1. The Twilight Saga: New Moon - Instead of seeing Inglorious Basterds, mom takes me to watch the second installment of a bloodless, soulless, agonizing, vampire film that pretends to be my generation's Romeo & Juliet. There's no spark between the glittering - literally, the fucker glitters in the sunlight! - vampire beau Edward (Robert Pattinson) and clingy Bella (Kristen Stewart), the action sequences were uneventful, and the ways Bella uses the usually shirtless teen werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner) as her personal tampon, you'd think it was a miracle that she got the poor bastard clipped without having half her face slashed off as a result. Not going to comment on the acting, mostly because there wasn't any between the three main leads. I get that New Moon is mostly mental masturbation for the 9-16 female demographic who soaked the seats at the sight of a ripped Lautner, but does it have to be this godawful about it?2. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - If New Moon is strictly a two-hour frig-off session for young girls who don't know why their seats are so wet, then Michael Bay's sequel to the 2007 blockbuster shows him shooting his load, blinding the audience with incoherent storylines, non-existent character development, baffling and unfunny crude humor (robot balls and robot humping included), and head-pummeling action which never gives us time to enjoy what's going on. To paraphrase Peter Travers, movie critic of Rolling Stone Magazine - "Revenge of the Fallen has everything. Everything loud, dumb, violent, racist, and misogynistic that director Michael Bay can think of puking up onscreen." Watch Megan Fox (who sizzled in the first Transformers movie) cheapened to porn-star status as she's leaning over a motorcycle in short shorts that would shame Daisy Dukes herself and the two Autobots ignorantly fueling African-American stereotypes as Skids and Mudflap, and you'll wonder how Bay could screw up his own (lack of) talent with a movie like this.
3. My Sister's Keeper - Director Nick Cassavetes' (the same director who spawned The Notebook) latest sobfest about a young girl (Abagail Breslin) suing her cold, bitchy mother (Cameron Diaz) for emancipation rights to her body, wants his audience to bawl hysterically, dab those eyes with Kleenex, but cry, dammit, cry! The only thing I crying over was for this movie to end.
4. Dragonball: Evolution - Being an anime fan, I was excited to watch the live-action version of the Japanese cartoon that became a hit in America, thanks to Cartoon Network in the 90's. Then I saw the actual movie, which lead me to the conclusion that Hollywood must leave popular anime shows alone.
5. Terminator Salvation - Loved the idea of setting the Terminator franchise in the middle of the war between SkyNet and humanity, hated how McG toned it down to get teenage boys in the seats. Loved how the Govenator made a CGI appearance in the film's climax, hated Christian Bale as John Connor (sorry, dude). It looks like the suits at Warner Bros. made the right call in moving Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince toward a summer release.
6. My Bloody Valentine 3D - It's bad enough to watch horror movies these days, so why add to the suck by putting the movie in 3D? All of the tired and recycled garbage is in the movie: a disturbed sociopath wielding a clever disguise and a sharp object (in this case, it's a miner's outfit and the weapon of choice is a pick-axe) starts killing off people in a small mining town. You'd think a place like this would be safe for whores, clueless law enforcement, and drunken teens who usually stack up the body count in these kinds of slasher flicks. Some things never change.
7. Knowing - How bad was this disaster sci-fi flick? The ending itself managed to be more ludicrous than anything M. Night Shyamalan cooked up or can pull out of his box of twist endings. The premise doesn't help matters: an MIT professor (Nicolas Cage) stumbles across a code of numbers that accurately predict violent disasters which leads to a huge cataclysmic event of which no one can escape from. Airplanes fall out of the sky, trains run off the subway and into buildings and streets, and a group of mysterious pedophiles follow his son around. Kidding, but that would make more sense than the actual conclusion to this mess.
8. Year One - What happens when you cross a very funny dude whose shtick is being as wild and obnoxious as possible (Jack Black) and another funny dude who plays the sweet, yet gangly, socially awkward teen (Michael Cera)? The result is Year One, a really shitty pre-historic comedy about our ansestor's invention of the roadtrip. It sucks to see Black, Cera, and the highly underrated Mark Ruffalo resort to sex jokes that don't sting, and using crappy pre-historic humor that would make Fred Flinstone cringe.
9. X-Men Origins: Wolverine - What was supposed to be the rip-roaring, adrenaline shot action film to kickoff the summer movie season, ended up a limp-dick prequel that causes confusion, rather than tie up loose ends. Hugh Jackman still has all the sharp humor and badassery he carried in the X-Men franchise, but his background story - he and his brother, Sabertooth (huh??) have been fighting machines for America dating all the way back to the American Revolutionary War - neither excites, nor engages us.
10. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra - Great. Another Hasbro doll getting the Hollywood treatment. And, by Hollywood treatment, I mean making a dumb, but fun movie, minus the fun. If you want to see a rip-roaring action picture about our fine military men and women in life-or death situations, rent The Hurt Locker on Blu-Ray and DVD.
1 comment:
Proud to say that I have seen NONE of these.
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