Mud Songs

Quantum of Solace is a sloppy action movie that uses fast-editing to compensate for poor direction — and it doesn’t work. The action scenes are disorienting and uninvolving. Even die-hard James Bond fans might have trouble caring about anything that happens this time around. After 30 minutes of car chases, explosions, knife fights, gun fights, fist fights, etc., I couldn’t tell who James Bond was after or why. I got near the end of the movie and still didn’t know what the bad guy was all about. Daniel Craig is fine as 007. The story could have been exciting in the hands of more skilled filmmakers. But it wasn’t. It isn’t. Quantum of Solace is boring and forgettable. Skip it.

The Incredible Shrinking Man is an okay B-movie, notable only because of the special effects. A guy is enveloped by an ominous cloud while out on a pleasure cruise. Six month later he slowly begins to shrink. That’s it. There’s your movie. Eventually the guy has to live in a doll house. His cat attacks him. He escapes to the basement where, even smaller, he lives in a match box, washes under a dripping hot water tank, tries to steal food from a mouse trap, runs away from a spider — that kind of thing. It’s worth a look for the cutting-edge 1957 special effects, but it’s lacking in every other regard (even for a B-movie).

The entire movie can be viewed online at guba.com (I’ve never heard of it either).

20 Million Miles to Earth comes off as an attempt recreate 1933’s King Kong but with a half-lizard man from Venus. The stop-motion animation scenes of Mr. Lizard are fun, and some of the acting is so bad it’s hilarious, but there are too many boring filler scenes. The story never takes off. Not enough attention is given to the most interesting character: the lizard man. Watching a movie like 20 Million Miles to Earth, which was made in 1957, makes me appreciate the original King Kong even more.

The Night Listener features Robin Williams as a radio storyteller who begins to receive calls from a 14-year-old boy whose depressing life story becomes material for a radio story. Williams speaks to the kid and his mother on the phone and notices they have similar voices. Is the mother pretending to be her 14-year-old son over the phone? Does her son actually exist? Does anybody care? More to the point, why should anybody care? What’s the big deal? There’s no reason for the audience to feel intrigued. Nobody with any sense would bother to hunt down the kid’s mother to see if he exists. Nobody with any sense would do half the things that go down in this movie. The filmmakers try to make it creepy and mysterious, and Williams does the best he can with the material, but the story goes nowhere. There is no story.

Cleaners is a low-grade, predictable thriller starring Samuel L. Jackson about a guy who cleans up the blood and guts left over at crime scenes and then one day gets tricked into cleaning up a murder scene before the police are called in. Stylistic touches such as inserting close-ups of inanimate objects, doorbells being pushed and coffee being poured are distracting to the narrative. What narrative does exist is conventional and ultimately melodramatic and stupid. It’s not a good movie.

James Berardineilli’s review of Hancock cuts to the case: “Hancock is a hodgepodge of intriguing ideas that, if developed further or presented as more than throw-ins to a confused production, might have made for a unique superhero film… Hancock is sometimes funny, sometimes clever, and occasionally involving, but it’s never brilliant and its edge is compromised by the neutering that accompanies the teen-friendly PG-13 rating.” Will Smith plays a homeless, alcoholic, belligerent super hero who grudgingly hires a PR man to improve his public image. So it’s a comedy, right? Or maybe an action movie? Maybe it’s a modern day Greek tragedy (I’m serious). Hancock had the potential to be a great movie in a class of its own, but it doesn’t know what it wants to be. So it’s a mess. It’s almost worth watching just to think about how good it could have been.

As a cheesy, “sci-fi” B-movie, This Island Earth doesn’t even approach the entertainment value of something like Forbidden Planet. (I have my doubts anything could beat Forbidden Planet. It’s impressive even outside the realm of B-movie appreciation.) There is a spaceship, an angry alien with a humongous brain and some humanoid people with big foreheads. All fine and good. The problem is boredom. The bad acting, the silly dialogue, the cardboard sets — you can only laugh your way through that for 10 or 15 minutes. Nothing cool happens until the last 20 minutes of the movie. That’s too much crap to sit through. Fast-forward to the 60-minute mark and you’ve got yourself a good time.

A disease breaks out that causes mass blindness in an unnamed city. The blind are quarantined, left to fend for themselves in a hospital that’s surrounded by guards who shoot anyone who tries to get away. I kept expecting more from the story than Lord of the Flies in a mental institution for the blind. Written by Don McKellar, Blindness is based on the novel of the same name by José Saramago. If you’ve read the novel, you might get more out of the movie than I did because you’ll know more about each character’s motivation than what’s presented in the movie. But from what I saw on the screen, I couldn’t get into it. It fell just a little too short for me.

The French Connection is one of a handful of classic crime thrillers that does nothing for me because the acting is dull or the story is either non-existent or just plain dumb. (I don’t like Chinatown either. You gotta problem with that?) The French Connection is supposed to have one of the best and most influential chase scenes ever. I heard the same thing about Bullitt. They both influenced me to go to sleep.

Cassandra’s Dream is Woody Allen trying to get back in form as a writer-director, but not quite making it. It’s the story of two brothers, Ewan McGregor and a mis-cast Colin Farrell (he sunk Terrence Malick’s The New World for me) who get tangled up in a criminal situation where people end up getting hurt. One brother struggles with his conscience; the other brother doesn’t. Certain scenes are well directed and affective, but there are too many elements of the movie that don’t work. Still, I admire Woody Allen for the attempt to present a story with both style and substance. I might like this one more if I get around to watching it again, but I’d rather just watch Crimes and Misdemeanors, which is pretty damn close to a masterpiece; same deal with Match Point. All three films deal with a similar subject manner, only the last two do it brilliantly.

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is a B-movie that’s no more sophisticated or frightening than The Blob. It has a few good shots, but it’s boring and over-rated. If you bother to watch it (I don’t plan to see it again), let me know if you think the guy who plays Mitch, Rod Taylor, looks and sounds like Robin Williams’s father. I was convinced the two must be related. They’re not.

I’ve watched all three incarnations of King Kong in the past two weeks: The 1933 original, the best of the bunch for my money; Peter Jackson’s 2005 CGI-heavy remake which — although bloated with nearly 90 minutes of subplots about characters no one cares about — kicks ass when Kong is on screen; and now the 1976 version that presents us with a guy running around in an ape suit. If you’re going for camp value, then okay, maybe it works. But let’s be honest: The Kong scenes are boring. There’s no drama or intensity to any of the action. If you were 9 years old watching it on TV sometime in the ’70s and loved it then, the nostalgia factor could cloud your judgement enough that you might have fun watching it again as an adult. That’s the case for me with The Poseidon Adventure, but not here.

The X-Files: I Want To Believe is a made-for-TV special given a theatrical release. That’s my guess, anyway. It’s not entirely unwatchable, but the writing is silly, ridiculous and lazy, especially the ending which just sort of happens and then disappears without much explanation. There’s a short epilogue about the main characters, but does anyone care? I don’t think so. Perhaps most of the original fans of the show, having grown up over the years, will see this movie and realize that the TV show was never really that good anyway.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (3-D) is a theme park ride for kids. The 3-D effects are disorienting. It’s difficult to focus on objects in the foreground when objects in the background are flying all over the place. Great for kids. I love Jules Verne’s original novel. It was fun to see certain scenes from the book come to life — the movie is faithful to the geography of some of the main scenes from the book. But otherwise, for adults, this is a lame night at the movies.

Hellboy II has Ron Pearlman wasting his talent in a lifeless pay-cheque comic book movie.

The Stone Angel is based on the novel by Margaret Lawrence, another sad and depressing Canadian novel where nothing good happens to anyone or anyone’s children, and then they die. (That’s an accurate summary of more than a few Canadian classics.) The film adaptation isn’t much more uplifting or hopeful. The movie tries to encompass too much of the novel instead of taking its time to develop the characters. It has its moments, but I lost interest well before the closing credits.

Skip it. The first Narnia movie is excellent, one of the best family-friendly movies of 2005. The best thing I can say about The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is they’ve improved on the special effects. Not much happens for the first hour (which will bore most kids), and when the action does pick up, it’s just eye candy. Too much emphasis on meaningless battles sequences and not enough on character and story.

Scarface is a silly, over-rated 1980s gangster movie that is so melodramatic and dated, it’s a joke. Cubans who hear Al Pacino’s Cuban accent must laugh the way Newfoundlanders laugh at the accents in The Shipping News. It may be fun to watch as a cheesy, over-the-top, violent, blood and guts B-movie, but an animé cartoon with the same two-dimensional characters would have been just as dramatic.

The Forbidden Kingdom is a forgettable martial arts film with Jet Li and Jackie Chan. It’s not unwatchable but it ain’t worth watching.

Black Book tells the story of a Jewish woman who, as an undercover operative for the Resistance, develops an intimate relationship with a high-ranking SS officer and falls in love with him. I took a look at this film because James Berardinelli selected it as one of his top 10 of 2007. He called it “a powerful and compelling World War II thriller that features note-perfect performances and an almost flawless screenplay.” But mostly it’s an excuse for director, Paul Verhoeven, to show off Carice van Houten’s breasts whenever possible (fess up Berardinelli). For me, Black Book felt like a CBC mini-series: exactly the same sharp and clean cinematography, the same self-consciously emotional style of acting — TV, not cinema. I just got an email from someone who watched the movie with me: “The more I think about the movie we watched last night, the less I like it. It seems like manipulative and slick schlop.” I can’t argue with that.