Contradicting Popular Opinion
A.K.A.
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks
:Mini-enquiries
intro
A couple of quickies this week. So it is.
Match Point
So there was a time when Woody Allen was good right? That’s what they tell me. Melinda and Melinda assured me that the time was not now. Same goes for that movie with the cookies and Tracy Ulman and the digging…
But Match Point was supposed to be his return to the good. So, despite the explicit and hilarious warnings of my friend DC, I gave it a go.
Truth be told, it is better than Melinda and Melinda, but in that way that the electric chair is better than the gallows.
What a f*cking stinker.
Where to begin? Hmm. Let me sum up the plot. Chris, a creepy Irish tennis pro who doesn’t seem to have an Irish accent, quits the pro-tour for a life of teaching backhands to aristocrats in London. He had the skills but not the drive to make it as a big name tennis player. He had the drive to improve himself from his meager home life, striving to improve himself and blah blah blah, pulling up bootstraps, blah blah blah. We hear a lot about how great he is but see very little evidence that the little shit is worth a damn.
Chris cozies up to a trust-fund brat named Tom by sharing a love of Opera, making them the only straight 20-something men who give a damn about opera. Creepy Tennis Pro gets in nice with rich Tom’s family, talking up Dostoevski with Papa, being polite to Mom and aardvarking the sister. He also becomes weird and obsessive over Tom’s fianceé Nola Rice. (An interesting name, it sounds… made up). Nola is played by Scarlett Johansson who seemingly gets worse at acting every time she tries it, asymptotically reaching Keanu-like levels of suckification. Soon she will be blown off of the screen by Patrick Swayze while playing an FBI agent. Anyways, Nola is a struggling actress despite her bee-stung lips and impressive bumper cars. She’s white trash from Boulder, Colorado with a deadbeat dad and a drunken mother, so naturally she hooks up with London’s upper class. Yeah. At any rate, it is lust at first sight for Chris, whereas Nola has the strong feelings of, “whatever, I guess you can do me.”
Chris gets a job from Tom’s Papa, marries Tom’s sister, moves up Papa’s corporate ladder, lusts some more after Tom’s fianceé and so on. Tom eventually kicks Nola to the curb. Nola disappears for a year, and comes back. At this point Chris is a big muckety muck with his father-in-law’s company, trying to have a baby with his wife, but decides, what the hell, I’ll have a little side action with Nola. Chris, despite many rather fatuous qualities, quite deftly juggles career, family life, and mistress. (Although to be fair, his wife is easily distracted by shiny objects. She makes Anna Nicole Smith look like Hercule Poirot.) Things take a turn for the worse when Creepy Tennis Pro Chris knocks up Lousy Actress Scarlett, I mean NOLA. But Chris comes up with a brilliant plan to solve all of his problems! He steals a shotgun from his father-in-law’s country house, goes to Nola’s apartment building, kills her neighbor then kills Nola carrying his unborn child. Then he goes on to have a poorly written dream sequence defending his actions to the ghosts of Nola and dead neighbor lady.
After doing these things, he has enough sperm left to knock up his own wife. They have a baby and live happily ever after. The end.
The movie is mostly comprised of suck. It manages to waste a perfectly good Brian Cox on a useless role (Shaun of the Dead‘s mom is quite good as his wife though). None of the leads is particularly compelling or likeable. The only humor in the movie comes from Tom, who is basically nowhere to be found in the last hour of the film.
The film-making is all over the place too. The film is ridiculously choppy. There are far too many scenes and far too many locations in the first 15 minutes. It was like 30 seconds, new scene, 30 seconds, new scene. As the film progressed we started getting 5 second scenes. We linger on one shot of people looking, but prematurely end a sequence that might have actually gone somewhere. Plus the damn flick unexpectedly jumps ahead several months at a time.
And then there is the tone. The first hour of the film is the usual “people with expensive things speaking with British accents” interminable movie bullshit, and then things inexplicably turn into third-rate, second-hand Hitchcock. The only connecting thread between the two films is how amazingly bland both are.
Oh, and the dialogue. My gods the dialogue. Lines like, “It would be fitting if I were apprehended” are routine in this flick. No matter what the mood or upbringing of the speaker people always say “make love.” They never bang or f*ck or have sex or bump uglies or canoodle or aardvark or make the beast with two backs or play cocks and quarters. The detectives working the murder case speak only in poorly disguised exposition. “I would like to check out the father-in-law’s guns, but am reluctant to cause trouble for the family.” (That might not be the quote verbatim, but is pretty f*cking close to typical dialogue in this movie.) People speak like f*cking robots. Has Woody Allen conversed with anybody since the f*cking ’70s? Do the people around him act and talk like the people in his movies? What kind of crap is he trying to pull on me?
I guess I should’ve paid more attention to DC when he told me that it was like the filmmakers took a Japanese version of Octopussy and had it translated back into English by a bunch of lazy interns.
And don’t get me started on the film’s sledgehammer-subtle metaphors. Ech. Or the ease with which our “hero” commits murder. He uses a shotgun in an apartment building with nobody else in the apartment seeming to notice. What the f*ck? The police half-ass their jobs, not following any leads, checking out any of the forensic evidence, interviewing any other family members including Nola’s ex-fianceé, etc.
To sum things up: Damn you Woody Allen!
Jarhead
Jarhead seems to be a war movie made by people who have seen war movies in the past. There have been many war movies and certainly this film is one of them. That’s about all I can say about the film.
It is definitely there. The camera was pointed at things. Sound was recorded.
Jarhead has the Apocalypse Now musical pieces, a Full Metal Jacket training sequence, and makes constant reference to other war films, but unlike many other, better, war films, it isn’t about anything in particular. But at its core Jarhead is a film about nothing. It is a fictionalized documentary without many facts. It’s memoirs made into a movie.
Jarhead has no plot, no narrative thread, minimal character development, no action scenes, and very little point. It does have color, though. That’s about all it has going for it. It’s a flick that plays just as well if you watch it 3 minutes at a time. It is a collection of semi-related ideas. It’s kinda like watching 90 minutes worth of Subway sandwich commercials back to back. They all have Jared in them. They are all about sandwiches and such. But they aren’t so cohesive that I would refer to them as a film.
Memoirs make lousy movies. Trust me on this.
Pimps
Eris S. whines about Chernobyl. It was a poorly designed power plant. According to a credible U.N. study less than 50 deaths can be attributed to radiation from this disaster. There were possibilities, of course, for much worse consequences, but all things considered nuclear power is safe and clean. Compare nuclear power to say… COAL. Other than Chernobyl, what are the big nuclear disasters? Three Mile Island? Nobody died because of Three Mile Island. The plants of Japan, the UK, France, and so on all seem to be working fine and fatality free. What about Coal? What about mining disasters? From 1900 to 1910 there were more than 2,000 coal mining fatalities EACH YEAR. In 1907 in Monongah, West Virginia the Fairmont Coal Company’s mine EXPLODED resulting in the deaths of 362 workers. Between 1900 and 1970 more than 100,000 miners had lost their lives due to the coal industry. But hey, those all stopped in 1970 right?
You never hear about mining disasters anymore right? (A sarcasm detector? That is a useful invention!)
Science good, Fear bad. We shouldn’t be reckless with nuclear power. Now that is dangerous. But being reckless when f*cking is also dangerous. As is the case with eating, driving, drinking, running, crossing streets, going down stairs, or shooting terrorists.
Mike “bring tha” Noyes spotlights the only Joe Dante movie I don’t like.
I think there will be a Playing the Lame tomorrow… If there is read it. Mark Badunkadonk needs the hits for his self-esteem.
Travis “if life gives you” Leamons sees some virtue in Crash that I do not.
As for me, I’ve got a Crumb DVD review coming up.
