Well, there are a couple weird touches. For some reason Samuel L. Jackson’s villain character, The Octopus, talks about eggs all the time. Seriously, he just keeps bringing them up – “I beat you like an egg,” “I don’t have egg on my face,” etc. etc. It’s worse than Tarantino’s obsession with feet. Also there’s a part where SPY KIDS style home computer effects depict a little tiny head attached to a foot that hops around on a table in front of him and he keeps saying it’s “plain damn weird.” I kind of wish writer/director Frank Miller was in the theater to experience the uncomfortable silence as the scene milked the “joke” over and over again for a couple minutes, clearly convinced it was hilarious.

The story involves a mysterious super hero dude called The Spirit who sort of helps the cops and gets in a fight with Sam Jackson and gets a toilet broken over his head. But the Octopus implies there is a secret that ties their pasts together, and then everybody dresses up like nazis and kills a cat. Also the Spirit’s childhood girlfriend is back in town trying to steal the same treasure that would give the Octopus super powers or I don’t know, who gives a shit. Not me and not you, I guarantee you.

Scarlett Johansen plays a sexy nurse or secretary who works for Jackson and drives him around. I like the girl but she has no idea how to handle this dialogue and comes off like an idiot. Eva Mendes does the same thing but, let’s be honest, that’s what she’s known for. The police commissioner is played by the dad from the Wonder Years. I guess if I had to choose the best performance it would be this dude Gabriel Macht who plays the Spirit. He’s kind of like Casper Van Dien might be after hanging out with George Clooney for a month. He does his best to embody the spirit of, you know, whatever this thing is supposed to be. (that’s not a pun by the way, it’s a coincidence.)

Some of the shots look kind of cool as individual stylized images, but this is clearly the work of an amateur director. There’s just no sense of pacing, acting or storytelling. It’s all the problems of SIN CITY without many of its strengths. It’s Robert Rodriguez’s cheesy tendencies without his natural born filmatist skills.

I guess I can sort of in concept admire Miller’s dedication to his own stupid idea of what’s cool. At least he doesn’t try to copy what other people are doing that actually is cool. It’s pretty ballsy to start out the movie with a personification of death named Lorelei and a long, melodramatic voiceover monologue about the city being the hero’s special lady friend. It’s a metaphor I just summed up in an overly generous 8 words – he stretches it on for a couple minutes, and then returns to it again at the end of the movie. “She is my mistress. My lover. My damsel. My lady. My fuckfriend. My booty call. My one and only love. I wrap my arms around her streets and run my fingers through her glistening chimneys. She is my city; the only one I would go down on. Ordinarily I’m not into that but for her, I would do anything. Sorry Meat Loaf.” (paraphrase)

In the early ’90s there was a small spate of these retro, defiantly cornball super hero movies, trying to partially modernize these old Saturday morning serial characters but also recapture whatever it was people might’ve liked about them back then, or something. So you had THE ROCKETEER, THE SHADOW and THE PHANTOM. All very flawed but also kind of fun. I especially liked THE PHANTOM where Billy Zane had the balls to wear a bright purple super hero outfit and ride around on a white horse in the jungle protecting African treasure from colonialists. I guess the Spirit looks more like the Shadow, but he’s that type of defiantly old school super hero – a dude in a fedora, tie and Kato mask. He’s a former cop who has mysteriously become immune to gun shots, so he decides to become a vigilante and a spy for the police force. Apparently his crimefighting mainly consists of clumsily jumping across roofs and stopping two pursesnatchers.

Okay, so let’s say you accept the cornball retro super hero deal. Now can I interest you in a SIN CITY hypermacho hard boiled noir thing also? I hope so, because The Spirit is gonna constantly narrate and flashback and talk tough about “broads.” When he disappoints his girlfriend by hitting on another woman right in front of her she will say “You bastard!” but then secretly smile to herself because she thinks it’s adorable that he treats her like human garbage. I’m sure all of America will love the retro super hero/chauvinism combo but just to appeal to a wider audience let’s mix in some juvenile humor like cartoon sound effects during fights, pants falling down and some wacky mentally deficient clones who wear t-shirts with their names written in bubbly cartoon font. That way we’re hitting all the bases of all the greatest things that make movies awesome. Mask, broads, pants falling down. Home run.

It’s all a bunch of tributes to obsolete entertainment styles that don’t mix that well. Didn’t we (those elite few of us) sort of like The Phantom because he was such an old fashioned boy scout? Would it really make it better if he was wearing that purple suit but lived in an exaggerated cartoon of a black and white city and there was blood everywhere? I don’t think those are great tastes that taste great together, necessarily. Maybe in the nerd world of comic books people are more accepting of this fetishistic nostalgia passing for a story because they expect less from reading a pamphlet for ten minutes than from paying ten bucks and 90 minutes to watch a production that took a year and millions of dollars to make and doesn’t have another installment coming for at least 2 years.

And maybe that’s part of the problem, is that those other movies I mentioned looked like they spent alot of money and time on them. This thing would be really impressive if some dude made it in his house and put it on Youtube, but for a major studio motion picture released in theaters it looks bargain basement. Not even bargain basement, more like garage sale. It’s suspiciously lacking in establishing shots, it always seems like it’s in closeup because they only have a 3′x3′ piece of brick wall background to put behind somebody’s head. It seems like it’s always CGI snowing but there’s rarely snow on the ground. They must’ve been real excited about a snow effects filter they had on their laptop.

The thing I really couldn’t figure out is Miller’s obsession with fuckin Converse All Stars. I think him and Will Smith’s character in I, ROBOT are the only people in the world who think Converse are all that fascinating to look at. I mean here is a guy wearing a suit, trenchcoat and fedora, and fuckin Chuck Taylors. It’s like those dudes who wear a suit and tie but then jeans instead of slacks, and that’s supposed to show that they’re laid back. It just looks silly but Miller is so proud of it that throughout the movie he does a special effect where the soles of the shoes are stark black and white like a xerox. So it draws your eye.

I don’t get it man, those aren’t even good footwear to be jumping roofs in, the soles are so flimsy and the traction’s no good. Plus, it’s such an outmoded stupid visual cliche for a cartoon character to be wearing Chucks. Here are a few other cartoon characters who wear Converse:

(I would’ve included a picture of the Spirit for comparison, but I can’t find any online that show his shoes. I guess the marketing people agreed with me on that one.)

THE SPIRIT is not so muçh a disaster as a miscalculation, a naive assumption that because people liked SIN CITY that they would also like whatever other stupid crap this same guy tried to do in the same style.

You know what it is, man? It’s nerd overreach. It’s like when one political party takes over the whole government. They start to get cocky. They lose track of reality. They go too far, so far even the people originally on their team get mad. The Nerdening of America may have reached that point.

I truly believe that my associate Harry Knowles and many of his colleagues and competitors have transformed western culture. As recently as the ’80s and ’90s being a nerd or geek was not something anybody would want to admit to themselves. They were the lowest of low, the socially awkward, the uncool. With the rise of the internet though came the rise of “geek culture,” and slowly these people reclaimed the word, turned it into a badge of honor. (I wonder if in 20 years people will proudly call themselves douchebags?)

Guys like Harry and Moriarty started to interview writers and directors and to some extent measure their worth based on if they knew about comic books or collected movie posters or some shit. We’re all used to these articles about, “Trust me, this is one of the good guys! He’s a geek like us, he knew everything about TRON, he has a tattoo of J.R.R. Tolkien on his calf, he has it in his will that a Mexican lobby card of KRULL will be burned and mingled with his ashes.” And people on the internet would become protective of these “geek” filmatists and their projects, hype them up on their websights and postings, petition the studios, force their nerd views into the conventional wisdom. The Nerd Panthers.

As their generation took over the media and entertainment industries the types of movies, TV shows and children’s comic books that nerds love became more widely accepted into the mainstream culture. Now magazines, TV shows and marketing firms try to reach out to “geeks.” They seem superstitious about the geek acceptance much like republicans going after that evangelical vote. In the last year Entertainment Weekly has done cover stories or entire issues on the San Diego Comics Convention, the Watchmen movie, Dark Knight, Iron Man and probaly other ones I’ve forgotten about. And in their endless chasing of zeitgeist tail they end up believing these “fanboys” as they call them might be right and they better be covering all this shit from a “we’re geeks just like you” perspective.

So when Robert Rodriguez made his movie based on the SIN CITY comic book, the table was set for him to try a pretty ridiculous experiment: why not, instead of taking this book and telling the same story as it fits best into the medium of film, dress up a bunch of dudes in Halloween costumes and have them awkwardly re-enact the exact drawings and every last word of the comic book using cheesy low budget special effects to make actual photographs into a limp imitation of black and white ink drawings? And in fact why don’t I quit the director’s guild so that they’ll allow me to have the guy who drew the pictures stand on set with me and credit him as co-director? Nerds always complain about comic book movies not being faithful to the source material, why not make the first ever UNCOMFORTABLY FAITHFUL comic book movie? It’s just so stupid it might work!

And I guess it did kind of work. I forgive SIN CITY its many shortcomings because at least it was an original thing to try, and I thought they were pretty good pulp stories, alot of it worked for me even though it looked like dudes standing in front of greenscreens, which in my opinion is exactly what it was. But if I may make some constructive criticism of the geek lobby – please don’t take this as racist against geeks, some of my best friends have glasses – the motherfuckers are way too god damn literal. Always talking about faithfulness and canonical this and the original that. I understand being a purist but I think some of these guys are sort of obsessive compulsive about it, they focus on one meaningless detail and miss the whole picture. For example I swear to Christ (and Christ will back me up on this I’m sure) there was a dude in the Chud comments on a story about a rumored “reboot” of the BLADE series, and he said he would see it if they went back to the original source material and used wood weapons instead of silver. To him it was the material that the weapons were made of that was interesting to him in that particular story.

What I’m saying is maybe SIN CITY is a pretty good movie that gets a little too much credit just for being literal about adapting the comic strip. That maybe Nerd America is too willing to accept literalness in place of actual cinematic quality. Unfortunately I can’t test that theory because this one is done in the same phoney greenscreen style as SIN CITY, but apparently the comic strip isn’t so much like that. So of course nerds want Frank Miller’s heart on a Lord of the Rings limited edition sword replica with certificate of authenticity for not being faithful. Okay, fine, but another reason to hate this is it’s a terrible fuckin movie. No need to get into the specifics of the adaptation.

If you must watch it, do it in a safe place surrounded by supportive friends.

But after this one I’m with you guys, I give up on Shyamalan. And it has nothing to do with twist endings (there isn’t one in this movie). This is just a bad movie that blows it from the beginning and gets more silly as it goes along, and there isn’t even much of the technical skill he used to display to make up for it.

The movie (loosely based on WHAT’S HAPPENING? I believe) is about a day when all the sudden everybody in Central Park just snaps and commits suicide. It’s assumed to be caused by a terrorist attack, but then it starts happening at other places, and not just in major cities. The story follows science teacher Mark Wahlberg and his wife Zooey Deschanel as they try to find somewhere safe to go, etc.

It’s a scary idea with some creepy death sequences and you’d think the Shyamalan of those two Bruce Willis movies would be able to make it, as they say on the covers of DVDs, “Scary as hell.” But to me the movie never, even at the beginning, feels real. The opening is kind of like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD or VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, two great movies to emulate. Except in this one, instead of taking a little time to establish everyday life before something odd starts happening, it takes about 3 sentences of conversation on a bench before everybody starts killing themselves.

As the disaster spreads there are just too many things that don’t ring true at all. One that really bugged me was when some construction workers see their friend fall of the building they’re working on, thinking it’s an accident – and their reaction is to stand there in awe. There’s no fuckin way! Have you ever seen somebody get hit by a car, or an old lady fall down? People might hesitate for a second, but then they run in from all directions and try to help. These construction workers see their buddy fall down and they just stand there, then one guy walks toward him and says “give him some room.” Then another guy falls, and they just stand there for him too. It doesn’t make any sense.

Another one: a woman in a crowd is talking to her terrified daughter on a cell phone, and tells the daughter to keep looking out the window next to the tree. Wahlberg (who does not know her) tells her no, tell her to stay away from the window next to the tree, so she does tell her that. Then he starts telling her questions to ask. Then when the girl starts talking nonsense (the first symptom of the toxin) the woman puts the phone on speaker and holds it up so everyone in the crowd can hear. And as the daughter is apparently killing herself the mother allows Wahlberg to take the phone away from her and listen. It’s as if the movie was made by a guy who just woke up from a 20 year coma and has not had a chance to reacquaint himself with human behavior.

It’s like the problem alot of you had with Indiana Jones. A couple things like this wouldn’t kill a movie, but the camel is covered in ten tons of straw before it even steps out into the desert. This movie is mostly made up of odd, not believable behaviors. The whole point of a disaster movie is to make it feel like it’s really happening (get it? happening.) It’s kind of amazing how fake movies look after 9-11. Didn’t you learn what it was like to really experience that kind of terror? So why do you have all these phony news reports pop up to convey all the information you want: experts say it is a terrorist attack. Experts say it might not be a terrorist attack. Most people believe it’s the government, because a confidential source said the CIA has a secret base in the northeast. What the fuck? Do people who make movies just not get cable? I don’t understand how you put these in movies and expect people to accept them as actual news broadcasts.

I think this is a problem he started having with SIGNS. Maybe he’s better at small stories about a few characters. Once he starts trying to depict world-wide disaster it’s clear that he doesn’t get out much. The other problem that started with SIGNS that is a big one here is his “sense of humor.” He’s trying to build this serious tension and then for some reason he thinks it’s funny to have a guy talk about how he thinks hot dogs are underrated. Worse, he seems to think it’s a good idea to put most of the “jokes” in at the end, when the tension should be highest. He has a mostly dead serious movie about a sudden disaster that seems likely to end the human race, and in the last half hour he decides to have a little comedy routine about Mark Wahlberg talking to a plant.

Wahlberg I’m afraid is pretty bad in the movie. I like the guy but he’s not the kind of actor who can play all different types. He sort of needs to stick to working class. As soon as he starts using the word “whom” you got a problem. And here he has to deliver alot of terribly written dialogue where, based on only basic information he comes up with a theory for why this is happening (get it again, happening), that’s obviously supposed to be correct.

And that’s another thing. SPOILERS AHEAD. You knew this being 2008 that the reason for THE HAPPENING would involve the environment, right? But the novel twist Shyamalan puts on it is pretty fuckin funny. I had to put on Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants to write this review in honor of Shyamalan’s revival of ’70s new age theories. The movie argues that plants can communicate with each other and are pissed at humans and are releasing toxins in order to defend Mother Earth from the humans. I had trouble holding back laughter in the scene where, after enough hints have been dropped that this is what’s going on, a soldier says “whoever’s doing this may be watching the roads” as he stands on a road with a bunch of trees behind him. LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!

And I swear on Christ’s rarely used crutch that there’s a scene in this movie where a little girl is playing on a rope swing and the camera keeps panning up to the branch it’s tied to as if you’re supposed to be scared. Did you see the expression on his bark? He looked fuckin pissed!

I don’t know, man. Nice try coming up with something new, but I had trouble finding this premise not hilarious. There’s a scene where Wahlberg is in sort of a cabin and there’s pounding from outside and I was hoping the door would swing open and there’d be a GARFIELD style computer-animated Lorax standing there with a pissed off look on his face. That would be a good Shyamalan twist for you.

It’s kind of weird that there’s a whole wave of “suddenly everybody snaps and turns violent” type movies now. There’s this one, THE SIGNAL, there’s the Stephen King book called CELL I think that’s supposed to become an Eli Roth movie, I think there’s some other ones, and then there’s 28 DAYS LATER which is pretty similar. Must be something in the post 9-11 air about this particular theme, I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure if it is remembered as a late oughts cultural phenomenon this will not be the movie anybody points to as representative. It’s a bad movie and not even that crazy of a bad movie, so I’d honestly recommend watching LADY IN THE WATER before this one. That one has more unintentional laughs and a couple monsters here and there.

So I don’t know what it was, I don’t know if I was just wrong about this guy ever being good, if those good ones were a fluke, or if he just snapped due to toxins and is not himself anymore. But many believe it was Bruce Willis. This is because there is a confidential source who says that Bruce Willis secretly directed THE SIXTH SENSE and UNBREAKABLE.

Still, I’m gonna assume anybody who refers to Shyamalan as “Shamalamadingdong” or anything like that is a dumbass. Even if you can convince me it’s not some xenophobic shit where you gotta make fun of any name that doesn’t sound American it still reflects poorly on you. A guy who makes movies as bad as this and LADY IN THE WATER, you oughta be able to come up with something better than making fun of his name like a playground bully.

And before we pack it in for the evening I think we should all share in some possible alternate titles for THE HAPPENING. I would have to start with PLANT OF ATTACK. You could also go with PLANT 9. THE HILLS HAVE PLANTS.DON’T GO ANYWHERE NEAR THE WOODS. LEAF ME ALONE. ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVES. MAXIMUM OVERPLANT.

Hmmm, I thought this would be alot easier than it’s turning out to be. I was thinking you could just take any movie title or phrase with “me” in it and replace “me” with “tree.” But for some reason all the ones that come to mind are small indie movies that don’t sound real badass. For example YOU CAN COUNT ON TREE or TREE, YOU, AND EVERYONE TREE KNOW. Or if you find a phrase using “fallen” you can change it to “pollen.” But POLLEN ANGELS doesn’t work.

You know what – I think I got it. TREEVENGE. Yep, I’m sticking with TREEVENGE.

Then he wrote DOMINO, one of my most hated movies of the last several years. But I blamed Tony Scott. I figured there could’ve been a good script in there, Tony Scott just ax murdered it to unrecognizable bits with his Guiness Book of World Records All Time Worst Editing Ever In the History of Cinema. But after seeing SOUTHLAND TALES I’m not so sure Kelly is clean on that one. In fact I bet he specified alot of that shit in the script.

SOUTHLAND TALES takes place in Los Angeles, in the near future, after a nuclear attack on Texas. It involves intrigue between an amnesiac action star, a senator, a porn star/talk show hostess, left wing radicals, a Homeland Security type Big Brother department of the US government, twin brother racist cops, the inventor of an alternative fuel, some dwarves, and a weapons dealer in an ice cream truck played by Christopher Lambert. The plot also hits on time travel, dimensional travel, the human soul, psychedelic drugs, kidnapping, blackmail, staged murders, slam poetry, and a zepellin piloted by Kevin Smith wearing old man makeup but talking exactly like he did in LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. The cast also includes Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn, John Larroquette, Bai Ling, Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, Miranda Richardson, Wallace Shawn, Curtis “Booger” Armstrong, Zelda Rubinstein, Janeane Garafolo in one shot of a crowd scene, and the guy who apparently played Seagal on MAD TV. Also your mom is probaly in there somewhere.

Obviously that sounds like a big crazy mess, but whenever I heard about it I just laughed and looked forward to seeing it, naively assuming that Richard Kelly was a smart guy with a clear idea of how to wrangle all of this madness into a story. Nope, not at all. Not only is he not trying to do that, I don’t think it ever occurred to him to consider doing that.

As far as I can tell this is not a story. It’s a long, convoluted explanation of the background details of some other story that you will never see and not really feel like you are missing out on after you’ve watched this. If there was a real story in there it would be an entirely different movie, and this would be the ambitious DVD extra that you would be excited for but then turn off after a couple minutes when you realize it’s duller than you imagined.

Most of the actors in the movie do a decent job. I would single out Gellar as the best for her character, she gives the closest thing to a funny performance in what the extras repeatedly claim is a comedy. There are actually a few parts that intentionally made me laugh, but overall it does not feel like it’s supposed to be a comedy, except when The Rock cartoonishly twiddles his fingers and somebody eats a bunch of Cheetohs.

There are ideas sprinkled here and there that I like. He’s trying to hit on that media saturation/corporatism theme that Paul Verhoeven did so well in ROBOCOP and STARSHIP TROOPERS, and he doesn’t do it nearly as well but I do like that sort of thing. So I liked seeing the Hustler logo on the side of a tank and the car ad where two CGI Humvees fuck doggystyle. But that’s about it. The vast majority of the movie doesn’t click at all. You don’t give a shit about any character or what they are doing. You’re not sure where the movie is going, and when it suddenly ends it turns out the reason you didn’t know was because it wasn’t going much of anywhere. (I thought it quoted”this is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper” about 25 times so that must’ve been on purpose. You see, it’s supposed to be not entertaining. In order to be a whimper. It’s deep. But a reader kindly reminded me that the movie intentionally misquotes it as “not with a whimper, but with a bang.” So I guess you could say it mis-misquotes it.)

The characters, who by the way have some of the worst names since Desolation Williams (Vaughn Smallhouse, Martin Kefauver, Dr. Soberin Exx, Dion Element, Fortunio Balducci, etc.), mostly talk in slow, “dream-like” nonsense about how they wrote a screenplay about babies not having bowel movements or a dream they had last night as Moby’s keyboard drones try to imply some sort of deepness. Imagine some of the dipshits from WAKING LIFE trying to talk to you like The Architect in THE MATRIX RELOADED. There are words coming out of their mouths but that doesn’t mean they’re talking.

Kelly has made a movie exclusively for those DARKO fans in the bunny costumes who will take every weeeeeeeird line of dialogue and quote from the book of Revelations and study it for years. You gotta do the research. One post on the IMDb actually criticized “The ones who can’t be bothered to read the graphic novels so they can actually understand the film and unlock all of it’s secrets.”

Yep, it turns out this 2 1/2 hour (cut down from 3 after it flopped at Cannes) movie is only chapters 4-6. Maybe that’s why I didn’t know it was a comedy – I didn’t study hard enough to know what was funny. You have to stay up all night doing your homework and then come in and try to stay awake through this god damn lecture. The teacher is Justin Timberlake, who narrates constantly throughout, explaining all the concepts that would come out in the story if at some point Richard Kelly (for now on R. Kelly) decided to include one.

I’m not gonna get into one of those “You just don’t get it / Oh yeah, ’cause there’s nothing to get, the Emperor has no pants” type arguments. If some people on the IMDb message boards have figured out ways to enjoy this horse shit then good for them. We don’t want to waste our precious resources such as electricity and John Lovitz. I’ve seen people who love SOUTHLAND TALES on the internet but I doubt I’ll ever encounter one in the wild. If you’re gonna be one of those people you will have to be more interested in studying symbolism and puzzles than in watching movies. Do all the paperwork and apparently the hidden entertainment value will reveal itself to you. Well that’s fine but to me the trek to the Holy Mountain should not be a prerequisite to enjoying a movie.

And speaking of which, let me just say that I can take weird. On the weirdness scale HOLY MOUNTAIN makes SOUTHLAND look like SWEET HOME ALABAMA. “Your sacrifice will complete my Sanctuary of 1,000 Testacles.” But it’s still captivating, it ends up having a structure, it brings you along on a journey with these characters and has a conclusion. It also makes stronger satirical points and is funnier than SOUTHLAND TALES. So it can be done, at least by a mad Chilean mime/Tarot expert. Not as easily by a frat boy armed only with some poetry books, a Bible, and a collection of David Lynch DVDs.

After watching the making of featurette on the DVD I really realized how much they failed. They keep saying “it’s about the end of the world – and it’s a comedy!” like some Amish guy who’s never heard of DR. STRANGELOVE or various comedies of the 1980s is gonna be impressed by that. The only shocking part is that they think they have made a comedy. Then they say it’s an action movie, though there’s no action in the movie. They say it’s a musical – there is one musical scene for Justin Timberlake. I’m no fan of his singing or dancing but I have to wonder why they would cast him in a movie and then have him do a musical number where he doesn’t dance or sing, but merely lip synchs somebody else’s song. Don’t you get it? They’re going out with a whimper!

And they say that it addresses many important issues of the modern age, which is the biggest failure as far as I’m concerned. Hearing Kelly list all the things it’s supposed to be about is a pretty good way to understand why it ends up not being about anything. But just look at the basic premise: left wing militants are messing with a politically connected celebrity to try to change the outcome of an election and pass a proposition that will add reforms to a PATRIOT ACT type bill. Of course I get the part about encroaching on civil liberties, but this is not the world we live in. When was the last time you heard of left wing radicals trying to do anything? Other than those kids who burn down buildings every once in a while to save the environment there is no such thing. There is no Weather Underground of the 2000s, no SLA, no Black Panther Party. I’m writing this on the fifth anniversary of this godforsaken war and what does the real life counterpart to the “Neo-Marxist Movement” (as they’re called in the movie) have planned? Some more marches. Writing some letters to the editor. I bet there will be an online petition. Some anarachists will put up a bunch of fliers. Maybe even graffiti!

The world of the movie just doesn’t ring true. Nobody, even crazy stupid people like this, have the balls to fight that way. You can’t picture any of this happening. If this was good satire it wouldn’t be using this setup that Kelly knows from movies about the ’60s and ’70s. It would follow the actual world we live in where people are either too apathetic to care or too overwhelmed to know what to do about it. Good satire has to come out of the reality of the world you’re looking at and not just out of the way stories are expected to go. You know what, the photography and effects may be classier in this movie, but IDIOCRACY is a way more entertaining movie that is also way more accurate as a satire about the world we live in right now. Unlike SOUTHLAND TALES it’s constantly funny, and in fact the thing dampening the laughs is that the jokes paint such an accurate portrait of our culture that you get kind of sad watching it.

But if it wasn’t spot-on satire it could still be fun to watch. Here’s the best analogy I’ve come up with to explain this movie: George Lucas was a huge nerd who spent years compiling notes about the world he used in the first STAR WARS. But then he went and made STAR WARS. He didn’t make a slide show about all those notes. If you watch STAR WARS you might love it and then go and read up on everything about yodas and chewbaccas and get wrapped up in that whole world outside the movies. With SOUTHLAND TALES you’re asked to do all of that without the movie to inspire it.

I learned more about the world of the movie from the set decorator talking about one of the sets than from watching the movie. I think it’s great to put all that thought into the sets, but then you gotta put something in front of them. That’s what Kelly forgot.

Sorry R. Kelly but until further notice you are persona non grata. As a buddy of mine said after watching SOUTHLAND TALES, “He just went from being the director of DONNIE DARKO to being the writer of DOMINO.” If you have a good debut but then follow it up with two of the worst movies of the decade then I’m afraid the math doesn’t work out in your favor. Richard Kelly, I sentence you to life imprisonment in Movie Alcatraz. If you figure out a way to swim off I’ll look the other way. But I’m not holding my breath.

The movie is a pointless and weird re-jiggering of the original. It’s not really the crazed spectacle I was hoping for, at least not from beginning to end. If you’ve seen the original you know where it’s going, and it’s not all that exciting to see him wander around a weird farm colony island looking for this missing girl and getting frustrated that nobody is cooperating. But oh boy does it have its moments.

I heard this movie was completely misogynistic, but I’m undecided on that one. Sommerisle in this version is a matriarchy with Ellen Burstyn in place of Christopher Lee. They are all intimidated by the male presence of Nic Cage and he’s freaked out by them. He gets stuck in a well and probaly other vaginal symbols that I’ve forgotten. Most of the characters in the movie are women and they’re all evil except for a nice lady cop at the beginning (this movie’s equivalent of a Tony Shalhoub token good guy Arab character). It definitely plays out like a woman-hater’s paranoid fantasy, but there are some signs that it might just be a big joke on gender relations. Cage is frustratingly lax about asking the women to explain what’s going on, but then whenever he does he interupts them and doesn’t listen to what they’re saying at all. He’s also pretty belligerent, yelling at people sometimes for no reason, tearing off kids masks, and when he goes into a classroom he thinks nothing of erasing a chalkboard covered in meticulous notes just to write down one name that he has already said out loud.

They could’ve gone a more obvious route and have him just be a chauvinist or a womanizer. This way it’s more subtle and maybe not intentional. Either way it’s pretty hilarious to watch this asshole freak out at the end yelling “YOU BITCHES! YOU BITCHES!” Nic Cage definitely punches out more women in this movie than any since at least PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED. He actually fights Leelee Sobieski, throwing her over a table and kicking her so she flies against a wall. He punches out a butch inn keeper so he can steal her bear costume. Then, while in the bear costume, he punches out another woman.

Now, in any other movie where Nic Cage punched out a lady while wearing a bear costume, it would be the most awesome thing ever. GHOST RIDER would’ve been almost watchable if it featured this turn of events. NATIONAL TREASURE would have somehow seemed forgivable. LEAVING LAS VEGAS… he probaly would’ve gotten two Oscars if it had had a bear suit punch-out. I mean, almost any character on film – that would add some layers to. What is it about this treasure hunter that he would not only punch out a woman, but would do it for a bear suit, or while wearing a bear suit? That is a dark character, that is a psychology worth exploring. In this movie, unfortunately, they put it in a context where it almost makes sense. But it’s good. I’m not sure any major actor has done anything this weird since the days of Marlon Brando’s ice bucket hat.

You will believe a man can put on a bear suit and punch a woman in the face.

In this version the Sommerislians make honey instead of apples, and their colony is based on a beehive. So Burstyn is the queen bee, the men are called drones and they just do work and don’t talk. And just like bees in nature, these women like to find a well-meaning cop who’s allergic to bees, seduce him, carry his seed, abandon him, then years later trick him into coming to the island and send him on a wild goose chase and then break his legs, pour bees on his head and burn him alive in a giant wicker man full of livestock. (I am assuming that is what bees do in nature but I have not checked wikipedia to be sure, sorry, no time.) Like in the original DOUBLE-SPOILER they succeed, and hopefully this sacrifice will help bring the honeybees back to all the hives everywhere, not just on Sommerisle.

One of the production companies involved is Emmett/Furla, familiar to fans of the Steven Seagal DTV era. Like those films this is full of weirdly amateurish storytelling that makes the whole movie feel off balance. The best example is a scene where Cage sees some guys loading wood onto a cart. He comes over and offers to help, but as he helps lift one piece of wood he knocks the entire cart full of wood out and onto the guy. So then he helps the guy up and leaves. Now the guy has to pick up all the wood again, and Cage just abandons him as if he’s satisfied with the amount of help he has provided. Weird storytelling ineptitude like this is normal in low budget movies that are put together on the fly and that nobody is expected to ever watch, but it’s unusual in a nicely photographed mainstream studio movie with a movie star and a well known director (Neil Labute).

Things get weirder in the PG-13 theatrical cut. The SHOCKING ALTERNATE ENDING! is actually the same but a little longer and showing some of the things that you only heard in the PG-13. The one major difference is that they put a weird helmet on Nic’s head and dump bees into it. The bees give him a beard and sting the hell out of him as he yells “OH, NO, NOT THE BEES! NOT THE BEES! AAAAAA! OH NO, MY EYES! MY EYES! AAAAAAAA RRRRRRRRGHHHH!!” (You’ll be quoting it for months.) This entire sequence was missing in the original release, but they still left in a shot of him with a face swollen by multiple bee stings. So that must’ve been a little jarring.

(The SHOCKING version also drops the original epilogue that had cameos from James SPIDER-MAN TRILOGY Franco and Jason FREDDY VS. JASON Ritter.)

In GHOST RIDER Cage’s character was obsessed with jellybeans and monkeys. In this one the must’ve-been-a-Nic-Cage-suggestion touch is that he buys a self help tape called Everything Is Okay. You never hear him listening to it, but the significance is that later it gets stolen from his luggage, signifying that in fact everything is NOT okay.

Cage does use his overacting super powers a little bit. The movie is best when he flips out and either yells at somebody for no reason or punches somebody for a good reason. There’s no way to do justice to it in writing, but if you’ve seen the movie I think you may agree that “HOWDIT GETBURNED!? HOWDAGEBURNED!?” may be the greatest overacting of Cage’s career. Which is saying alot.

And I don’t really think he’s overacting here, but for some reason it’s pretty amazing to see a guy like Nic Cage crying “Oh my god! Oh my god!” as women are about to burn him alive. You just don’t expect to hear that kind of whimpering from a star of his caliber.

I have to admit, I am a little fascinated with this movie. Even after listening to some of the commentary track it’s an unsolved mystery – I got no idea what they were trying to pull. Apparently Johnny Ramone was a huge fan of the real WICKER MAN movie, and told Nic Cage to watch it, and then as a tribute to Johnny Ramone they bought the rights and then remade it into this unrelated, completely ridiculous movie. What a stirring tribute to a guy from a rock band people like.

But as much as I am glad I saw it, I cannot really recommend this movie to normal people. Instead, I say check out the highlights that are available on youtube. You will get most of the good parts and they’re probaly even better out of context.