The Agent of Chaos

Before I start my review of 2012, I want to issue a giant "fuck you" to the theater I saw it in. I only have three theaters in my city, and they're all owned by the same heartless corporate assholes, incapable of feeling love and probably unaware of the true meaning of Christmas.

The theater was packed ballsack to ballsack and the air conditioning was about as effective as one of the employees blowing into the theater. After about ten minutes the air was stale and the Mexican kids behind me had driven me to the BRINK OF SANITY. Every time there was drama on the screen they would loudly sigh and start loudly mock-crying. Towards the end of the movie they had created a symphony of restless foot-tapping and had sent me VIP, front row tickets and the acoustics were out of this world. And there was another Mexican kid right next to me who was one of those anal fissures who thinks he needs to announce shit as it happens. Like "OH MY GOSH THAT'S A BIG PLOT POINT" every time there was a big plot point. Does anyone have the number for the Mexican ambassador?

So it was hot, my shoulders and back and legs hurt, the air was stale, the audience were a bunch of faggots. I was so ready for some apocalypse-porn. I wanted that audience to erupt into a fireball and have the manager turn into a giant man-maggot while all the stockholders get fed to a giant bird. I wanted to see this fucking city get destroyed by a biker gang of anthropomorphic tornadoes.

Unfortunately, it didn't LIGHT MY WORLD ON FIRE. It's not exactly a DISASTER, but it won't be the END OF THE WORLD if you miss it. It's sure to start a TIDAL WAVE at the box office and your seeing it may be as inevitable as ARMAGEDDON.

I don't understand how writing these scripts could possibly be so brain-scrambling. I want to see the world blown to shit and see clowns become the dominant species on Earth. Instead we're treated to lame family drama, the sort of tenth-run Oscar bait that the Academy laughs at for being such a shameless attempt to get the cast some Oscars. But with volcanoes and exploding cities thrown in.

The story is pretty simple. The world is exploding. Sunspots are after us. Or something, I'm not sure. Anyway, Yellowstone is exploding and fireballs are coming for you. John Cusack and his family are arguing amongst themselves and the screenwriters are planning to off his wife's new boyfriend so that she can reconcile with her husband. And that's it. The rest of it is window dressing. The point of the movie is to be unabashedly optimistic (to use the film's only words against it) and torture the audience with small seats and mouth-breathing foreigners.

The lame plot could be forgiven because it's a movie about the (fucking) end of the (motherfucking) world, so at least it's fun to watch all those cities you'll never get to live in get spitefully blown to shit, right? But holy cake, for a movie that's nearly three hours there's hardly any apocalypse to be had. When the apocalypse is apocalypsing it's all a great deal of fun, but if this movie was an hour and a half and the ratio of apocalypse action to overwrought family drama was preserved, this would turn into a documentary about the creation of Earth, because I have to find the reciprocal to solve that equation.

Let's not split hairs about something: Roland Emmerich is trying to tell us something. He's been making movies about the end of the world for over a decade, he clearly has a big boner for blowing up cities and he spent over $200 million on this monstrosity. That means one of one things: he spent at least $140 million (with all three of its disaster sequences, there's no way in fuck this cost $200 million--there's just no way) on a doomsday device. THIS IS HOW A JAMES BOND VILLAIN ACTS. Connect the dots, you sheeple.

Roland Emmerich is a menace to society. He's Michael Bay without the fanfare and box office numbers. He doesn't even use young, undeserving actors like Bay does. He uses tired old B-listers. If you can be described as "a poor man's Michael Bay", I hope you're good at improvising nooses, because you may just be dangerous*.

Chiwetel Ejiofor completely (and I mean completely) invalidates John Cusack's character by having more interesting drama and being a much better actor, damn it. In the span of a few years he starred in Dirty Pretty Things and Serenity, two excellent performances that should have made him far more bankable and far more popular. He has a story that runs parallel to John Cusack's and they reek of two different screenplays that were fused with John Cusack's modest career goals and transformed into something lumbering and awful. Actually, there were probably some other screenplays in there as well, like the actually good apocalypse movie that no one seems interested in making. You know, the 100-minute film about characters facing the apocalypse and certain death, witnessing the destruction of the Earth and beginning to pick up the pieces after they miraculously cheat death. The one that addresses the themes of certain death and the destruction of every thing they hold dear.

As for the rest of the characters, Danny Glover continues to barely make an impression on the viewer, which is his trademark acting style. Oliver Platt plays the fat government agent (I'm sure his actual job is never revealed; he's just "evil government agent") who wants power and nothing else. If he had chosen a role in local government instead of national government, he would have ended up as the heartless mayor who wants to bulldoze the youth center and build sell the land to some greedy corporate types who want to build a strip mall. While Oliver Platt embezzles all the funds from the sale to buy more hot dogs, a plucky group of neighborhood kids challenge the land developers to a game of basketball, with the winner taking the land the youth center is on. But when the land developers hire the New York Knicks to play against the children, they must contend with their superior skills. Will the childrens' devotion to the youth center and belief in the power of teamwork be enough to overcome the Knicks' superior skill? Will the Knicks' lack of investment in the fate of the youth center keep them from beating the children of inferior skill? Will Mayor Oliver Platt ever eat $3 million worth of hot dogs (A: Yes)?

Hold on, let me write this down.

3/10

*I set out on my Michael Bay retrospective to try and find something about his aesthetic that I like, and after just three films (I'm still trying to make it through Armageddon, okay?) I've pretty much rejected him as useful in any respect.

The All-Seeing Eye

The hardest thing to review is mediocre films because there's nothing to say about them. They don't excel and they don't fail. They just exist. An interesting premise is rarely squandered by a mediocre film, it's just not given an especially good treatment. It's a victim of filmmaking by committee that waters it down, or maybe a creative group that whose brains were homogenized (with a blender) to keep them from coming up with an exit strategy for Iraq.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is one of the most perfectly mediocre films of the year. I didn't love it, I didn't hate it. It occupied an hour and a half of my time and then I went home. I laughed at a handful of parts, but no scene struck me as particularly unnecessary. It almost defies analysis just by being so damn inoffensive.

The tale The Men Who Stare at Goats weaves is that of a reporter, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor at his blandest and most mediocre) who is following alleged psychic soldier Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) en route to a black ops mission. Along the way we frequently cut to Lyn's past in a secret government training facility where a man named Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) taught them to fight with their minds using New Age techniques.

One of the simplest mistakes it makes is that it goes from meandering and plotless (it's a roadtrip movie for the majority of its running time) to an anti-war parable with the heroes saving prisoners from a villain that seems like a little third-act studio revision. Trying to change your narrative style mid-film is such a rookie mistake, and while this is Grant Heslov's first film as a director, he was responsible for the pretty great screenplay for Good Night and Good Luck.

The second is that Ewan McGregor's entire character needed to be excised from the screenplay. He's not just useless, he's detrimental to the impact of the film. Having a cipher for our skepticism rarely works in a movie like this, and here Bob Wilton is the peak upon which we sit to view these characters in action. We never get deep into the absurd rivalries of these loopy, eccentric character because we're viewing it all through Bob Wilton's rolling eyes. It's like we're being told every few seconds not to forget that these characters are clownshit, but the drama and the comedy would have been more effective if we had started sympathizing and relating to the characters, instead of relating to them in a "look at how stupid they are, and the poor fellas don't realize it" sort of way. Yeah, these guys are as crazy as that Bill O'Reilly-Ann Coulter-Glenn Beck Cerberus I keep drawing subconsciously, but the whole film is akin to reading an article rather than watching a film.

That's not to say that the film doesn't work occasionally, it's just that it putters through the portions that don't work, as if it was written on a scene-by-scene basis and then the remaining scenes were written to connect the good ones together. The best portions of the film are when Bob's (and our) skepticism begins to melt and we begin to wonder if Lyn really is crazy or if he does have some psychic powers because, as I stated above, these are the parts where our skepticism doesn't get in the way of our relating to the characters and participating in the drama (and drama being the essence of comedy--by extension, the comedy).

Heslov strikes me as a man who never intended to be a director, but rather to be a writer (he was an actor before he was a writer, I believe). If I were to speculate (which I always do), I would say he accepted the directing job because he perhaps had a difficult time in the trenches as a writer on Good Night and Good Luck and decided that the best way to gain more control over future projects was to at least have some experience directing, if not direct those future projects himself.

Furthermore, he was guaranteed a huge star (with barely a hit to his name--isn't 21st century movie stardom so strange?) in George Clooney which would surely get his project greenlit and he's guaranteed a tidy little sum which will help him get future projects produced. Good for him. I can only hope those future projects are more along the lines of Good Night and Good Luck, though.

So as I said before, there really isn't much to be said about this film. It works sometimes, it has some good gags, but it's not really worth seeing in theaters. I will say that I do believe this film is based on true events, because it's a touch easier to believe than this.

5/10

Tuppence is Tuppence

When the machines take over and they all put us in hamster wheels to keep them powered, it will fall upon them to every 25th of December comb through the archives of the billion different film versions of A Christmas Carol to inject into our cerebral cortex. This will keep us happy, and having our spine pierced by large needles will keep us sore enough for a few days that any extra running would be unheard of. When they discover Robert Zemeckis' version, they will be touched to discover a film populated with robots like themselves, even starring a cold, calculating protagonist that learns to love. Their circuits overcome with emotional data, they will react logically and assume the Christmas spirit, giving all human workers the day off. We will then chase down and smash their leader into toasters.

So thanks, Disney's A Christmas Carol, for helping with the revolution. And for nothing else. Maybe for adding some variety to my nightmares.

A Christmas Carol is about a heartless, soulless, textureless, weightless specter named Ebenezer Scrooge who must combat insane ghosts who send him through a blender of physical comedy so that he may emerge a broken man and accept whatever strange traditions are thrust upon him by the oppressive London society. If I made the movie sound a bit like a Freemasons-backed fable, GOOD. We've had a trillion adaptations of this film, every year we're forced to sit through a new retread of this goddamn story and I don't know why anyone thinks it's relevant to make yet another film on the subject.

You know who should have known better? The financial backers who paid $200 million for this film. That's 40 million #9s with no tomato from Jimmy Johns. At least that would have been delightful, unlike this unfeeling monstrosity. that ranks it high on the list of most expensive films ever produced for a retread of a story everyone in the (very small, very bored) audience has heard a thousand times, but this time with extra ugly and more unpleasant, mannered Jim Carrey.

The animation is a step up from Beowulf, but I can make more attractive things on a graphing calculator than Beowulf, so that's not saying much. They still haven't fixed the problem of the dead eyes staring straight into the audience's soul, and they haven't fixed the uncanny valley movements that make them look like robots who wish to be men and wrap themselves in human skin.

And the shocking thing is, after browsing the IMDB boards, some people think this film is a "visual masterpiece". Yeah, there's no accounting for taste, but that's like calling a dumpster a visual masterpiece. A dumpster filled with dead robots who have been stealing your blood and toenails in your sleep for months.

The whole film looks like a video game cutscene only with real actors thrown into the mix like one of those games that's thrown out to shamelessly promote the film it's based on. Gary Oldman's Bob Cratchit looks like an imp that might live under your bed and his son Tiny Tim (also played by Gary Oldman in yet another of Zemeckis' clever ideas to leave my nightmares with his distinctive thumbprint) looks like that imp had a child with a porcelain doll. Bob Hoskins' Mr. Fezziwig may be the most offensive of them all. He looks like a wall that gained sentience, developed anthropomorphic features until he had the frame of a human and then started to dance and scream. The scene, where he dances and bounds about the hall weightlessly, trashed anything nice I could say about the film's aesthetic. Not only did it cheapen the film by likening it to a video game cutscene, it ruined whatever sense of weight remained for these characters and spoiling any remaining delusion that these characters might be something like human.

Jim Carrey is pretty awful in the lead role and as the three ghosts. His voice is horrifically mannered in the worst way possible, as if a Jim Carrey voice simulator got stuck on in-store demonstration. Scrooge's character design is cartoony and at odds with the realistic look the animators were going for, and since that realistic look failed he looks all the more out of place. Strangely, though, he's the most emotive and textured of all the CGI robots, although "most human-like" is pretty fucking faint praise.

I thought we all agreed after Beowulf that this motion capture nonsense was a failed experiment. We have the technology to replicate inanimate objects with photo-realistic quality, but the technology to do the same to humans just isn't there. It doesn't need to be achieved by producing dozens of over-budgeted digital horrors. Either make it fully animated or put real actors against animated backgrounds, maybe touch them with digital composition to make them blend better. It works pretty well for Robert Rodriguez, I think.

Let's recap. Emotionally traumatizing, hideous to look at, retread of a story we've all heard a million times before. I know a lot of critics have given it credit for getting the story right, but I don't care about that, and if you think about it, neither do you. If you wanted that same goddamn story you would have stayed home and watched A Muppet Christmas Carol or read the book. You don't really need a movie to tell you such a well-known story, do you? You went to see this movie because...well, frankly I don't know why I saw it, either. Morbid curiosity.

My point is a film is about the style, the visuals, the audio. This film fails to present a working style and therefore I discard it despite its using a classic story as a crux.

2/10