credit for being a less-obvious-than-it-could-be variation on the GHOSTBUSTERS template. Instead of New York City it’s a small desert town; instead of being experts in a disrespected field they’re losers who get involved by flaunting their “United States Geological Survey” credentials in an important sounding tone; instead of being ostracized for their unorthodox beliefs it’s for being a sexual harasser and for giving everybody in the army diarrhea.

Jones is occasionally asked to call upon his powers of buffoonery, like in the scene where they decide the way to catch the alien bug that’s crawling under his skin is to reach up into his ass:

but for the most part Duchovny and Jones take the right deadpan approach. Some might say they’re putting no effort into it, I think they’re just playing it purposely laid back. But the movie itself sure is lazy, so it seems less like an absurd joke and more like a screenwriting short cut when Duchovny casually reveals that he used to work for the Pentagon. I mean it almost comes across like they thought of this after they’d written the beginning and didn’t want to bother rewriting those earlier scenes.

There’s really no reason why these guys should be the heroes. It’s not one of those things where nobody believes them so they have to handle it themselves, and it doesn’t seem like they’re necessarily the most qualified for the job. They just lucked into it and then lie and sneak around and the local cops are stupid and fall for it. But I’m not sure why somebody else more capable isn’t working on this whole “alien monsters are getting loose and attacking the locals” problem. Or why the government has such lax security in the miniature alien habitat they’re growing in a cavern. And there aren’t enough jokes to keep me distracted from how little this stuff makes sense.

The movie is shot in a very plain and cheap looking manner, which only seems like it could be an intentional artistic choice in one of the better scenes, the one where they have to shoot a flying monster in a shopping mall. It’s funny though, the one thing that does look good is the digital monster effects. I think we finally have an explanation for the terrible creatures in THE MUMMY RETURNS: Ivan Reitman was hogging the computers they needed.

There’s a couple pretty funny jokes and alot of really terrible ones. Jones’s character is named Block, but a white guy accidentally calls him “Black,” get it? And he gets a bug inside his hazmat suit so he says “There’s a fly in my suit.” Instead of soup, you know? Hilarious! They make two attempts to do “funny singing” scenes – Scott doing bad karaoke to attract the “alien bird,” and a singalong in a car. But neither has any logical reason to happen, they’re very forced, like some clueless producer demanded two “funny singing” scenes and they had no choice but to put them in there or lose their jobs.

I guess the equivalent to the GHOSTBUSTERS “he slimed me” scene is the part where Jones gets stuck up a giant blob monster’s butthole. It’s weird that that didn’t become a big thing, with t-shirts and stuff. Maybe they overdid it by having them get farted on first.

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legacy: Writers David Diamond and David Weissman went on to write OLD DOGS, WHEN IN ROME, and apparently POLICE ACADEMY 8 (details only on IMDbPro). Duchovny continued in movies but has stuck with smaller, indie type movies other than the X-FILES sequel. Scott continues to play basically the same character in most of his movies. Reitman has directed two movies since (MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND and NO STRINGS ATTACHED) and continues to talk about doing a GHOSTBUSTERS 3. But not an EVOLUTION 2. I guess there was an EVOLUTION cartoon, but I’m sure it was more of a “no turning back now” situation than a “let’s keep going with this.”

would they make a movie like this now? I hope not, but you never know.