No:
No point. 5/10
Transformers - (2007)
Alien vs Predator: Requiem (2009)
Everywhere I look is a darkness. 4/10
Cabin Fever - (2002)
STN Select: July 2025
2 weeks ago
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Image, comment, score
The Invasion - (2007)
No:
No point. 5/10
Transformers - (2007)
Fuck you Michael Bay. (3/10)
Alien vs Predator: Requiem (2009)
Everywhere I look is a darkness. 4/10
Cabin Fever - (2002)
A man, a banjo, a turd. Fuck off. (0/10)
No:
No point. 5/10
Transformers - (2007)
Alien vs Predator: Requiem (2009)
Everywhere I look is a darkness. 4/10
Cabin Fever - (2002)
Sunday, 14 March 2010
The Fourth Kind (2009)
Directed by: Olatunde Osunsanmi
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, Will Patton, and REAL PEOPLE BECAUSE THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED (Not)
Plot: THIS REALLY HAPPENED! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! No it fucking didn't, and no amount of whining at the beginning and end will make it real. Nor will more post-film "What happned next" notes than a TRUE FUCKING STORY will make this film truer than those. But basically this is Close Encounters of the Third Kind plus one channeled through Paranormal Activity and Northern Exposure.
Rule 1 for a film trying to make you believe it is a dramatisation of real events: Don't have the lead fucking star stand there almost practically superimposed and introduce the fucking film. That's so fucking TV it hurts. It's a quicker disconnect than the Church of Scientology have ever acheived. It is possibly acting as a caveat for the fucking stupid.
It's in that group of films of "Actual/Found" Footage, like Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch Project and Passion of the Christ, but it runs a dramatisation next to the "actual" footage to try and make you think that it's based on something that actually happened. Framed on a level up from this is the central character (now actually looking like your "classic" grey and a husk of her former self and speaking like Julie Hagerty in Airplane!) in an interview with the director in a glib attempt to add gravitas to the story being true. Or something.
I'll say it right now, you never see the fucking aliens. IF THEY EVEN EXISTED AT ALL. So you never get to find out if they look like David Morse, you never see if they're tall or short, grey or green. And you certainly never get to see if they look anything like fucking owls. Yes, I said owls. Why? Because when the film is doing the WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I SLEEP AT NIGHT? psychoanalysis bit early on, it turns out that every single one of them remembers seeing an owl just before their sleeping/anal probe troubles.
Now, apparently there are 10 species of owl native to Alaska. This is 9 more species than there are of humans in Alaska. I'm assuming that seeing an owl at night when your house is surrounded by fucking trees in an area where owls are as common as whining children is not a rare occurence. I'm also assuming that owls are still nocturnal in Alaska....so using owls as a plot device for linking cases just seems like a idea born out of idiocy when they could have used something like a wolf, a kodiak bear or Al Pacino. An owl is just an invitation to make your case load bigger than it could be. "Oh I couldn't sleep last night because there was an owl outside. It was hooting all fucking night." "Are you sure it was sticking a cold steel rod up your backside?"
And on it goes, and boy does it drag towards the end. Over the course of the film you've seen a couple of Milla's patients go bathshit mental during hypnosis - one that is so frightened by the experience that he goes home and murders his family before committing suicide, and the other that ends up levitating on his bed with his mouth wide opening speaking ancient Sumerian. Everything then focuses on Milla and her two children (her daughter has gone blind due to the trauma of her father's death) - still coming to terms with the death of her husband that you saw stabbed at the start of the film (and whose killer has yet to be caught).
After she's put under house arrest for "causing" three broken vertebrae in the levitating patient, things are starting to come to an end. Her daughter goes missing, supposedly kidnapped by the aliens and she is accused by the local sheriff of causing all this and takes her son into custody. Only one way to try and get her daughter back - go under hypnosis. This is probably the most effective scene of the film, and due to the 24 style double framing - the "actual" footage alongside the "dramatisation" before the fragmented Sumerian translation appears on screen. This is where it should have ended - the fallen camera and the air of WTF? mystery like at the end of Blair Witch.
Problem is, there's just no mystery. You find out that her husband actually shot himself and that she's been in denial all along. She's not to blame for her daughter's disappearence and she is now paraylzed from the neck down. Whilst intermittently effective, the film doesn't have a clue what it wants to be - it would have been far better choosing early on which path to go down - "actual/found" footage OR dramatisation. It dances between the two like a drunken Grandparent at a wedding - carefree and with no fucking regard to what is going on around it. And hammering home the "THIS IS REAL" point really made me want to punch something hard. It's an insult to the intelligence of everyone that watches it (though no doubt some people will actually believe it is real). What they should have done was lop off 25 minutes and gone down the "Actual" footage route, or just made it a straight up film about a mystery surrounding a remote town in Alaska.
That way I wouldn't have been playing a 90 minute game of eye marble over a film that is suffering from Multiple Film Disorder.
Overall: 5/10 - generous, perhaps, but it was done with enough style at times and the "chills" were effective enough.
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, Will Patton, and REAL PEOPLE BECAUSE THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED (Not)
Plot: THIS REALLY HAPPENED! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! No it fucking didn't, and no amount of whining at the beginning and end will make it real. Nor will more post-film "What happned next" notes than a TRUE FUCKING STORY will make this film truer than those. But basically this is Close Encounters of the Third Kind plus one channeled through Paranormal Activity and Northern Exposure.
Rule 1 for a film trying to make you believe it is a dramatisation of real events: Don't have the lead fucking star stand there almost practically superimposed and introduce the fucking film. That's so fucking TV it hurts. It's a quicker disconnect than the Church of Scientology have ever acheived. It is possibly acting as a caveat for the fucking stupid.
It's in that group of films of "Actual/Found" Footage, like Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch Project and Passion of the Christ, but it runs a dramatisation next to the "actual" footage to try and make you think that it's based on something that actually happened. Framed on a level up from this is the central character (now actually looking like your "classic" grey and a husk of her former self and speaking like Julie Hagerty in Airplane!) in an interview with the director in a glib attempt to add gravitas to the story being true. Or something.
I'll say it right now, you never see the fucking aliens. IF THEY EVEN EXISTED AT ALL. So you never get to find out if they look like David Morse, you never see if they're tall or short, grey or green. And you certainly never get to see if they look anything like fucking owls. Yes, I said owls. Why? Because when the film is doing the WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I SLEEP AT NIGHT? psychoanalysis bit early on, it turns out that every single one of them remembers seeing an owl just before their sleeping/anal probe troubles.
Now, apparently there are 10 species of owl native to Alaska. This is 9 more species than there are of humans in Alaska. I'm assuming that seeing an owl at night when your house is surrounded by fucking trees in an area where owls are as common as whining children is not a rare occurence. I'm also assuming that owls are still nocturnal in Alaska....so using owls as a plot device for linking cases just seems like a idea born out of idiocy when they could have used something like a wolf, a kodiak bear or Al Pacino. An owl is just an invitation to make your case load bigger than it could be. "Oh I couldn't sleep last night because there was an owl outside. It was hooting all fucking night." "Are you sure it was sticking a cold steel rod up your backside?"
And on it goes, and boy does it drag towards the end. Over the course of the film you've seen a couple of Milla's patients go bathshit mental during hypnosis - one that is so frightened by the experience that he goes home and murders his family before committing suicide, and the other that ends up levitating on his bed with his mouth wide opening speaking ancient Sumerian. Everything then focuses on Milla and her two children (her daughter has gone blind due to the trauma of her father's death) - still coming to terms with the death of her husband that you saw stabbed at the start of the film (and whose killer has yet to be caught).
After she's put under house arrest for "causing" three broken vertebrae in the levitating patient, things are starting to come to an end. Her daughter goes missing, supposedly kidnapped by the aliens and she is accused by the local sheriff of causing all this and takes her son into custody. Only one way to try and get her daughter back - go under hypnosis. This is probably the most effective scene of the film, and due to the 24 style double framing - the "actual" footage alongside the "dramatisation" before the fragmented Sumerian translation appears on screen. This is where it should have ended - the fallen camera and the air of WTF? mystery like at the end of Blair Witch.
Problem is, there's just no mystery. You find out that her husband actually shot himself and that she's been in denial all along. She's not to blame for her daughter's disappearence and she is now paraylzed from the neck down. Whilst intermittently effective, the film doesn't have a clue what it wants to be - it would have been far better choosing early on which path to go down - "actual/found" footage OR dramatisation. It dances between the two like a drunken Grandparent at a wedding - carefree and with no fucking regard to what is going on around it. And hammering home the "THIS IS REAL" point really made me want to punch something hard. It's an insult to the intelligence of everyone that watches it (though no doubt some people will actually believe it is real). What they should have done was lop off 25 minutes and gone down the "Actual" footage route, or just made it a straight up film about a mystery surrounding a remote town in Alaska.
That way I wouldn't have been playing a 90 minute game of eye marble over a film that is suffering from Multiple Film Disorder.
Overall: 5/10 - generous, perhaps, but it was done with enough style at times and the "chills" were effective enough.
Friday, 12 March 2010
Wanted (2008)
Directed by: Timur Bekmambetov
Starring: James McAvoy, Mrs. Pitt and Morgan Freeman
I watched this a couple of weeks ago, but I've only just been hit by the curved turd bullet of "Holy Fucking Shit! What the convoluted fuck was that?" that this monstrous pile of utter rubbish propelled at me from an unspecified location made up of what I can only assume to be infinite pile of primordial gunk yet to have the catalytic spark that would turn it into something good.
That's not to say that I was aghast to the atrocity that I had just witnessed when, through sleepy eyes and practically haemorrhaging ears, I heard Morgan Freeman utter "Oh shit" (or was it Oh fuck? *apathetic shrug*) before having a bullet exit his forhead to cue the end credits.
Don't get me wrong, I like my balls to the wall action films. I just don't like them stamped into said wall and force fed to me through the guise of Mrs. Pitt's naked ass. I can imagine that from start to finish that this was some sort of mastubatory fantasy for a select group of people. However, I fall into this category and am not ashamed to say it, but I'm not one to be conned by a bunch of disengaging scenes with a fucking knitting factory at the middle of it.
Okay, so the "curving the bullet" and shooting the wings off a fly bits are a bit screwy, but it's a decent enough quirk for a film of this ilk. But for fucks sake, knitting death warrants into some fucking cloth, jesus? I know it's from a comic book and they like their stuff whacky and if you change too much then you're going to be burning letters from angry fanboys for the rest of your life, BUT COME THE FUCK ON! It would have made far more sense if you'd got a "Stich'n'Bitch" group in to sort out the murdering contracts.
Plot? Fuck off. Seriously, fuck off.
Starring: James McAvoy, Mrs. Pitt and Morgan Freeman
I watched this a couple of weeks ago, but I've only just been hit by the curved turd bullet of "Holy Fucking Shit! What the convoluted fuck was that?" that this monstrous pile of utter rubbish propelled at me from an unspecified location made up of what I can only assume to be infinite pile of primordial gunk yet to have the catalytic spark that would turn it into something good.
That's not to say that I was aghast to the atrocity that I had just witnessed when, through sleepy eyes and practically haemorrhaging ears, I heard Morgan Freeman utter "Oh shit" (or was it Oh fuck? *apathetic shrug*) before having a bullet exit his forhead to cue the end credits.
Don't get me wrong, I like my balls to the wall action films. I just don't like them stamped into said wall and force fed to me through the guise of Mrs. Pitt's naked ass. I can imagine that from start to finish that this was some sort of mastubatory fantasy for a select group of people. However, I fall into this category and am not ashamed to say it, but I'm not one to be conned by a bunch of disengaging scenes with a fucking knitting factory at the middle of it.
Okay, so the "curving the bullet" and shooting the wings off a fly bits are a bit screwy, but it's a decent enough quirk for a film of this ilk. But for fucks sake, knitting death warrants into some fucking cloth, jesus? I know it's from a comic book and they like their stuff whacky and if you change too much then you're going to be burning letters from angry fanboys for the rest of your life, BUT COME THE FUCK ON! It would have made far more sense if you'd got a "Stich'n'Bitch" group in to sort out the murdering contracts.
Plot? Fuck off. Seriously, fuck off.
The plot for Wanted is somewhere in this jumper.
With the guy that directed Daywatch and Nightwatch this should have been good. But he fell into that "foreign director's first Hollywood film" trap and pandering to tastes. It's not gritty and the moments that it would try and claim are brutal would be beaten into submission by the interrogation of Chunk in The Goonies.
And despite all that, it is big, dumb and fucking annoying fun, though the law of dimishing returns would have me gnawing off my own leg if I ever had to suffer it again. But I might just watch it again to see if I can get the knitting pattern.
Overall: 3/10
Note: I am aware it wasn't knitting, but I don't fucking care.
Monday, 8 March 2010
Law Abiding Citizen (2009)
Directed by: F. Gary Gray (or is it F. Gray Gary? or F. Gary Graybraham?)
Starring: SPARTA!, Ray Charles and Chief O'Brien
I'd already heard that this was a very bad film, but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. It was far fucking worse than that. Imagine, if you will, a story cobbled together with shit and semen, hammered through a collander with a big fucking mallet when the convex head of a spoon would have sufficed, processed with offal and stale piss, covered with pastry, baked for two hours and then retrofitted with vomit and then muddied with a thousand lonely suicides.
Well, that's more appetising than this. Seriously, this film spends nearly two hours believing that is something it was never going to be. It quickly shot it's own moral load over its self-righteous face screaming "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!! There's a message here, a serious message about the American justice system...." and then quickly forgets that message while wiping its cock down in your face and secretly laughing at you.
Basically, Sparta is a family man that one night gets attacked by some petty crooks (not wearing balaclavas I might add) - one of these petty crooks decides that rather than just make off with some valuables that it would be a good idea to murder Sparta's wife and young daughter and leave Sparta for dead. As you do. Okay, so there's no film if this doesn't happen so I'm prepared to roll with it....
....and roll is what one of the crooks does when caught. Ray Charles is the prosecutor who has to break the news to Sparta that because of some fuck up with evidence and the fact that Sparta had passed out that his statement wasn't valid - the guy that did the killing is rolling over on the other guy to get a plea bargain whilst the other poor schmuck gets sent to death row. Sparta is mortified, but Ray tells him it's the only way they are guaranteed to get them both in jail as the case would probably collapse otherwise.
So, on we go. 10 years later, the day of the execution and Ray is there to watch it. Ad then something goes horribly wrong - instead of killing the guy easily it seriously fucks him up painfully before killing him. Oh I wonder who arranged that? Sparta then proceeds to help the other crook (who is now a free man snorting coke and screwing cheap hookers) escape the "three strikes you're out" rule as the cops come to his apartment. Well, help escape so he can torture him to death whilst filming it whilst speaking in Latin and doing a Cossack dance.
Anyway, they have no difficulty finding Sparta, who decides to strip naked prior to his arrest for some reason (six-pack quotient?). And then the "fun" begins. In the 10 years since the initial incident it seems that Sparta! has become an expert on law, bought shit loads of property and learnt how to make a perfect meringue in his mouth. Basically, he wanted to be caught so he could then orchestrate his masterplan.
And what is his masterplan? Well, here goes:
And then they throw in a red herring accomplice - not once, but fucking twice. Once by making you think that perhaps he is the mysterious "Chester" the boyfriend of the a girl working for Ray Charles that no one has ever met. That one is put to bed when he blows up her car. And then the black gloved accomplice that massacres more people at the funeral for the bomb victims.
Of course, the accomplice back door would be too weird now as everyone is seemingly accounted for or fucking dead by this point so they'd have to invent a person out of thin air to fill that role. I think I would have preferred this route, especially if they'd recruited Rutger Hauer or Malcolm McDowell. Or Paul Reubens. Now that would have been awesome. In fact, everything else would have been awesome.
Turns out that in the 10 years between the trial and execution that he bought a warehouse next to the prison and FUCKING TUNNELED INTO THE PRISON! Or every solitary cell to be precise. He's stocked up the tunnel with all manner of uniforms and equipment and right at the moment that Ray Charles and Chief O'Brien find this little treasure trove of potential destruction, Sparta is at City Hall planting a bomb that is going to wipe out the mayor and all the chiefs of police.....THAT PROBABLY WEREN'T EVEN IN THOSE POSITIONS WHEN HE GOT HIS REVENGE BONER 10 YEARS AGO!!! Well, he's basically trying to cripple the city in revenge for the sins against justice. That's the message.
Of course, Ray and Chief O'Brien play the old switcheroo and plant the bomb in Sparta's cell before he gets back....and he falls into their trap and makes the phonecall triggering the device....and that's it, Sparta is dead and we're no better off. We've learnt nothing we don't already know from watching Law & Order, CSI and Inspector Gadget. It could easily have made a statement about criminal injustice and flaws in the legal system but it takes the torture porn route. But in reality, we're the ones being tortured by this utter piece of crap....and it's crap that you've stood in and walked into your house.
And then to have the end credits roll and to find out that Sparta was a fucking robot and the real Sparta is about to torch Ray Charles house....well, that just takes the fucking piss.
This is possibly the worst mainstream American film made by people who have made decent films in the past - F. Gary Gray was responsible for "The Negotiator", and writer Kurt Wimmer has written some enjoyable fluff like "Equilibrium". But here they just invite themselves to a wank party and get jizz everywhere they weren't supposed to.
Overall 1/10
Note: Some parts of the story description have been added after the review was written to keep in spirit with what the filmmakers did.
Addendum 1: I've just figured it out - it's a reverse "Shawshank Redemption"!!! FFS!!
Starring: SPARTA!, Ray Charles and Chief O'Brien
I'd already heard that this was a very bad film, but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. It was far fucking worse than that. Imagine, if you will, a story cobbled together with shit and semen, hammered through a collander with a big fucking mallet when the convex head of a spoon would have sufficed, processed with offal and stale piss, covered with pastry, baked for two hours and then retrofitted with vomit and then muddied with a thousand lonely suicides.
Well, that's more appetising than this. Seriously, this film spends nearly two hours believing that is something it was never going to be. It quickly shot it's own moral load over its self-righteous face screaming "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!! There's a message here, a serious message about the American justice system...." and then quickly forgets that message while wiping its cock down in your face and secretly laughing at you.
Basically, Sparta is a family man that one night gets attacked by some petty crooks (not wearing balaclavas I might add) - one of these petty crooks decides that rather than just make off with some valuables that it would be a good idea to murder Sparta's wife and young daughter and leave Sparta for dead. As you do. Okay, so there's no film if this doesn't happen so I'm prepared to roll with it....
....and roll is what one of the crooks does when caught. Ray Charles is the prosecutor who has to break the news to Sparta that because of some fuck up with evidence and the fact that Sparta had passed out that his statement wasn't valid - the guy that did the killing is rolling over on the other guy to get a plea bargain whilst the other poor schmuck gets sent to death row. Sparta is mortified, but Ray tells him it's the only way they are guaranteed to get them both in jail as the case would probably collapse otherwise.
So, on we go. 10 years later, the day of the execution and Ray is there to watch it. Ad then something goes horribly wrong - instead of killing the guy easily it seriously fucks him up painfully before killing him. Oh I wonder who arranged that? Sparta then proceeds to help the other crook (who is now a free man snorting coke and screwing cheap hookers) escape the "three strikes you're out" rule as the cops come to his apartment. Well, help escape so he can torture him to death whilst filming it whilst speaking in Latin and doing a Cossack dance.
Anyway, they have no difficulty finding Sparta, who decides to strip naked prior to his arrest for some reason (six-pack quotient?). And then the "fun" begins. In the 10 years since the initial incident it seems that Sparta! has become an expert on law, bought shit loads of property and learnt how to make a perfect meringue in his mouth. Basically, he wanted to be caught so he could then orchestrate his masterplan.
And what is his masterplan? Well, here goes:
- Get a mattress for a confession
- Says the title of the film
- Get a steak for a second confession of where the defence attorney for the crooks is buried alive
- Oops, steak arrived too late and the guy is dead....
- Kills cellmate
- Gets sent to solitary
- Watch as everyone is helpless whilst anyone that had anything to do with the apparent injustice 10 years ago is picked off one by one. Except Ray Charles. Maybe because he's a family man.
And then they throw in a red herring accomplice - not once, but fucking twice. Once by making you think that perhaps he is the mysterious "Chester" the boyfriend of the a girl working for Ray Charles that no one has ever met. That one is put to bed when he blows up her car. And then the black gloved accomplice that massacres more people at the funeral for the bomb victims.
Of course, the accomplice back door would be too weird now as everyone is seemingly accounted for or fucking dead by this point so they'd have to invent a person out of thin air to fill that role. I think I would have preferred this route, especially if they'd recruited Rutger Hauer or Malcolm McDowell. Or Paul Reubens. Now that would have been awesome. In fact, everything else would have been awesome.
Turns out that in the 10 years between the trial and execution that he bought a warehouse next to the prison and FUCKING TUNNELED INTO THE PRISON! Or every solitary cell to be precise. He's stocked up the tunnel with all manner of uniforms and equipment and right at the moment that Ray Charles and Chief O'Brien find this little treasure trove of potential destruction, Sparta is at City Hall planting a bomb that is going to wipe out the mayor and all the chiefs of police.....THAT PROBABLY WEREN'T EVEN IN THOSE POSITIONS WHEN HE GOT HIS REVENGE BONER 10 YEARS AGO!!! Well, he's basically trying to cripple the city in revenge for the sins against justice. That's the message.
Of course, Ray and Chief O'Brien play the old switcheroo and plant the bomb in Sparta's cell before he gets back....and he falls into their trap and makes the phonecall triggering the device....and that's it, Sparta is dead and we're no better off. We've learnt nothing we don't already know from watching Law & Order, CSI and Inspector Gadget. It could easily have made a statement about criminal injustice and flaws in the legal system but it takes the torture porn route. But in reality, we're the ones being tortured by this utter piece of crap....and it's crap that you've stood in and walked into your house.
And then to have the end credits roll and to find out that Sparta was a fucking robot and the real Sparta is about to torch Ray Charles house....well, that just takes the fucking piss.
This is possibly the worst mainstream American film made by people who have made decent films in the past - F. Gary Gray was responsible for "The Negotiator", and writer Kurt Wimmer has written some enjoyable fluff like "Equilibrium". But here they just invite themselves to a wank party and get jizz everywhere they weren't supposed to.
Overall 1/10
Note: Some parts of the story description have been added after the review was written to keep in spirit with what the filmmakers did.
Addendum 1: I've just figured it out - it's a reverse "Shawshank Redemption"!!! FFS!!
Friday, 19 February 2010
Knowing (2009)
Directed by: Alex Proyas
Starring: Nic Cage, several child labourers, a man with a halogen torch in his mouth
Ah, end of the world films. Don't you just love them? All that build up to the end of the world and then a bunch of fucking people survive and it's not the end anymore, just a shift in the way of life as they fight through the rubble of destruction which you never actually see, though it's a little known fact that "The Road" is actually a sequel to "Deep Impact". [citation needed].
There are always survivors somehow.....and that's annoying. Damned annoying, as it cheats you out of the real end of the world bloodlust that you were hoping for. "Knowing" is slightly different. The world is totally fucking BBQed at the end by a Solar Megaflare, but there is a survival caveat....
So, how does this survival caveat come about and how do we get there? It starts off with a class 'Time Capsule' project in the 1950s and the creepy girl with a monobrow and a permanent frown just writes a bunch of numbers that confuses her teacher. Now, any normal teacher would have just put the kid on detention and torn up the paper and called the men in whites coats - especially in 1950s America where you could be committed to the funny farm for suggesting that Communism would work if you gave it a chance. But no, this teacher puts it in the time capsule.....
....flash forward 50 years to the Grand Opening and we have Nic Cage (sleepwalking through yet another role like a oversized hunchbacked goblin) and his son - that is the grieving Nic Cage as his wife had died a year before. That old chestnut is basically thrown in to make an excuse for Cage not actually giving a damn about what kind of film he is in. They could easily have had the happy family scenario played out on screen and probably would have if someone like Tom Cruise had played the role, but no, they picked Cage, signed his paycheque and he just showed a total lack of emotion and apathy....and when he does smile, it looks forced - kind of like in "Face/Off" after the face switch when he's John Travolta's character being Nic Cage's character......it's a smile of pure and utter fucking PAIN. "Do I have to smile?"........For fuck's sake Cage, you used to care!
Anyway, I digress.....so the capsule gets opened and lo and behold, Cage's son gets the bunch of crazygirl numbers and a pissed up Cage figures out that the numbers relate to the dates of major disasters and the death toll plus another number he can't figure out. There are three dates at the end that are yet to come....oooo, spooky. Wonder what the last one is? Cage can't figure it out as it is just 33 people and there is no number after it......
So Cage tries to convince his fellow professors that there will be a disaster the next day where 81 people will die - oh yeah, it should be mentioned at this stage that Cage is a Professor of Cosmology and rambles on about determinisim at MIT, so this all seems a little too convenient and really starts to blow his mind. Well, it would look like it's blowing the mind of another actor, but Cage's reaction is to look like a washed up tramp with no cares in the world and show little facial emotion.
Cue the next day and Cage is stuck in traffic - he sees his GPS and has a fucking eureka moment (with no facial emotion) - the missing numbers are the coordinates....and lookie here! They're actually the ones for the accident that is about to happen.....and it's here that the film is at its best - DESTRUCTION! The plane crash is simply fucking brilliantly done - horrific in the aftermath too. Definitely not something to watch the day before a flight or if your lifelong dream is to be a rescue worker.
Weird shit is also happening to his son - visited by some sinister looking men that you only see from behind. Are they like the Men in Black, but only the dour version? Or is there something more to them?
And so it moves on. He tracks done the daughter of the creepy number girl like a stalke whilst actaully looking like a stalker. When any normal women would have pepper sprayed him in the face, this women humours him for a bit until he brings up the numbers and the fact that another disaster is imminent. She then runs away from him with her daughter only to creep back to Cage after the next disaster prophecy comes true - another spectacular disaster set piece of a subway crash. They then figure that the 33 on the last disaster is actually EE but they have no idea what it stands for and the eyebrow daughter tells Cage that it's the day her mother told her she was going to die. Nice.
They then check out her mother's old home, which is basically a shack in the woods - the kind of place where a serial killer would hold bodies. In fact, I'm surprised that during the wooden scene that follows they don't stumble on the corpse of Nic Cage and a pile of copies of the "The Wicker Man" remake. After some stumbling around they find that EE stands for "Everyone Else". If this was a Roland Emmerich film it would have had REM' "It's the End of the World...." playing by now....
...meanwhile, outside the creepy mobile home the Mystery Machine has turned up to unmask the creepy backs of heads guys that seem to be menacing the kids. The kids scream and Cage comes running and chases after them. He catches up with one of them and then the strangest thing happens - the guy yawns and pukes pure white light out of his mouth. I mean totally Daz white kind of white. When Cage comes to, they're gone....
Next day Cage realises that the solar flare that has been talked about on news pieces during the film is actually going to be a global killer - the solar flare equivalent of the dinosaur killer meteor. They're fucked basically, and unless they're Johnny Storm they're going to be burnt to a crisp - not even a burnt out husk will remain. But they still think that perhaps sitting in a cave will be fine....WRONG! The radiation will boil them alive. But, they prepare to do that anyway - where's there's hope there's still a push to do something other than loot and pick up hot girls....
...so off they go to the school where Cage has found out the girl looked herself in a cupboard and came out with bloodied hands after his son just started writing numbers and carries on carving it into the desk with his fingers after the paper and pen are taken from him. It was another eureka moment....he then steals the whole fucking door of the cupboard, takes it home and tries to find the numbers that the girl may well have scraped with her fingernails....
...but nothing is showing up and the women legs it to the caves with his son and her daughter seconds before he finds the numbers.....they're the coordinates of the eyebrow girl. Of course, the solar flare is causing havoc with mobile phones. Cage has to try and find them, but obviously can't get through. Then in a necessary plot hole at a gas station, his son phones him from a landline - he gets through. Long story short: kids get taken in woman's car by strange torch-mouth men, woman steals a car to go after them but gets taken out by a massive lorry (the date for her death was right!) and Cage catches up with the kids whilst they're being led away by the strange men. Then a big fucking spaceship comes down - presumably because this was the only way they could have a happy ending without Superman turning up and sucking all the solar flare in and shitting it into dark matter, thus saving the global energy crisis - Cage is told by his son that he can't go.....the strange men then reveal themselves to be white glowing aliens who are only saving children because they belong to some intergalactic space paedo ring.
Off flies the ship (and many others like it) and Cage trundles home to his estranged father to face a massive wall of firey death (another spectacular scene), before we see the two kids skipping through corn on a CGI planet with an Yggdrasil lookalike tree. And no fucking buildings! The aliens basically dumped a bunch of kids on a planet with plenty of resources and no goddamn buildings, with a big gnarly tree and couple of rabbits - I mean, you would have expected a bunch of creepy torchmouth aliens who can predict the future down to the corpse to have at least read some William Golding, but fuck me if they haven't and they just leave the kids to start from scratch on their own - thus ensuring that the human race will soon be over.....
Meanwhile back on Earth.....
Overall: 5/10
Starring: Nic Cage, several child labourers, a man with a halogen torch in his mouth
Ah, end of the world films. Don't you just love them? All that build up to the end of the world and then a bunch of fucking people survive and it's not the end anymore, just a shift in the way of life as they fight through the rubble of destruction which you never actually see, though it's a little known fact that "The Road" is actually a sequel to "Deep Impact". [citation needed].
There are always survivors somehow.....and that's annoying. Damned annoying, as it cheats you out of the real end of the world bloodlust that you were hoping for. "Knowing" is slightly different. The world is totally fucking BBQed at the end by a Solar Megaflare, but there is a survival caveat....
So, how does this survival caveat come about and how do we get there? It starts off with a class 'Time Capsule' project in the 1950s and the creepy girl with a monobrow and a permanent frown just writes a bunch of numbers that confuses her teacher. Now, any normal teacher would have just put the kid on detention and torn up the paper and called the men in whites coats - especially in 1950s America where you could be committed to the funny farm for suggesting that Communism would work if you gave it a chance. But no, this teacher puts it in the time capsule.....
....flash forward 50 years to the Grand Opening and we have Nic Cage (sleepwalking through yet another role like a oversized hunchbacked goblin) and his son - that is the grieving Nic Cage as his wife had died a year before. That old chestnut is basically thrown in to make an excuse for Cage not actually giving a damn about what kind of film he is in. They could easily have had the happy family scenario played out on screen and probably would have if someone like Tom Cruise had played the role, but no, they picked Cage, signed his paycheque and he just showed a total lack of emotion and apathy....and when he does smile, it looks forced - kind of like in "Face/Off" after the face switch when he's John Travolta's character being Nic Cage's character......it's a smile of pure and utter fucking PAIN. "Do I have to smile?"........For fuck's sake Cage, you used to care!
Anyway, I digress.....so the capsule gets opened and lo and behold, Cage's son gets the bunch of crazygirl numbers and a pissed up Cage figures out that the numbers relate to the dates of major disasters and the death toll plus another number he can't figure out. There are three dates at the end that are yet to come....oooo, spooky. Wonder what the last one is? Cage can't figure it out as it is just 33 people and there is no number after it......
So Cage tries to convince his fellow professors that there will be a disaster the next day where 81 people will die - oh yeah, it should be mentioned at this stage that Cage is a Professor of Cosmology and rambles on about determinisim at MIT, so this all seems a little too convenient and really starts to blow his mind. Well, it would look like it's blowing the mind of another actor, but Cage's reaction is to look like a washed up tramp with no cares in the world and show little facial emotion.
Cue the next day and Cage is stuck in traffic - he sees his GPS and has a fucking eureka moment (with no facial emotion) - the missing numbers are the coordinates....and lookie here! They're actually the ones for the accident that is about to happen.....and it's here that the film is at its best - DESTRUCTION! The plane crash is simply fucking brilliantly done - horrific in the aftermath too. Definitely not something to watch the day before a flight or if your lifelong dream is to be a rescue worker.
Weird shit is also happening to his son - visited by some sinister looking men that you only see from behind. Are they like the Men in Black, but only the dour version? Or is there something more to them?
And so it moves on. He tracks done the daughter of the creepy number girl like a stalke whilst actaully looking like a stalker. When any normal women would have pepper sprayed him in the face, this women humours him for a bit until he brings up the numbers and the fact that another disaster is imminent. She then runs away from him with her daughter only to creep back to Cage after the next disaster prophecy comes true - another spectacular disaster set piece of a subway crash. They then figure that the 33 on the last disaster is actually EE but they have no idea what it stands for and the eyebrow daughter tells Cage that it's the day her mother told her she was going to die. Nice.
They then check out her mother's old home, which is basically a shack in the woods - the kind of place where a serial killer would hold bodies. In fact, I'm surprised that during the wooden scene that follows they don't stumble on the corpse of Nic Cage and a pile of copies of the "The Wicker Man" remake. After some stumbling around they find that EE stands for "Everyone Else". If this was a Roland Emmerich film it would have had REM' "It's the End of the World...." playing by now....
...meanwhile, outside the creepy mobile home the Mystery Machine has turned up to unmask the creepy backs of heads guys that seem to be menacing the kids. The kids scream and Cage comes running and chases after them. He catches up with one of them and then the strangest thing happens - the guy yawns and pukes pure white light out of his mouth. I mean totally Daz white kind of white. When Cage comes to, they're gone....
Next day Cage realises that the solar flare that has been talked about on news pieces during the film is actually going to be a global killer - the solar flare equivalent of the dinosaur killer meteor. They're fucked basically, and unless they're Johnny Storm they're going to be burnt to a crisp - not even a burnt out husk will remain. But they still think that perhaps sitting in a cave will be fine....WRONG! The radiation will boil them alive. But, they prepare to do that anyway - where's there's hope there's still a push to do something other than loot and pick up hot girls....
...so off they go to the school where Cage has found out the girl looked herself in a cupboard and came out with bloodied hands after his son just started writing numbers and carries on carving it into the desk with his fingers after the paper and pen are taken from him. It was another eureka moment....he then steals the whole fucking door of the cupboard, takes it home and tries to find the numbers that the girl may well have scraped with her fingernails....
...but nothing is showing up and the women legs it to the caves with his son and her daughter seconds before he finds the numbers.....they're the coordinates of the eyebrow girl. Of course, the solar flare is causing havoc with mobile phones. Cage has to try and find them, but obviously can't get through. Then in a necessary plot hole at a gas station, his son phones him from a landline - he gets through. Long story short: kids get taken in woman's car by strange torch-mouth men, woman steals a car to go after them but gets taken out by a massive lorry (the date for her death was right!) and Cage catches up with the kids whilst they're being led away by the strange men. Then a big fucking spaceship comes down - presumably because this was the only way they could have a happy ending without Superman turning up and sucking all the solar flare in and shitting it into dark matter, thus saving the global energy crisis - Cage is told by his son that he can't go.....the strange men then reveal themselves to be white glowing aliens who are only saving children because they belong to some intergalactic space paedo ring.
Off flies the ship (and many others like it) and Cage trundles home to his estranged father to face a massive wall of firey death (another spectacular scene), before we see the two kids skipping through corn on a CGI planet with an Yggdrasil lookalike tree. And no fucking buildings! The aliens basically dumped a bunch of kids on a planet with plenty of resources and no goddamn buildings, with a big gnarly tree and couple of rabbits - I mean, you would have expected a bunch of creepy torchmouth aliens who can predict the future down to the corpse to have at least read some William Golding, but fuck me if they haven't and they just leave the kids to start from scratch on their own - thus ensuring that the human race will soon be over.....
Meanwhile back on Earth.....
Overall: 5/10
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Eagle Eye (2008)
Directed by: DJ Caruso
Starring: Sheer The Beef, Michelle Monaghan, Vic Mackey and hundreds of CCTV cameras
What's it about? - Two people, seemingly chosen at random, to carry out a terrorist attack
Okay, so it starts with a military operation - wanted arab terrorist returning to a small village for what seems to be a funeral. He's resurfaced after years "underground" and this might be the only time the good old US of A get to take him out once and for all. Problem is, the computer system can't verify for certain whether it is really him and recommends an abort. Vic Mackey, Secretary of Defence agrees but El Presidento via the telephone overrules as it's their best chance for perhaps a few more years and greenlights the strike - BOOM....suspected terrorist and a bunch of innocents obliterated. Sounds familiar, you betcha, it's on the news nearly every day. But, don't forget that this happens because these kind of beginnings in films are always relevant later on.....
And here starts this bewildering techno thriller. Why is it bewildering? Well, it kind of undoes what is a great set up with a massive paradigm shift halfway through. Now, I know films these days require a huge suspension of disbelief, but when you require this suspension after an hour when it was doing okay developing as it was then it really gets fucking annoying. Basically, this goes totally William Webb Ellis halfway through and reinvents the ball game it was playing into something much less rounded and predictable.
Now, as a sci-fi fan I'm used to my far fetched stories, but the difference between your galaxy spanning sci-fi space opera and this is that at least with the former you're prepared for what you're about to see/read....this....well, unless you have spoons for hands and drive around in a clown car then nothing could really prepare for the asshattery that comes after a solid first hour.
The setup is simple - Shia and Monaghan are introduced to us - him a hard up college dropout who finds out that his twin brother has been killed and her a single mother packing her son off to play in his school band at the State of the Union address. As she packs her son onto the train you see some sinister guy make off with her sons trumpet. A few minutes later: Setup 1 happens: Shia has 3/4 million dollars deposited in his account and a whole load of weapons and bomb making equipment planted in his apartment. Then he receives a call from a mysterious woman to tell him to get the fuck out of there as the FBI are on their way....he doesn't, and ends up in an interrogation room where he screams "I've been framed" to Billy Bob Thornton who thinks its related to his dead brother - who was in the Navy. Cue a Navy investigator in on the case too. Shia gets his phonecall and the mysterious woman helps him escape by slamming a massive fucking crane of convenience into the room he's in, nearly killing him.....so he's out and away.
Setup 2: The same woman calls Monaghan and tells her that the train carrying her son will be derailed if she doesn't comply, so she basically does. Her instructions are to take a Porsche Cayenne (you know, the really fucking hideous 4x4) and follow further instructions.....turns out she ends up picking up Shia who avoids breaking his neck in a hefty fall and being hit by a speeding train in the space of a few seconds.
So there they are together, following instructions in a massive chase. The woman on the phone is controlling everything for them and their getaway is made easy by changing lights to green etc. Even easier when they get to a wrecking yard and the car crushers are on remote control and take out the remaining cop cars. Our two unwilling "terrorists" are away and free to follow the instructions of the mysterious woman. Other players are introduced doing little things and a neat little techno conspiracy is brewing - in kind not too far removed from "Enemy of the State". And then around the halfway mark, the big reveal - in part due to the woman explaining what is going on and in part to the Navy investigator being given special access to a secret level in the Pentagon that holds a superspy computer....as Rolf Harris said "Can you tell what it is yet?".
Of course, it's the fucking superspy computer pulling all the strings and getting unsuspecting people involved in the plot. Totally SkyNet. And now for the unravelling - it needs Shia because his brother worked with the computer before it killed him for suspecting something was a wry and his eye scan can put her plan into action, and it needs Monaghan to be the carrier of the tiny bomb crystal that is activated by sonic vibrations (her son's trumpet has the trigger in....) that is going to kill the President and other members of the cabinet (except Vic Mackey) all because her "Abort Mission" suggestion at the start of the film was ignored. So, once they're out of the way her plan is to have Mackey as president.....
Wow. Just wow. It's just plain fucking daft once you find out what is actually going on. If you'd found out at the end it might well have been better. I'd have preferred it to have been revealed that it was actually Dougie Howser pulling the strings - it would have made as much sense. I guess I'm annoyed at the damn thing because it was actually promising and quite enjoyable until the carpet disappeared and you realise your house is actually a magic carpet and you're falling towards the ground at an alarming rate only to crash into the second half of this pile of shit.
Overall: 4/10
Starring: Sheer The Beef, Michelle Monaghan, Vic Mackey and hundreds of CCTV cameras
What's it about? - Two people, seemingly chosen at random, to carry out a terrorist attack
Okay, so it starts with a military operation - wanted arab terrorist returning to a small village for what seems to be a funeral. He's resurfaced after years "underground" and this might be the only time the good old US of A get to take him out once and for all. Problem is, the computer system can't verify for certain whether it is really him and recommends an abort. Vic Mackey, Secretary of Defence agrees but El Presidento via the telephone overrules as it's their best chance for perhaps a few more years and greenlights the strike - BOOM....suspected terrorist and a bunch of innocents obliterated. Sounds familiar, you betcha, it's on the news nearly every day. But, don't forget that this happens because these kind of beginnings in films are always relevant later on.....
And here starts this bewildering techno thriller. Why is it bewildering? Well, it kind of undoes what is a great set up with a massive paradigm shift halfway through. Now, I know films these days require a huge suspension of disbelief, but when you require this suspension after an hour when it was doing okay developing as it was then it really gets fucking annoying. Basically, this goes totally William Webb Ellis halfway through and reinvents the ball game it was playing into something much less rounded and predictable.
Now, as a sci-fi fan I'm used to my far fetched stories, but the difference between your galaxy spanning sci-fi space opera and this is that at least with the former you're prepared for what you're about to see/read....this....well, unless you have spoons for hands and drive around in a clown car then nothing could really prepare for the asshattery that comes after a solid first hour.
The setup is simple - Shia and Monaghan are introduced to us - him a hard up college dropout who finds out that his twin brother has been killed and her a single mother packing her son off to play in his school band at the State of the Union address. As she packs her son onto the train you see some sinister guy make off with her sons trumpet. A few minutes later: Setup 1 happens: Shia has 3/4 million dollars deposited in his account and a whole load of weapons and bomb making equipment planted in his apartment. Then he receives a call from a mysterious woman to tell him to get the fuck out of there as the FBI are on their way....he doesn't, and ends up in an interrogation room where he screams "I've been framed" to Billy Bob Thornton who thinks its related to his dead brother - who was in the Navy. Cue a Navy investigator in on the case too. Shia gets his phonecall and the mysterious woman helps him escape by slamming a massive fucking crane of convenience into the room he's in, nearly killing him.....so he's out and away.
Setup 2: The same woman calls Monaghan and tells her that the train carrying her son will be derailed if she doesn't comply, so she basically does. Her instructions are to take a Porsche Cayenne (you know, the really fucking hideous 4x4) and follow further instructions.....turns out she ends up picking up Shia who avoids breaking his neck in a hefty fall and being hit by a speeding train in the space of a few seconds.
So there they are together, following instructions in a massive chase. The woman on the phone is controlling everything for them and their getaway is made easy by changing lights to green etc. Even easier when they get to a wrecking yard and the car crushers are on remote control and take out the remaining cop cars. Our two unwilling "terrorists" are away and free to follow the instructions of the mysterious woman. Other players are introduced doing little things and a neat little techno conspiracy is brewing - in kind not too far removed from "Enemy of the State". And then around the halfway mark, the big reveal - in part due to the woman explaining what is going on and in part to the Navy investigator being given special access to a secret level in the Pentagon that holds a superspy computer....as Rolf Harris said "Can you tell what it is yet?".
Of course, it's the fucking superspy computer pulling all the strings and getting unsuspecting people involved in the plot. Totally SkyNet. And now for the unravelling - it needs Shia because his brother worked with the computer before it killed him for suspecting something was a wry and his eye scan can put her plan into action, and it needs Monaghan to be the carrier of the tiny bomb crystal that is activated by sonic vibrations (her son's trumpet has the trigger in....) that is going to kill the President and other members of the cabinet (except Vic Mackey) all because her "Abort Mission" suggestion at the start of the film was ignored. So, once they're out of the way her plan is to have Mackey as president.....
Wow. Just wow. It's just plain fucking daft once you find out what is actually going on. If you'd found out at the end it might well have been better. I'd have preferred it to have been revealed that it was actually Dougie Howser pulling the strings - it would have made as much sense. I guess I'm annoyed at the damn thing because it was actually promising and quite enjoyable until the carpet disappeared and you realise your house is actually a magic carpet and you're falling towards the ground at an alarming rate only to crash into the second half of this pile of shit.
Overall: 4/10
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