Left cold: “Whiteout”

Hey all, thanks for joining me for “Schlocktastic ‘80s Week.” It was a fun walk down memory lane, and I’ll probably do a part two soon enough, but for now it’s a painful jolt back to the present with Whiteout. Whiteout is one of the last of the summer movies, the kind thrown in a sort of movie-distribution Hail Mary at the ass end of August/front end of September in the hopes that enough people are so dispirited (or it’s still so goddamned hot) that they’ll sit in a movie theater and watch damn near anything that’s projected onscreen. And that’s pretty much the mood you have to be in to muster any sort of engagement with Whiteout.

Criminally Overlooked: “Zodiac”

Among the most criminally of the criminally overlooked is 2007s Zodiac by David Fincher. This is an epic, sprawling film that effortlessly crosses generational lines using the passport of unsettled, amorphous horror. It’s a film without a wasted shot or a mediocre performance. It should have swept the Oscars. It should have beaten down No Country for Old Men by revealing the Coen Brothers’ (and, to be fair, Cormac McCarthy’s) hipster-artist nihilism for the poserism it ultimately is. But that didn’t happen. I was one of the few who saw it and it’s barely remembered now. Today, I asked a hip, intelligent coworker if she’d seen it, and she replied, “No. Is it a TV series?” It was all I could do not to run down the hallway naked and screaming about the endtimes (admittedly, this packs less of punch around my office since I did it after I saw Transformers 2’s box office numbers).

Fourth of July in Siam, cameras, lingerie, and Thai movies: “Wongkamlao” and “Nymph”

One of the benefits of celebrating the Fourth of July in a foreign country (one with actual diversions and not a postage stamp in the middle of the desert, like last year) is that you get the days off, but don’t have to deal with the usual Fourth of July headaches: cookouts populated by weird family members you’d rather not spend time with, the annual bloodsport of fighting for a patch of land to watch the fireworks, the list goes on. I mean, I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but part of freedom and independence is the freedom from having to put up with cousin zippy from mom’s side boasting about his new position as deputy chief accountant at the Usinger’s plant. So this year, I headed out to Central World mall, where as fortune would have it, they were hosting a camera expo/lingerie show. Excellent! What better way to celebrate America’s birth than by watching lovely Thai women in lingerie strike Sapphic poses in the middle of a family mall. If this isn’t what our forefathers fought the Revolutionary War for, well…they sure would have. Unfortunately, you can only ogle the pretty girls for so long before the sex-tourist vibe sets in. So, I decided to book some time at the Cineplex. Public Enemies hasn’t yet opened in Thailand, and Transformers is blowing everything else out of theaters, so I saw a couple Thai movies instead. Yes, this whole paragraph was a long-winded way of telling you I’m going to review some Thai movies. But isn’t the pic from the camera expo awesome?

Attack of the cheap knock-offs: “War(s) of the Worlds” and “The Day the Earth Stopped”

So apparently while you’ve all been sipping your lattes and surfing the Internet, a small production company called The Asylum (they of the classic MegaShark vs. Giant Octopus) has been making direct-to-DVD knockoffs of Hollywood blockbusters, and C. Thomas Howell has been carving out a nice empire of his own within this genre. I knew about some of these films, and I even caught Howell in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds when it was released to compete with Spielberg’s version. I simply assumed he was an innocent bystander caught up in all this dreck—just some poor former Brat-Packer who needed money to keep his ‘97 Saturn running. I never would have imagined he was evil genius starring/directing/producing these cinematic daisycutters bombs. A sort of crap-movie Rommell if you will. Alas, there he is, foisting another War of the Worlds knockoff at us, along with The Day the Earth Stopped. I’m not going to go so far as to say that C. Thomas Howell is the devil, but I’m sure there’s a UN human rights tribunal with his name on it. Or at least there should be.

When bad movies happen to good mutants: “X-men Origins: Wolverine”

Well, the summer movie season is upon us once again, and with its advance guard, the unfortunately titled (and written and directed and acted and…) X-Men Origins: Wolverine it doesn’t exactly burst out of the starting gate. It doesn’t even stumble. No, the starting pistol sounds, and it lurches, staggers a couple steps, then suffers an aneurysm and collapses in a heap that twitches feebly a couple times for 100 or so minutes. What Brett Ratner wasn’t finished screwing up with X-Men: The Last Stand, director Gavin Hood capably and thoroughly takes care of.

Watching the “Watchmen”

Well, give Zack Snyder this much: with Watchmen he filmed what was believed to an unfilmable graphic novel and brought it to the screen more or less intact. It seems that the success of his 300 (aka: The Violentest Gay Porno Ever) gave him enough juice to do what people never thought would be done. So, uh, good for him for that. He even managed to realize the novel’s fairly pedestrian artwork in a dynamic way and give the movie a bit of visual style that captures the look of a comic-book panel without going over-the-top haywire like Ang Lee’s Hulk. Unfortunately, his adaptation of Watchmen imports all of the graphic novel’s weakness, and Snyder throws in a few of his own. The result is audacious, but underwhelming movie, wildly uneven, and seeming more than anything like the work of artist that’s been sealed in a Tupperware container for the past 25 years.

Crazy women and the audiences expected to love them: “Over Her Dead Body” and “Watching the Detectives”

(Well, once more I’m giving you a two-fer, since neither of these movies really have enough substance for an independent review.)

So my older brother once told me, “Stay away from crazy chicks, because you think you can fix them, but you can’t, and you just end up as nuts as they are. They’re pretty good in bed, though.” Now given the fact that this same brother cannot stand any contemporary music and wonders why bands of his youth like Journey, Foreigner, and .38 Special don’t get any respect or radio play anymore, you understand why generally take his advice was a grain of salt big enough to stick in a pasture for the delight of the cattle. Still, the myth of the crazy chick is omnipresent in our culture and it shows up in these two films.

The truth is…oh, who gives a damn: “The X-Files: I Want to Believe”

The X-Files: I Want to Believe leaves the viewer pondering a central mystery: who thought this was a good idea? Seriously. Chris Carter, I can understand. He wants to revive his cash cow and can’t admit that it’s been slaughtered, rendered, sold off as ground chuck and eaten as a hamburger by some overweight Middle American family. But David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson have gone on to fairly successful post-X-Files careers. And didn’t anyone at 20^th Century Fox look at the script and go “Uh..erm…pass.”

 

Counterpoint: The Work Wife’s Review of “Wanted”

So, Kassandra the work wife took great exception to my review of Wanted. After her initial torrent of verbal abuse died down, I placated her by promising to upload her rebuttal to my review if she would write one. I suspected that this would end things once and for all, as Kass fears word-processors like a cat fears a full bathtub (something in her upbringing…I think as a child she was taught that they were the tools of the Devil). Alas, no. Either she conquered this fear or I’m thinking of some other chick I know, because she sent me the following:

Better Living Through Sociopathic Violence: “Wanted”

Wanted is about Wesley Gibson (James McEvoy), a 20-something office drone, put-upon by his sadistic boss, emasculated by his cheating girlfriend, broke, until one day he learns that he has super powers and a destiny which requires them, and Wesley becomes Spider-Man!

 

Wait. That’s not right.