This week’s 3x3 starts at the 50:00 mark in the Alice in Wonderland podcast. Our choices:
Dingus
3. Crash
2. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Tom
3. Beautiful Mind
2. Spanglish
Kelly Wand
3. The Time Machine
2. Phantom Menace
I’m not against remakes, or reimaginings, or reboots, or whatever. But if you’re going to tackle one of the all time greats, have a reason. I’m not picky. It could be as hacky as “Let’s examine the same themes but with an all black/female/robot cast” It could be “Wouldn’t it be awesome with updated special effects.” (though this is not a free pass either, we really do not need any more King Kongs).
It could be “Let’s redo this Cold War allegory as a middle east tension/global warming allegory, can switching the bogeyman from Communism to Islam/climate change reveal anything interesting?” But just a pretty much shot for shot redo? Why? It’s a no win situation. It cannot possibly surpass the original by being essentially a traced copy of the original, and it’s not weird/wacky/charming enough to be interesting even as a thought experiment.
I dismiss the hand wringing of cultural conservatives when they talk about the entertainment industry being corrupt or evil or whatever, except when I get to this stuff. I just cannot engage with it. I just cannot understand what people are thinking when they fund it, or write it, or film it, or agree to act in it, or pay money to see it. I worry about the people who enjoy it. Reasonable people acknowledge that some speech is so irresponsible or so lacking in social value that it isn’t protected by the first amendment, and while I would never legislate against these kinds of movies, for me personally they cross the line.
There are a lot of movies and TV shows like this, but I saw this one recently and it’s a particular clearly defined version: The plot of this movie is basically two attractive women behaving demeaningly and ridiculously against each other and themselves in order to win the attentions of an unremarkable man.
I predict great things for this thread. And by “great things”, I mean “people who can’t be bothered to elaborate posting lists of movies they don’t like”!
By the way, Hugin, there are some very good movies that have unfortunately been written off as torture porn.
-TomLike Spanglish.
I’ll give him Love Actually. That one was okay.
Congo. Yes, Jurassic Park did well. No, it’s not because of the tight plotting of Michael Crichton. It’s because of fucking awesome dinosaurs and crazy special effects. Seriously, at some point someone should have looked at the gorilla effects for Amy, (pretty gorilla, water, rain drop, wet, pretty gorilla) and the dailies on Tim Curry’s unbelievably amazing acting, and shut the whole thing down.
Push, Based on a Novel by Sapphire. Zach Braff’s worst film yet. A highly misguided disaster from start to finish. I get what he was going for, but Sammo Hung was poorly cast and the bullet time effects were just questionable.*
*I haven’t seen Push, but it’s amazing how easy it’s been to convince people that it was directed by Zach Braff.
Pulp Fiction was the start of it for me. I thought Reservoir Dogs was a really good film (although it feels like it was written for the stage). Pulp Fiction was a technically well-shot film full of ‘cool’ dialogue and ‘rad’ things happening that I just let slide. Kill Bill was Quentin Tarantino writing a terrible love letter to exploitation films (something we should have left behind) and martial arts films. It’s not a good martial arts film. It’s not a good film. It’s just terrible. I can’t forgive the wasting of someone who is so technically gifted (i.e. good at the tech aspects of directing) on dreck like this.
They took an interesting idea from a Spanish film and built a monument around it. That monument happened to be a tomb. A gaudy, vapid tomb at that.
This, for me, is why fan-service is a bad thing. I hate this film, and that’s something I say about very few films. I hate it enough that I will probably never see a film starring Gerard Butler or directed by Zack Snyder again. I actually wish it didn’t exist.
You know what? If the fight scenes had been interesting, if there had been actual choreography instead of the stupid slow-down-speed-up-slow-down then I could write it off as a dumb action film, something to enjoy without thinking about it. That the whole package is so terrible and so serving of “HELL YEAH” sentiment means I can’t.
I’ll give him Love Actually. That one was okay.
Congo. Yes, Jurassic Park did well. No, it’s not because of the tight plotting of Michael Crichton. It’s because of fucking awesome dinosaurs and crazy special effects. Seriously, at some point someone should have looked at the gorilla effects for Amy, (pretty gorilla, water, rain drop, wet, pretty gorilla) and the dailies on Tim Curry’s unbelievably amazing acting, and shut the whole thing down.
Push, Based on a Novel by Sapphire. Zach Braff’s worst film yet. A highly misguided disaster from start to finish. I get what he was going for, but Sammo Hung was poorly cast and the bullet time effects were just questionable.*
*I haven’t seen Push, but it’s amazing how easy it’s been to convince people that it was directed by Zach Braff.
I actually like Reservoir Dogs (although it feels like a play). Pulp Fiction was just a little too full of ‘cool’ dialogue and ‘rad’ scenes but it was okay. Kill Bill is where I lost Mr. Tarantino. Jackie Brown I haven’t actually seen, nor anything since Kill Bill. I sat through both parts looking for something to like. I found nothing but the continuation of unfortunate things (the ‘cool’ dialogue and ‘rad’ scenes) that started in Pulp Fiction. That’s why it’s unforgivable.
Vanilla Sky
They took a good idea, from a Spanish film I still haven’t seen, and built a monument around it. A gaudy vapid tomb, as it happened.
There are probably plenty of films I could level this at, but Vanilla Sky happens to be the worst I can come up with on the spot.
300
I want to write this off as a dumb action film. I did at the time, too. But the action itself swapped choreography with slow-down-speed-up crap and everything else was just terrible. A truly awful film that feels like “HELL YEAH” fan-service taken to stupid extremes. So stupid I actually hate it. I cannot find a single thing in this film that is worthwhile and I now actively avoid anything with Gerard Butler or Zack Snyder attached to it. Something in this film, something about just how diabolical it was, has put me off those two for life.
Good call on A Beautiful Mind, by the way. I thought it was a decent film but I’ve forgotten everything except Russell Crowe chasing pigeons. That’s normally a good indicator of a film being mediocre or bad in retrospect. Anyhow, good call on the way they treat the mental illness there. I looked it up and it turns out the screenwriter’s mother is a psychiatrist and he was worried about people not taking their medication. Odd.
Dingus, good call on The Passion. Coming from the Catholic side, it’s all about the transcendence. The torture etc. is only mentioned as a sort of side-note. That’s the most damning criticism of the film idealogically, that Mel Gibson is coming from an old-school (Pre Vatican II) perspective. Catholics like Mel Gibson who denounce Vatican II tend to be rather hardcore and a little brutal in their beliefs. Hence his highlighting of just how horrific a death it was, which is sort of beside the point. As Tom says, it’s part of the point but not the main thrust of it. I get the feeling Gibson was making a film for people who understood the spirituality and the other aspects but who may not understand just how brutal the Passion actually was. In that respect the film succeeds. But for the bits with Satan and his child I might be fully behind that as the point of the film, but I’m not entirely convinced that it was.
Bahimiron: sorry, old chap.
P.S. I’m in the Martyrs phase of my learning about horror. I’m not looking forward to it.
I edited my entry to add some explanation.
If you’d like to defend some examples in the torture porn genre, feel free, (we may not even agree about the categorization of some movies), or maybe it’s just a gap that cannot be bridged. shrug.
Is utterly, interminably terrible on every conceivable level. It’s like watching a beloved figure from your childhood being strangled with candy floss. Mike Myers’ outfit alone is more terrifying and repugnant than anything in Hostel.
If I’m ever feeling too cheerful I remember this film. It has an irredemeeably mean-spirited and awful plot, laden with sub-Daily Mail Broken Britain hypocrisy. It’s got heavy-handed, dreadful cinematography (we’ve desaturated everything because the plot is sad and bleak DO YOU SEE). There’s terrible acting from pretty much everyone involved. It lasts approximately four hundred years. Oh, and it has Danny Dyer. Danny fucking Dyer.
Desperately nasty and uncool. It’s the film version of the creepy “uncle” nobody likes dancing with the young girls at a wedding, right down to Sly’s idiot slur and rubbish goatee. Ugh.
I also agree wholeheartedly with Phantom Menace and torture porn in general.
EDIT: That’s probably a little harsh on Sly’s voice, which I know he can’t really help. Still, he stands as one of the worst bits of casting ever.
Where are all the chick flicks? There have to be some out there that are so bad they can’t be forgiven as light entertainment. I’m struggling to think of any though. I guess it’s been a while since I had to do that circuit.
Reasonable people would also object to torture porn and eviscerate completely the notion that it is somehow not protected by the first amendment. And possibly ridicule anyone who suggested otherwise. They may then turn around and ridicule the people making torture porn. And the world where this series of discussions happens is a better place than one where it cannot.
And I say this as having not enjoyed any of the last decade or so’s torture porn efforts that I have been exposed to (which isn’t that many). At all. I find what I have been exposed to be utter shit; I don’t know that Saw is a torture porn film per se but I thought it was utter shit too and it seems to have launched a torture porn franchise so I’m tossing it out there. I think they are trading on, in part, an old horror concept of people who are otherwise decent getting caught up in something terrible well beyond their control (well, from what I saw of Hostel 2 it might have also been preying on the “sinners get killed” trope. Bijou Phillips is in that one right? She always plays crazy tramps right? Not saying the character deserved it, merely that it’s not unexpected that such a character would be horribly tortured and killed in a torture porn movie, because horror movies have been lazily trading on that concept since before I was born. And I thought she was tortured. I saw her bound up, I think. In torture porn, that generally leads to torture I assume).
Back to the topic at hand. . .
1. The Messenger - I hated this movie when I saw it in the theater. The scene when Hook is explaining to Lelu that she’s being awfully uppity in assuming she got a sign from god made me inexplicably burst into giggles when he got to the “maybe some dude just tossed the sword into the field” bit. I think it was some sort of tension release, but something about it just struck me as hysterical.
I found it odd that most of the Frenchmen who supported Joan seemed to speak with accents that weren’t French. But that’s not really the end of the world. I was annoyed when the battle scenes kept reuising effects scenes over and over (I think they used the same “round stone ball dropped down through the shoot and crushing attackers” footate like 12 times from different angles). But that’s not the end of the world either, and at times the battle scenes were pretty good. I thought Leluvovitch was awful in the lead. That is especially problematic in a movie about Joan of Arc, because she got like 97% of the screen time. She was some sort of ADHD hyper spaz, yelling half her lines. I’d like to pair this character played by Leluvovitch with Christansen’s Anakin in a movie written by George Lucas. It would be epic.
I thought the political maneuvering scenes driven by Faye Dunaway’s character felt like part of a separate movie. Given the subject matter, they’re really important. The political machinations were significantly inferior in both design and execution than those found in Elizabeth, say (which is perhaps an unfair comparison, I dunno). And certainly will never ever ever been mentioned in the same sentence as the movie who I won’t name because to name it would sully it. I think the question of whether Joan is really getting tweets from God or not is a potentially interesting one. But the movie sort of crammed most of this into the last third/fourth. There were better ways to weave this sub-plot into the movie from the get go. I found The Messenger to be less than the sum of its parts, and its parts were terrible.
I know some people like it. I can’t stand it.
2. Eyes Wide Shut - I’ve had this argument with some Kubrick adherents and they’re probably right and I am probably wrong (I’m not sure I know how rrmorton feels about this one, actually, and would probably enjoy hi take). I maintain there is no edits/rearrangement of footage/adding of scenes that could be performed to make this a good movie (their arguments of course being “Kubrick died and someone else had to pick it up after shooting”). I thought it was ridiculous. When it came out of course I was unhappy that United Statesian theaters would be getting a modified version to do away with the boobs and sex and stuff; not because I desperately wanted to see boobs and sex lol. After seeing the movie, and later some of the unedited scenes, I realized taking the sex out was really a non factor because the movie sucked so hard and I can get better boobs and a better plot from softcore porn on Cinemax (here is an old favorite.
The thing I do like this movie for is it provided me and mine with plenty of nights of password-fueled enjoyment. Password to get beer from the fridge. Password to have someone get you a beer from the fridge. Password for shotgun. Password for “dude, you are too drunk right now, you need to slow down and take a quiet five minutes”. Password to take your turn at darts. Etc. That joke rocked.
Well, “Valentine’s Day” was awful even by the standards of that particular genre. Like, absolutely nothing redeeming about it.
“Swept Away” - the Guy Ritchie romantic comedy starring Madonna was pretty awful as well but I’m not a huge fan of his anyway so I don’t know if it’s unforgivably bad. No, wait, it is.
I’m struggling to think of a third - my movie-watching time is so tight these days that I tend to watch things that I’m predisposed to liking anyway.
I can only think of one off the top of my head, (besides agreeing with everything Hugin said about torture porn,) as I can usually find something redeemable about any movie.
Year One. How could so many people who are normally so funny come together to make a movie that sounds funny on paper, but is so incredibly unfunny in every way on screen?
I’ve been thinking about this all week, and I have come up with my top three movies for which There Can Be No Forgiveness.
As Good As It Gets. This is a movie about awful people doing unpleasant things to each other. Oh, not as aggressively unpleasant as ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’, but then that movie never pretends to be anything it wasn’t. ‘As Good As It Gets’, on the other hand, seems to want you to think it’s a movie about a quirky little man who woos and captures the heart of a hardworking woman. But no, it’s the Jack Nicholson character is antisocial and hateful and chases an abrasive what’s her name from Mad About You and making fun of good old gay Greg Kinnear. I didn’t like any of these people and was ready for them to go away after the first ten minutes.
Requiem for a Dream. This choice will probably be the one that earns me a few ‘you just don’t get it’ responses. So be it. If watching people sink into drug-, infection-, and loneliness-induced misery is not getting it, then I’ll settle for my blissful ignorance. Look, it’s got some good performances and interesting shots (though the weird cuts did give me a weird feeling of vertigo at times), I just don’t want to see what they’re showing me.
Sorry, no imdb link for the last one because I can’t (or wont’) remember the title. Something about a mermaid found in the sewer, it’s a Japanese gorefest and it actually made me hate life for a little while. Why would this be created? There’s no plot, just a dude finding a girl in the sewer then painting while she rots (and you get lots of opportunities to watch her rot). No plot, just this.
The sex scene from Spanglish is on youtube ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhq_T2RyLpg ) and god is it painful to watch.
Guinea Pig part four, Mermaid in a Manhole. The other ones aren’t a whole lot better. My favorite would have to be…
Gigli - Seriously you can’t make a list like this and not kill the phenomenon that was Bennifer
Hostel 2 - One of the most egregious examples of the torture porn genre with no redeeming qualities what so ever.
Rom Coms - Hmmmm need to think on this one. There are so many bad ones to pick from.
Can I just issue a blanket statement that if your RomCom starred Jennifer Lopez, Matthew McConaughey, or Kate Hudson you likely sucked.
“I’m sorry guys, my lists aren’t very good and my picks aren’t very good, and let’s just get this over with!”
Come on, Mr. Wand! Give yourself a little credit. This was an awesome 3x3.
What, is that Monty Hall’s version of Dirty Harry?
Actually, this is not a bad topic. You guys talked about it forever. I can think of lots of movies that may apply. Here’s my top three:
Nutty Professor (and all sequels) starring Eddie Murphy. Years later I am still mad at myself for not walking out of this god awful, insulting piece of shit. Not only does Murphy waste our time wearing a fat suit and making fart jokes, but he insists on playing like every single character so he can wear 6 different fat suits and make that many more fart jokes.
Elephant from Gus Van Sant. The aforementioned shot for shot remake of Psycho is a contender, but at least Psycho has like a plot and a point, even even they were simply from the original. Elephant simply has no reason for being. It offers no insight into anything. It meanders for hours without structure or interest. The characters are barely there and it couldn’t be a more facile examination of school shootings if it tried.
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas live action film starring Jim Carey. Why does Hollywood insist on taking the perfection and poetry of something like the classic animated musical version of this only to warp it into some obscene, garish, inhuman monstrosity?