I hated it. I hated every moment of it with a passion and fury that outmatched the heat of a thousand fiery suns.

One day, a famous film critic found it and read it. He then tweeted out a link to this review to his thousands and thousands of followers, with the words “THAT’S what I’m talking about!”

Roger had a thing for “citizen criticism”. He used me as an example of how, in the wake of the death of print journalism, that the job of being a “film critic” was granted to everyone in the age of self-publication.

I was terribly flattered at this.

And then this happened:

Well, shit. “I guess I’d better be interesting,” I thought.

So within the next week I wrote a post about how he was both wrong and right about videogames.

I always liked Roger’s reviews. I liked how he was down to earth, and how abnormally fair his reviews were. He did not compare “Halloween” against “Citizen Kane”; he compared it to “Friday the 13th.” It was fair. He did not believe that you had to have gone to film school in order to understand movies; nay, you simply had to enjoy them.

I like that perspective.

When he got cancer – and moreso after he lost his jaw – something changed within his being. I like to think that he took a long, hard look at his life, what he was doing, what he believed, and what he felt was important – and decided to become a voice for that. His posts took on a humanist, compassionate stance. He was always a bold speaker but now he was boldly standing up for things that were classically outside of the purview of a “mere” film critic.

He was a man filled with truth and righteousness and empathy and courage.

I admire him for that.

And I already miss him.

First, it’s pretty damned awesome. Everyone kicks an unholy amount of ass.

Second, the real “star” of this vehicle is the Hulk, especially Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner. The Hulk steals all battle scenes, and Ruffalo has all the best lines. I’m not even kidding here: I found myself giggling with glee every time the Hulk smashed things, and Bruce Banner got all of the best lines.

That’s really all I need to say. It is what you expect.

Holy fuck was this filled with awesome.

“Kicking the ever-living shit out of Nazi ass” has always been a favorite fantasy of mine, and Captain America delivers that in spades.

Well. Sort of. There are Nazis, but the main enemy is Hydra, one of Hitler’s secondary research arms. What would happen if there were super-humans during World War II? Well. That’s what we get to find out.

There’s a strange mirror here. We all know that the Axis powers were the ones concerned with “ubermensch” – supermen – and tried to find ways to create them. In the movie, the Allies succeed where the Nazis fail.

The story concerns itself with one Steve Rogers. Steve is a 90 pound weakling from Brooklyn. He has asthma and a host of other ailments that prevent him from protecting his professed love: America. He continually gets given the boot whenever he enlists to fight overseas.

However, Steve is a plucky duck – rather unique, in fact. He never quits. He hates bullies. He is willing to lay his life down, however meagre it is, to save others – and demonstrates this.

All of which proves that he is The One.

Steve is given a Serum by a Scientist. It makes him stronger. Faster. Taller. Muscles throb under his skin afterwards.

And then he goes out to kick an unholy amount of Nazi^H^H^H^HHydra ass. That’s pretty much what this movie is about: ass kicking in the 1940s. Captain America is to “ass kicking” as The Wire is to “thoughtful examination about the war on drugs”.

Being a comics nerd, I am familiar with Cap’s origin and all the weird (and campy) details involved (such as him clocking Hitler in the jaw on the cover of his first issue). The movie pays homage where needed and does its level-best to incorporate some of the more difficult elements into its baseline (such as Bucky). It is a solid story, well told.

We saw it in 3D, so the colors were muted. See it in 2D.

Once upon a time, I had a weird hallucination (or maybe it was a bad dream?) about a mythical fourth Indiana Jones film. In this dream, the filmmakers tried to re-engineer a beloved film series in such a way that they could continue the franchise using the main character’s son. Legacy actually manages to set those ducks in a row, though it has a few flaws.

One of the best things about Tron: Legacy is that it brings the audience the answer to a question that is nearly always left on the table with Epic Adventures: What happened later?

What, exactly, did Flynn do in the years after he left the digital world in Tron? We know he became CEO of ENCOM, sure – the original film tells us that. But, putting yourself in Flynn’s shoes, would you ignore the massive technological breakthrough that was physical digitalization? Wouldn’t you try to re-create the events and go back – only on your own terms?

I sure as hell would. And just like Flynn, I wouldn’t tell a soul. I’d keep it all for myself.

Which is pretty much exactly what we are told happened. Flynn uses his experience on the grid to write a new game, a new story – one that becomes a merchandizing empire and cements ENCOM as a new Microsoft.

Flynn has a son. We are shown the two of them sharing a bedtime story, one that explains What Happened. We watch Flynn ride off on his Ducati to the office. . . and he never returns.

Flash forward 20 years. Sam, Flynn’s son, is the majority shareholder of ENCOM but has no intrest in running it. Alan, Flynn’s old partner (and the digital Tron’s “user”) is on the company’s board and has served as Sam’s surrogate father. Sam has become the spoiled, reckless stereotyped rich-kid-iconoclast we expect him to be. He’s a master hacker and loves motorcycles.

There is a MacGuffin event and Sam discovers his father’s old office, complete with a hidden digitizing-laser, which (obviously) accidentally fires and sends Sam into the Grid.

Now we have a Tron Movie.

In its heart, Legacy is a liberal application of HAL 9000 and Monkey’s Paw to a modern Frankenstein story. See, Flynn created a slave program, a version of himself, named CLU. CLU was programmed to create a “perfection”, and, as decades of science-fiction stories have taught us, you must be extremely exact in the commands you give to artificial intelligences.

CLU’s interpretation of “perfect” differs from Flynn’s. Shit goes down: Tron is killed (kind of) and Flynn is trapped in the Grid. CLU takes over and starts a digital holocaust. Sam, of course, is our flesh-and-blood messiah to the digital world.

Legacy’s greatest weakness lies in what I will hesitantly call an over-complication of plot. All of the elements make sense, and the scenes work well, but it’s very heavy on exposition: much is told and not shown.

Well and good; it’s a deep story. The movie strives to relate as much as possible through flashback sequences but some of the more esoteric philosophy will likely leave audiences cold. The failure lies in the film’s connective tissue: its ligaments and cartilage aren’t quite strong enough to support the bones and meat and it comes off as a tad too-long.

I’m not going to spoil it any further except to say that the ending (of course) prepares us for further sequels – ones that do not depend on the presence of The Dude.

The film’s visuals are simply stunning and its soundtrack is perfect. The cast delivers what they promise (especially Bridges, who serves two roles, one of which is a computer-generated “younger” version of himself). There was really only one character, the nightclub owner, who I hated. Most of the remaining characters resemble porn stars.

There are countless homages to other films: dialog snippets, camera angles, action sequences. There’s a batmobile and a lot of Lebowski fan service.

Go see it and have fun with it, but know that it’s not going to be Citizen Kane, and it doesn’t try to be.

2009’s REC 2 is the sequel to 2007’s REC (which was remade in the United States as Quarantine). I haven’t seen Quarentine and don’t really care to; REC was awesome enough for me.

REC 2 starts about 15 minutes before REC ends. That statement doesn’t spoil anything. However, it’s not going to be possible to talk about the movie any further without spoiling either REC or REC 2 so I’m going to have to shut up about it soon.

Just know that it does an excellent job of turning the zombie trope on its head. It does so well and it does so in an unexpected manner.

You’ll probably, uh, have to, you know. Locate a copy of this. Just FYI.

It is easily the best film I have seen this millenium.

Future archaeologists will regard this film as Christopher Nolan’s high-water mark. I say this with melancholy and hope that my prediction is misaligned. I don’t know if anything Nolan makes again will be this collected and that fills me with mourning for masterpieces yet to be made.

Inception braids several genres together in a manner most masterful. It is a caper story and a psychological thriller, a romance tale and an action vehicle, a puzzling mystery and a con-artist yarn. I felt a brilliant dizziness watching these plates juggled, breathlessly waiting for breakage.

You see, I wanted the story to implode because I wanted to have written it.

Spoiler: I was denied the satisfaction of schadenfreude. All of the story’s shenanigens pay off in a satisfying manner.

Have I discussed what the meat of the plot yet? I haven’t? Hrm. I’m not sure it’s possible for to do so cogently. You see, Inception is about dreaming. To explain the storyline is to retell your dream from last night. Events only make sense in the context of their own timelines, realities, and dreamers.

The plot of Inception is strong and easy to follow. However, like the dream-stories it spins, Inception is more about the feeling and experience of the dreaming rather than any crude linear timeline. And why would Nolan want to talk about timelines anyway? He already did that.

The movie is filled with small hedges towards its philosophic underpinnings. At one point, the team’s “dream architect” imagines into “reality” two large mirrors facing each other, which then display an infinite number of Ellen Pages and Leonardo DiCaprios receding into the far forever,

turtles

all the way down.

None of those are the real versions of the characters. Not even the physical bodies between the mighty marbled mirrors: they, too, are figments within a dream, avatars of their sedated, sleeping selves.

That scene forms the existential seeds of the forbidden apple-of-knowledge within Inception’s Garden of Eden. The idea of disassociated reality repeats through the film, over and over again (turtles all the way down). There are some Deep Core questions concerning the nature of existence and our perception of it: are there dreams within dreams within dreams?

Nolan twists and spins the story back upon itself with this idea, creating a climax that occurs at the same time in four different realities, each running at a different speed – and does so in a way that the audience is never left to wonder “which reality is this scene occuring?”

It’s masterfully done.

I could easily spend several hundred words discussing the film in the context of other existential films (like Dark City, one of my favorites). How the movie is what I had hoped the The Matrix trilogy would have been, or how the film’s final scenes call back to Blade Runner.

However, to do so may very well dilute what Inception really is, and I don’t want to do that.

Dear reader, if you carry even the slightest degree of respect for my opinion about matters such as these, you will see this film.

And do it before someone stupidly spoils it for you.

Vanilla Ice is a rad rocket riding rapper. He dresses like Two Face while he and his homies are (I guess) touring the country, presumably dropping phat beats and mad science. The movie opens with him and Naomi Campbell, future bane-to-personal-assistants, doing a show in a typical 1990’s nightclub replete with indoor chain-link fencing. He gets hit on by A Groupie. The next morning, Vanilla Ice almost kills a young girl by spooking the horse she is riding.

This girl is, of course, the Love Interest.

Later, one of the crew’s motorcycle fails in the middle of the street. They then. . . well. I’m not entirely sure what happened next. But suddenly everyone is hanging out at one of the most surreal looking houses I’ve ever seen, which just happens to be located next door to the Love Interest’s house.

Alex Keaton’s The Love Interest’s dad is in witness protection. He is, of course, a good guy, but he is distrustful of Vanilla Ice (who had previously beat the shit out of the Love Interest’s douchebag boyfriend, Superboy). There’s some sort of plot involving this and a kidnapping but seriously why the fuck do you care?

THE MOVIE HAS VANILLA FUCKING ICE IN IT, MOTHERFUCKERS.

Frankly, this movie is so surreal and patently bad in nearly every way that it should become a “four food groups” style staple of “so bad they’re good” movies. A sample of dialog:

Vanilla Ice: “What’s it like?”

Love Interest: “What’s what like?”

Vanilla Ice: “You know. Havin’. . . parents and stuff?”

Yeah.

Here’s the really fucked up bit: the movie has some of the absolute best cinematography I’ve seen in a long time. In fact, the shot framing is so good that it feels out of place.

Which, you know, makes sense. The cinematographer, Janusz Kamiński, would later win two Oscars: one for Schindler’s List and one for Saving Private Ryan. He’s been Senior Spielbergo’s go-to guy since 1993 and has done every one of his films since then.

Things to watch for:

Nearly all of the cars shown in the film are painted white. Supposedly this is because Vanilla Ice expressed an opinion (“I like white cars”) but I like to think there was an artistic statement here.

The mafioso spitting out his food. For no reason. While he’s sitting on the hood of his (black-colored) car. In front of the house of the guy he’s there to kill. What the fuck?;

The not one but two utterly terrible covers of “Thank You Fa Lettin’ Me Be Mice Elf Agin“;

The “falling in love” montage where the principles teleport between a construction site, a desert, and horse ranch;

Vanilla Ice wearing his sunglasses while riding a motorcycle in the desert. At night.

The camera spin around the fishbowl as Mr. Keaton tells his daughter that he’s in witness protection (it’s a fucking excellent visual).

The credits end with “—-> b kool stay in skool”.

Words of wisdom for us all.

There’s a lot of talking in this film. Fully thirty minutes goes by before anything happens. It felt like a Quentin Tarantino vehicle: Let’s spend ten minutes talking about eggs, and then we’ll get in a car, and talk some more about how they paint lines on asphalt. Then we’ll get out of the car and talk some more.

Tony Stark is set up to be the hero and a role-model for kids (seriously, there are children dressing up like him in the movie). I think: not so much.

All of the women in his life – even Pepper Pots – are merely carriages for tits and ass. He speaks to and about women in such ways to give me pause as to what kinds of behaviors are being transmitted to impressionable teenage boys.

Plus, he’s clearly a Republican who believes in a privatized military. Guns for me but not for you. The US military has been cast as the “bad guy” here but I think that’s unfair.

I mean, I’m not a big fan of the expression of military force, but at least (mostly) there are multiple individuals involved in the decisions as to when and where to apply it. People who actually went to war colleges and have spent their lives studying foreign policy. Just like me, they don’t like the the idea of a spoiled rich-kid with daddy issues being able to start wars with impunity.

All of the heavyweight talent thrown into this film but is either cast as themselves or brutally underutilized. Sam Rockwell, a master scene thief, plays Zaphod Beeblebrox Eric Knox half the other characters he plays Tony Stark 2.0. He’s a Scott McNealy to Stark’s Steve Jobs.

(I’m going to go out on limb and suggest we’ll see Bill Gates as the bad guy in Iron Man 3D.)

Don Cheadle, one of my favorite actors, is new to the series as James Rhodes, having replaced another of my favorite actors, Terrence Howard. He gives a pretty good performance, I guess, but his role is one of a military meathead with a heart of gold. He only ever has two emotions: “calm” and “annoyed at Tony”.

Scarlett Johansson is allowed to deliver one of the best-choreographed goon beat-downs I’ve seen in a long time. However, she mostly serves to be a sexualized automaton, a cardboard cutout printed straight from the works of Robert Heinlein or perhaps Penthouse Forum.

The best performance is delivered by Mickey Rourke, who is also the most believable character. Mickey’s a good actor, but I fret that he is only ever going to be given roles where he is required to be dirty and/or tattooed.

As for the mainstays, they kind of stay the same. I mean, Tony’s still a narcissist prick; Pepper is still an emotionally-abused spouse, and Happy’s still a second-string sidekick.

I’m bored about talking about this movie now. You’ll probably go see it. It’s dumb and serves its purpose. But I don’t recommend it too much.

I haven’t been disappointed by anything this badly since The Phantom Menace. This movie has proven one thing to me: that it knows how to use Google Maps to plan a trip to Mediocre, Alabama.

Obligatory “It’s pretty” comment: It’s very pretty. But if you put lipstick on a pig, you’re still going to end up with one very confused pig. And really, who puts lipstick on pigs? (Aside from pigfuckers, that is). Special effects don’t make a film great or even good. 3D certainly doesn’t, which is why I’m glad i saw it in 2D so that I wasn’t distracted.

I want to find the fuckers who gave it the Oscar for Best Cinematography and choke them. There’s no cinematography when every frame is a digital painting. Of course your shots look great; you don’t have to wrestle with the whole “reality” part of film making.

I could probably spend several hundred words talking about how the plot is a contrived structure built from off-brand Cliche’ bricks but seriously I don’t think we need to go there. “Dances with Smurfs” sums it up pretty well.

We have our obvious mustache-twirling bad guys with personalities ripped right out of Aliens and Apocalypse Now. In the future, we will approach every problem like General Custer, somehow having lost the past couple centuries of intellectual and ethical growth.

But hey, maybe the Republicans win the next thirty elections.

Drill, baby, drill.

I actually died a little inside when I realized that the man who created Aliens made this. What the fuck happened, dog? You put together a masterpiece story that had a very strong series of comments about motherhood and feminism and did so subtly and strongly; this thing is a constant hammer to the groin. I am made to feel guilty for fucking over my people back in the 17th century. I’ll have to apologize to my father for my sins, I guess.

We’re not even going to try to be sneaky, either: when I heard the word “Unobtainium” used in a serious mien within the first 20 minutes, I wanted to turn it off. We never actually find out what this magic material is used for or why it’s valuable enough for us to commit genocide over. Just tell me that it’s required for faster-than-light travel engines or something. Give me a reason to care.

Once again, we have walking “mechs”. I fucking hate them. These ones, at least, have glass canopies to protect the pilots (where the ones in the Matrix had, you know, air).

The mechs have knives. What the fuck is up with that? The climax has a fucking knife fight between the protagonist and a mech. I’m not fucking lying to you. That’s just liquid stupidity, poured into a shot glass for you.

How come human machine guns magically change scale so that they are the right size for twelve-foot tall aliens?

The Na’vi aren’t mammals. Why do they have boobs? Large enough to be sexy, small enough to not require a bra. Anything more than a mouthful’s wasted, I guess. We’re supposed to be sympathetic to them so we have to be attracted to them.

Why do they mate for life? That’s a hell of a first date, my friend. You’d better be sure that you two are sexually compatible before you break out the lube and put the condom on. Maybe they depend on Cosmo quizzes and elaborate questionnaires. “Do you like receiving oral sex? If so, do you like teeth? If so, how hard?”

For that matter, what weird biological advantage is there to being colored blue? Or, how come every biological organism on this planet can be bonded to using magical nerve endings that GROW OUT OF THEIR HAIR?

None of the biology makes sense at all.

Plus it uses that goddamned Papyrus font.

If you want to see a good movie that uses aliens in a good way to have a good conversation about racism, go see District 9.

01:14PM <valerie_> Brandon… I see you.
01:14PM <jorm> ohgod.
01:14PM <valerie_> i make myself cringe!

Let’s just get the obvious out of the way: Roland Emmerich directs porn. It may not be porn that shows penises and va-jay-jays, but it is porn. To be precise, he directs disaster porn. Which, like, you know, sexy porn, has a direct correlation between “excitement” and “plausability”.

Stargate was his first real foray into porn. It’s relatively softcore in nature – the type of stuff that shows up on Cinemax late at night. Totally not plausible, but then it’s a movie about aliens and really how often do scads of horny cheerleaders check into super expensive hotels in the Carribbean? Not often, I tell you.

His next film – Independence Day – was his first foray into the XXX genre, and despite some flaws it was a fun ride. High budget, some A-list stars, and a plot that provided moderate entertainment during the “down time”. Still smack full of implausability (who believes anyone when they say “It’s okay; I’ve been snipped!”) but okay.

Then he did Godzilla, which was. . . well. Remember that time you pulled down a movie because it had some great keywords in the description, and it was kind of hot for a while, and then suddenly someone is peeing on someone else and the film has gone to “nonononono” land? Godzilla is like that.

Then he did an artsy porn, The Patriot. This was the disaster porn equivalent of The Story of O: overly long, too much talking, and then the mood is ruined when Udo Kier opens his mouth. Someone gets “stabbed” with a “flagpole”, there are some jingoist words spoken, and we reach for the tissues.

Emmerich returned to his XXX strengths with The Day After Tomorrow, which was also wonderfully implausible but hey, some people find Ron Jeremy attractive.

Let’s just not talk about 10,000 BC because that was more like one of those incomprehensible flicks that get churned out of basement studios in Italy.

This brings us to 2012. In this film, Roland is trying to break that mythical “fourth X” wall. It’s what my friend Christian calls “Spleen Porn”: the film doesn’t fuck around with foreplay; it goes straight for the starfish, do not pass go, do not collect two-hundred dollars. What we call a “plot” is really just the DVD menu flickering around as one picks a “chapter”.

If you like this kind of porn, this movie is for you. It’s long, though, so bring extra kleenex.