Beautiful is a rather strong word

Beautiful-CreaturesOne of the most repeated complaints about Hollywood is its lack of originality. (Others include: It’s too liberal, it’s too conservative, it’s homophobic, it’s pro-gay, it’s too populist, it’s elitist, and so on.) Considering the number of remakes, reboots, and rip-offs of great or popular movies we’ve been offered in recent years – from Clash of the Titans to Footloose, from The Amazing Spiderman to The Bourne Supremacy, and Harry Potter wannabes from The Seeker to Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief – this criticism is not unfounded. With the exceptional financial, if not artistic, success of the Twilight films, supernatural teen romances have shown up everywhere. It’s how we got The Vampire Diaries and Red Riding Hood. And it’s how we ended up with Beautiful Creatures. The authors of the book the film is based on even brag about its similarities to other work, hyping a quote from School Library Journal claiming, “Give this to fans of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight or HBO’s True Blood series, and they will devour all 600-plus pages of this teen Gothic romance.” The good news is that the movie is neither extremely long, nor terribly acted, nor soft core horror porn. Continue…

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Just die already

A-Good-Day-to-Die-HardIn case you forgot, the reason we have Bruce Willis is Die Hard, John McTiernan’s ridiculously entertaining 1988 action film about a wise-cracking lone cop trying to save his wife from a hostage-taking gang of criminals in an LA skyscraper. (Yes, it was his Emmy-winning role in Moonlighting that got him Die Hard, but Die Hard is what made Willis a movie star.) There have been four sequels, two in the 90s that were not as great as the original but were still funny and thrilling popcorn films. Then they rebooted the franchise in 2007 with Live Free or Die Hard, which was absurdly plotted and featured equally absurd action sequences, such as a chase scene between a fighter jet and a car and a bunch of highway overpasses. It was a great ride, and I loved it. I was thrilled that they decided to make another Die Hard, but A Good Day to Die Hard is unfortunately the worst of the series.

Like the previous movies in the series, the plot of A Good Day to Die Hard is jumpstarted by the familial duties of John McClane (Willis). In this version, he is trying to reunite with his estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney), who has been arrested for murder in Moscow. As John travels from New York to Russia, we discover that Jack is not the ne’er-do-well John seems to think he is; rather he’s a CIA agent charged with rescuing a Russian political prisoner. Because it’s a Die Hard movie and Die Hard movies don’t operate in the real world, John runs into Jack as Jack is trying to make his getaway with the prisoner, Komarov (Sebastian Koch). Then there is a really long chase scene through the streets and highways of Moscow. One thing leads to another, and we end up at Chernobyl. Continue…

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One of the Side Effects is sleepwalking

628x471The fake Ablixa causes sleepwalking. Which seems to be what Soderbergh was doing while directing the movie.

Steven Soderbergh has announced that Side Effects will be his last Hollywood film. At 50, he’s done; he’s said that he’s going to turn to painting and, maybe, directing television. But after directing Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Out of Sight, The Limey, Traffic, Erin Brockovich, Oceans 11, Che, The Informant, and Magic Mike, I would want to go out with a bang. Side Effects is a whimper. It’s basically a long, relatively well-acted Law & Order episode, complete with discussions of double jeopardy and a “shocking” but offensively retrograde ending. Continue…

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The bodies get warmer

Warm-Bodies-kThis was pretty delightful. Great soundtrack, too.

This winter, two of my students are writing research papers on why zombies are such a popular topic in media culture. And what they’ve taught me is that, while horror trends come and go for all sorts of reasons, zombies stories, with their mindless mobs chasing lone survivors, tend to reference cultural anxieties about pending invasions; for much of second half of the 20th century, it was about the Cold War, and since then it’s been about the fear of some mixture of globalism and out-of-control viruses. Even when the zombie story is very well done – the remake of Dawn of the Dead, or 28 Days Later, or The Walking Dead – dread and hopelessness are so central to that plot that I become unnerved. So badly, in fact, that I walked out of Dawn of the Dead and stopping watch The Walking Dead after the first season. But hope and love are the central themes in the zombie romance Warm Bodies, and that is why I liked it so much. Continue…

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I had a sad

jeremy-renner-gemma-arterton-hansel-gretel-witch-huntersIt’s like they didn’t even try.

I used to love to write bad reviews. Back in the late 90s, when I was lucky enough to review movies for Newsweek.com, I was actually only lucky to get the stuff none of the real critics would bother with: crappy teen comedies, really weird foreign films, and second and third-rate action movies. Every week I would figure out new ways to trash them; I was thrilled when someone said, “Ted’s review is scathing.” One of my proudest moments was when Yahoo! News published a story about the wretched reviews of Battlefield Earth and quoted mine in the introduction and conclusion of the article.

Now, as I approach 40, I find very little pleasure in that sort of negativity, even in those nearly pyrotechnic slams that some critics (like The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane or The Austin Chronicle’s Marc Savlov) specialize in. Either it’s the antidepressants, an overload of empathy, or just simple maturity, but I don’t really want to participate in the blood sporting free-for-all that occurs whenever Lindsey Lohan or Michael Bay make a movie. Now, instead of seeing a bad movie and giddily imagining how I can shred it in print, I get sad. Continue…

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