Hei kek ji wong

"As a prostitute knows no true love, so an actor knows no true feelings."
-Chinese saying

"King of Comedy" is less a coherent movie than it is a series of comedy sketches, half of which focus on an incompetent extra trying to sneak back onto a film set (which grants the opportunity to parody any number of Chinese action films), half of which focus on the acting lessons he gives to local gangsters and hookers. The comedy's pretty hit-or-miss, but it's funny enough often enough -- there's even some genuine (if mild) satire, as he takes perfectly nice, normal people and transforms them into incoherent lunatics with his "acting advice." But ultimately, there's exactly two things that make this movie worth seeing: Stephen Chow, and Stephen Chow.

The first is Stephen Chow the actor, and it's his appealing, wide-eyed naivete that sells most of the jokes. Over the course of the flick, he's repeatedly slapped in the face -- both literally and metaphorically -- and it's his refusal to indulge in self-pity that makes him a sympathetic character. The second is Stephen Chow the celebrity, and it's hard not to read the storyline as being at least pseudo-autobiographical. In particular, an early cameo by Jackie Chan manages to be both hilarious and somewhat moving.

In fact, the movie gets both surprisingly dark and surprisingly sentimental for a Cantonese comedy. And it's an impressive feat that the climax -- in which he is incapable of breaking character until a wounded police officer utters the word "cut" -- manages to be both absolutely ludicrous and surprisingly touching. It's no "Shaolin Soccer," but it's worth seeing, if only as a reminder to how Stephen Chow got where he is today -- by being a first-rate clown, whether he has a lot of expensive toys to play with or not.

Across The Universe

And the award for best trailer of 2007 and maybe even of ever in the whole wide world goes to...

*drum roll*

Across The Universe!!!

*wild applause*

The other nominees smile for the camera, the makers of The Bratz Movie smiling hardest of all. The Dragon Wars guys clap enthusiastically, though inside they are already planning the fastest way home to drink themselves into a bitter stupor.

The thing about the trailer for Across The Universe is that, well... it is the greatest trailer ever. For the first time in a while the trailer actually sold me on the film with no help at all from any synopsis, cast list, or director. I've heard Julie Taymor's done neat things. I thought The Lion King stage show was pretty dazzling. I heard Titus was pretty balls. The end. I didn't really care that A.t.U was hers. But the trailer... my goodness, it was mind blowing.

The genius of the trailer is that it tricks you. It presents itself at first by saying "Hello, nice to meet you. I am just another cliche love story, but I use Beatles tunes to call myself a musical."

"Ho hum," says I in response.

"But wait!" the trailer says. "Just hear me out! I'm not just a plain old love story! I was kidding before when I said that!" and then it explodes. It explodes everywhere. There is an explosion of music, of color, of action, of unbelievable imagery. There is an emotional progression to the trailer, an awe-inspiring swell of sound and visuals and puppets and Eddie Izzard.

"FUCK YOU," the trailer screams with glee. "I'M NOT WHAT YOU THOUGHT I WAS AT ALL! I WILL BOGGLE YOUR MIND! COME SEE ME!"

So I did. I went and saw it, my mind prepped to be boggled.

Now... here's the thing. Some might say that I just got overexcited about it. That I had simply psyched myself up so that my expectations, once again, exceeded any possibility of being satisfied. But see... that's not what happened. I didn't tell myself that this was going to be amazing. I had been told already. The trailer told me. It screamed at me, even. "FUCK YOU" it said, if you will remember.

I had no idea what the movie was going to involve. I had no idea the story it was going to tell. I had no idea what it was going to dwell on. I had no preconceived notions. I just knew, I knew because I had been told, that Across The Universe was something special, something different, something unique and influential and arresting.

I had been lied to.

Across The Universe wasn't... bad. Well, it wasn't horrible. I guess it was bad. And it most certainly wasn't good. It was a disjointed, incoherent, inconsistent, unemotional, rambling, scattered, cliche ball of self-indulgent, half-realized, two-dimensional, wannabe pop art.

Sorry Julie...

Some say it was just a love letter to the '60s. The revolution, the image heavy creative expression, all of which was encapsulated by Beatles music. Yummy.

I LOVE THE BEATLES!!! you and the rest of the world says. I KNOW, RIGHT!?

But if it was a love letter, it was, and I'm sorry about lame phrasing, written by someone without a heart. Or maybe just a heart made of poo-poo doo-doo.

I heard a rumor that Taymor had nearly a whopping 90% of the music sung live on the set! Exclamation point! Boy, the sound in the film is so over processed you sure can't tell! But that doesn't matter. Many of the covers are really nice. A great stand-out for me is Joe Cocker's "Come Together" cameo. Really really fantastic. Eddie Izzard's Mr. Kite is pretty friggin' swell, too. And "Let It Be" is really... really nice.

And most of the visuals that accompany the songs are really astounding. Everything surrounding Mr. Kite's musical romp was thumbs up great. The choreography to songs like "I Want You" is not only really freakin' creative, but superbly executed.

So if all this is so nifty, why does the movie blow my nuts?

'Cause it doesn't MEAN anything! A lot of the musical segments make for reeeally neat music videos. The end. They have no bearing on one another, on the film as a whole, on any over lying message, and they certainly don't come together to form a coherent "love letter" so don't dare spew that jargon at me, you.

There is no progression to the film as a whole. The musical numbers don't build on each other. Not emotionally, not thematically, nothing. And they certainly have no baring on the half of the film that serves as some semblance of a... plot. "Plot."

The film doesn't amount to anything. There is no energy to half the songs, never mind any part that isn't musical at all. There are characters that serve no purpose other than to provide a stretch of an excuse to sing another song (Dear Prudence) and plot points that aren't fully realized and some that are completely assumed.

The music meant nothing to the film, the film meant nothing to the characters, and the characters meant nothing to me. There was no emotional release. There was nothing. It was nothing. It meant nothing. Nothing.

How can you do that? How can you demonstrate for over two hours great promise, the ability to paint a beautiful picture with song and mesmerizing images and have it mean nothing?

Because that's all it was. A beautiful picture. A painting. A painting inspired by the 60's, overwrought with references and artistic imitation in the form of an homage. But paintings are 2-D, and may generate some "Oohs" and "Aahs" but evoke no emotional response. Not the kind of response this should have garnered at least.

It was just a freaking over extended music video for Christ sake, stretched way too thin.

At least Hard Days Night and Yellow Submarine had some fun with themselves. And were both under an hour and a half.

Shoot 'Em Up

I'm a victim of my own hyped up expectations. For whatever reason, I have psyched myself up for movie after movie to the point where there was no way the movie could have been as good as I feel ready for it to be. Transformers is a great recent example. I'm not big into the whole Transformers... deal. I didn't play with the toys, I didn't cream for the cartoon when I was little. In all honesty, I just thought the concept was pretty... hokey. And by pretty hokey, I mean really hokey. I just couldn't do it. But then the idea for a live-action Transformers explodes onto the scene and Michael Bay is slated to direct. I hate Michael Bay. He is an unoriginal schmuck in love with explosions and unbelievably ridiculous, but well executed, action action action. This is the perfect film for him. Perfect. The only reason for making a live-action Transformers movie would be to take the hokey cartoon characters and make it baaaad ass. And it could have been. It should have been. And I was ready to see cool shit blow up.

Shit blew up. But there were also lame attempts at both character development and tongue-and-cheek slapstick sequences featuring the Auto-Bots themselves. What? The fuck?

That's not a Michael Bay movie. And the one time I'm excited for a Michael Bay movie he sticks a fork in my pooper. Metaphorically speaking.

Anyways, my point here is -- I might have been able to enjoy it if I hadn't already decided what it was supposed to be. Enough people like it, so it's obviously fun enough.

I just... screwed any chance of liking it for myself.

So! Funny story! Same thing happened with Shoot 'Em Up!

It's a perfect idea, really. It's an action movie spoof. Celebrating ridiculousness and cheesy dialogue. Glorifying plot holes and unbelievable violence. And when I heard about the opening scene where Clive Owen delivers a baby in a warehouse while in the middle of a shoot out with an endless stream of baddies, I was instantly pumped. This isn't just cheap silliness, this is clever goofiness. Clive Owen is the guy who would be and is cast in these kinds of movies. He is a bad ass. Paul Giamatti can do anything. And Monica Bellucci is a babe. So the cast is a thumbs up, too.

Now, writer/director Michael Davis didn't take a good idea and puke all over it ala Mr. Bay, he just didn't realize it's full potential. Or perhaps he was just a victim of a poor budget. Or maybe he ran into a lot of other pot holes. Or maybe he was just lazy. It was a fun movie that should have been amazing. It could have been amazing. It showed glimpses of amazingness. But it never got there.

First of all, the concept alone an endless bowl of good times. There is no limit to ridiculousness. Ridiculousness is limitless. And the writing itself is reeeally really clever. There are sequences of puuure genius. I would list them, but I'm lazy. Trust me. Juuuust trust me.

The problem the film had was in how it was presented. The camera work and editing was just... lame. The production value was bland. It was hokey and uninvolved. Which maybe...? Was the point...? But that leads me to a problem.

You can't really spoof the action genre. You just... can't do it. In a sense, action films are spoofs in and of themselves. They're explosive exaggerations of some anti-reality, and while the good ones sell you this ploy, convince you to suspend your disbelief and gawk and cheer, they're still unspoofable. If you're going to try and simply spoof an action movie, you're going to make a bad action movie, and that's just boring and uninventive.

You just can't just spoof 'em. Spoof 'em up, if you will. LIKE THAT?

Shoot 'Em Up is not a bad action movie. It latches on to the ridiculousness. It's not about plot structure and character development, but about making people say and do crazy shit. Maybe it exploits bad action movies, but it is not one of them. But it's not... a good one either.

The way to sell an action movie like this is to make it flashy and ridiculous. Take Hot Fuzz for example. An amazing parody/homage that thrives because it is genuinely funny (Hilarious, even?) on it's own, crafty, quick, solid, and a damn good buddy cop action flick. I know Shoot 'Em Up and Hot Fuzz are not one in the same, and they are not aiming for the same thing, but my point still stands. Hot Fuzz works because it is a great movie on it's own. Just like Shaun of the Dead. SotD stands above other zombie movie parodies and comedies because it's a really good zombie movie.

There were a lot of times Shoot 'Em Up was just boring. And while I could smile and nod at some of the clever ideas, they just never kept me too involved outside of that. And there are plenty ways to be flashy and hokey at the same time. It was just bland and uninvested.

So... that... was a bummer...

Can't find a way to... end... this...

... the end...

Too Much Reality

"Too much reality is not what the people want."

-Woody Allen, Stardust Memories

So I was just thinking about the conversation that spun out of Alex's review of "Sunshine," in which Andrew referred to Danny Boyle as "the anti-genre guy." I think I get what you mean, and I guess I have mixed feelings about it. ("Unbreakable" springs to mind as a movie trying something similar and failing kinda dramatically.)

In fact, talking about superhero comics, there's a similar divide in thinking there, as well. Without going into too much geeky detail, there's a school of thought that adheres to silver-age images like the Flash standing with his hands pressed against the sides of his head and screaming "Everything around me is green...green...GREEN!" On the other hand, there's comics that feature the Joker firing a bullet into Barbara Gordon's spine, stripping her naked, and taking photographs of her mutilated body for her father. That argument's even there (albeit in a subtler way) in the movies -- contrasting the first X-Men movie as a grittier sci-fi thriller with the first Spider-Man as a big, colorful, over-the-top fantasy.

But it's a trend towards -- I don't really know what to call it, exactly. But it's widespread, in the grim-'n-gritty approach to comics, in the tsunami of reality television. Video games seem to be reaching towards more and more elaborately simulated environments, particularly in the rise of massively-multiplayer online gaming. Animation has shifted away from gorgeous, stylized, hand-painted artwork, to this hideous, stiff, jagged CGI. I sometimes think that I'm the last fantasy writer left in theatre. And the internet -- with the rise of myspace, youtube, and, er, opinionated blogs -- I know of at least one person who referred to Time Magazine's designation of "You" as the person of the year as "Lamer than anything that has previously been called lame", and I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I think that they're onto something.

I dunno. I don't really have any big realization or anything about it to offer, but I do wonder what it all means.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

When I first heard of this project, I was skeptical. See, I'm a big fan of the book, and the book strikes me as being totally unfilmable -- not just in terms of structure and narrative, but in terms of the basic concept. Hell, if I were producing this thing, the closest I could come to a faithful adaptation would be to take a film crew, load them down with a copy of the book, film equipment, and a fuckload of drugs, and send them out into the Nevada desert to see what they come up with. And even then, the story is so much a product of its place and time -- the disillusionment immediately following the sixties -- that it's impossible to re-create. The whole exercise of making a movie at all just seems intellectually bankrupt, offering little more than an opportunity to show some visual inventiveness.

But then they gave the project to Terry Gilliam, and visual invention is kind of his thing. What makes the movie work is how carefully it builds a world -- yeah, there's the really memorable visual gimmicks like the floor being covered with blood and the lounge full of bloodthirsty reptiles -- but that sense of the world being constantly off-kilter, shifting in subtle and almost subliminal ways, is what fills the two-hour running time. To complain that it lacks a cohesive narrative seems to me to be utterly missing the point -- this isn't a story so much as it's a really horrible trip, in every sense of the word.

If there is an underlying point, it's the implication that the lunacy they create and inhabit is nothing compared to the grand lunacy of the country in which they're trying to survive, to the agreed-upon fiction of normality. Their pointless self-destruction is held up to ridicule -- but is it really any more pointless than the plastic, unfeeling existence of those who pretend to be disgusted with them? The apparent sanity of mainstream culture is so self-evidently absurd that the brutality with which they attempt to destroy it in their own lives actually makes a terrifying kind of sense. And lately, maybe it's not so hard to re-create that context in our own time.

a. Haynes' introduction.

In an over-extended period of teenage angst and grief, I currently reside in Chicago, Illinois enrolled in Columbia College to study Film and Writing. "Might as well chase the dream for a couple years, right?" as I say to anyone who frowns upon my impractical life choices. Might as well chase it for a couple years before fiscal priorities slap my sack and I collapse in my own puddle of exhaust and worthlessness before I trudge back to Rochester to teach a lower form of English at the high school I attended to a room full of underprivileged minorities who ain't got no time to read or write when they gotta be pullin' a double shift to help support their baby-mama until I retire or, more likely, commit suicide in my parents' basement.

Might as well.

My reason for partaking in this snob fest? Well, for one, I'm a snob. For two, I'm studying film and should probably keep my brain gears turning in regards to my opinions and general reactions to the motion pictures. For three, it's a good open forum to keep Alex and phil in check and make sure I have every opportunity to let them know when they're wrong. For four, I have a review journal up at rottentomatoes (check it hurr) which has, as of late, sort of fallen through the cracks as I divert my attention to school projects and the presumptuously vague attempt at profundity and self-expression that is a... blooog... and, well, I would like to get it all started up again. I hope that this'll help jump start that desire.

My taste in movies is admittedly scattered and inconsistent so... bear with me.

-a. Haynes

P.S. - Also, this'll blow your mind.

Sunshine

First things first(to anyone reading this, aka no one), I'm Alex. Hi. I'm kind of new to this whole "blogging" or "web logging" or "typing things into a computer screen that others can read and have independent thoughts about" thing. I'm a music major at a community college in Rochester Minnesota. My turn ons are girls with large boobs and small brains. My turn offs are... few and far between.

Alright, so I guess I should talk about a movie. Recently, I took in Danny Boyles(Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) latest talking picture, Sunshine. It's some semi futuristic sci-fi movie about scientists trying to re-ignite the dying sun using a bomb that sounds like it came from Plan Nine from Outer Space. This movie made the plot somewhat believable, which was a feat in it of itself. Flawless execution is the name of the game here. I, myself, get sick of the predictability we have come to love, cherish, and respect from science fiction. Sunshine really breaks the mold. There are constantly twists and turns, and not this M. Night Shalamanananan(anan?) crap where you are picking the so called "unpredictable twists" out in the first five fucking minutes. A lot of thought and consideration went into the script to keep the viewer in the dark about the ending.

The visuals and analogies from this movie blew me away like a drunken prom date. Someone was watching a National Geographic Channel special on outer space and thought, "Oh wow, space is pretty cool." Because they captured the intriguing and unknown better than most movies dealing with space do. And all the analogies and ideas about self sacrifice for the better of mankind are enough to make you re-evaluate your entire existence.

Okay, so I suppose I should use the tired old system of blank out of blank stars or stripes or wombats or whatever to rate these things, so I guess I'd better start now. I hate doing that just because when a movie is really great, and you want to give it a perfect score, there is always the voice in the back of your mind that says, "but what if something better is made and you have to tare your movie scale." And especially since this is the first movie I've reviewed here, its hard to give it a perfect score. Fuck it, it was fucking awesome and you're an awful person if you don't see it. I'm giving Sunshine a whopping 5 dingle berries out of 5.

phil's Introduction

Hey. My name's phillip low, and I'm a playwright/theatrical producer in Minneapolis. Of particularly revelant interest may be the fact that I'm also an evaluator for the Ivey Awards (sort of the local equivalent of the Tonys) as well as a blogger for the Minnesota Fringe Festival, which means that I'm already fairly accustomed to seeing and reviewing a lot of entertainment. My main claim to fame is as the founder of Maximum Verbosity, the theatre troupe that all three of us have belonged to at one point or another.

For me, the main reason behind creating this site is that the three of us are a bunch of film snobs who have been having an ongoing argument about movies for many years now. But we've all moved to different places -- Chicago, Minneapolis, and Rochester -- and this is a space for us to continue that argument, as well as a space for us to think out loud about the things that entertain us.

As for whether or not that's interesting to anybody else? Only time will tell. But let's fire up the desktop and enter the typing fray, enh?