Contradicting Popular Opinion
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks.
I apologize about my recent absence from the internets. Mark Ruffalo came over and broke my thumbs, then I tried to hug Danny Bonaduce and he dropped me on my face. It was awful.
I’m just kidding. Mark Ruffalo seems like a perfectly gentle and timid soul, whose ass I could soundly kick. As for Bonaduce, I highly recommend that all of you Youtube him hitting Johnny Fairplay with the back body drop. It was the best thing I saw on television since Letterman made Paris Hilton cry.
Good times.
Get on with it.
During said absence from the internets, I took the time to watch a string of good movies that I wanted to see and felt no compulsion to pan, movies in black and white, where men wore hats.
I also finally saw Lucky Number Slevin and Smokin’ Aces. Apparently, they are different movies. In my head they were tied together despite debuting about 9 months apart. You can understand my confusion though, right? Both films have large casts of movie stars, a title which serves as a slight pun on the central character’s chosen name, cheeky violence, warring mafia factions, hitmen, goons, a final reel father-son twist, and over-stylized visuals.
Let’s start with Slevin. I was with this movie for quite a bit. Lucy Liu was appealing as the crazy coroner love-interest, the art direction was interesting enough, and its convoluted story was surprisingly easy to follow. Plus it had God and Gandhi as rival mob bosses; that alone is worth the price of admission. I reiterate: I was with the film for quite a bit.
But then it lost me. Generally speaking, movies build up to something big in the third act. The third act of Slevin is all exposition. The majority of the film’s final 20 minutes is spent explaining things the audience should’ve figured out already. The only thing the film doesn’t explain is how the Josh Hartnett character managed to age only 15 of the last 25 years.
(For those who have seen the movie or who don’t mind me spoiling the obvious twist: In the modern day portion of the movie, the late twenties Hartnett claims to be 25. In the flashbacks, set in 1979, his character is about 10 years old. The film was released in 2006.)
At any rate, it felt as though the screenwriter got antsy, wanted to end the movie as quickly as possible, and thus turned the final bit into a radio play. It soured me on the flick. Be a movie: Show me, don’t tell me.
Thus, I thought “Smokin’ Aces must be the good one.”
It took about 4 minutes of that one to convince me otherwise. Holy god what a crappy movie. So the opening is shot in that washed out, hyper-dark, Tony Scott making Domino style. I couldn’t even see what was going on, not that seeing was required at any point in this turd. This didn’t wait until the third act to become a radio play. It was as though Joe Carnahan had never even seen a movie before, let alone made them.
Aces basically goes like this: Poorly disguised exposition, useless “cutesy” small talk, even more poorly disguised exposition, introduction of a character who won’t be very important, more expositions, third rate Tarantino small talk, joke about the erection of a prepubescent, etc. Plus half the actors are putting on the ugliest accents around. Affleck seems to think that playing a bail bondsmen means doing a poor imitation of Max Cherry. Andy Garcia seems to be doing some sort of Donald Trumo impersonation.
Eventually this thing builds to a few uninteresting and hard to follow action sequences. The only thing I can count as a positive in this flick is that small-time celebrities were able to kill larger celebrities. I happy when a guy like Batmanuel gets to kill a Ray Liotta. That’s nifty.
And I guess it’s always nice to see Ben Affleck get killed.
