Mud Songs

I tried watching Woody Allen’s Scoop last night but only managed to get through the first 30 minutes. The script has (had) potential: A reporter dies, meets someone in the afterlife who gives him the scoop on a great story, and then he comes back down to earth as a spirit to give the scoop to another reporter. Unfortunately, the other reporter is Scarlett Johansson, who is a painfully non-comedic actor. Woody Allen’s comedic acting isn’t getting much better with age either. I heard recently that he’s decided to only make dramatic films for now on. Good. He should also avoid acting in his movies himself, give up on trying to write dialogue for young characters and stop casting actresses who look like Barbie dolls.

If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen all there is worth seeing in this movie. Any 3 minutes of Flight of the Conchords has 10 times more laughs than Tropic Thunder. Normally I’d stay clear of anything with Ben Stiller’s name on it (he wrote and directed this one), but I heard good things about Robert Downey Jr. playing a black guy that made me think, “Okay, maybe it’s alright.” But it’s not. I admit I laughed out loud maybe 3 times after some of Downey’s lines, but the rest of it was like every other Ben Stiller so-called comedy: a waste of time. Not my kind of comedy.

Wanted could have been a fun action movie, but it’s just boring and bad. Angelina Jolie is technically in the movie. However, she’s only one of several minor characters in an ensemble cast. She spends most of her time posing under lights that make her look attractive as possible. That’s about it. Morgan Freeman shows up for his multi-million dollar pay cheque too. Sometime stupid action movies can be fun, but Wanted is just a rip-off.

SPOILER ALERT. In The Strangers, a couple looking for a quiet night in their secluded summer home are terrorized by three masked people who walk slowly in and out of shadows while kicking empty cans and knocking over stuff. And they’re not in a rush (which I think is supposed to make them scarier somehow). Eventually they tie up the couple, stab them to death and drive on down the road. That’s it.

There is no reason to see The Happening, ever, not even out of morbid curiosity. Considering the downward slide M. Night Shyamalan has been on since, well, arguably since The Sixth Sense, it seemed inevitable that he would eventually hit rock bottom, and this is it. Even The Village had moments where you think, “Maybe this’ll get good now,” but there isn’t a single compelling moment in the entire running time of The Happening, and subsequently nothing to feel disappointed about. I like Shyamalan as a director, so I was hoping to see at least a few good scenes or cool shots. But nope. The Happening is a zero on every level. The writing, the acting, the direction — it’s all bad, mediocre at best. I know a couple people who enjoyed it because they thought of it as a B-Movie. Okay, maybe. But I think most people would agree with me: This movie sucks.

I couldn’t watch more than 30 minutes of Stephen King’s The Mist. Judging only from what I saw, it’s a horror film in the sense that the writing is horrible, the acting is horrible and the special effects are horrible. Everything is so bad, I thought I might enjoy it as a B-movie. And maybe I can. But not today… Okay, I managed to come back and watch the rest of it. The special effects get a little better and the acting gets worse (the script certainly doesn’t make it easy for them). I can see how the story of a bunch of people stuck in a grocery store while a mist outside full of tentacles and creepy crawlies kills anyone who walks out the door could be a scary movie, but by trying too hard to be dramatic, it’s just stupid. The person I saw the movie with said this: “Man, that movie sucked. Were we ever afraid of anything? Did we ever feel any emotion the director wanted us to feel when he wanted us to feel it? I can’t believe it gets a better rating on Rotten Tomatoes than The Science of Sleep. That’s messed up.”

As straight up science fiction movies, Star Trek movies are kind of lame — but they’re fun if you can get into the whole Star Trek universe, and I do. That being said, Star Trek: Nemesis is a mess. Data has another evil twin? Captain Picard has been cloned? Why is this the first time we’ve heard of the Remans, and now we’re supposed to be scared of them? And how many women squirmed in their seats during Riker and Troi’s love scene? That was disgusting. It’s no wonder Nemesis put an end to the Next Generation movies.

Indiscriminate Harry Potter fans will probably like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix . It was another soulless, unengaging snoozefest for me.

Notes on a Scandal may have two Oscar-nominated performances from Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, but the movie is a waste of time. I nearly walked out of the theatre. It’s not all bad, but I didn’t care about anything or anyone in it. It was too contrived.

The best I can say about Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center is that I was able to sit through the whole thing without wanting to walk out. But I wouldn’t call it a good movie either. Patriotic Americans are going to eat it up. Everyone in the movie is a hero. We never see what it’s like to hear the bad news about a relative who died when the towers collapsed; we only get to know the families of the policemen who live. Then there’s the businessman / former marine who dusts off his old uniform and covertly makes his way to ground zero, as it was called, to look for survivors. What a guy! He’s not even signed up, but like he says to one of the men in the rubble, “You are my mission!” There’s an even better scene near the end where he decides to officially sign up to the marines again because, “Someone has to avenge this.” Great. (George W. Bush is going to love this movie.) World Trade Center may have some basis in truth, but you can’t believe anything Oliver Stone throws at you no matter how straightforward his direction is in this film; he still manages to put his fingerprints all over this one. It’s just another sentimental, flag-waving, I-love-America movie. In the context of the events of 9/11, that seems unnecessary to me.

Valiant is about carrier pigeons during WWII. It is the worst computer animated film I’ve seen to date. It is so dull, uninteresting, unfunny, I would have walked out of the theatre when I saw it if I was by myself. I could smoke a pound of weed and write a better script than Valiant. It may have worked as an animated short, but there’s not enough to hold out for a full-length feature. And not a thing to look at it. Computer animated movies for kids should be at least visually stimulating, give the kiddies something goosh about. But there is nothing to see here, folks. The most vibrant colour I saw was grey. Skip this movie. It’s a stinker.