Netflix Recommends... That Awkward Moment (2014)

*
Director: Tom Gormican
Starring: Zac Efron, Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan

Lesson one: Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan, fine actors who have separately made fine films, should not make movies together. Lesson two (which I learn over and over again): Netflix is wrong more often than it is right. In the time that I've been keeping track of the movies that I've watched based on Netflix's recommendation, always choosing something I've never seen (which, in Netflix's defense, immediately eliminates at least a quarter of the titles in the Top Picks list, with another quarter being irrelevant because they're TV series), I've seen a lot of bad movies. Every once in a while I'll end up with a good movie, one that I either wouldn't have seen otherwise (Warrior, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) or that I had always intended to see but had never gotten around to previously (Miller's Crossing, Please Give), and sometimes I'll see a movie that's objectively bad but still reasonably entertaining (300: Rise of an Empire, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters), and in at least one case a bad movie that isn't entertaining in and of itself, but which can be made entertaining by tracking the subtext (This Means War). Mostly, though, I've seen terrible movies. Rendition. Runner Runner. Let's Be Cops. The Other Woman. A Good Day to Die Hard. And now, That Awkward Moment, a movie in which Zac Efron and Michael B. Jordan appear shirtless often enough to suggest that women are the target audience (Efron even won an MTV Movie Award for "Best Shirtless Performance" - what a world we live in), yet is so aggressively bro-ish that every other scene might as well start with a title card reading "No Girls Allowed."

Review: Men, Women & Children (2014)

*
Director: Jason Reitman
Starring: Jennifer Garner, Adam Sandler, Rosemarie DeWitt, Ansel Elgort, Kaitlyn Dever

Put on your pearls and get ready to clutch them, because apparently there's this new thing called the internet and it is going to destroy the very fabric of society. I am genuinely perplexed as to how a filmmaker as young as Jason Reitman can make a film as wildly out of touch as Men, Women & Children, a bizarre piece of moral panic propaganda that I have a hard time believing could actually speak to anyone, it's so shrill and hysterical. Despite making the wrong choice at basically every turn, Reitman's film actually does manage to eke out a moment or two of genuine emotion, but it can hardly register when it's surrounded by so much absurdity.

Netflix Recommends... Let's Be Cops (2014)

*
Director: Luke Greenfield
Starring: Jake Johnson, Damon Wayans Jr.

Yes, Netflix recommended it - and on the basis of my having watched The Interview, no less - but this one is really my own fault. As a fan of New Girl and of Jake Johnson and Damon Wayans Jr. in New Girl, I genuinely though there was a chance that I might enjoy Let's Be Cops at least a little bit, despite the scathing reviews the film inspired and despite the inherently queasy-making nature of its premise. Good, challenging movies can be made from transgressive premises - not in the case of Let's Be Cops, but in the case of other, better movies less content to cater to the lowest common denominator and more willing to make the effort to resist going for the easiest gag at every turn. I'd love to watch that movie; instead I watched this.

Canadian Film Review: The Captive (2014)

*
Director: Atom Egoyan
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Rosario Dawson, Scott Speedman, Mireille Enos

The general consensus on Atom Egoyan seems to be that he's been in a sharp decline as an artist for the last decade, or so. I haven't really agreed with that, having found things to like about even Where the Truth Lies and Chloe, two of his least loved films, but The Captive may be the film that makes me change my tune. This abduction thriller is not just a mess, it's borderline unwatchable. Built around characters who are wafer thin, performances that never quite jive with each other, and a story which, were it told in linear fashion rather than in Egoyan's signature scrambled narrative style, would be immediately exposed as a tale that wouldn't even qualify for distinction as a good Lifetime movie, it fails in pretty much every respect. Seriously, this thing is baaaaad.

Netflix Recommends... The Interview (2014)

*
Director: Seth Rogan & Evan Goldberg
Starring: Seth Rogan, James Franco

I can't really blame Netflix for this one, as I was genuinely curious about how bad The Interview could be and probably would have seen it at some point eventually anyway (though, as an aside, I continue to be baffled by the fact that Netflix can "recommend" a movie to a user while also predicting that the user will dislike it). Having now seen it, I can say that rarely has a film caused so much fuss without deserving any of it. A comedy devoid of laughs and a political satire lacking in bite, The Interview would already be long forgotten were it not for the fact that for a brief moment it looked like it might spark World War III; instead if will live in infamy, albeit probably less for the international tensions it created than for the leaking of emails about Angelina Jolie.

Review: Gangster Squad (2013)

*
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Starring: Josh Brolin, Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone

Lurid. That’s Gangster Squad in one word. Full of violence as stylized as it is gratuitous, characters so undercooked that even a cast full of fine actors can’t breach their inherent artificiality, and dialogue that sounds like a twelve-year-old’s idea of classic Hollywood sophistication, the film has shockingly little to recommend it. Sure, it contains some cool looking shots, but that can hardly make up for the fact that it’s a failure on pretty much every level.

Review: Jack and Jill (2011)

*
Director: Dennis Dugan
Starring: Adam Sandler

Yes, this happened. Don't ask me how. I'm not proud. Please... look away...

Review: Year One (2009)

*
Director: Harold Ramis
Starring: Jack Black, Michael Cera

Early in Year One one character lamely tries to get one over on another and the other responds, "This is just insulting." There's no better way to describe the film as a whole. It's insulting. It's the cinematic equivalent of a school project that you forget is due until about 20 minutes before class so you slap a bunch of stuff together quickly and declare, "Good enough."

Canadian Film Review: Puck Hogs (2009)

*
Director: Warren P. Sonoda
Starring: Jeff Geddis, Johnny Gardhouse, Joe Dinicol

I think that the best way to introduce Puck Hogs is to describe one of its big scenes: a player who has been out of the game for a couple of years rejoins the team and when he shows up on game day, everyone jokes that his equipment (which has never been cleaned because he's a dude) smells as if something crawled into his hockey bag and died. They then discover that something did, in fact, crawl into the bag and die - a mouse - and after a minute spent exclaiming about how gross that is, they proceed to pass it around the locker room with their hockey sticks. The game pretty much comes to an end, however, when they find out that a cat had also crawled into the bag and died. It's all very sophisticated and high-brow.

Review: The Roommate (2011)

* / * * * *

Director: Christian E. Christiansen
Starring: Leighton Meester, Minka Kelly

Everything you need to know about how serious The Roommate intends to be can be summed up in the following sentence: the social network that the characters use to connect with each other is called “Frienderz.” Frienderz! You actually have to try in order to come up with something that stupid; it doesn’t happen accidentally when you’re trying to come up with something good. The Roommate is a bad movie that aspires to nothing more than merely existing, though if you go into it with the right attitude, it ends up being far more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Maythew #7: Session 9 (2001)

*
Director: Brad Anderson
Starring: David Caruso, Peter Mullan, Josh Lucas

If Session 9 had been the first movie my brother and I watched for Maythew, the series probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground. This is easily one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It's not scary, it's not interesting either in terms of narrative or in terms of its visual aesthetic, it's just dull. Dull, dull, dull.

The plot (if you care and you shouldn't) involves an asbestos cleaning crew that has been hired to work in a long closed mental hospital. The crew includes Gordon (Peter Mullen), Phil (David Caruso), Hank (Josh Lucas), Mike (Stephen Gevedon), and Jeff (Brendan Sexton III). Jeff is new, Phil and Hank are constantly at each other's throats over a woman, and something is obviously wrong with Gordon. As for Mike, he quickly disappears from work to sit down in the basement listening to old tapes of a patient with multiple personalities.

The film tries to emulate the atmosphere of The Shining, making it appear that the building itself is having an effect on the actions and attitudes of the workers. Is the building haunted? Evil? Are former patients still lurking around, waiting to do damage? In truth evil is brought into the building by the workers, specifically Gordon who is in the midst of an intense mental crisis. As his inner turmoil begins to bubble to the surface, the situation for everyone else becomes increasingly desperate - whether they know it or not.

The problems I have with Session 9 as a film are myriad, but I'll try to narrow them down to a few. The narrative is not cohesive, for one thing, and the story feels like horror's greatest themes slapped together. The characters are paper thin and their motivations are never properly defined. Perhaps worst of all, the film simply feels lazy. It relies too heavily on the viewer's emotional response to other films and tropes from the genre without bringing anything new to the table. It feels like a student project, to be honest, and not a particularly good one.

Matt's Thoughts: Session 9...is a cinematic abortion. I have no idea what I thought this movie was, but it most definitely was not this.

The characters gained no development through the film, the storyline was non-existant, and the most interesting character can be found only in the deleted scenes.

Session 9 was a last-minute addition to the Maythew viewing list due to our local video store having an insanely poor selection. There were about 8 other movies that I would have rather seen that had to be cut from the list, and I'm pretty sure I just ended up hitting 'random page' on wikipedia and landing on this.

The most confusing part of the movie is that it has 'generally positive reviews' all over the internet. Session 9 ruined my chances at Maythew 2: Electric Boogaloo. I am, as they say, disappoint.

Canadian Film Review: Inconceivable (2008)

*
Director: Mary McGuckian
Starring: Colm Feore, Jennifer Tilly

Mary McGuckian’s Inconceivable is a movie with an idea. It gets so caught up in this idea that it kind of forgets to be a movie. To be a movie you need plot and characters or, at the very least, one or the other. You can’t fool me into thinking that there’s a plot that is being moved forward just because you put in a series of fast cuts and fades to white. Nice try though.

Inconceivable takes the test tube baby industry as its subject, pondering just what it means to create a “designer” baby. Patients can choose the hair and eye color of their child, the sex, and even the sexual orientation. In a sense, they’re leaving nothing to chance. In another sense, they’re leaving absolutely everything to chance. Who knows if they’re actually getting what they’ve paid for – and if they don’t, it’s not like babies have a return policy.

All of the patients are conceiving children with the help of Dr. Freeman (Colm Feore). The patients are given ticks, essentially, rather than solid personalities and are frankly so interchangeable that it's a wonder why the story bothers having so many. There’s Frances (Geraldine Chaplin), well past her child-bearing years but in need of having a son to ensure that she and her daughter (Oona Chaplin) get a share of her comatose and dying husband’s estate; Trixie (Sara Stockbridge) who really, really wants a girl; Kay (Kerry Fox) who has a sick child and needs a baby who can act as a donor; Lottie (Andie MacDowell) whose character trait is that she’s really, really horny; Elsa (Donna D’Errico), a newagey lesbian who wants to conceive with her girlfriend; Tutu (Elizabeth McGovern), a high-strung workaholic; and finally Malcolm (Lothaire Bluteau) and Mark (David Alpay), a gay couple having a child via surrogate. That seems like a lot of characters but don’t worry; you won’t actually get to know any of them. There’s also a character played by Jennifer Tilly, whose name completely escapes me and isn’t listed on IMDB.

The success rate with this group of patients is 100%, which goes beyond being unusual and enters into the realm of the impossible. The patients have kept in touch with each other during their pregnancies and exchange photos of their babies which leads Tutu to notice something very odd: all of the babies look exactly the same. She’s heard of another clinic where is was discovered that the doctor running it was actually using his own sperm and that he has subsequently fathered somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 children through his clinic. She wonders, of course, if Dr. Freeman has done the same thing and launches an investigation against him which leads to a result that is surprising to everyone, but most especially Dr. Freeman.

The screenplay, written by McGuckian, is very repetitive. We see the same scene played out between Dr. Freeman and each of his patients – and when I say the same, I mean the exact same words from him with slight variations in terms of the responses of his patients, depending on the character trait they’ve been assigned in lieu of an actual personality. We see multiple versions of the embryo extraction and later implanting scenes, the same thing, over and over for each patient. We see each patient being injected with the drug to promote the sustainability of the embryo. It gets boring very quickly. The film tries to pick up steam towards the end but by then it’s a lost cause; you don’t care and then it gets slapped with a “happy” ending.

The actors do their best to breathe life and vitality into their characters, but they have little to work with. Tilly is the only one who really succeeds, somehow making the film hold still long enough to allow for her character to take on actual dimensions. I do, however, have one nitpick with her character: she’s shelled out tens of thousands of dollars and endured numerous disappointments in her multiple attempts to conceive at Dr. Freeman’s clinic. After the embryo is implanted, what’s the first thing she does? She goes to bar and has a drink and a cigarette. Of course, that makes just about as much sense as anything else in the movie.

Review: Four Christmases (2008)

*

Director: Seth Gordon
Starring: Vince Vaughn, Reese Witherspoon

Beware of renting a movie when you’ve seen virtually everything on offer because you might end up having to endure a film like Four Christmases. Seriously. If this is all there is, find a book to read, go for a jog, break out a board game – do anything else if it means that you won’t be wasting any time on this dreck. You know how sometimes a movie will try to promote itself by capitalizing on the past Oscar wins of its cast? See the movies that the five Oscar winning cast members were rewarded for instead.

Brad (Vince Vaughn) and Kate (Reese Witherspoon) are a happily childless and unmarried couple who revel in each other’s company. They take dancing lessons for fun, enumerating their reasons for not wanting to get married to the other couples in the class (all of whom are engaged), and they play a game where they each create a character and then go separately to a bar where one tries to pick the other up. Every year they come up with a lie to get out of having to spend time with their families at Christmas so that they can go on vacation to some exotic locale. This year it’s Fiji but the airport is fogged in, delaying their flight until the next day. A TV reporter then pops up to ask them how they feel about their holiday plans being delayed, at which point their families know that they’re still in town and available for the festivities.

Both of their parents are divorced, so they have to make four visits. First they go to see Brad’s father Howard (Robert Duvall), who thinks Brad is prissy, particularly in comparison to his two brothers (Jon Favreau and Tim McGraw), who are Ultimate Fighters. Next they go to see Kate’s mom (Mary Steenbergen), where they get roped into playing Mary and Joseph in a Nativity play. Then they go to see Brad’s mom (Sissy Spacek), who is currently living with Brad’s ex-best friend, who tries to reassure Brad by stating that he “never had a sexual thought about your mom until I was 30.” Finally they go to see Kate’s dad (Jon Voight) who doesn’t get to do much besides own the place where several of the conflicts are finally resolved.

The idea for this story isn’t bad and you could make a good movie out of it, the problem is with the execution. For one thing, it seems like the writers came up with a few jokes and then tried to construct a film around it, the result being that the dynamics between the characters are always shifting to suit the needs of whatever joke is being set up and the jokes, as a result, feel incredibly forced. Brad and Kate are so in love and they have such a deep connection that they spend all of their time together, and yet they apparently haven’t ever had a real conversation in the 3 years that they’ve been together. They also, apparently, have never met anyone in each other’s families (although it seems, at least, that Kate has met Howard before) despite the fact that all of their family members live within such a short distance that they can drive to all four houses and visit at each within the span of about half a day.

This being a romantic comedy, there will of course come a crisis that will test the relationship. In this film it comes in the form of Kate deciding that maybe she wants kids after all (how she reaches this decision after nearly concussing one baby, being projectile vomited upon by another, and being tormented in a bouncy castle by her 8-year-old niece is beyond me) and Brad reiterating that he doesn’t see children in his future. Given how little they apparently know each other, they probably shouldn’t be having kids any time soon, but three guesses as to how the film ends. Since you probably only need one, want to use the other two to guess how their families find out? Yeah.

Review: My Life In Ruins (2009)

*
Director: Donald Petrie
Starring: Nia Vardalos, Richard Dreyfuss

Do you hear that sound? It’s the tired gears of this plot grinding away, begging to be put out of their misery. I can’t remember the last time I saw a film where the plot machinery was so clearly visible and where everyone involved seemed to be proceeding with a “let’s just get this over with” attitude. I wasn’t even expecting that much from this, just light, fluffy summer entertainment but I find it difficult to be entertained by things that never aspire to more than the lowest common denominator. The closest this film gets to wit is having a character named Poopy Kakas, who has a nephew named Doody Kakas. Har.

Many years ago, I was counted amongst those who succumbed to the charms of a minor phenomenon known as My Big Fat Greek Wedding. That film, written by and starring Nia Vardalos, an unlikely leading lady to be sure, was charming and funny even if some of its brush strokes were a bit broad. Whatever it lacked in finesse it made up for in heart, and its success was due in no small part to Vardalos’ very relatable persona. Vardalos is still pretty relatable (albeit considerably leaner than in the previous film), but that presents something of a problem here. Because her screen persona is easy to identify with, you end up feeling bad for her because she’s stuck with this material, which seems to have gone straight from first draft to screen without any buffing and polishing in between.

Vardalos is Georgia, a history professor who has lost her university position and is now making ends meets as a tour guide in Greece. Her tours aren’t fun in that she refuses to go to beaches and insists on getting into the actual history of the area in a very detailed way when all the tourists want to do is head to the gift shop. Because she isn’t a crowd pleaser she gets stuck with the bad bus, the bad driver and the bad group, while her rival gets the good bus, the good driver and the group made up of “polite Canadians.” Having spent all my life around Canadians, I have to tell you that if I were on vacation I think I’d rather spend it with the drunk, unintelligible Australians in Georgia’s Group B.

Group B is comprised of a bunch of stereotypes, characters who have tics rather than personalities. One of these characters, Irv (Richard Dreyfuss), gains some dimension as the film wears on, succeeding by the sheer force of Dreyfuss’ will to overcome the hackneyed machinations of the plot. I don’t think this film ever met a cliché it didn’t fall madly in love with, which would be fine if the filmmakers had any understanding of how to incorporate those elements into a story. Instead they’ve built a chain of clichés with nothing around them that you can invest in. I truly believe that a decent film could have been made from the premise of this one, but the writing here is so indefensibly lazy that there is nothing of substance or value to be found in it.

I really don't know what else I can tell you about this movie. The scenery is nice, but I don't know if My Life In Ruins can actually take credit for that. This is a bad movie, plain and simple. Vardalos will be back in theaters next month with her directorial debut I Hate Valentine's Day - I haven't seen it but I feel fairly safe in saying that if you have to see one Nia Vardalos film this year, see that one.

Canadian Film Review: Kardia (2006)

*
Director: Su Rynard
Starring: Mimi Kuzyk

Focus is unquestionably an important part of telling a story, but when that focus is as narrow and singular as it is in Kardia, it suffocates the narrative. This is a film that aspires to be meditative and deep but is so lifeless and stiff that it plays like a bad student film. Its protagonist, in her role as narrator, expresses a lot of ideas about the heart, ideas which I suppose are meant to make the audience reflect on the meaning of life and love and whatever, but it’s all so hollow and trite that all I found myself reflecting on was the fact that I just wasted an hour and a half of my life.

Kardia begins at the end, with Hope (Mimi Kuzyk) walking across a courtyard and collapsing, her heart – which we will find has always been fragile – having given out. She tells us the story of her life: how she was abandoned as an infant and found by a man (Peter Stebbings) who went on to raise her as his own, how he taught her about airplanes and solar eclipses, amongst other things. It’s discovered that Hope has a heart condition that will require an experimental procedure which involves Hope as well as a blood donor having open heart surgery at the same time in order to create a circuit so that the blood goes from the donor, through Hope and back through the donor. Her pseudo-father agrees to be the donor and the procedure is a success. Hope grows up and adores her father, whom we see teaching her various life lessons. All is well... or perhaps not.

What is real and what is not is never certain in this film. We learn that the man Hope refers to as “Dad” was actually a stranger who volunteered to be her donor after seeing her picture in the paper and that he died on the operating table. As a child, Hope constructs a fantasy relationship with this man, whom she knows only through a photograph of the two of them taken just before the operation, and is actually raised by a woman she refers to as Auntie Floorie (Donna Goodhand) who was sent by social services.

In theory I have no issue with this twist of the plot, it’s the execution that bothers me because it’s so sloppy. All Hope has of Dad is that one picture and the memories she has created for herself and when she gets hold of the hospital records and discovers that her donor was an unnamed volunteer, she’s shocked, which would imply that she had no idea that the man in the photograph was not, in fact, her father. However, even in her fantasy version of events where she’s raised happily by Dad, he finds her abandoned in the woods, which would imply that she’s always known that he wasn’t her father. We’re never really clear about what Hope knows and when she knows it, which robs the revelation – if it is a revelation because, again, either she knew or didn’t know that he wasn’t her father - of the impact it should have.

This film fails because it’s a prime example of “tell” rather than “show.” It informs us of emotions rather than evoking them and it reduces whatever warmth might be produced by the fantasy parenting sequences to nothing by being overly clinical in its exploration of the meaning of the heart. There are good ideas here, but the execution is poor.

Canadian Film Review: A Stone's Throw (2006)

*
Director: Camelia Frieberg
Starring: Kristen Holden-Ried

One thing this movie gets right: when the police show up in search of the protagonist, who is in turn vague about the circumstances of their interest when question by his nephew, the nephew goes to his room, Googles his uncle’s name and finds out exactly what’s going on. I think I may have inadvertently clapped when that happened and, if I did, it would have been the first and last time during this ill-conceived exercise in cinematical regurgitation.

The plot is a veritable Frankenstein’s monster of a story, sewing together bits and pieces of You Can Count On Me, Erin Brockovich, and The Shipping News to little purpose. Jack (Kristen Holden-Ried), the wayward brother, shows up one day at his sister’s door and is less than forthcoming about his reasons for coming to town. His nephew (Aaron Webster), who idolizes him, believes that he’s come to town to do an exposé on the local mill, which may or may not be causing health problems for local residents.

The story branches off into several potential plots and subplots, none of which ever really takes off to become something substantial. Jack and his sister argue about their dysfunctional childhood, Jack takes up with his sister’s best friend (Lisa Ray), and the nephew – inspired by Jack – tries to take matters into his own hands and take down the plant on his own. But none of this really means anything – the film plants the seeds for several plots, but doesn’t really let any of them grow. There just isn’t a coherent idea here about what kind of movie this should be.

It would be helpful, at least, if the protagonist was someone you could root for – that’s kind of an essential element of an “activist movie.” Instead we have Jack, a photojournalist and environmental activist whose argument seems to rest solely on the assertion that he’s right and everyone else is wrong. He rails against the residents of the town, calling them short-sighted and “self interested,” for turning a blind eye to the problems stemming from the mill because it’s the town’s primary source of employment. Two problems: Firstly, Jack, as we later learn, is on the run after having set fire to some trailers at a mining site (his justification once again comes down to “I’m right, everyone else is wrong”). When he shows up at his sister’s door and when he later gets his nephew to lie to the police for him, he makes them his accomplices. If these aren’t acts of self-interest, I don’t know what is. Secondly, and I may be biased because I grew up in a small town where the local mill provided a great deal of employment, but I don’t think it’s wrong to not want to shut down the business that’s essentially keeping the town alive. There’s a long field between shutting it down completely and regulating it for the sake of the environment and the health of the workers and residents.

In the end, Jack sees the error of his ways and does the “noble” thing by turning himself in and it’s all very anti-climatic because the narrative just doesn’t build to it. The story is so scattered, the characters so flat and lifeless as they go through the motions, re-enacting scenes from other movies, that you really feel nothing for them either way.

Review: The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)

*
Director: Justin Chadwick
Starring: Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Eric Bana

Even an awful movie tends to have at least one thing in its favour. With that in mind, I’ll state that Kristen Scott-Thomas is pretty good in a small supporting role. However, I wouldn’t recommend it based solely on that. In fact, there are no circumstances in which I would recommend this train wreck of a movie – not if you’re a fan of any of the three principle actors, not if you’re a fan of costume dramas in general, and especially not if you’re a fan of your own will to live, which this film will quickly sap from you.

I won’t bother much with the plot of the film, because I assume that most people are familiar with the basics of the Anne Boleyn story. Besides which I have so many issues with this film that I don’t really want to waste time rehashing the story, which is so ineptly written but which perfectly complements the one-note characters it inflicts upon the world. As portrayed in this film, Henry VIII et al. don’t even seem like they belong in their setting – Gossip Girl, 1526 would have been a more appropriate title. The characters seem too modern in the ways that they relate to one another, which would be fine if the film allowed them any depth at all. As it is, the three main characters can be summed up thusly: Mary = good, Anne = bad, Henry = horny jackass.

The most frustrating thing about The Other Boleyn Girl is that there’s a compelling story buried beneath this one - I mean, Henry VIII’s relationship with and marriage to Anne Boleyn changed the course of British history, causing the split between England and the Catholic church amongst other things – but the film decides instead to treat the British monarchy like the world’s longest running soap opera and it just becomes ridiculous. Henry’s relationship with Mary also has the potential to be interesting, but the film explores it in the most shallow way. She’s married when they meet so he gives her husband and herself positions at court which will require the husband to be largely absent and give Henry easy access to Mary. She becomes his mistress, has his child, and then is abandoned so that he can take up with Anne. Mary is openly prostituted to Henry by her family so that they can gain his favour, and becomes his mistress not necessarily by consent, but simply after he says to her, “Tonight.” If Mary were shown to mind, in the least little bit, that she’s being treated as chattel , this might be a better movie, but instead she doesn’t really seem to give it more than a cursory thought. Her mother (Scott-Thomas) gets it and comments on it, but neither of the Boleyn daughters really seems to have much perspective on her position as it relates to the King.

Unless you’re in a particularly sadomasochistic mood, do not see this movie. For the sake of your own sanity, don’t see this movie.

Review: Southland Tales (2007)

*
Director: Richard Kelly
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake

Dear Richard Kelly,

Just what the fuck was that?

Southland Tales is an absolute mess of a movie based in part on the Book of Revelation and having to do with terrorist attacks, war in the Middle East, various governmental and non-governmental factions spying on and plotting against each other, oil shortage and the development of an alternate source of fuel which causes a rift in the fourth dimension which in turn causes Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) and Rolland Taverner (Sean William Scott) to develop doubles... and some other stuff. It’s kind of hard to say what, exactly, it’s about because it is so unfocused, so muddled and convoluted that any real thread of a story is buried deep, deep within this pretentious and self-indulgent film.

Throughout the film writer/director Kelly mixes elements of science fiction, musical and what he apparently believes to be satire. These satirical inclinations are most obvious through the prevalence of Saturday Night Live and MadTV alumni in the cast, and through the character of Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a porn star, mistress of Boxer, and collaborator with the Neo-Marxists who are working to use Boxer, the son-in-law of the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, to subvert the government. When not helping to set Boxer up, Krysta is busy turning herself into a product by recording her own album (which includes the single “Teen Horniness Is Not A Crime”) and creating her own talk show and energy drink. A lot of the wink-nudge moments in the film come courtesy of her, but even though I don’t think these elements really work, this isn’t a criticism of Gellar herself who is good here and of all the actors seems to have the best grasp of her character. Ultimately, the problem with the film’s aspiration towards satire is that for satire to be effective, it must be clever and this film is not. The comedy in the film is so easy, so lacking in bite that it misses the satirical mark and lands firmly in the realm of parody. In the tradition of films like Epic Movie and Superhero Movie, this might as well have been called David Lynch Movie.

I’m a big fan of Kelly’s previous film Donnie Darko and a firm believer that there are few things more rewarding than a challenging film, but Southland Tales is inaccessible to the point of being ridiculous and to make matters worse, it’s also kind of pointless. Even as I was beginning to lose myself in the film, I felt that there must be some ideas being expressed regarding governmental control, suspension of basic freedoms and Apocalyptic religious preaching, but the more I thought about the film afterwards, the more suspicious I became about its structure. Words and phrases like “Patriot Act” and “civil liberties” are thrown out frequently to make it seem as if the film is actually about something, but the twisting, turning, overlapping plot is just a means of disguising the fact that the film doesn’t really have anything to say. If Kelly’s point is that the Patriot Act is bad and runs contrary to the tenets of democracy, then my response is: no shit. There’s no there there in Southland Tales; it’s just a mish-mash of quirky characters and peculiar moments that add up to nothing.