Week 9 - Goodbye February, hello March!

Week 9 was a weird one.  I went from the godawful to the ridiculous to the mediocre, finally finishing up with a couple of great movies.  But overall, it was a pretty unsatisfying week with the worst movie I've watched so far, and hopefully that'll be as low as it goes!  Mediocrity was the other order of the day, as Hollywood seems to be satisfied churning out movies with zero percent intelligence and originality, and one hundred percent predictability.

But enough bitching, onto the movies..........

Fenruary 26th - The Whole Nine Yards

Sweet Jesus, this was awful.  I'll watch Bruce Willis in just about anything (though I will certainly draw the line at ever watching the sequel to this train wreck).  This is a man who has been in several of my very favourite movies.  From Sin City to Die Hard.  The Fifth Element to Last Man Standing.  Even the near misses usually are backed up by pretty great ideas (Surrogates springs to mind).  But this movie is just pure, unadulterated rubbish.  It's like some Hollywood hack thought 'Let's get the funny guy from Friends, and get him to play the exact same character. We'll throw in Bruce Willis.  And boom!  Easy peasy.'  Unfortunately they forgot to include a script, any humour, any intelliegence and any characters worth caring about.  Even the photoshopped poster I've put to the side screams of laziness.  There are lines so bad in this I actually cringed.  'Be careful.  Are you kidding?  I'm Mr. Careful'.  This is supposed to be a romantic moment.  Avoid, avoid, and avoid again.  It's gets two points for providing Amanda Peet and Natasha Henstringe as something nice to look at.

2/10

February 27th - The Man with the Screaming Brain


Bruce Campbell is the movie equivalent of marmite.  You either think he's a quirky legend, responsible for memorable turns in Evil Dead, Bubba Ho-Tep and Maniac Cop.  Or you think he's simply a bad actor.  I fall into the first category.  The man is always entertaining, and always throwing a nod and a wink to the audience.  His movies are simply about having a good time in as ridiculous way as possible.  In TMWTSB (come on, I'm not gonna type that title over and over again), Campbell writes and directs as well.  It's the story of a rich American who is in Bulgaria for a potential business deal. Unfortunately he is killed, but has his brain fused with a Bulgarian taxi drivers and is brought back to life.  I don't think I really have to say any more do I?  Low budget in the extreme, this is nevertheless bursting with character and has a damn sight more originality than the movie above.  It's can be laugh out loud at times, though admittedly other jokes do fall flat.  So grab a six pack and order a few pizzas, and have fun.

6/10

February 28th - Mission: Impossible 3


M:I 3 always felt like the safest movie of the franchise.  After the overblown experiment of John Woo's M:I 2, the third outing was given to JJ Abrams, Hollywood's newest hotshot who was basking off of Lost's success.  There was a touch more realism brought to the table, and an emotional element brought in as Ethan Hunt had seemingly been tied down.  More humour was introduced too, with Simon Pegg coming on board as a tech geek.  All the elements are there for an entertaining movie.  But certainly after seeing Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, this just falls a little bit flat.  There are no risks taken with characters, no surprising elements or spectacular action sequences to marvel at.  It's just a solid, functional movie.  Philip Seymour Hoffman is pretty good as the villain I will admit, but he's acting so serious it feels like he should be in a different movie.  In fact, if you changed the title of the movie, and changed Ethan Hunt's name, there would be little to identify this with the rest of the franchise.  So overall, pretty enjoyable, but also pretty forgettable.  Oh, and I really don't like it when movies show you a sequence at the beginning that you know is going to pop up later in the movie.  It removes the suspense and creeping doubts about all of the character's fates, robbing the movie of any potential surprise casualties.

6/10

February 29th - The Losers


Anything based on a graphic novel, I will always give a chance.  After finally giving in and subscribing to LoveFilm, I came across this.  It fell out of the cinema pretty quickly, as the similarly themed A-Team reboot pulled in the audiences more.  The story goes that Five Spec Ops agents are targeted by a enigmatic bad guy called Max.  He tries to kill them but succeeds instead in killing 25 innocent children, and having the blame placed squarely on them.  They are offered a chance to get even with Max by a beautiful woman.  But she has her own agenda.  So overall, the plot is paper thin, but if these types of movies are executed well, then you don't have to care so much for plot and just enjoy the spectacle.  Unfortunately, the set pieces in this are pretty formulaic, and also suffer from bad CGI.  The only characters who are charismatic are Jensen (played by Captain America Chris Evans) and Max (played with relish by Jason Patric).  They both bring humour to the movie and are the only memorable characters.  The rest just feels like noise surrounding it, and it's a shame, because it seems like a missed opportunity.

5/10

March 1st - The Taking of Pelham 123


Tony Scott will never be regarded as highly as his older brother Ridley.  But that's like comparing prime rib to weird brother of prime rib (10 points for you if you get the reference).  Ridley Scott creates unique worlds which we're lucky enough to get a glimpse of.  Think Alien and Blade Runner.  Tony Scott is more rock 'n roll than that.  His movies can be instantly satisfying, but will not really linger long in the memory.  Think Top Gun and Man on Fire (True Romance is his one exception, but I put that more down to Tarantino's script). Unfortunately this unnecessary remake doesn't even achieve the heights of highly entertaining. It's merely 'meh'.  Denzel Washington is always good value, and is easily the best thing in this. John Travolta, on the other hand, is hammier than he's been in years.  He tries to exude menace, but merely comes off as silly.  I also wonder if he was paid for every time he said 'Motherf*cker', as maybe that would explain him using it 20+ times.  There is very little tension in the movie, and you can see every plot turn coming from a mile away. Admittedly, it does earn extra points for casting Tony Soprano as the Mayor of New York.  Brilliantly ironic.

5/10

March 2nd - The Driver


So far, this week has been dominated by misfires and I keep coming back to the word, mediocrity. I needed something to turn me around. Something to break the funk.  I was messing around on LoveFilm again and thought I'd just go for a genre movie.  Something dependable, but with a bit of extra bite to it.  And then I came across this. Drive was one of my favourite movies from last year.  I guess I didn't realise just how much of a debt was owed to Walter Hill's 1978 chase flick. The opening scenes are very similar to say the least as we follow a less than talkative driver as he helps a couple of goons get away after a robbery.  But that's where the similarity ends. This evolves into an obsessed cop chasing the criminal movie and is probably closer to Heat in the end than Drive.  Tremendously entertaining tough guy flick, with some of the best car chases you're likely to see.  This was in the pre CGI days, and you can feel every crunch of metal.  Highly recommended.

8/10

March 3rd - True Lies


And so we come to my favourite movie of the week.  I've talked a bit before about the troublesome nature of nostalgia.  True Lies came out when I was about 13 or 14 and it instantly became my favourite thing ever.  I was a little hesitant to revisit it, but given that it's a James Cameron movie, I needn't have worried.  This is Cameron and Arnie's ode to James Bond movies.  It highlights the ridiculous nature of Spy movies, and enjoys a lot of humour at the expense of the genre conventions along the way. Arnie plays Harry Tasker, an American spy at the top of his game.  Only caveat?  His wife thinks he's a salesman, and has done for 15 years.  When a Middle Eastern terrorist smuggles a nuke into the US, you just know those two worlds are going to collide.  This is nonsense of the highest degree.  The action scenes are spectacular and over the top.  Arnie has probably never been funnier as he and Tom Arnold bounce off each other brilliantly.  Jamie Lee Curtis has probably never been sexier. And I can't remember the last time we saw a Harrier Jet in downtown LA.  Probably Arnie's last 'great' movie (though I have a soft spot for End of Days) and just as good as I remember.  Nostalgia?  Now that's more like it.

9/10

Another week done, and I hope there are much better weeks than this to come!  If anyone has a suggestion for movies I have not covered yet, please put them in the comments below.   Now that I have subscribed to LoveFilm (and getting extremely good value out of it with my movie experiment), who knows what I will watch from day to day?

Until next time.............