Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

Starring: Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, James Dodd, Seth McFarlane, Jeffrey Tambore, John Hurt, Luke Goss

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Writers: Guillermo del Toro, Mike Mignola

Studio: Universal

I really like Hellboy. I own the graphic novels, the toys, and saw both movies. I thought the first film was uneven, but it was a valiant effort to adapt a tricky property. The comic book's a very mannered affair that doesn't translate visually or storywise to film. This forces the movies to be somewhere between Ghostbusters and Men in Black with a fantasy backbone. Hellboy and his friends crack wise and do battle with a hoard of beautiful looking monsters in our world and the underworld.

It's a difficult balance to maintain when a film has so much going on. It's a film that deals with growing up, being different, golden robots, relationships, drunken monster men, cheap Mexican beer, anti-German sentiment, and the bureaucracy of the man. It succeeds most of the time, but when the film fails, it falls with a pronounced thud. Abe Sapien is a wonderful foil for Hellboy, but he's a complete dud as the star of his own subplot. His romance with an exiled princess just doesn't carry the weight the film wants it to have. It feels forced, and it drags the film down. It's a little too operatic for the blue collar protagonists.

However, Hellboy's relationship with his girlfriend Liz is a strong source of comedy and bickering; it works because they play it mostly funny but keep a core a real emotion in there. That nugget of real emotion drives most of the film's gags, fights, and set pieces; when the film looses that nugget, it weakens.

Writing: Pretty good. I would say it's tighter than the previous film. The dialogue is funnier and the plot is more focused. The villains sound a bit too much like generic fantasy characters, but that's mostly the point. They also provide a great contrast to the very modern style of the protagonists.

Directing: Del Toro and company have created a great look for the film.

Acting: Perlman is excellent as the lead. He was the best about the first movie, and he doesn't dissapoint. He has a certain rough charm as Hellboy that really works on screen, and he can sell it quite well through the make up. He and Doug Jones do an uproarious drunk male bonding scene together that must have been difficult to make seem laid back after a combined 7 hours of makeup between the two of them.

Speaking of which, the cast works together quite nicely, despite most of them being covered in makeup and posthetics. Also, some of them have voice actors doing the dialogue with someone else in the body suit. Somehow, Seth McFarlane and Perlman have a good chemistry despite not being on the set together.

Selma Blair does a good job, and Jeffrey Tambore brings the funny when he gets the chance.

Editing: I could have done without Abe making googy eyes for like fifteen minutes, but otherwise, a decent job.

Sound: Some great little noises for all the creatures, monsters, and magic; it sounded believable.

Soundtrack/Score: Good mood music with some great soundtrack singles. It was also quite nice to hear The Eels in a movie.

Self-Awareness: Yes, it's a weird fucking movie that revels in it's own weird. It also knows how to laugh at the sheer untamed bizarre it's filled with.

Overall Rating: When it works it's wonderful, but a few scenes are definitely better used as bathroom breaks rather than entertainment.

-Pete

Batman and Robin

Starring: George Clooney, Chris O'Donnel, Alicia Silverstone, Uma Thurman, Arnold Schwarzenegger
Director: Joel Shumacher
Writer: Akiva Goldsman
Studio: Time Warner

Do you see Uma Thurman's face in this picture? She's broken, exhausted, and little stupid; this is what watching Batman and Robin does to people. I reviewed the funniest Batman movie every made; it stars Adam West. This film wants to be that film so badly that it hurts, but like any pathetic wannabe, it just tries and fails like a baby bird with one wing. It isn't funny; it's just sad. The near fatal shift in tone for the Batman franchise reaches its nauseating climax here. Batman Forever taught the studio that a cheesy, hideous looking Batman film could make more money and get better reviewed than a dark one. Here is the attempt to take that formula and push it as far as possible.

Nothing mature happens in this film; it's all product placement for happy meal toys, action figures, and credit card companies. Don't forget Batman pulls out a credit card that says fucking, "Batman," on it. I have nothing against a funny Batman story. I love Adam West's take on the character and all that entails, Joker's Millions is a great Batman story from comic books published fifty years ago that's fucking hilarious (yes, Batman is in other things besides movies). The real problem with this film is that it isn't funny; it tries and fails at humor repeatedly with awful puns and contrived visual gags that never deliver a real laugh from the audience.

Then there are the attempts to create drama in the film. Batman and Robin's family dynamic, Alfred's sickness, and Mr. Freezes attempts to save his wife might have worked in a movie that didn't have dancing gorillas, wacky sound effects, horrible puns, Alicia Sylverstone street racing, Batman's credit card, and that dog that gets frozen just before it mictorates on a hydrant. It's insande to think that anyone intended any portion of this film at actually come close to pathos.

Direction: Joel tries and fails to incorporate some heavy CGI into this movie. It might not have aged well, but I doubt the opening sky diving sequence with butterfly Mr. Freeze every looked good. The film really emphasized Shumacher's limitations; he's so bad at creating mood in scenes that he can't even do broad superhero slapstick. I also could have lived without the closeups of Batman and Robin's tight rubber clad crotches and butts. I hear this is a kid's movie Joel or at least a kid's toy commercial.

Most of his attempts at atmosphere are just huge uninteresting wastes of money. He actually cost the production millions of dollars by getting refrigerated sets so you could see the actors breath in Mr. Freeze scenes. Sadly, the lighting was done wrong, and it wasn't visible. He could have just saved everyone the trouble and just burned a pile of millions of dollars and filmed that. I swear that might look cool in a Batman movie.

Writing: Akiva Goldsman might be the anti-christ. The dialog alone in this script is enough to turn the moon to blood and summon the four horsemen. His attempts at comedy consist of puns so bad that Mr. Peabody would slap you in the face for uttering them. (If you don't know who Mr. Peabody is, that's minus 25 Canary points.) The sheer number of puns involving ice, winter, chilling out, staying cool, kicking ice, etc. that come out of Arnold's mouth make me wonder if he was even trying. What do I know? He has an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, but he also did Lost in Space. I don't like any of the scripts for these movies, but somebody sure does. I think that somebody needs a tire iron to the face.

Acting: Clooney is alright, but he could be a million times funnier with something better to work with. Arnold has the worst lines of his career and a costume that even he complained about limiting his acting ability; I can't be too mad at him. He admits he wasn't at the top of his game. Uma plays her role like a drag queen which comes very close to ruing the entire film by her self; it's astonishing how repulsive she as the film's tongue-in-cheek sex pot. Chris and Alicia give performances that killed their respective careers; they should have run for the hills after reading the damn script. The writing and the acting have the same problem, for the most part, none of these people are right for a comedy like this. They can't carry it to the fucking curb, let alone for two hours.

Editing: The editor made the mistake of letting any of this footage survive.

Sound: Lots of stupid cartoon sound effects.

Soundtrack/Score: They milk Danny Elfman's score and upgrade to be even gaudier than before, and the Smashing Pumpkins song is cool.

Self-Awareness: Everybody knows they are making a joking Batman film, but they have no idea that it isn't funny at all.

Overall rating: Fuck this goddamn turd and the hell spawn that birthed it.
-Pete

Batman: The Movie

Starring: Adam West, Burt Ward, Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin, and Lee Meriwether
Director: Leslie H. Martinson
Writer: Lorenzo Semple Jr.
Studio: Twentieth Century Fox

I take comedy very seriously; it takes real skill to be funny on a regular basis. In this manufactured camp classic, every line of dialog, set, gesture, and costume choice are deliberate attempts to celebrate and ridicule the bizarre superhero comics of the fifties and sixties.

Every set is full of bizarre details in the background that require a pause button to take in; it's a staggering commitment to an aesthetic for a film created before vcr and dvd. The baroque nature of the humor yields new treasures with every viewing. Your second viewing points out the ridiculous pattern in the lining of the Riddler's jacket. Your third shows you that Catwoman's room is marked by a pretty pink ribbon and not a cat. It goes on and on.

Writing: The writing is tight. The plot is supposed to be ridiculous, the characters eccentric caricatures, and the dialog mannered and absurd. It's supposed to be exactly the opposite of hip, and it's as ironic as Stephen Colbert waving an American flag while the nation sinks into the sea.

Direction: Strong direction that works well around the budget constraints. It also helps that the film's aesthetic is supposed to look cheap so the director can dwell on the rubber sharks and cheap camera tricks that create the film's special effects.

Acting: Growing up watching with reruns of Adam West as Batman on basic cable has spoiled me. I grew up eating dinner in the living room with my little brother watching him and Burt Ward trying to foil Egg Head, False Face, King Tut, or some equally bizarre celebrity guest villain. It also makes me pissy when people my age only know him from Family Guy. The man has been doing brilliant comedy since my father was 5 years old. He can bring a mock seriousness to dialog that just floors me every time. Few things sound as equally serious and ridiculous as when Adam West says them, and Burt Ward provided the perfect foil for West. His voice is a comfortable old couch that my ears love to lay upon; it sturdily anchors the film as it bounces along waves of excess.

The excess comes in the form of the guest villains; we get some great lunacy coming from Romero, Meriwether, Meredith, and Gorshin. It's like watching the Harlem Globetrotters play; the ball goes from player to player so each can showboat rather than win the game. It's all about who can throw the most flair in front of the camera while looking a like a damn fool. Burgess Meredith is wearing furry gloves; he has muppet fingers, a monocle, and a cigarette holder. Gorshin is wearing a purple girdle, and Romero didn't shave his mustache. It lurks beneath his makeup crushing the suspension of disbelief with every closeup and well lit scene. It appears like they had a lot of fun filming this; I would like to think so at least. It just seems like a perfectly good waste of a rocket umbrella if you aren't enjoying the ride.

Editing: Nice abrupt cuts between wacky set pieces, and who could forget that gorgeous spinning logo. It's a tight film, and like the best comedies, it remembers that a good joke never overstays its welcome.

Soundtrack/Score:Crazy big band with blaring horns and wacky little musical ticks. A fun cartoony score that keeps things bouncy.

Self-Awareness: It plays it completely straight, but don't let that fool you. This film is self aware of every second of every frame.

Overall Rating: 5 stars because it's a perfectly executed comedy.
-Pete

Postal

Starring: Zach Ward, Dave Foley, Jackie Tohn
Directed by: Uwe Boll
Written by: Uwe Boll and Bryan C. Knight
Studio: BOLL KG

We all know who Uwe Boll is, no introduction is necessary. Nor does one need to preface a review of any of his movies with anything but "This comes from the guy that directed Alone in the Dark". From that alone you know you're in for some brain damage.

What you probably didn't know, though, is that Uwe Boll can be fairly entertaining on his own - especially when he's drinking a 40. I got to witness as much when I attended the free CSW screening of Postal. I also got to learn that Mr. Boll is, in fact, apeshit and thinks of himself as a maverick filmmaker fighting the good fight against those "fat executives in Alabama". That's right, Alabama.

Postal is the next, and possibly one of the last, detris-ladden installment of the Uwe Boll Video Game Super Fun Action series and, I have to get this off my chest as early as possible, the first act of the movie contains some of the better directing he's ever done. Kudos Uwe, it's still totally unimaginative and conventional, but at least we got to see the principal characters in principal shots minus any inserted video from the original game (a la House of the Dead) or see supposedly dead characters start to get up while the film's still rolling (a la Alone in the Dark). But the rest of the movie is shit: shoot out after shoot out, bad delivery after bad delivery, and what can only be thought of as the single worst homage to Casablanca at the end, which was almost immediately preceeded by a "homage" (i.e. a demonstration in Boll's arrested directed ability) to Boll's mindblowingly longwinded final us-vs.-them scene in House of the Dead.

Direction aside, the movie's story centers on the main character, Dude, not to be confused with this upstanding fellow, who is having a really really bad day. I mean, a really really really REALLY bad day. So bad that more than a third of the movie is devoted to just showing how bad of a day he is having, rather than adulterating such scenes (e.g. Dude having a shitty job interview, Dude getting harassed by a guido and even Dude escaping a massacre at the welfare office) with, you know, plot. That's not pacing, that's just Uwe. I guess you could say the movie's ultimately about Dude's transcendence of trailer-trash life and his acceptance of life as a badass, but that's getting way too analytic for something like this.

To be fair though, there is a plot to Postal: the Taliban wants to stick Bird Flu in some very sought-after dolls and eliminate the Western Hemisphere in a plague-to-end-all-plagues while Dude's cousin, a charlatan that runs his own religious compound, wants to get his hands on the very same dolls so as to sell them on eBay and pay off one million dollars in overdue taxes. Once Dude formulates and executes a heist for his cousin and, simultaneously, Osama bin Laden's forces encroach on the same German-themed amusement park (where the last order of dolls rest), the two bands of thieves collide - HILARITY ENSUES. Not really. Just a bunch of violence and boxom broads running around with guns and bad child-murder jokes.

You see, that's what's wrong with this picture, and much of what Uwe produces. Yes, we all love tits and explosions, along with some trashy jokes - that's an integral part of the escapism of postmodern cinema (I find). Sometimes, goddammit, we don't want grand, enlightening themes or characters we can easily assign simple normative values (+/-) to. I mean, fuck, we just want to see characters have fun and give into some baser but ultimately more natural inclinations. But that doesn't mean we'll swallow brazen images of jugs and gunshot wounds in just any old fashion way. (S)Exploitation films have been around since the '70s and for someone not to acknowledge those older manners of approach to such material (that is, not to rehash them over and over again) and try delivering these seedier elements to us with fresh plots or direction or characterization is kind of insulting. Perhaps Uwe doesn't know about these ancestral movies. Or if he has, maybe he thinks he's "updating" them by "integrating" content from the newer media of video games. But neither is an excuse for shoddy filmmaking; in these cases, he's either ignorant or deluded.

Writing: Uwe wrote this in conjunction with his assistant director, which helped in that his assistant director is American but not so much a writer as a hack. Dialog is rarely paced well and while there are some persistent story elements and a few true plot points, it doesn’t sustain anything close to a narrative or even a rebellion against traditional structure: in other words, it just blows.

Direction: Again, the first act shows some limited understanding of space and camera work. Nothing Guillermo del Toro wouldn’t have known when he was 7.

Acting: Feh. We know Uwe couldn't do shit with high caliber actors before Postal…

Editing: Some scenes are fucking ridiculously long and annoying and GRRRR.

Sound: Nothing of note. I guess the gunshots sounded like gunshots.

Soundtrack/Score: There was one song I liked in the first act – so I guess this was better than Speed Racer in at least one regard.

Self-Awareness: Uwe Boll actually has a short role playing himself during the doll extraction scene at the German amusement park. And he manages to poke fun at himself (e.g. he says something like “As you know, I fund my movies with Nazi gold…”), but he’s such a terrible actor that it all falls flat. Nice try.


Overall rating: *

~Ian

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

Starring: John Cho, Kal Penn, Neil Patrick Harris is there too for like 7 minutes.
Directed by: Jon Hurwitz
Written by: Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg
Studio: Kingsgate

I remember the first H&K movie fondly. It had its shortcomings (dahh, they wanna go to White Castle because they're blazed) but poked fun at racism and grass-chiefin' stereotypes in a youthful and witty fashion. And there was references galore to those delicious, bowel-obliterating hamburgers that I love/hate.

This sequel, now afforded the luxury of a plot and larger budget, manages to blow it and blow it hard. And there's not a slider in sight.

Before settling into Mean_Critic_Mode, let me take a moment to be straight (forward?) with you, kind viewer: I was blazed when I saw this flick. Like flying. I walked into the Burbank AMC theater faded on top of the line tree: "3rd eye". (Mad props to Wattz for the hook up by the way) And off of a two-foot glass bong no less. So, you could have misspelled 'there' as t-h-e-i-r on an ex parte notice and I would have laughed my ass off. Also, I think there was still some OxyContin (R) still floating about in my brain - with that shit, I'd pop a smile even while watching the last act of Pay it Forward with a bunch of lugubrious sixteen year old girls.

Yet, I left this movie having smiled a handful of times and laughed once. And that laugh came in the first act. And the set up for it wasn't exactly Aristocrats-calibre: Kumar produces a bong in the cramped bathroom from miscellaneous parts he somehow got on the plane, ends up coming out with it in hand, and uninformed old people mistaken it for a bomb. The end, of laughter.

The vast majority of the movie consists of a series mish-mosh of goofy yet unfunny and rehashed bits. Let's see: Incest humor? Check. Run in with Ku Klux Klan? Check. General stereotyping of southerners? Check. Over-the-top federal agent hot on the case? Check [also, who the fuck finds Rob Corddry funny anyway?]. SHIT MAN BOOMERS = COMPLETE DISTORTION OF ONE'S PERCEPTION OF REALITY WHOOOOOOAAAA? Check.

Even NPH's scenes disappoint: the hilarious asshole side of Doogie Howser previously displayed some how spoiled in the interim and we're now left with some slurring guy tooling around. Then again, how long can one milk the joke anyway? I hope NPH doesn't do the third one. And finally treated, like finding via your tongue the razor embedded in a candy apple, to a HURR PRESIDENT BUSH HURRRrr scene, I felt like I was back watching the shitty 2005 season of SNL. Not to mention they're in Amsterdam for only 8 minutes of screen time, and in Guantanamo Bay even less. The escape itself was about 2 minutes. What I would have named the movie? Harold and Kumar: Dicking Around in the "South" But Who Cares.

So here's your rundown:

Writing: Jokes are half baked or completely rehashed.

Direction: It's a "comedy" about two minorities that happen to be stoners and stalkers, who'd expect any shots to blow their mind? The Amsterdam parts were shot on location though - made me nostalgic.

Acting: NPH totally phoned it in. Shame. Penn consistently plays the same character he plays in everything, from Superman Returns to House.

Editing: Should have been shorter. Like, a hour shorter.

Sound: Boy, I sure did hear the water splash when Kumar took that shit at the beginning of the film, mmhmm.

Soundtrack/Score: ?

Self-Awareness: One joke (in the scene after the credits no less) where NPH's godlike status is further cemented, but nothing else. Another manner it which it paled to the original.

Overall rating: * 1/2

Also, don't do drugs kids...until your brain fully develops. Hit me up when you're eighteen.