Movie reviews

Movie review: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

UPDATE, December 21, 2023: I have made a few tweaks to the review, but rest assured, I still think THIS IS A VERY BAD MOVIE.

This was a bad movie and a bad Star Wars movie.

I was excited when it was announced that Lucas had sold the rights to Star Wars to Disney. Disney has been making extremely competent pop movies for a while now, so I was confident they would do a good job here–and better than Lucas had with the prequel trilogy.

(To give Lucas credit, for all the problems the prequels had, there is a defining vision that underlies all three movies, and each builds on the other. This leaves aside the quality of execution and a lot of curious design choices, but the vision was there.)

So in 2015 we get The Force Awakens. J.J. Abrams is the director and I actually felt at the time that he was a good choice–Star Wars is big, kid-friendly fluff and with a good script and cast, it’s the kind of thing Abrams can do well. The Force Awakens borrows copiously from the original Star Wars, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s a little eye-rolling (please please please no more Death Stars or Death Star substitutes), but the new characters are engaging and fun to watch, and it feels like Star Wars. Everything you want is there.

The Last Jedi is more like a modern Star Wars–less fluffy, more gritty, with more consequences. It deliberately plays against some of the established tropes, even as it copies beats from The Empire Strikes Back. By the end, I was wondering how the rebellion would come back in the third movie after being reduced to what seemed like a room full of people by the end. Ho ho, if I had only known. EDIT: In retrospect, I feel The Last Jedi tried a bit too hard to deconstruct Star Wars, which may have pushed Abrams and crew to basically create an almost standalone film to close the trilogy.

And then we have The Rise of Skywalker, or Star Wars as Written By a 15-Year-Old Star Wars Nerd.

There are things I liked. The effects were nice. The cast, although let down by a generally awful script, remain fun to watch. Ian McDiarmid still chews scenery with unbridled glee. Some of the lightsaber fights were entertaining (I especially liked the one on the wreck of the Death Star1Neat visual, but ugh, with Rey clearly fatigued).

But everything else ranged from okay to just bad. Oh, so bad.

The scenes with Leia felt awkward, because all of her dialog was generic (for obvious reasons). I would have preferred they recast her role for the final movie or just not featured her character at all (have her join with the force in an early scene or something).

Rey turns out to be the granddaughter of Palpatine instead of a scrappy scavenger who just happens to turn out awesome. Bleah.

And the lineage of Rey underlines my central complaint with the film (apart from its relentless pacing, which was more exhausting than thrilling): The Rise of Skywalker is stuffed full of plot devices that are made just for this film, that have not been built on or even mentioned in previous movies. The stakes feel non-existent because everything is just thrown at the viewer out of nowhere.

  • The Emperor somehow survives or gets cloned, despite last seen falling down some giant shaft in a Death Star that exploded minutes later. But this is actually not the dumbest thing in the movie. Palpatine’s resurrection would have worked a lot better–along with the whole “I’m stuffed full of Sith, haha!” thing–if it had been set up from the first movie and played out over all three.
  • Hyperspace skipping, or whatever it was called. Why? So dumb. The last jump should have had them slam into the wall of a canyon and die, ending the movie early and saving everyone a lot of time.
  • If General Redhead had held up a sign, Wile E. Coyote-style, that said “I’m the spy!” it would not have been any more dumb than him blurting it out the way he did. It would have been better, really. Also, why did he believe Kylo Ren had to be stopped? Why did he say he didn’t care who won? Why was his character sacrificed for this dubious plot? And who was the grumpy old man who shot him? Like so many things in this movie, grumpy old man is just there with no explanation.
  • Abrams, never a master of subtlety, decides to give every Star Destroyer the ability to literally destroy stars. Or planets. Why? As Poe says, “Sure, why not?” Because it’s so cool (if you are a 15-year-old Star Wars nerd).
  • Speaking of, I literally rolled my eyes when the surprise fleet of ten million ships magically shows up at the final battle. Very good timing there. Good thing it was telegraphed heavily multiple times beforehand, so it wouldn’t seem at all like an actual surprise. I’ll pretend the boy sweeping at the end of The Last Jedi was on one of those ten million ships.
  • Finn keeps saying he wants to say something, then he never says it. WHY?! It’s the last movie, have him say it! There is not going to be a Finn spinoff series, sorry.
  • Rey kissing Kylo at the end was grossbuckets.
  • Rey proclaiming herself Rey Skywalker at the end also made me roll my eyes.
  • Space horses.
  • The new droid should have had a price tag on it, since its only purpose was to enhance merchandising.
  • Did I mention the pacing? The movie never slowed down and ended up feeling shapeless, just careening from one action scene to another, with tiny bits of character moments squeezed in-between.
  • Rose is reduced to almost a cameo for no apparent (or good) reason.

On the plus side, they couldn’t think of a way to bring back Jabba the Hutt or have someone frozen in carbonite. If only J.J. Abrams had been frozen in carbonite.

Anyway, this was a disappointing end to what could have been a great trilogy. I’ll conclude by damning it with faint praise: for all its excesses, missed opportunities and general level of dumb-even by Star Wars standards–it was still better than Solo.

BUT NOT BY MUCH. In hindsight, I was mistaken. Solo is not a good movie, but it is still better than this sloppy, shoddy excuse of a film.

Also, here are 23 of the worst parts of the movie (some of which I highlight above), and I agree with all of them: The 23 Worst Parts of ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’

The Matrix 20 years later -or- lol CRTs

I watched The Matrix again recently, having not seen it in its entirety since it originally came out in 1999. Some of the effects are a bit dated-looking now, but the bullet time and all that still looks spiffy.

The funniest part was Morpheus explaining that it was around 2199 in the movie, though Neo believes (as others in the matrix do) that it is 1999. You may be puzzled to discover that in 2199 we have touchscreen displays, but they all run on giant CRT monitors.

While I still enjoyed the movie, it almost felt a little too lean, because Neo’s journey from “I am totally not The One” to “I am totally The One and can fly like motherf’n Superman” seems a bit abrupt. Also Trinity falls in love with him for no apparent reason, as per The Oracle’s prophecy.

I am not really sure what to expect from the just-announced fourth Matrix movie, starring Keanu Reeves and Carrie Anne-Moss, especially since the latter’s character died in the third one. But I’m expecting the CRTs to at least be updated to flat panels.

(Don’t) Go Solo

I watched Solo tonight on Netflix so you don’t have to.

Haha, no. It wasn’t that bad. But it really wasn’t very good, either. Here are my thoughts in list form:

  • I’m glad I didn’t pay full price to see this in a theater
  • Aiden Ehrenreich was okay, but really didn’t have much to work with, and didn’t feel at all like the same character Harrison Ford played
  • Not enough Lando
  • Lando’s emotional attachment to L3 (a droid) was kind of weird
  • Never have a character talk about how predictable everyone is in a movie that is predictable
  • Competent special effects but few that had any real “wow” factor
  • The fan service bits weren’t as overbearing as in the prequels, but they were still bad
  • We get it, any band in a Star Wars movie needs to be really weird and alien
  • The movie started out slow, almost dull
  • Han is supposed to be a great pilot, but we are literally never shown this until he is suddenly forced to fly the Falcon
  • The tone was way too dark for a character who is a lovable rogue
  • We don’t need a backstory on the name Solo
  • Bring back the opening title crawl
  • If they still go ahead and make a Boba Fett movie, I will be very cross
  • It ends hinting at a sequel. Ha, fat chance.

Deadpool, false alarms and free movies

I saw Deadpool last night. I knew just enough about the character and movie to properly calibrate my expectations (vulgar, gory over-the-top violence, irreverent) and was pleased to find the movie was, in its own vulgar, gory and irreverent way, quite charming and at times pretty funny. Ryan Reynolds obviously has affection for the character/material and had a great time making the film–and it shows. As a bonus, you get to see him nude. As a special bonus, you even get to see his naughty bits. As penance for this, you see them after he has been transformed into a hideously ugly mutant.

About a quarter of the way through the movie a pair of small white lights began flashing, one on either side of the movie screen. It seemed like an alarm of some kind. Presumably they don’t have real alarms (the kind that pierce ear drums) to prevent that whole “yelling fire’ in a theater effect. I ignored it for a bit and then Nic finally said we should check it out so we went to the lobby and immediately got word that it was a fire alarm, but a false one. We returned to our seats and the lights kept flashing, which was more annoying now that we knew there was no inferno imminent.

A few minutes later a pair of employees came in and one gamely tried talking over the movie’s audio (Deadpool is not a film that employs subtlety in its audio–or any other part) and we got the gist: an apology for the alarm and an offer for a full refund or free pass.

After they left the film suddenly froze. It’s a digital projector so I’m wondering if the hard drive crashed. Would we get to see the world’s largest BSOD? No, it turned out they were setting the movie back to just before the disruption. I actually caught a piece of dialogue I had missed the first time.

When the movie ended we filed past someone who did indeed give us a pair of free passes (good until December 31, 2017, so good for the release of Episode VIII). We’ll likely use them for Zootopia, one of those anthropomorphic Disney moves that looks way better in the previews than it has any right to.

Overall, the disruption was relatively minor, didn’t detract from the experience (Deadpool is pretty much the perfect movie to experience a false fire alarm in) and we got a free movie out of it. I rate the evening 6 out of 7 Ryan Reynold’s fourth wall-breaking comments.

Movie review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Hey, there’s a new Star Wars movie out. You may have heard about it, possibly.

Released twelve days ago, Star Wars: The Force Awakens has already made over $600 million domestically. Even taking into account ticket price inflation, that’s an impressive figure. Ten years after Lucas wrapped up his prequel trilogy with Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, there’s apparently quite an appetite for more Star Wars movies.

I’m not going to ramble on since the Internet is already stuffed to the gills with reviews of the movie, but I will offer a few of my own thoughts.

I saw the original Star Wars when I was 12 years old. It was magical and awesome. I’d never seen a movie like it before. When Return of the Jedi came out in 1983 I paid to see it four times, something I’d never done before and have never done again since. I loved Star Wars and its flaws and imperfections didn’t bother me in the slightest, even as I acknowledged them.

When Lucas decided to make Episodes I-III I was excited. I’d have preferred Episodes VII-IX since we already knew Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader, but still, new Star Wars!

As it turned out, whatever Lucas captured for the original three movies largely eluded him for the prequels, which were flat, poorly-directed, bloated with overly busy effects, featured embarrassing fan service and had one of the worst movie romances ever.

The biggest criticism I might level at The Force Awakens is that it largely uses the template of the first movie, swapping in new characters for the same general roles. But this is a minor nit, because it is done well and serves as a way to relaunch the movie series, not just for people who didn’t grow up with the original trilogy, but especially for those who did.

I suspected J.J. Abrams would be a better fit for Star Wars than Star Trek and he is. Reining in his excesses, he ably directs a cast that is diverse, smart and appealing. The script is rather sharp for a Star Wars film. The whole thing moves relentlessly, but finds the right places to breathe before picking up the action again. The fan service is tolerable–in stark contrast to what Abrams did in Star Trek–and Harrison Ford, who plays a surprisingly large part in the film, perfectly recaptures the character of Han Solo. And BB-8 is adorable.

Really, the major achievement here–apart from the stellar work done by the young cast that will carry the series forward–is that this feels like a Star Wars film in a way the prequels never really did. It’s ironic that it took people other than Lucas to rediscover and recapture what made the original trilogy work so well.

Now I just have to wait impatiently for Episode VIII.

Movie review: The Martian

I don’t review movies much anymore but I’m offering a quick one for The Martian:

Go see it.

Based on the self-published book of the same name, this is a smart, funny and even touching movie that is grounded in believable science, telling the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars and the effort to rescue him. The cast is diverse and enjoyable, the script respects the intelligence of the audience and the visuals are as lush as you’d expect in a Ridley Scott film.

I can now forgive Scott for Prometheus.

Movie review: Oz the Great and Powerful

Nic and I wanted to go watch some mindless spectacle so we settled on Oz the Great and Powerful. This is a great example of a movie filled with CGI for its own sake. So much of the movie looked fake–deliberately so in the case of the backgrounds, which were callouts to the look of the original Wizard of Oz–and was distracting because of it. Just because you can CGI a bunch of butterflies doesn’t mean you should.

James Franco was okay as Oz but lacks the presence the role needs. When he smiles he looks like a goofy kid, not an oily con man. Michelle Williams did what she could with the role of Glinda but had weird eye makeup or something that made it look like she was always on the verge of weeping. Plus I’d just seen her again in Brokeback Mountain and was half-expecting Ennis to show up and ask her how she could afford that g-damn fancy dress she was wearing.

The battle between Evanora and Glinda at the end of the movie was wholly unnecessary and brought to mind the Gandalf/Saruman fight–not a flattering comparison. And Evanora obviously went to the Emperor Palpatine School of Discipline.

The flying monkeys were baboons and didn’t look as scary as Zach Braff (human or monkey form). Disappointing.

Overall I found it mediocre but not entirely objectionable, like eating a bag of chips that aren’t your favorite flavor. You’d miss nothing by waiting to catch it on video.

It made $80 million this weekend.

Movie review: Prometheus

In space no one can hear you script.

Prometheus is the sort-of prequel to Alien. I say sort of because the events don’t lead directly into Alien but rather lay some of the groundwork for the series. Sort of. Unfortunately that groundwork is a shambles, hobbled by a muddled script and characters that serve as little more than vessels for plot devices. The saving grace, as one might expect of a Ridley Scott film, are the visuals. They are arresting and spectacular but ultimately provide nothing more than a gloss to a rather poorly-made movie.

Starting from the premise of disparate ancient civilizations all producing the same star map, Prometheus goes on to have billionaire Peter Weyland in the year 2093 launch a ‘trillion dollar’ space expedition (so I guess he’s actually a trillionaire) to find the ‘engineers’ that apparently seeded life on Earth and inspired the star maps of all the different ancient civilizations. The expedition features the titular space ship and a crew of 17 whose names are conveniently written across the front of their space helmets so the audience can remember who is who.

They arrive at LV-223, just a hop and skip over from the infamous LV-426, home of face huggers and other bad things but no one on the Prometheus knows anything about aliens with double mouths, acidic blood and a strong desire to kill all humans. They are on a mission of science! Except they actually aren’t because the infirm Weyland, who has faked his death for no apparent reason, is secretly onboard the ship and hopes the engineers will help save him from his old man disease or make him young again or something because if they could make humans, surely they can fix old man disease, right? Right.

Also onboard is Vickers, who is revealed late in the movie to be his daughter, as if it’s supposed to be a shocking moment. Her character is the alleged commander of the mission, though she seems hostile and indifferent to everyone and everything, possibly related to unspoken daddy issues. Her character is completely superfluous and unlikeable as a bonus. That she gets squashed by a rolling space ship would be considered a small payoff if it didn’t come so late in the film.

Naturally there is also an android, this time played by Michael Fassbender. He is the son Weyland never had or some nonsense like that. Mainly it seems like every Alien movie, even a sort-of prequel, needs an android so here is David. David might be described as a paranoid android, as he engages in a lot of quirky and vaguely (and sometimes overtly) menacing behavior. While Fassbender is interesting to watch, the character is a puzzle piece that is never explained, an Ash without motive.

After discovering artificial structures on the surface of LV-226 — by someone literally spotting them through a window on the Prometheus — the movie sets about with the worst science team in the history of forever exploring the mysteries therein. It starts with cool shots of ATVs scooting off of Prometheus and heading to the structures because there seems to be a rule that you can’t park your space ship close enough to just walk over. Maybe they were worried about getting a ticket.

The crack team begins its work. As they enter the structure the doctor guy notes that it has a breathable atmosphere (explanation: none). To prove it he laughs, takes off his helmet then laughs some more. When he doesn’t keel over dead everyone takes off their helmets. This is bad procedure for several reasons. Firstly, without knowing the source of the breathable atmosphere you also don’t know if the unknown source might suddenly cut off, leaving you to die within seconds from the otherwise deadly poisonous air. Secondly, with their helmets off it makes it that much harder to remember the character names.

After finding a room filled with vases that leak black goo that is probably alive, possibly sentient and very bad indeed, the crew returns to the ship. But no one notices that two of the crew have wandered off. One is a geologist who is ‘in it for the money’ and shows his contempt for the mission via a Mohawk haircut and piping weed through his space helmet. But he does have fancy probes that scoot through the alien structure and map its interior. Then he gets lost. The guy with the mapping probes.

Getting lost with him is the biologist. He goes back to the room filled with mysterious and seemingly alive black goo. When the goo resolves itself into a snake-like thing that rises out of the goo, the biologist does what any trained professional would do — he leans forward and tries to pet it like a kitten. He ends up being killed by the snake, which is pretty surprising! Didn’t see that coming.

Meanwhile the android infects a doctor onboard Prometheus with the goo for no given reason. The doctor starts to Go Bad but it’s okay because Vickers is there to ice (er) him with a flamethrower. Also the geologist, who got lost with the biologist, turns into a zombie but he gets taken out, too. Then Vickers sleeps with the ship’s captain. Or maybe that happened before. Anyway, the doctor also sleeps with his wife, whose name is SHAW because that is on her helmet. Shaw becomes pregnant with a babby except it was earlier revealed that she can’t get pregnant but now she is — HOW WEIRD IS THAT? She tears off into a room with an all-purpose medical pod and programs it to REMOVE THE BABBY. Except the medical pod is made for men only, kind of like Dr. Pepper or Irish Spring soap. Shaw is smarter than the machine, though, so she orders it to just cut open her stomach and yoink out whatever is in there (well, not her stomach, obviously, but whatever she might be ‘pregnant’ with). The machine complies and in loving detail pulls out a tentacled something or other that squirms about terrifically in the pincers that hold it. Shaw leaves after getting her stomach stapled and thanks to advanced 21st century drugs seems no worse the wear.

So, the black goo. It apparently is what creates or modifies life. The engineers abandoned the goo moon of LV-226 but left piles of their ships buried beneath its surface for some reason (the ships are the same as the one discovered at the start of Alien). They dress up in suits that explain the look of the famous Space Jockey from Alien. There are weird holographic ‘security camera’ projections that show these guys all fleeing in terror from something then dying somehow in a big pile. Why these holograms show them running but never reveal what they are running from is never explained. Maybe the tell-all hologram got corrupted by black goo. One of the engineers had his head cut off so the crew take this two thousand year old head back to the ship and somehow their medical machinery revives it and it explodes. SCIENCE.

All right, it seems they aren’t getting the answers they want here what with everyone dying and things exploding, but Weyland is not to be deterred. There is a single life sign being picked up by lost dead geologist’s probes and they find out that it’s an engineer in a stasis tube. David the android has been studying their language, which I guess did not evolve in any way over thousands of years, and speaks a few words of greeting to the engineer after they force him to wake up. The engineer rips David’s head off and kills everyone he can get his tremendously large albino hands on. This is what you call waking up in a bad mood. SHAW and VICKERS escape.

Back on the ship, the captain (who is not actually in charge of anything except for flying the ship) and two crew whose names I can’t recall because they never got helmets and only had a few lines each thinks it might be time to leave. The engineer thinks the same thing and jumps into the pilot seat of his Uterean craft. David the android tells Shaw, who escapes the alien ship, that the engineer is going to deliver some goo to Earth. Probably not a good thing for Earth. Shaw tells the captain the alien ship must be stopped but they are a team of SCIENCE , not the military so the best the captain can do is ram the Prometheus into the alien ship as it takes off. Which he does. Shaw and Vickers are scrabbling about on the surface as the alien ship comes crashing down in slow motion. Shaw leaps out of the way but Vickers forgets how physics works and as the alien ship rolls like a giant wheel toward her, she keeps running away from it in a straight line, hoping that somehow she will outrun it. She does not and gets smooshed.

Shaw goes back to the lifeboat/medical pod left behind and oh dear, that tentacled thing is now 50 times its original size and probably hungry. David the android’s head is still functional despite being removed from his body and landed conveniently close enough to a communication device. He contacts Shaw and warns her that the engineer is out and about. Sure enough he shows up and is very mad because they smashed his ride and he’ll show that woman what’s what. Shaw then introduces tentacled thing to the engineer and escapes again. The tentacled thing shoves a tentacle down the engineer’s throat in order to deliver a final shot SURPRISE.

Shaw and David the android’s head decide to commandeer another alien ship (remember, the moon is littered with them) and take off to the engineer’s home planet because, well, because.

THE END.

Okay, looking over this, I realize it’s more a plot summary than a review but in summarizing I am hoping to capture how inane, illogical and plain dumb the plot is. This is a movie trying to be deep, profound and meaningful and failing. And it fails because Alien was a neat horror movie set in space and trying to build it up into more was a bad idea in the first place. It also fails even when you strip away its metaphysical musings and simply take it as a horror/action movie because it is neither scary nor filled with satisfying action.

But yes, the visuals are great.

I give Prometheus 4 out of 10 Uterean ships and one of those is for the visual effects. Maybe two.

I recommend checking out this Broken forum thread on the movie for a rollercoaster ride of anticipation, disappointment, resignation and in a few odd cases, absolute love for what Ridley Scott hath wrought.

Top grossing films of 2011

Yeah, I’m a bit late with this.

Here are the top-grossing movies domestically for 2011 (domestically refers to Canada and the U.S. As you’ll see, worldwide grosses paint a somewhat different picture):

1 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 $381,011,219
2 Transformers: Dark of the Moon              $352,390,543
3 The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1     $281,287,133
4 The Hangover Part II                        $254,464,305
5 Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides $241,071,802
6 Fast Five                                   $209,837,675
7 Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol        $209,278,301
8 Cars 2                                      $191,452,396
9 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows          $186,842,737
10 Thor                                       $181,030,624

This list can be summed up thusly: YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO COMPLAIN ABOUT TOO MANY SEQUELS. EVER. Exactly one of the top 10 movies is not a sequel and it — Thor — is based on a licensed property and is in a genre (superhero films) that has had titles cranked out regularly over the past decade.

Let’s have a look at each film and figure out why they made buckets of money (apart from exorbitant ticket prices).

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. If you include ‘in 3D’ this becomes one of the longest movie titles ever but no one can keep an accurate count of how many Harry Potter movies there are (7? 8?) so it never got called Harry Potter 7 (or 8), typically being referred to as simply ‘the new Harry Potter’. The success of this is no surprise because it wraps up the saga and all of the HP movies have done well. Most of them have been looked kindly upon by critics, too, which never hurts.

2. Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Regarded as better than #2 (the very definition of damning with faint praise) the third installment proves the least popular of the trilogy (when taking into account ticket sales and not inflated ticket prices) — not a good sign for Michael “BLOW IT UP” Bay but $352 million even in 2011 dollars isn’t chump change, so this series seems safe for awhile or until it’s run into the ground (with Bay directing, this will probably literally happen).

3. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1. Another popular series, the sparkly vampires continue to draw in its loyal audience with the penultimate film (at least until Twilight: The New Generation or something comes along). Like Harry Potter, they are squeezing out a few more bucks by splitting the last book into a two-part movie. While I can see this for HP, given that the first book was about 300 pages long and the last was about 10,000, it seems more of a money grab for Twilight. But hey, I have not read the books nor seen the movies, so who am I to judge? As a bonus, even the critics seem to be warming up to this saga of pasty white teenage/werewolf/undead love.

4. The Hangover Part II. Hey, another sequel. Weird! This one seems to have coasted a bit on the success of the first movie. A third is all but inevitable and probably won’t do as well. This will not stop a fourth or fifth from being made. This is the only live action comedy to make the top 10, proving again that for whatever reason people do not like to go to movies to laugh. Maybe the ticket prices put filmgoers more in the mind frame for tragedies.

5. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. In North America the wind seems to no longer be in the sails much for this, although overseas it’s still incredibly popular (over $802 million), so Johnny Depp can probably continue to wear eye makeup (and get paid for it) into the foreseeable future.

6. Fast Five. I am surprised at the resiliency of this series. The April release would suggest it was viewed as not cut out to be a summer movie yet it did boffo box office. People really like Vin Diesel and fast cars, it seems. Don’t blame me if Diesel uses this to leverage a new Chronicles of Riddick movie, I never saw it!

7. Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol. Another sequel, another surprise. After a tepid reaction to #3 people returned in greater numbers to watch Tom Cruise running again. He can probably crank out a few more before shifting into the inevitable character (‘I’m too old to be a leading man anymore’) parts.

8. Cars 2. The second worst-performing Pixar movie ever and after adjusting for inflation the worst. While you can’t really call a movie that makes close to $200 million a flop, it clearly underperformed. This is what happens when merchandising is a primary consideration and the audience can sense it. This won’t stop them from making Cars 3 before The Incredibles 2, though. There is no justice. This was the only animated film to crack the top 10, a bit unusual in itself.

9. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Exemplifying both ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ and ‘more of the same’ the sequel to Sherlock Holmes managed to do almost as well as the first, which means it’s probably considered a failure of sorts. Expect more explosions or zombies or exploding zombies in the third one.

10. Thor. Wait, this isn’t a sequel. How did this get here? Thor is, of course, based on the Marvel comic character and under the direction of Kenneth Branagh (!) it proved a solid hit. But before they can stamp out Thor 2, Thor 3 and Thor 4: I Adore there’s The Avengers movie this summer. I find it hard to imagine a sequel to this but on the other hand, do we really want them to remake The Incredible Hulk again?

I tried to watch Batman & Robin

I tried to watch Batman & Robin. Yes, the 1997 movie with George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger. There’s a Warner movie channel on preview now so I figured I’d record it on the PVR (in HD!) and give it a shot, having never seen it before. I was aware of its less than stellar reputation. I cringed at the first butt shot, winced at the batsuit with nipples and watched through my fingers as if at a horror movie while Arnie lumbered onto the screen and bellowed, “Da ice man cometh!” I found it odd that Batman and Mr. Freeze would meet right at the start of the movie and that distracted me until the hockey guards/attackers skated in.

At that point kitsch was no longer enough. Or it was too much. In any case, that’s as far as I got. I’ll assume Batman won in the end and be happy with that.

The Dark Knight Rises (which is almost as dumb a title as Batman Begins) is coming out this summer. My only concern is that Nolan will fall into his own navel and make it too Grim and Serious. What it is unlikely to be, however, is too campy. I’m fairly confident that Batman & Robin sucked all remaining camp out of the universe.

Twilight Zone: The Movie review

I’ve seen Twilight Zone: The Movie before (in the theater when it came out in 1983) and recently watched it again. It doesn’t hold up.

I had forgotten that the opening is a literal update of the final few seasons’ intro sequence, complete with the Scary Door, floating eyeball, shattering window, human figure and clock, all given a nice modern sheen. What this does is underline how silly the whole thing was to begin with, and I’m not convinced that was the intent here. When CBS revived the series two years later, they wisely jettisoned this for completely different opening credits that call back to the original without aping them.

The movie is framed by a character played by Dan Aykroyd. In the movie’s first sequence, he is a passenger in a car driven by Albert Brooks. They exchange banter for a bit before Aykroyd talks Brooks into pulling over in order to show him something ‘really scary’. This turns out to be Aykroyd done up with make-up effects worthy of the original Star Trek. The main problem here is that they apparently could not budget a movable mouth, so Aykroyd’s monster face looks like a mound of blue plaster topped with a fright wig. Maybe it was meant to be an homage to Creepshow and other cheesy horror movies/comics, but that’s not what The Twilight Zone is about, so it would have still missed the mark there.

This leads into the first of four stories and the only original one, which on the one hand I find understandable (present the audience with stories they know and presumably love) and mildly puzzling on the other (“I can watch these stories for free on TV, why should I pay to watch them in a theater?”). Sadly, the original story is the weakest of the bunch. A racist man played by Vic Morrow leaves a bar in a huff and finds himself in Nazi-occupied France, where the bad guys see him as a Jew. He then lands at a KKK lynching, appearing as the black would-be lynching victim, escapes again to find himself doing a compelling impersonation of Charlie during the Vietnam War before ending up back with the Nazis. Upon return, he is captured and put into a cattle car and shipped off to the concentration camps because he is a racist and isn’t that ironic?

Granted, the message episodes of The Twilight Zone were never subtle to begin with (in one an American Nazi — played wonderfully by Dennis Hopper — is guided by Hitler himself), but this story is a limp series of sequences that feels rote. There’s no investment in the character — he’s just a nondescript loudmouth with ugly views and an uglier suit jacket (it was the early 80s, after all) and each sequence is too brief to carry any emotional impact. There is a certain ghoulish feeling knowing that Morrow was killed during the shooting of the Vietnam scene (when a helicopter hovering above him crashed due to an effects explosion).

The next story is a remake of “Kick the Can”, directed by Steven Spielberg and is cute enough to be twee and that’s even before you get to Scatman Crothers’ creepy perpetually grinning character. Where the original leaves off with the seniors transforming into kids and running off into the night, the remake brings them back to old age because the object is to be old in body but with ‘young minds’. Having shown everyone how neat it is to be young again but not really so you better climb back into bed and be old, Crothers heads off to the next seniors home to do it all over again. The scene where someone finally punches him in his stupid grinning mouth was apparently deleted.

This story captures Spielberg at his most sentimental. While the actors are fine, the script is mawkish and heavy-handed, once again bent on delivering a message above all else. As you might have guessed, I found Crothers’ character (new for the remake) annoying and unnecessary.

The third story is a remake of the classic episode where Bill Mumy plays an evil kid who can do anything with his mind and occupies most of his time by demanding fealty from his parents and their neighbours as they are forced to endure his childish, outlandish indulgences, lest they get sent to the corn field — or worse. The remake introduces a new character, a young school teacher who takes the boy home and gets ensnared in his bizarre world and changes the supporting characters to be similar victims, rather than his actual family. The rest plays out mostly the same but while the horror of the original was palpable (one character is famously turned into a living jack-in-the-box) it is presented more cartoonishly here (literally, for the most part). The biggest change is the ending, where the teacher breaks through the boy’s loneliness and agrees to teach him to be nice and use his power wisely rather than to put people into cartoons where they are eaten by monsters. It’s a happy thing but makes the story feel a bit too pat. The original leaves one with a sense that these people are going to be stuck in his hellish world for a very long time, the remake seems to sum up with ‘all you need is love’ and while that’s nice, it’s not nearly as fun. Still, this is far better than the first two stories.

The final is perhaps one of the best-known of the original series, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” where a nervous airline passenger (William Shatner in the original, John Lithgow in the remake) believes he sees a creature on the wing of the plane trying to damage the engines. This is the most faithful retelling, down to Lithgow’s character being carted off in a straitjacket and the reveal of actual damage to the plane, proving he wasn’t just seeing things. It differs in a few ways, most notably by eliminating the wife of the character. My biggest problem with this segment is the pacing. In the original, the character seems perfectly normal but nervous about flying (given that his previous flight ended in an actual nervous breakdown). After first spotting the creature, he begins to unwind and grows increasingly hysterical, but there is always the sense that he is trying to maintain control. The remake starts with Lithgow in the washroom, already freaking out. The arc of the character isn’t given room to breathe and is less rewarding as a result. Plus, Lithgow plays nervous maybe a little too well. The creature’s appearance is also changed from a big fluffy something with a kind of ugly face to a hairless, demon-like thing with a mouth full of nasty-looking teeth. While it is theoretically scarier, it also changes the creature’s motivation. In the original, it seemed to be pulling apart the plane out of fun. The remake creature seems more determined to actually bring the plane down, which muddles why it would disappear when Lithgow’s character tries to point it out to others instead of just finishing the job.

The movie ends with Lithgow in the ambulance and Aykroyd revealed as the driver, offering to show him something ‘really scary’ (I’m guessing bad make-up effects).

On a scale of 1 to 10 Serlings, Twilight Zone: The Movie rates 6 Serlings. Individually:

“Time Out”: 4/10
“Kick the Can”: 4/10
“It’s a Good Life”: 6/10
“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”: 7/10

Review: Skyline

Remember how there were two asteroid movies that came out close to each other (Armageddon and Deep Impact) and two volcano movies that did the same (Dante’s Peak and the creatively-titled Volcano)? This past year has seen the same thing happen with alien invasion movies set in L.A., namely Skyline and Battle: Los Angeles.

I watched Skyline and it was mediocre at best. The effects were decent and the alien design was competent if uninspired (the usual weird organic/machine hybrids, much like those seen in The Matrix sequels) but the movie overall was limp. The opening has some promise — a series of mysterious blue lights drop down from the sky — but once the alien reveal is made and the assault begins in earnest the movie lumbers along with its ultimately uninteresting band of survivors trying to escape the luxury beachside tower they are holed up in. Inevitably their numbers get whittled down as they get plucked off/sucked into the light or the hungry maw of an alien one by one. When it was down to the young couple who have both been exposed partly to the magic alien transformation light I realized I didn’t care about their fate. It’s suggested that their partial exposure (and the woman being newly preggers) may have saved them and even though the man goes through the whole transformation and becomes a big glistening alien hulk thing with blinky lights for eyes, he still retains enough of his human self to save the woman from being turned into an alien snack. To what effect I don’t know, since the coda also establishes that the aliens have pretty much trashed every city across the world and a nuke dropped on L.A. only made them even more ticked off.

It was a better ending than uploading a virus into the mothership, so I will give the filmmakers credit for that.

As with so many alien movies, the reason behind the invasion is so much poorly-explained, unbelievable nonsense. It seems that humans are being caught and used to ‘hatch’ new aliens, which begs the question of what the aliens did before they arrived on Earth. It’s not even worth pondering more than that.

Thumbs down, although the lead actor was kind of cute, so on a scale on one to ten aliens, Skyline rates three aliens and one mutant alien/human offspring. For having a cute lead actor in a bad movie, Skyline rates a six.