A Tale of Two Finales, Part I — Lost

It's not that the series finale of Lost was "bad," exactly, so much as that it was the worst imaginable finale for the show and perhaps one of the worst of all time, including shows that ended with unceremonious cliffhangers after sudden cancellation. It's one of the infinitesimally few examples since I started following popular fiction around 1989 that the theories and endings that random schmucks on the street came up with turned out to be vastly superior to the real thing. James "Sawyer" Ford himself would be proud of the con that Lost pulled off; a pulpy soap opera that successfully masqueraded for years among critics and awards shows as serious television.

The Lost faithful will continue to whine and wheeze and gnash their teeth at anyone who points this out, of course, but it's all good. It's hard to believe today, but some of you might remember that back in 1999 when The Phantom Menace came out anyone who set a critical foot into any Star Wars message board was chased out with pitchforks and death threats. Some fanboys literally took years to admit the truth. Lost fans are struggling with their disappointment the same way that Star Wars fans did a decade back, but it's cool, I'll wait for them. I have no problem being ahead of the curve.

FULL SERIES SPOILERS AHEAD!!
(Advance warning — this entire entry is written for Lost veterans only and will be borderline-gibberish to the uninitiated.)

Lost has always been a nonlinear show (to a fault in season three when they ran out of new backstories for the characters and fell into a monotonous rut) — flashbacks, flashforwards, gratuitous time travel, and in the last season after Juliet set off the nuclear bomb in the fifth season finale, flash-sideways. An alternate reality exploring the lives of all the castaways in a world where the mysterious island was submerged and forgotten at the bottom of the sea. It was an ingenious gimmick, applying a classic science fiction trope to a beloved mythology, which became more fascinating still when the characters in the alternate universe began seeing flashes of the world of the Oceanic 815 crash and mysterious island that they came from. The show seemed to be building towards a truly epic climax.

Unfortunately, it was all a trick. And not a fun one either, but a really nasty and meanspirited one, like what the popular kids did to Sissy Spacek at the end of Carrie. The alternate reality that we spent probably a good five or six combined hours of Lost's final season languishing around in, complete with plot twists, action scenes, romance, and cliffhangers, was just fucking purgatory the entire time. All the main characters were just screwing around in the afterlife and the characters that only existed in purgatory, namely Jack and Juliet's son, were apparently just soulless, lifeless automatons, which is incredibly creepy and the furthest imaginable thing from the heartwarming revelation that showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse seemed to believe it to be.

The show ends with all the characters ascending to heaven, which is extremely literally one of the mock endings I would joke about with people throughout the show's run, as in "as long as Lost doesn't end with it all turning out to be Vincent the dog's dream or the cast ascending to heaven, I'll be okay with it; just kidding, they would never in a million years actually do something that stupid."

Now I'm not talking about religion here — you don't give a shit about my religious beliefs any more than I give a shit about yours, nor should you — but I'm just talking about the most basic component of telling a story. You know, storytelling. They tricked us into believing that the alternate universe and the hours upon hours we spent in flash-sideways were pertinent to the story being told on the main island and the primary mythology and that the two stories would tie together in some kind of satisfying way, which they weren't and they didn't. It was just time-wasting bullshit, some of the worst wheel-spinning filler this side of that episode where they revealed the origins of Jack's tattoos. If they really wanted to end Lost with the characters going to heaven then it could have just as easily been a five-minute epilogue at the end, instead of the terrible, terrible waste of time that the better part of season six ended up being.

I mean, sure, I was surprised by the revelation, which slavish Lost cultists will tell you is enough. But surprise is not by default good. You'd be pretty fucking surprised if a deranged crackhead came around the corner and stabbed you in the spleen with an AIDS-infected shiv. That doesn't make it a wonderful ending.

But the one silver lining to this agonizingly stupid twist is that in rendering the flash-sideways utterly meaningless, it also renders them utterly skippable. Fastforward through them on DVD and you absolutely will not miss anything whatsoever. They have no pertinence and no meaning — in fact, they actively gut the power of scenes like Jin, Sun, and Sayid's deaths by showing them happy as clams as soon as one scene later. A version of season six on DVD that simply edits them out entirely would be fantastic. I might even consider watching it again one day. I'm as likely to rewatch the purgatory subplot as I am to rewatch Disaster Movie.

But that's not to say that Lost's final season is immune to criticism beyond the purgatory subplot; ignoring it merely increases a C- season of television to something around a B-. And that's not comparing it to genuinely artistic shows like Mad Men or Friday Night Lights (which, by and large, drooling Lost fanboys will hilariously still tell you that Lost is better than); even concurrently airing pulpy genre shows like the third season of Chuck and the first season of Spartacus: Blood and Sand presented more coherent and satisfying narratives (although I will grant that season six of Lost is many times over preferable to season four of Heroes).

What the primary island storyline of the final season did is reveal that at no point during Lost's run was it ever a science fiction show. Thousands of websites and critics that had casually referred to it as sci-fi for years wound up with egg on their collective faces. Don't get too hung up on all the mysterious research teams and sonic barriers and time travel theory and alternate realities, because Lost was always fantasy all along. Not even pseudoscience like Back to the Future or The Matrix, but straight-up wizards-and-unicorns stuff, no different than Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.

You wanna know the solution to Lost? Okay, buckle in. There's a pool of magic at the center of the island called the Heart of the Island. What is the smoke monster? A man who fell into the pool of magic hundreds of years ago and turned into a monster. Who is Jacob? A man who was made immortal hundreds of years ago to protect the pool of magic. Why did the plane crash? Because all the main characters are candidates to replace Jacob. What are the numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42, which I am deeply ashamed to say I know by heart)? The numbers assigned to the candidates. What was the DHARMA Initiative? A team of scientists on the island to research the pool of magic. Who are the Others? A crew of island dwellers dedicated to protecting the pool of magic. What caused the island's healing powers, lethal pregnancies, time travel, electromagnetic bursts, visions of the future, and other inexplicable phenomena? The pool of magic did it. Why is Richard Alpert immortal? Jacob did it with his pool-granted magic powers. What are the whispers on the island? Ghosts. Why does Walt have magic powers and why do the Others want him so badly? Who the fuck knows, they never explain it! (Note to any Lost fanboys reading this: If I got any of that wrong, please, for the love of god, don't bother correcting me. I don't care. Seriously.)

Some Lost fans will argue that the pool of magic is highly concentrated electromagnetism and thus still falls into the soft sci-fi milieu, which I guess could explain the research teams and pool guardians and, if you use your imagination, even time travel, but ghosts and immortality-granting superpowers? Please. It's magic. And I don't like the revelation that what I happily believed to be a science fiction show for years was in fact fantasy any more than I liked the revelation that the Force in Star Wars, something I happily believed to be fantasy for years, was in fact sci-fi (inasmuch as a bunch of bugs in your bloodstream is science). I'm relieved that they did offer an answer to the nature of the smoke monster, but the answer left me wanting.

Holy shit, don't bring any of this up on any Lost forum or Lost thread on any TV message board, though! There's a minor war going on throughout the internet, you see, between people who were disappointed by the resolution of Lost and can easily and coherently explain in the context of the show how it failed as a piece of storytelling, and the people who claimed to love every second of it and respond to the first group exclusively with some mixture of insisting that anyone who didn't like it "didn't understand" the show's simplistic narrative, incoherent strings of ad hominem attacks, and, most laughably, parroting Lindelof and Cuse's explanation that it was "always about the characters."

Red lights should have gone off in everyone's heads when the showrunners began insisting between seasons five and six that Lost was "always about the characters," clearly covering their asses before the fact. Should have, but didn't, of course, because the mix of fanaticism, near-religious devotion, and rage at anyone who doesn't match them in these qualities among hardcore Losties puts the even the most insufferable Trekkies, Whedonites, and Harry Potheads to shame. Hell, even Twihards aren't as bad as Losties — they love horrible shit, sure, but by and large they've accepted the scorn of the world at large and are happy to love their horrible shit, while hardcore Lost fans continue to fly into a rage at the unthinkable notion that anyone doesn't love their fantasy teevee show. So they've predictably embraced the party line and are now full-throatedly crying out that it was "always about the characters" and that they never cared, at all, about coherent and satisfying solutions to the show's many mysteries, claiming that anyone who did is a nitpicky asshole who just didn't get Lost, man.

It is, of course, a lie. Pure and simple bullshit, down to the last man. I hate to make sweeping declarative statements, but yeah, they're all lying. I got into Lost during the summer between season one and season two and since then I cringe to admit that after every single episode I got online to read message board reactions and TV site reviews (although, to my credit, I was never one of those people who spent untold hours posting stupid theories that bordered on fanfiction), and people were never, ever talking Kate's love triangle or whether or not Jack would work out his daddy issues; they were talking about the hatch and DHARMA and the smoke monster and mysterious healing and electromagnetism, you know, the mythology. Always and without exception. It's really, really funny to watch so many fanboys stumbling all over each other to retcon the stuff they spent six years talking about in a mad scramble to get their lips around Damon Lindelof's cock and insist that it was "always about the characters" for them.

But let's give you, the hypothetical person who insists it was "always about the characters," the benefit of the doubt. Let's say you're telling the truth. Well, if you watched Lost exclusively for the character arcs and thought that they were rich and satisfying, try watching The Wire or The Sopranos or Mad Men or Friday Night Lights or The West Wing or Deadwood — go ahead, I'll wait! Your mind will be fucking blown at what serialized drama is actually capable of! (And although I've yet to see any of Breaking Bad, everyone tells me it's phenomenal and it's high up on my list of shows to watch.) But of course these series still explore concepts like crime, politics, and American life, which may be too much damn mythology. You just want pure character, no bullshit about islands and Others, as many Lost fans are now claiming they always did? No problem. Most major networks air new episodes of serialized character dramas every day. They're called soap operas.

Now there were a handful of things that I liked about Lost's final episode, "The End." I loved Hurley winding up as protector of the Heart of the Island, with Benjamin Linus as his sidekick. It was a great ending for the show's two best characters and Hurley's kindhearted nature gives you an idea that his reign over the island will be a peaceful and prosperous one. I liked Jack and the Man in Black's final fistfight, I liked Richard finally getting a grey hair, indicating that after everything he may go on to live a normal mortal life, and although I was cringing at it being intercut with the awful purgatory revelation, I really liked the final on-island scene with Jack, dying with Vincent the dog beside him and ending the series on a close-up of his closing eye, mirroring the pilot's first shot. Lindelof and Cuse inexplicably claimed that the final shot of the series would be a hotbed of controversy, but I've seen no such thing anywhere on the internet. It was a good, borderline-excellent final shot, soured only by the many other shots surrounding it.

Looking to the series as a whole, there's even more I liked, even if the finale makes it all akin to a thrilling sky dive ending in a crash landing after your parachute fails to deploy. The first season was a wonderful mix of character and mythology-building, loaded with exciting action and cliffhangers and gorgeous cinematography and art design (the latter of which strangely got worse and worse as the series went on, culminating in some sets in the final season that were seriously B-movie stuff whenever they went into the caverns or the temple). It did a great job building Locke, Hurley, Sawyer, and Sayid in particular into compelling characters and had an awesome culmination in the two-part "Exodus" finale.

The series proceeded to struggle by wasting much of its second season on tail section survivors who would all die and be rendered pointless and much of its third on flashbacks so redundant as to be agonizing, but redeemed itself somewhat with the introduction of Benjamin Linus in season two and Juliet Burke (the best female character the series would produce) in season three, and then really redeemed itself with Charlie's heartbreaking sacrifice and the introduction of the flashforwards in the third season finale, "Through the Looking Glass." The tight, fourteen-episode fourth season is the show's second best thanks to the freshness of the flashforwards and the introduction of the Kahana crew, particularly Martin Keamy, my favorite villain throughout the show's run, played by the awesome Kevin Durand. Things went a little haywire after that with baffling time travel in season five and then plunged into shit with purgatory, but even in the otherwise execrable season six I thought the Richard Alpert flashback episode, "Ab Aeterno," was outstanding.

But however delicious parts of the feast may have been, the final course was rotten. It don't matter if you've been eating the ambrosia of the gods, if your final course is rotten, you're pukin'. And Lost's finale made me puke (figuratively). I had some good times with the show and even, I confess, spent a few hours on Lostpedia in my day, but I no longer have any desire to watch it, think about it, or read message boards about it, and the thought of debating it is about as appealing to me as getting my teeth pulled one by one. I've washed my hands of it completely. If you liked it I'm happy for you and if you're one of the tiny fraction of Losties who can back up your love without incoherent insults or bleating about "the characters," then hell, I even respect you. But I'll never agree with you.

Chances of me ever rewatching Lost from beginning to end: 1%

Chances of me ever rewatching Lost while skipping season six flash-sideways: 10%

Chances of me ever rewatching Lost while skipping season six flash-sideways, all tail section survivor-centric scenes and episodes, and most of the first half of season three: 20%

Chances of any Lost fanboy refuting anything I've written here without insisting that it was "always about the characters" or resorting to a gibberish string of ad hominem attacks: 0.005%

In Defense of Super Mario Sunshine

In preparation for the release of Super Mario Galaxy 2 I've been getting my plumber on by replaying the first three chapters of the Super Mario 3D quadrilogy (or as we called it back in the yonder days of '09, the Super Mario 3D trilogy). I had briefly considered doing retrospective reviews of all three games, but hey, I once also briefly considered My Name is Earl to be a good television show. We all briefly consider stupid things. Truth is that when it comes down to it there's nothing to say about Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Galaxy ― both are more-or-less universally accepted classics that routinely rank high on best games of all time lists and it's common knowledge that each game is one of the highlights of its respective console and all of post-1995 Nintendo gaming. Mario 64 rules and Mario Galaxy rules; those are my reviews.

It's the middle child of the Mario 3D family that I find interesting, 2002's strangely-named and more importantly strangely-conceived and designed Super Mario Sunshine. It's plainly the black sheep of the family with its homogenous tropical settings, Shine Sprites, mandatory blue coins, juice-vomiting Yoshis, and most importantly its water jetpack-centric controls and challenges, and as such it's frequently left out of nostalgic retrospectives on both the 3D Mario games and Mario series as a whole. Segments of Nintendo fandom enjoy it but without nearly the same fervor as the company's iconic classics and discussion of it on forums invokes equal parts praise and scorn. Plenty of people even argue it's just a bad game, period.

Me, well, I actually dig it. There's a slightly batshit experimental nature to it (much as other Nintendo-produced GameCube games like Pikmin and The Wind Waker) and for all its flaws it has gameplay and design elements that none of the other 3D Mario games or any other 3D platformer ever made have matched. I'm not here to argue with the consensus opinion that it's the weakest of the three games in the 3D Mario subseries I've played; I think that opinion is correct, even obvious. Mario 64 and Mario Galaxy are both A+ masterpieces. Sunshine is more like an A-, or a B+ if I wake up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. But I still got a huge kick out of going back to and replaying it and it has a couple of my single favorite environments out of basically any game I've ever played; moments of whiteknuckle tension, serene beauty, and pure madcap cleverness abound.

So this is my defense of Super Mario Sunshine. It may be inherently absurd to write a "defense" of the 3rd best-selling game on any given console, but hey, high sales don't always correlate to acclaim. After all, The Phantom Menace is the 12th highest-grossing movie of all time (a lot higher than that if you don't count Harry Potter movies) and if you wrote something on the internet called "In Defense of The Phantom Menace" you would be swiftly lynched and your family assassinated. But unlike Star Wars, Mario climbed back on the cool train, so I should be safe. Let's do this in two parts: first, the game's downsides, and then its awesomeness.


Super Mario Sunshine downsides:

The blue coin hunt. We'll rip the band-aid off quick and get the shittiest aspect of Mario Sunshine out of the way first thing: the incredibly poorly-conceived and poorly-implemented hunt for hundreds of blue coins scattered arbitrarily as pigeon shit through the game's hub and seven worlds. And these ain't no Mario 64-style blue coins that are simply normal coins but worth more, oh no, these babies are traded in to net you the Shine Sprites needed to progress through the game. You can get to and defeat the final boss and see the ending without pursuing them, yes, but if have any completionist urges then you're in for a Lars von Trier-esque nightmarish journey into obsession as you desperately scour every square inch of every single world for just one last coin. And if you think that the game has any intention of indicating how many coins you're missing from each world, let alone where any coins might be, then guess again, asshole.

It goes without saying that Mario Sunshine is the only one of the three games I've never gotten all 120 trinkets in (Shines here, Stars in the others), and I can say with near-certainty that I never will. I'm simply not hunting down all those coins, even with a guide. But the real offensive thing about the blue coins isn't how difficult they are to find, but the fact that the 24 Shines acquired by finding them all is 24 potential obstacle courses, bosses, platforming challenges, and puzzles stripped away from the main game, if not whole worlds worth of potential. Which takes us straight into our next point.

Relatively few levels and unique challenges. Compared to Mario 64's fifteen levels and Mario Galaxy's forty, it's tough not to be disappointed by Mario Sunshine's seven. Seven expansive, excellently-designed levels, yes, but still only seven. One of the amazing things about Mario Galaxy is that every single one of its 120 Stars represents a unique and creatively-designed challenge, whereas if you strip out the blue coins, the Shines you get for collecting 100 yellow coins in each world, and all the repeat trips to collect a second Shine on each obstacle course, you're looking at just barely over 70 unique challenges in Sunshine.

Although I can't find any official info on the topic, I strongly suspect that just as The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker's relatively few dungeons is famously because development was cut short, Mario Sunshine was initially intended to have a longer development cycle but was rushed out the door at the end to get those sexy Christmas '02 sales. I would have happily seen the game delayed to 2003 to have the volcanic Corona Mountain and the lost ocean civilization at the bottom of Noki Bay expanded into full, ten-Shine courses instead of the tiny mini-levels they are, because as is Mario Sunshine just feels inescapably sparse compared to its older and younger brothers.


The implementation of Yoshi. The fact that Yoshi's in the game ― yay! Nearly everything else about his implementation, from aesthetics to gameplay ― boo! First off, I simply must know what mad genius at Nintendo decided that what Yoshi fans really wanted was for Yoshi to be available to ride in a 3D Mario game, but only in the colors of the prettiest pink, the brightest orange, and the most feminine purple. I mean... what? That would be like if in the Avatar sequel James Cameron decided that what the fans really wanted was for the Na'vi to have black and white stripes ala zebras. Yoshi's green, you idiots!

Beyond that, all that Yoshi really does is make Mario floatier and more difficult to control. He inexplicably dies by turning into paint (?) upon touching water despite being perfectly apt at swimming in Super Mario World and he vomits fruit juice all over everything, complete with gross gurgling noise, when you hold the R button, which turns enemies into platforms. Basically, nothing that makes Yoshi awesome is in this game; we're stuck with some neutered, gruesomely bulimic impostor. I pray Mario Galaxy 2 does a better job with the dino than Sunshine did.

The final level. If you're a fan of the 3D Mario games you may remember a pair of levels called Bowser in the Sky and The Fate of the Universe, the final stages in Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy, respectively. Both are awesome, lengthy, intimidating stages that do a great job testing all the skills you've picked up through the course of your journey and serve as worthy gauntlets before the final boss. In Super Mario Sunshine's final level before the last boss, Corona Mountain, you easily hop across a view platforms then take a boat across the lava to Bowser. It takes like a minute and contains no enemies or substantial platforming (especially not compared to the rest of the game). More than anything else in Mario Sunshine Corona Mountain screams that the developers were forced to rush the game out the door before the fruition of their vision.

A lack of Bowser. Mario 64 and Mario Galaxy both have three big boss fights with Bowser. In Mario Sunshine you don't meet Bowser for the first time until immediately before your first and only battle with him; instead, you spend the entire game dealing with Bowser Jr. and his alter ego Shadow Mario. Even in the lone battle you have you can't actually touch or get close to Bowser (in contrast to the other games where you get right up in his ass). You sort of fight him as he lounges in a giant hot tub in the sky by dodging hot water he splashes and fire he breathes at you and pounding weak spots on the hot tub so that it breaks and spills him out. Seriously. It's real weak, and the battle with a giant Bowser Jr.-controlled Mecha Bowser in the middle of the game feels much more appropriately climactic, again indicating that the final act of Mario Sunshine had a truncated development cycle.

Nothing special for getting all 120 Shine Sprites. Super Mario 64 is guilty of this too (getting to talk to but not ride Yoshi does not count as special), so I don't begrudge Sunshine too much. But thankfully in Galaxy the developers finally figured out that you deserve a treat for your hard work and let you play as Luigi upon acquiring every Star.

Mentally retarded Princess Peach. There's no way around this: Princess Peach in this game is written and voice-acted with the clear intent of the character being mentally retarded. She constantly looks around in wide-eyed confusion and slowly slurs all her words like she's recovering from a brain aneurism. It's a little creepy and makes it quite confusing what Mario sees in her. Whatever happened to Peach's badass Super Mario RPG personality?


Super Mario Sunshine awesomeness:

The setting and mood. Ironically, one of the things that people complained most vocally about back in '02 ― Mario Sunshine's homogeneous tropical settings, all beaches and ocean and seaside villages ― winds up being one of the things that makes it stand out fascinatingly today. The game has a much stronger sense of place and feels more cohesive, vibrant, and real ("real" by Mario standards, I mean) than either of the other games. In Mario 64 we were told that all the paintings in Peach's castle were turned into magical alternate realities by Bowser so it didn't really bother us that they felt disconnected from the main hub. Mario Galaxy (and I assume Mario Galaxy 2 as well) happily plunges headlong into pure abstraction by simply explaining that we're traveling the universe so it's no matter that the planets we explore bear no resemblance to one another.

But in Super Mario Sunshine we visit Isle Delfino, a tropical paradise under siege from Bowser's vile son and a place where each level fills in and enriches the setting a little more. The island's biggest city, the bustling Delfino Plaza, acts as our central hub. From there we take pipes to visit other villages, namely the suburbs of Bianco Hills which neighbor a large reservoir and are fairly leisurely outside of their giant Piranha Plant problem, and the much more intense ancestral home of the Pianta people, Pianta Village, housed up among the tower-sized palm trees at the highest point of the island near a forest of giant mushrooms hanging over a perilous and infinite ravine. We go to various leisure resorts, from the world-famous hotel at Sirena Beach now infested by ghosts, to the relaxing Gelato Beach, to the Pinna Park amusement resort which Bowser Jr. attacks in a giant mech.

Throw in Delfino Airstrip, the bustling shipping port of Ricco Harbor, and the eerily beautiful Noki Bay on the far side of the island with its impossibly gargantuan waterfall and vacant underwater ruins deep on the ocean floor (now home only to a battleship-sized eel), and what you have is a place that feels utterly tangible. It's actually completely believable as functioning society, complete with a tourism and seafood-based economy, and in all of Mario gaming the city of Rogueport in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is the only setting that comes even close in richness and atmosphere.

From each level you can see other levels in the distance, shimmering through the tropic sun, and this only makes the game feel that much more cohesive. Most notably, at the highest point of Pinna Park you can see every other level in the entire game except for Noki Bay, which is on the exact opposite side of the island. The geography of the island is completely solid. I imagine it's not too many years before we reach the point of remaking games from the beginning of the last decade, and if Nintendo ever does a remake of Mario Sunshine my primary wish is for them to strip the invisible walls out and give you the option to freely swim from level to level or run over the hills of Isle Delfino to get anywhere you wish. They would hardly even need to fill in any missing gaps to do so; it's all here.

Most of the level design. I say "most of" because, as specified above, I'm not pleased by the blue coin hunt or Corona Mountain, but beyond those flaws I think that Mario Sunshine has some of the greatest 3D platforming of all time. Whether you're dodging the hostile squids and making your way up the massive scaffolding of Ricco Harbor, chasing a giant Piranha Plant through Bianco Hills, hopping across towering mushrooms, riding a roller coaster while battling a mech with a rocket launcher, getting run down by Wigglers on Gelato Beach, rescuing the mayor from a burning Pianta Village, solving the mysteries of a haunted hotel, bouncing perilously hundreds of feet in the air from power line to power line, or surfing on a high-speed blooper, Mario Sunshine always seems to have a new, exciting trick up its sleeve and something to keep the game fresh and aggressively paced at every corner. The levels are big but not obnoxiously so ala Donkey Kong 64; exactly the right size for there to be lots to explore but to keep every square inch packed with action, excitement, and danger. I can't complain about any of 'em.

In particular, Noki Bay. I single this level out because it's actually my favorite level in any of the 3D Mario games and probably one of my top five environments in any game I've ever played, even sweeping aside the entirety of Shadow of the Colossus in terms of pure, serene beauty.

On the far side of Isle Delfino, tall cliffs form a perfect aquatic alcove where three spires topped with giant seashells penetrate from the somewhere on the ocean floor up into the clouds, interconnected by wires. An enormous waterfall plummets majestically from high up in the cliffs down into the bay. The cliff faces are etched with mystery too; covered in ancient markings, hidden tunnels, secret ruins, and pulley systems and footholds to help you make your way up. Explore enough and you'll find an antagonistic giant Blooper at the very top of the cliffs, above even the mouth of the waterfall. Keep exploring further and you'll find the tomb of Noki king behind the waterfall. Allow the waterfall to push you down to the ocean floor and you can visit the Greek-style ruins of a long-abandoned underwater city, now guarded by a monstrous eel.

The beauty, atmosphere, and pure visual creativity of this environment is borderline-obnoxious. Even the music's pretty serene. It'll make you depressed that nothing so gorgeous actually exists in real-world nature, and it's almost as much fun to just bullshit around in as it is to pursue the Shine Sprites. I hugely look forward to replaying it every time I'm getting my Sunshine on.


The hub world. Super Mario 64 stumbled onto an interesting formula by making Princess Peach's castle the central hub via which all worlds were connected (a formula which the other great N64 3D platformer, Banjo-Kazooie, would copy verbatim a couple years later). It had a jaunty theme tune, was an interesting look into a location we'd yet to really explore in a Mario game, and there were even a few monsters and secrets here and there. By Mario Galaxy, this concept was still at work but had run itself a bit dry; Rosalina's Comet Observatory was frankly a bit of a pain to get around trying to remember which level was where, maybe the weakest aspect of the entire game. Nintendo seems to have had the same thought, as Super Mario Galaxy 2 has eliminated the hub formula and gone back to a series of levels laid out along a map screen ala Mario Bros. 3 and Mario World, a decision I approve of.

Super Mario Sunshine however hit the hub world sweet spot with the bustling seaside hamlet that is Delfino Plaza. It's not dangerous (you can die if you drown yourself or repeatedly jump from a really high location, but that's it), but it has such a fun and lively atmosphere to it, with canals and gondolas and statues and fountains and beaches and islands and shops and fruit stands. With the boats going in and out from Ricco Harbor and the airstrip and Piantas running about their days buying and selling and even a police station and a court of law it does a remarkable job feeling like a complete community, and it's actually about as fun as the game's "official" levels to go about Delfino Plaza playing the mini-games and searching for the secret bonus stages and hidden Shine Sprites. Best hub ever.

The floating obstacle course levels. Scattered about the worlds of Super Mario Sunshine you'll find ten or so so-called "secret" (I use the world secret in quotes since most of them are mandatory to beat the game) obstacle course challenges. These courses take place in bizarre, abstract voids splashed with bright colors and an a capella version of the Super Mario theme song humming along and they might be my absolute favorite part of the game as they represent the leanest, purest 3D platforming challenges in the history of video games (and continue to eight years later, unless something in Mario Galaxy 2 tops them).

They take away your jet pack in these levels so there's no gimmickry to them, no tricks, no puzzles, just sheer tension as you dance and flip your way over the spinning blocks and tiny platforms, always a hairsbreadth from oblivion. (Here's a good example. The guy playing it has his jetpack because he's already beaten it and you're allowed to bring the jetpack in after beating the level, but he never uses it.)

Funny thing is that thousands of internet whiners hated these levels because they couldn't beat them, and I'll admit, some of them took me damn near dozens of tries, but personally I thought that aspect was awesome. That leads us right into our next topic.

Challenge! Games today seem easy. It's not difficult to understand why; as presentation becomes more cinematic and budgets skyrocket, developers increasingly want everyone who plays a game to see it through to the end to see all the hard word they've put into it, as surely as a film director wants people to see it through to the end of his or her movie. But I confess that I sometimes miss the whiteknuckle tension, the sweat on my brow and the lingering dread of death lurking at the slightest missed jump or miscalculated twitch of the control stick, which is where Mario Sunshine frequently delivers, particularly in the aforementioned obstacle courses. Best part is that thanks to the flawless play control it never feels cheap if you die. You're in perfect control, whatever happens is your fault, good or bad.


Cool boss fights. This tends to be expected from big console Nintendo franchise games be they Mario, Zelda, or Metroid, and outside of the final battle with Bowser which I already bitched about, Mario Sunshine delivers. Repeat battles with an oversized Piranha Plant named Petey and no less than less than three battles with a giant Blooper are kind of cool, but the three battles where the game really shines (pun?) are as follows:

1. A fight with a giant ghost manta ray that you shoot with water to divide, again and again and again and again, until you're battling hundreds of tiny little shithead ghost manta rays out for your blood who are finally little enough to spray and kill.

2. A fight with a towering Mecha Bowser while you're riding in a roller coaster firing missiles at his face and blowing his rockets out the air.

3. A terrifyingly giant eel emerges from a hole in the deepest ocean floor of Noki Bay's underwater ruins and tries to suck you right into his school bus-sized jaw. It's pretty freaky by the standards of any game, let alone Mario, made worse by the fact that to calm him down you have to clean his teeth for him while he's still trying to kill you ― which mandates journeying by your own free will right into his mouth.

Great use of height. I'd venture to say that there's no 3D platformer where you go higher up more regularly than Super Mario Sunshine. Whether you're climbing the scaffolding to reach the highest point above Ricco Harbor, making your way up the cliff face to the mouth of the waterfall in Noki Bay, or traveling up the conveniently platform-sized fungus lining the side of the skyscraper tree at the center of Pianta Village, you're frequently reaching for the clouds in this game. A big part of the game's fun is what excellent use it makes of up-and-down space, for the most part even better than the next game in the franchise did. Galaxy made amazing, innovative use of gravity, yes, and that's part of why it's ultimately the better game, but you still aren't going quite as high quite as regularly as Sunshine.

FLUDD, the play control, and the physics engine. On its face, the idea of giving Mario a jetpack may seem absurd ― I mean, he's the jumpman! ― but it turned out to be genius, largely because of how buttery smooth it controls. Using FLUDD's hover nozzle will very rapidly become second nature as you play, and the quality of the jumping and hovering control is so superlative that you'll soon find you can bend the game world to your will like The Matrix or some shit.

A wall too high to jump over? No problem whatsoever; just do a sideways midair somersault against the wall, wall kick off, then turn on your hover nozzle and glide back over the wall you just kicked yourself off of. Easy as pie. Go back and play Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie or even the Jak and Daxter games on PlayStation 2 and feel the difference in how effortlessly and powerfully you can control your main character. It's just not even remotely close. I'd go so far as to say the only platformer with a comparable physics engine is Mario Galaxy, but even then I'm not sure that's it's actually better, just equal. The 3D Mario team has mastered the art of having your game avatar move both very quickly and very precisely (much as I'm not sure that any 2D platformers ever really matched Mario Bros. 3 and Mario World's play control).

Throw in the additional FLUDD nozzles picked up through the course of your journey that allow you to dash forward at rocket speed (including doing like Jesus and running over the surface of the water) and shoot yourself fifty feet straight up into the sky and what you have is a brilliantly cool little toy to base a platformer around. I understand why it had to go in future games but I admit I kinda miss the damn thing.


I'd say that about wraps it up as goes Super Mario Sunshine. I hope I didn't come across as overly nitpicky in the first part; after all, I bitch because I love and I really do love this game, enough that I'd call it a personal favorite despite its many flaws. If nothing else, getting out all their wacky jetpack and tropical ideas in this game cleaned Nintendo's creativity pipes enough for Super Mario Galaxy, and even if you're one of those weird people who thinks Mario Sunshine is a piece of shit, I think we can all agree that that more than justifies its existence.

MacGruber

Okay, so here's the biggest cinematic surprise of the year (unless Inception and / or Toy Story 3 ends up being a piece of shit): MacGruber, a Saturday Night Live production expanding a series of thirty-second sketches into an 89-minute feature, made me laugh my fucking ass off. I'm not talking about a few scattered, guilty chuckles, I'm talking about bellowing laughter straight from my gut. I'm still thinking back on jokes and guffawing here in front of my computer hours later. I'm sure the critics will sneer at MacGruber and I'm sure it'll bomb spectacularly at the box office, but here and now and for the record I'm gonna say that I dug this movie and think it's one of the best spoofs in ages.

I intentionally use the word "spoof" instead of "satire," because, no, I don't think that MacGruber is as good as Zombieland or Hot Fuzz, but I don't view those movies as spoofs. They're too self-aware for that label, loaded with explicit discussion of the genres they're skewering; commentaries as much as they are narratives. A spoof is something more like Robin Hood: Men in Tights or Austin Powers, not critiquing its genre so much as heightening every aspect of it into comic absurdity, and what the original Austin Powers did for classic James Bond movies MacGruber does for macho 80s action flicks starring guys like Stallone and Seagal and Chuck Norris.

It clearly announces this intention as the film opens with MacGruber's former CO finding him in self-imposed exile in a third world country and trying to convince him that he's gotta come back because he's the only man who can get the job done, a scene yanked directly, beat-for-beat from Rambo III. We proceed on to a hammy terrorist villain, a tragic backstory for our protagonist presented in clunky flashbacks, every single character greeting MacGruber with "I thought you were dead," characters crying out in anguish in epic slow motion, the hero's romantic interest tending his wounds, gratuitous sex scenes, cool guys walking away from explosions, and hands-down the single funniest twist on the "gathering the team" montage I've ever seen. It works beautifully precisely because of how straightly it's played outside of the title character — scenes with the military brass and the villains could almost be plucked out of actual 80s action films with barely an alteration.

The twist comes in the form of MacGruber himself cranking the macho posturing, the arrogance, the hubris and the bluster of the manly 80s action hero (very different than the post-Die Hard action hero, who would just as soon sit out the action and can bleed and make mistakes) to hitherto unprecedented levels not even close to justified by his actually quite limited talent as a hero. The contrast between the cartoon protagonist and the surprisingly straightforward 80s action flick around him is hysterical if you're familiar with the genre that's being goofed on. I don't normally think of Will Forte as a great comedic actor but he gives it his all as MacGruber and does a hilarious job mocking and paying homage to the macho action hero all at once.

While Forte does the heavy lifting, I like Kristen Wiig as his romantic interest just as much. I never watch Saturday Night Live outside of occasionally checking out the SNL Digital Short so I first became aware of Wiig not from the show but from her small part in Knocked Up, and she has quickly become one of my absolute favorite comedic actresses. She's very subtle, never needing to raise her voice or overact to win a laugh, and she needs her own star vehicle stat. Meanwhile, Powers Booth gives sincere 80s gusto to MacGruber's CO, Ryan Phillippe has the dry but necessary straight man role as MacGruber's partner, and Val Kilmer's admirably hams it up as the villain, Dieter Von Cunth.

Despite a bit of gunplay and bloodshed, MacGruber isn't a true action-comedy, not in the way that Kick-Ass is. It's a comedy with a few slapstick action scenes that take themselves no more seriously than the action in the aforementioned Austin Powers; none of it is in any way exciting or visceral and it doesn't aim to be. The movie's just a spoof, but it's a smart, aware, hilarious one, fighting the good fight in trying to rescue the genre from the clutches Aaron Seltzer & Jason Friedberg's "______ Movie" series.

It shouldn't come as any huge surprise in light of how funny MacGruber is that it's directed by Jorma Taccone, one-third of the comedy trio The Lonely Island alongside Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer who are collectively responsible for basically every watchable thing Saturday Night Live has done in the last decade not involving Tina Fey as Sarah Palin: "Lazy Sunday," "I'm on a Boat," "Jizz in My Pants," "Dick in a Box," "Motherlover," and every other funny Digital Short. Their ultra-modern, pop culture-infused and internet-influenced surreal sense of humor made Hot Rod one of the most underrated comedies of the last few years and it can be sensed here too. There's really no excuse not to just hand SNL entirely over to them at this point. Hell, that might even get to me to watch.

But however tepid Saturday Night Live may be these days they can at least be proud of this film, the best one to carry their brand name since Wayne's World back in 1992.


3 Stars out of 5

Shutter Island

Shutter Island is the pulpiest film Scorsese's ever done. That's not in any way to say that it's the worst film Scorsese's ever done, simply the pulpiest. Martin Scorsese is a director who generally aims to make great, classic cinema almost every time he steps up to the plate, a tendency that would be annoying as hell if he weren't literally one of the best artists ever to work in any medium through all recorded history, so it's interesting and a bit unexpected to see him unleash his talent after a four-year gap since The Departed onto the first pure, unapologetic popcorn-muncher of his career.

And if you thought that the tough cops and thick Boston accents and blaring Dropkick Murphys music of The Departed lacked subtlety, then Shutter Island is gonna really ruin your day. This is noir pulp drawn in the broadest possible strokes: fog and gloom penetrate everything, the shadows are long and black, the buildings ominous, the cliffs jagged and foreboding, the wind and rain and lightning overpowering and exhausting, and the performances very flashy (except for Mark Ruffalo, for reasons that make sense in the plot), all creepy glances and ragged dialogue and intense whispering that would border on overacting were they not in such able directorial hands. It's the cinematic equivalent of a master artist doing his latest painting in primary colors. It's such an immensely stylish movie that it overcomes any narrative shortcomings to stand proud as an impressive thriller.

The movie opens with a U.S. Marshal played by Leo DiCaprio on a boat to the Ashecliff Hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island. He and his partner have been brought in to investigate the case of patient, Rachel Solando, who seems to have impossibly escaped from her secure cell. As a hurricane settles over the island the findings of DiCaprio's investigation become less and less explicable and more and more personal and we descend into a psychological nightmare that comes to include secrets, conspiracies, escapes, chases, Nazis, and at least one explosion. The film's format of exponentially swelling insanity restricted to one fixed location is more than a bit reminiscent of Kubrick's The Shining.

I'll say straight up that I don't think this movie has a particularly great script. Not a bad one, mind you, but the magic here is indisputably on the set and behind the camera, not at the typewriter. When the investigation uncovers evidence of a mysterious unknown patient somewhere on Shutter Island, you don't have to be even close to as big a cinephile as I am to see exactly where things are going, and the story soldiers on to the conclusion 95% of you will predict as reliably as the sun comes up. It even adds a bit of insult to injury by climaxing with an extremely lengthy exposition dump that goes so far as to include a character pulling out an honest-to-god blackboard on which to explain the movie's plot.

So yes, in the hands of a lesser director with lesser aesthetics, Shutter Island could have been raw mediocrity. But man, the aesthetics — I just love the style of this movie, so much that I hope Scorsese does another equally blunt, subtlety-free movie, and soon. Shutter Island generates so much thick tension out of thin air that it's incredible; the nightmare just keeps building, the pacing aggressive and the movie getting more sinister by the minute. The cinematography is gorgeous, a perfect representation of what modern noir can and should be, except for when we cut to DiCaprio's dream sequences filmed in vivid, breathtaking color. Not noir, but still damn gorgeous.

Speaking of DiCaprio, I think this is probably his third best performance yet outside of Catch Me If You Can and The Departed, overcoming any vestiges of lingering boyishness and giving a driven depiction of the tough cop at the film's center. Ben Kingsley however still ends up dominating as the head doctor of Ashecliff, with some help from Max von Sydow, together forming a duo of unparalleled creepiness. Like most everyone else in the film they aren't playing it low-key, but they'll make your skin crawl and they greatly spice up any and every scene they're in.

I mean it in a good way, more or less, when I say that Shutter Island represents a triumph of style over substance. It probably won't be nominated for Best Picture and I don't think it needs to be (although the directing and cinematography are another matter), and actively doesn't deserve any writing awards, but it's simply a really cool and stylish bit of detective pulp with a psychological horror coat of paint on it. I think the teenage male standing in front of me in line for Alice in Wonderland said it best: "I went to see Shutter Island but I ran out and went home as soon as they showed a dick on the screen, because I was afraid I was gonna see another dick."


3 Stars out of 5

The Wolfman

[Ed. Note: I struggled with how best to approach reviewing a movie that reaches new heights of mediocrity with the resounding success of Joe Johnston's The Wolfman. It's too dumb, dull, and generic to praise with any enthusiasm, but the aesthetics, acting, and effects are too competent to tear into with any relish. Its middlingness haunts me. So I have decided that the only way to appropriately review such a mediocre film is with an equally mediocre review; thereby, my review of The Wolfman is written in the form of a 4th grade book report by Timothy Kraemer, age 9.]

Hi! This is my movie report on The Wolfman. In the movie The Wolfman a man acted by Benicio Del Toro gets a bit by a werewolf while visiting his dad in England! He starts turning into a werewolf too when the moon turns full. It is bad when Benicio Del Toro turns into the werewolf because he goes crazy and hurts people by accident even if they are his friends when he is normal human.

Some of the special effects for the werewolf are kind of cool! But they are also like a lot of special effects I have seen before in other movies, so they aren't any better than in other movies. Emily Blunt is in the movie. She is supposed to be the girlfriend of the wolfman but it is corny. She is pretty. A detective who is Hugo Weaving comes to figure out who is the wolfman. He was in The Matrix! That movie is cool.

When the wolfman comes it is kind of cool when he kills people. But you do not know the people he kills very good so other than being cool it is not scary. It is not scary because you do not care who dies. It is bad when a movie that is a horror movie is not scary. Maybe it is an action movie. But the action scenes are dark and I could not see them good. I do not know what the movie type is.

It is cool that the movie is in England in 1891. There is a lot of fog and scary buildings. It had an old monster movie feel to it! But I think maybe the guy who made the movie was copying the settings of old monster movies because he didn't think his movie was good enough without copying things instead of trying to make new things.

In the end there is a big fight with two werewolfs. They are both of the werewolfs made out of special effects so it made me think of the fight between the werewolf and the vampire in Van Helsing. This made me feel bad.

In conclusion, I do not think that you should see The Wolfman because I did not think that it scared me or had super cool action. If you did see it it would be cool to see Hugo Weaving and to see the old London buildings, but that might not be cool enough to see the whole movie. This has been my movie report on The Wolfman


2 Stars out of 5

Edge of Darkness

Despite an engagingly grief-stricken leading performance from Mel Gibson and a couple of muscular action scenes as staged by Casino Royale director Martin Campbell, Edge of Darkness ultimately reveals itself as the most paint-by-numbers thriller imaginable. I've never seen the 1985 BBC television series of the same name that it's adapted from (also directed by Martin Campbell, before he hit it big with Bond and Zorro), but I understand it was highly acclaimed as a riveting, fresh work and selected by the British Film Institute as the fifteenth greatest British television series of all time. And I don't doubt that was true back in '85, but a lot of these conspiracy thriller tropes have become so deeply ingrained in our pop cultural subconscious that as of 2010 they no longer have the slightest kick.

(I'll warn in advance that, while leaving out specific details and who lives and who dies, I'm gonna reveal the rough outline of how Edge of Darkness plays out because it's tough to discuss my big gripes without doing so.) The film opens engagingly enough with a Boston cop played by Mel Gibson picking his visiting daughter up at the train station and her getting bloodily gunned down by an assassin within minutes. A grieving Gibson follows a lead by searching for the registered owner of a gun his daughter had in her nightstand and soon finds himself at her workplace, a shadowy, secretive weapons manufacturing firm called Northmoor, housed in a creepy black tower with a slimy, mustache-twirling CEO played by Danny Huston.

That might sound well and good, but here's the problem: the plot is basically over at this point, and we're only like a third of the way through the movie's runtime. If you've ever seen a conspiracy thriller before in your life, in any medium of fiction, it's painfully, glaringly obvious from the first second we set eyes on Northmoor that this is our villainous organization and Danny Huston is our big bad. Maybe this would be okay if the movie turned into an action flick after this point, but it continues on for another hour as a mystery, behaving as if there's any more plot we don't know, then shocks us by revealing that Northmoor was manufacturing nuclear weapons and Mel Gibson's daughter was killed because she found out and planned to expose them. I mean, come on now. A bright seven-year-old could've guessed that "twist."

With the plot and pacing of Edge of Darkness being a bust you have to turn to acting and directing to find the movie's admirable qualities. Mel Gibson may be a real-life racist and right-wing fundamentalist whack job, but damn if he doesn't still have an engaging screen presence even after a near decade-long gap between this and his last role in 2002's Signs. Compare him to newer actors like Sam Worthington and Channing Tatum and the vast gulf in talent is pretty damn clear. While no other performance is particularly memorable Gibson makes his character's grief and drive for justice and revenge about as compelling as you could ask for through the super-thick Boston accent he puts on.

Martin Campbell's direction is typically classy and understated, free from flashy camera or editing tricks and with action scenes that take the form of extremely short bursts of intense violence (outside of one Bourne-flavored fight sequence in an apartment). It's a far cry from what Campbell did in his Bond and Zorro movies, but he gives the violence a weight and intensity that's admirable. One particular scene where Mel Gibson kills an antagonistic car with a gun made me laugh out loud with approval (don't worry, my theater was pretty much completely empty, I wasn't being an asshole) and think "damn, I wish that had been in a Bond movie!"

However, Campbell and screenwriter William Monahan undermine the weight of the movie's action and general realism of its tone by inserting quite a few scenes where Mel Gibson hallucinates about his dead daughter and has conversations with her. Very jarring, very unwelcome, and very unnecessary — Mel Gibson's sad that his daughter died. We get that. It's very, very simple, and Gibson's performance more than drives the point home. We didn't need Star Wars-style post-death ghost conversations to jackhammer it in.

So overall I can't bring myself to recommend this movie unless you've never seen a conspiracy thriller before in your damn life. There's just nothing remotely creative or substantial here, nothing that adds anything to the world of cinema, nothing that needed to be said. You wanna see a conspiracy thriller? Great, watch The Manchurian Candidate (the original, not the 2004 remake). You wanna see an action flick about a father out for justice for his daughter? Great, watch Taken — it's got Liam Neeson, even better than Mel Gibson! But as for Edge of Darkness, I quote Gangs of New York's Bill the Butcher: "You are neither cold nor hot. So because you are lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth."

You nailed it, Bill.


2 Stars out of 5

Crazy Heart

Crazy Heart is a movie with a great character badly in need of a worthwhile story. Jeff Bridges is incredibly entertaining as the washed-up country singer Bad Blake, weariness always lurking at the corners of his eyes with his voice thick and gravelly from decades of drinking and smoking, and while I stand by Sam Rockwell in Moon being 2009's best leading performance I have no problem that Jeff Bridges picked up the Academy Award for Best Actor. Dude's put in his time as a great performer going all the way back to 1971's The Last Picture Show and he deserved it.

But as for the movie around him, sheesh. I honestly never need to see another musician struggle with substance abuse onscreen again. Since it's about a musician struggling with addiction and the love of a good woman it goes without saying that the critics went apeshit for it, and I admit that if you focus exclusively on Bridges and block out everything else I can see the appeal, but for me Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story skewered all these musician movie tropes so thoroughly that they just kind of make me chuckle and roll my eyes now.

Here's my recommendation for Crazy Heart: watch the first half, then quit. I'm dead serious. The first hour or so just has Bad Blake driving around the Southwest, boozing and disrespecting everyone and singing country music and generally being a badass, and it's a good fuckin' time. Then we have to watch him fall in love with a divorced journalist played by Maggie Gyllenhaal (who, by the way, gives a completely nondescript performance and it's a fucking joke that she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress while Inglourious Basterds' Mélanie Laurent wasn't) and sober up and become a better man and ugh. No thanks. Already seen that movie, assholes. We actually have to watch him go to Alcoholics Anonymous, when all we want is to see him get drunk and sing some more country. It's agonizing.

So yeah, the critics missed the boat here. There's two great things in Crazy Heart, Jeff Bridges and the country music he sings. Everything else is redundant bullshit. However, the movie failed to get a Best Picture nomination even in the expanded ten-film field, so it seems like I'm not the only one who noticed.


2 Stars out of 5

Iron Man 2

Seeing the original Iron Man remains one of my most purely exuberant moviegoing experiences of the last five years. I laughed, I cheered, I applauded at the end, and I still had an imbecilic grin plastered on my face hours later. In fact, I loved watching Iron Man in theaters so much that I intentionally haven't rewatched it in the two years since and have no plans to do so — I'm sure I'd still enjoy it, but I simply don't want to dilute that fond memory by noticing any deficiencies the movie may actually have. I don't have any immediate plans to rewatch Iron Man 2 either. But not for the same reasons.

When I first saw the full Iron Man 2 trailer, which featured multiple villains, Lt. Colonel Rhodes robot-suiting up, Tony Stark flirting with Pepper Potts, Nick Fury setting up the future Avengers movie, and Scarlett Johansson doing something inexplicable, I said to myself, "Holy shit! That looks like a goddamn mess!" And sometimes the trailer is honest: Iron Man 2 is a goddamn mess. A slick, polished, and reasonably entertaining mess to let wash over you with a tub of overbuttered popcorn in a big movie theater, mind you, with a predictably quirky and awesome leading performance from Robert Downey Jr., but still a mess. It's mystifying to me why so many of the same nerds who were enraged by Spider-Man 3 seem ready to die in defense of Iron Man 2, because, news flash (any obese comic book nerds reading this may want to stop here, lest they risk a heart attack), the two movies have damn near the exact same problems.

Of course, I was one of the few people who found Spider-Man 3 sort of fun, so that's not me shitting on Iron Man 2. Not exactly, anyway. But just as Spider-Man 3 fell short of its predecessors, Iron Man 2 isn't nearly as good as the original. It's all over the place, breathlessly trying to tell its own cluttered story while simultaneously shuffling pieces towards the future Avengers flick. To the movie's credit it doesn't pull a Matrix Reloaded or a Dead Man's Chest and end with "to be continued," it's self-contained and can be watched on its own, but in every other respect it's one of the messiest flicks I've seen in years, with nearly every scene seeming to pick up with a completely disparate storyline from the one preceding it.

The trailer actually left out one of the biggest plot threads: Tony Stark is dying, his blood poisoned by the power reactor in his chest. So he hands Stark Industries over to his assistant Pepper Potts and focuses on being Iron Man full-time, but holy shit, because after revealing his identity at the end of the first film the United States government is trying to get him to hand over the Iron Man weapon, an unscrupulous arms manufacturer named Justin Hammer plots to best Tony's designs, a crazy Russian named Ivan Vanko cuts even more to the chase by just planning to build a better suit and kill Tony to death with it, and Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson groom Stark for future opportunities on the superhero team they're putting together. Oh, and Tony feuds with his friend Rhodey. And has some alcohol problems, and copes with daddy issues, and of course has a romantic subplot. Holy overstuffed two hours, Batman Iron Man!

"That's okay," you say to yourself. "It's a summer action flick, I ain't in this for grand storytelling, I'm in this for all the action!" Well, geez, this is awkward — I don't quite know how to tell you this — but there are only three action scenes in Iron Man 2's 124-minute runtime. Three, all of them robot suit-on-robot suit battles. The final one is admittedly a lengthy blow-out, but nothing in these fight scenes really begins to compare in vibrance, energy, or creativity with the train scene in Spider-Man 2, the Batmobile chase in the middle of The Dark Knight, or even Stark's escape from imprisonment in the original Iron Man. Robot suit men just punch and shoot at one another. Fun, sure, but nothing remotely spectacular.

But as I said above the movie is still deftly carried in spite of everything else by Robert Downey Jr. What else is there to say? Dude fuckin' rules. One of the best actors alive. Makes every line entertaining, makes silence captivating, generates chemistry with every other actor onscreen no matter how little they may offer him in return. Tony Stark is a more flamboyant and probably more purely entertaining figure than any other onscreen superhero we've seen, thanks much more to Downey Jr. than to the script, and I hate to even imagine what the movie would be like without him.

The rest of the cast doesn't fare as well outside of the also awesome Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer. Mickey Rourke seems bored as shit as Ivan Vanko, his dialogue agonizingly drawled in a goofball Russian accent, Scarlett Johansson is never good outside of Woody Allen movies, and as sincerely shocking as this is to me, Don Cheadle as Rhodey is a clear downgrade from Terrence Howard in the original film. The critics, confused by the fact that Don Cheadle is usually a wonderful actor, pretended like this wasn't the case, but it is. Howard brought a certain spark to the character; I still remember his reading of the line "Next time, baby" two years later. Don Cheadle just phones it in, dry, flat, and devoid of any personality. Can't remember any of his lines a week later.

So should you check out Iron Man 2? If you wanna see some dumb, pulpy fun with some laughs, some robot fights, and an immensely charming leading performance, sure, go for it. It's vastly inferior to the original (and, for that matter, Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes from a few months back), but harmless enough, and if you see it stay through the end credits, because like the original film there's a secret scene at the end setting up the Avengers. But please, if you're only going to see one superhero movie this season, make it the far superior Kick-Ass.


2 Stars out of 5

Robin Hood

There's a huge gulf between talking about the best movies and talking about your favorite movies. A handful of classics, like Back to the Future and Raiders of the Lost Ark, fit comfortably into both categories. Others, like Citizen Kane and To Kill a Mockingbird, are acknowledged masterpieces and mandatory viewing for any serious student of film, but I'm not gonna pretend like I regularly pop them in and kick back with a cold one. And then on my list of all-time favorites that are in no way masterpieces you would find movies like GoldenEye, The Karate Kid, Wayne's World, and of course, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

The critics shit on Prince of Thieves in 1991 and they continue to shit on it today, but hey, fuck 'em. I love that movie with a feverish glee, American-accented Robin Hood and all, and could give one iota of one one-millionth of a shit how this may reflect on my tastes. I love its freewheeling adventure spirit, its rousing score, its rollicking action scenes, and most importantly Alan Rickman devouring the scenery in bloody, twitching chunks as the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham. I've seen it so many times I can damn near quote along with it while I watch and I could (and probably would, if I didn't consciously stop myself) go on for hundreds of words on that film alone, but I'll save that for a future retrospective review. For today I feel like it's just important to establish upfront the heavy baggage I carried with me into Ridley Scott's new Robin Hood.

This ain't the Robin Hood story you think you know, whether in the form of Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner, or Disney cartoon animals. While basically every other version of the myth ends with the return of the heroic King Richard, this movie begins with a dickhead version of King Richard dying in battle on his way back from the Crusades — not a spoiler, it happens like ten minutes in — and the traditional Prince John villain receiving an upgrade to King John. He squabbles with his advisors while one of Richard's archers, Robin Longstride, returns to England and finds himself looking over a small farming village called Nottingham alongside a widow named Marian. Meanwhile, King Philip of France plots to make war on a weakened England. Big battle scenes ensue.

Ridley Scott aimed to bring Robin Hood down to earth and in that straightforward respect he was successful. The problem is that he arguably brought Robin Hood crashing down to earth, jammed like a square peg in a round hole into a generic semi-epic of medieval warfare and political intrigue. Change the names of Robin, Little John, Marian, and the village of Nottingham and I'd pretty much have no idea that this screenplay was ever written with the intention of being a Robin Hood movie — even the villain, a French spy and marauder named Godfrey, is a brand new creation, with the Sheriff reduced to a piddling, zero-impact supporting character. It ends up feeling like a little bit of Robin Hood mythos accidentally leaked onto a print of Braveheart or Gladiator so they said fuck it and decided to release it in theaters, albeit with the bloodshed dialed back to PG-13 levels.

That's not to imply that the movie is boring or devoid of action; there's plenty of battles, hundreds dead, and even a spot of comic relief in Little John and Friar Tuck. But — and this is where my Prince of Thieves bias comes in — when I think of Robin Hood the giant neon sign in my mind flashes the word ADVENTURE, and I would in no way, shape, or form ever describe Scott's Robin Hood as an adventure movie. A medieval war movie perhaps, but not an adventure movie. There's a little bit of travel, sure, but Robin spends at least half if not more of the runtime just chilling in Nottingham, flirting with Marian and tilling the soil. And, sorry to be unimaginative, but I wanna see Robin Hood getting chased, sneaking under the enemy's nose in disguise, picking up new companions on his journey, swashbuckling, and in general feeling like a rogue, none of which this Robin Hood does. It's a bizarrely dry interpretation of one of popular fiction's most infamous scoundrels.

Part of the problem is the badly miscast leads. There's fun to be had in Kevin Durand's Little John, Max von Sydow's Sir Walter Loxley, Sherlock Holmes and Kick-Ass's Mark Strong further cementing his villainous typecasting as Godfrey, and even a bit of scenery-chewing in Oscar Isaac's King John, but however many Academy Awards they may have between them I don't think that Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett were right for Robin and Marian. Fine actors, especially Blanchett, but they have virtually no personalities in this movie and no romantic chemistry whatsoever. Dryness emanates from them; I was worried they would near a spark and catch flame.

It's also kind of bizarre how the film purports to be the beginning of the legend, yet Robin Hood is played by an actor nearing fifty. Don't get me wrong; I'm not one of those morons who needs all my film leads to be whippersnappers — I'm the world's biggest enthusiast of 57-year-old Liam Neeson's newfound career as a pulpy action star and I was appalled at them casting sexy teens as Superman and Lois Lane in Superman Returns — but both Crowe and Blanchett just look too damn old for these parts. I would have rather seen someone like, I don't know, Stardust's Charlie Cox as Robin Hood. Not as good an actor, no, but better for this role. Fuck, I never, ever thought I'd say this, but even Orlando Bloom would have been better.

As for what the film gets right, if you've seen Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven (which, by the way, in its director's cut form ties for Alien as the best film Scott's ever done) you know that Ridley Scott has a real talent for making these medieval epics look and feel just right. The sets, the costumes, the castles, the villages, the weaponry, the layer of Middle Ages dirt and grime on everything, it all looks great, especially bolstered by beautiful cinematography. I won't go so far as to say it makes you want to be there, but it's authentic and drawn with painterly skill, simply a nice movie to look at and watch unfold on a big screen, whatever near-fatal weaknesses may be found in the storytelling.

Therein lies the problem when it comes to whether or not I'd recommend seeing Robin Hood. The de facto middle ground recommendation with a middle-of-the-road movie like this seems to be to suggest renting it on DVD, but there's no way you should watch a movie where nearly all pleasure derives from letting the medieval settings are warfare wash over you on your television screen. It insists to be seen in theaters. But it's not good enough to unconditionally recommend, so I'll add a condition: if you're really into medieval settings and conflict, check out Robin Hood at a cheap matinee screening. If not, then just watch Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves again. That's right, you big baby, you know you like it.


2 Stars out of 5

NBC Sitcom Musings: 30 Rock, The Office & Community

Three years ago at the end of 30 Rock's first season I was completely in favor of the show's Emmy win for Outstanding Comedy Series. It got off to a slightly shaky start, buoyed more by Alec Baldwin's instantly classic interpretation of the sleazy executive archetype in Jack Donaghy than the scripts themselves, but soon grew into itself, finding a manic, madcap, often surreal voice that at its best moments even reminded me of Arrested Development's goofier bits. Episodes like "Tracy Does Conan" and "Hardball" (still, I think, the two best of the entire series) achieved comedic nirvana while The Office was in the midst of some slight third season growing pains with the whole Jim-Karen-Pam love triangle and, well, the less said about My Name Is Earl the better. An Emmy well awarded.

30 Rock's second season was still an easily recommendable sitcom but not quite up to the standards of season one. Not that the writers dropped the ball in any big way — quite the contrary, that's the season we had "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah" — it was just a little less fresh, while The Office season four was roughly on the same level as season three (except for the episode "Dinner Party," a minor masterpiece of cringe-inducing, soul-crushing awkwardness, which I absolutely fucking loved). That year was definitely more up in the air but I certainly didn't have a problem with 30 Rock snagging the Emmy again. I still watched and laughed at every episode. It was just a little more ambiguous which show was truly better.

But when it comes to the latest Emmy, 30 Rock season three versus The Office season five, again won by 30 Rock, Emmy dropped the ball. 30 Rock was still ahead of the TV comedy curve, sure, anything written by Tina Fey will be, but was palpably treading water by that point, declining to innovate its format, take risks, or develop its characters in any permanent way (the show's only true long-running story arc is Liz and Jack's initially antagonistic relationship becoming a close friendship, which was pretty well complete by the end of season two).

The Office season five was meanwhile the show's best season since its second, with immensely likable new characters in Holly Flax and Erin Hannon, brilliantly awkward episodes like "Golden Ticket" and the "Lecture Circuit" two-parter, the long-time-coming Dwight vs. Andy showdown in "The Duel," the absurd sheer joy of "Cafe Disco," and the pièce de résistance, the entire Michael Scott Paper Company arc spanning the last quarter of the season where new boss Charles Miner (played by Idris Elba of The Wire) came in and fired Michael, prompting Michael to start a rival paper company. That arc was hilarious, exciting, bold, and not only some of the best comedy of that TV season but some of the best television, period. So I think the Emmys messed up there.

As for this TV season we now near the end of with The Office season six and 30 Rock season four, while I hate to admit it since I used to love the show so much, I'm really feeling 30 Rock's age. I've come this far and I continue to like Jack Donaghy so I'll probably stick it through to the end, but as a show that never tweaks its tone or settings, has no real running story arcs, never introduces any major new characters, and really evolves in no way except the well of jokes and episode plots running gradually drier, it's become a creaky thing. "Sweet, a new 30 Rock! Play that shit!" has become "Oh, a new 30 Rock. I guess I'll get around to that." The Office season six isn't nearly as strong as season five but I'm still enjoying it (outside of the abysmal clip show episode), perhaps because unlike 30 Rock the dynamics change, the characters develop, and the plot has at least a little sense of forward momentum.

The new NBC show that has risen forth from nowhere to become possibly my favorite sitcom on television is the college comedy Community, now nearing the end of its first season. It's tonally much more on par with 30 Rock than the The Office, with a cartoony, madcap, surreal nature to it and little in the way of genuine awkwardness or human drama (and as such, we'll see if it's feeling similarly old if it ever makes it to season four), but I'm really loving it. It's clever as hell, has a big cast of completely distinct and hilariously messed up characters, does pop culture references just right, and best of all has a strong satirical touch in the way it parodies or plays up sitcom tropes. Community deserves this season's Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy, although I'm already cringing in anticipation of Glee winning. I'm glad that the torch will be passed, but I fear it will be to the wrong show.

Consensus: Watch Community now while it's still young and easy to catch up on, because it's hilarious. The Office has its rough patches but I'd definitely still recommend getting into it if you haven't, and start from the beginning because it's a show that builds on itself and has satisfying character arcs (and because season two is the best season). 30 Rock is a little dusty at this point but at least watch the first two seasons. Skip My Name Is Earl now and forever. I'm not really into Parks and Recreation either, but some worthwhile critics like it.

Note: This post isn't to imply that NBC sitcoms are the only sitcoms worth watching. Starz' Party Down is outstanding dark comedy and possibly the most underwatched show on television outside of Friday Night Lights, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is ongoing, Curb Your Enthusiasm has been renewed for another season, and although I haven't yet watched it, many non-stupid people have recommended Modern Family to me. (I don't like How I Met Your Mother or The Big Bang Theory because the laugh track murders it, the animated sitcom trio of The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy have all grown incredibly stale and I stopped watching each years ago, and Entourage is a piece of shit and if you like it you should feel bad about yourself.) But I was just specifically interested in analyzing the NBC comedy block in this post.

Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass fully lives up to its title. While not perfect, it's definitely the most pure, giddy fun I've had in a movie theater so far in 2010 and a flick I can easily see myself picking up on DVD and enjoying repeat viewings of for years, something increasingly rare these days. Part satire of the inherently absurd superhero mythos and part awesome superhero flick of its own accord, injected with a healthy dose of high school comedy and an unhealthy dose of gory action, I like to think of Kick-Ass as being Watchmen meets Superbad.

The plot's pretty simple: a high school comic book nerd named Dave Lizewski (he claims not to be a nerd in his voiceover narration but all onscreen evidence refutes this) decides more or less on a whim to become a superhero named Kick-Ass. He's marginally successful at best but meets a father-daughter duo of much more talented and much more murderous superheroes named Big Daddy and Hit Girl, whose crimefighting ways incur the wrath of mob boss Frank D'Amico upon not just them but Dave as well. I'm leaving out a few other key characters and subplots but let's just say that violence ensues and leave it at that.

The cast isn't exactly loaded with big stars beyond Nicolas Cage as Big Daddy. In fact I've never seen the protagonist Aaron Johnson in anything, while everyone else is recognizable from one or two other projects — Chloë Grace Moretz from (500) Days of Summer plays Hit Girl, while Superbad's McLovin (the actor has a name, but c'mon, he's McLovin) is another superhero named Red Mist and Sherlock Holmes villain Mark Strong further cements his typecasting by playing the heavy. Big Daddy and Hit Girl stand out the most. I hate a lot of Nicolas Cage's work (Knowing's awfulness shall haunt me forever) but he's hilarious here and I applaud his humility as an actor; you almost never see an established A-list star playing second fiddle to an unknown but here it provides for pleasantly odd onscreen chemistry. As for Chloë Grace Moretz, well, we'll get to her in a minute.

Here are the top three things that Kick-Ass has going for it as far as being supreme entertainment:

1. It's an action comedy that truly balances the action and the comedy. The vast majority of the time the phrase "action comedy" is code for "a comedy with a few action scenes." Most are quite bad, but even in the genre's few gems — 2008's Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder for example — the action scenes would fail to stand up on their own without the laughs. They're the spice, not the main course. Then you have action movies with so much comic relief that you could almost classify them as action comedies — think Star Trek and Iron Man — but again, just the comedy with the thrills removed would leave you with an anemic, pointless film.

Then there's Kick-Ass, a genuinely and consistently hilarious comedy that had everyone in the audience I saw it with roaring while also being a vibrantly shot, creative, badass action flick with some of the coolest fight sequences I've seen in a couple years. Each half alone is so strong it could carry a movie by itself, together, they lift Kick-Ass to greatness.

The comedy occasionally yields to cliché; for example, we pretty much first meet our protagonist masturbating, the exact same way that American Pie: The Book of Love opens, not a good comparison to invite. And there's a scene where the protagonist's love interest greets him and he greets her back only to realize that she was greeting the girl standing behind him and be embarrassed, which is directly out of the first Spider-Man. But when it gives way to spoofing the absurdity of superheroes and pure vulgarity it's quite funny, and when it leans on the pitch black comedy of copious murder it's hysterical. This is a dark, dark comedy, not for everybody. Probably not even for most people. But man did I laugh.

And the action kicks ass (pardon the pun, it was inevitable); there's cool fights and cool weaponry and everything you could want, particularly when it comes to Big Daddy and Hit Girl. There's one shootout partway through lit only by a strobe light that's gotta be one of the most creatively shot gunfights I've ever seen in a film, bringing fresh and exciting life to something we've all seen hundreds of times in movies and TV. I've sat yawning through so many action scenes in recent years that it was nice to be grabbed by the balls for once. A big part of that is also due to my second reason Kick-Ass rules...

2. It's gory and violent as fuck. The 80s are dead, and it's pretty much expected these days that every summer action flick is going to lounge comfortably in PG-13 territory. Wanted is one of the only exceptions of recent years, but while I admired that film's bloody sensibility I found everything else about it instantly forgettable. Kick-Ass actually manages to marry sick and twisted violence to likable characters and a hilarious script, so it wins hands down. Brains are blown out of skulls onscreen, people crushed and exploded and burned alive, hacked to pieces, limbs sliced off, blood and viscera flying all over the place. Oh snap! It'll make your parents feel faint.

Beyond Wanted and Rambo you just don't see that kind of screen magic anymore outside of maybe slashers and torture porn, but I don't wanna watch that shit. There was also a fair amount of gore in Watchmen, but the tone was rather dry like you should almost feel bad if enjoy the violence for violence's sake; in Kick-Ass, there's a demented clown-style wicked glee to it that happily invites you to love the slaughter. That is, if you can get over your...

3. Moral outrage. There are legitimate moral outrages. War, mass starvation, corrupt politicians. But quite literally every single moral outrage in recorded human history that can be boiled down to "oh god won't someone think of the children?!" has been breathtakingly idiotic. No exception. Ever. Controversy over violent video games, idiotic. Rap music, idiotic. The sex scene in Mass Effect, idiotic. Dakota Fanning in Hounddog, idiotic. Sexting, idiotic. And I find something fascinating about the sociology of stupidity so I love watching people work themselves up into an angry lather over their moral outrage, which Kick-Ass seems to have accomplished thanks to Hit Girl, an eleven-year-old assassin (played by an actress who I think was twelve at the time of shooting).

Some critics and news commentators are livid over her use of the words "cunt" and "fuck," saying that having young Chloë Grace Moretz say these words was morally reprehensible. This is absolutely hilarious because twelve-year-olds are incredibly foulmouthed and swear more than just about anyone except maybe thirteen and fourteen-year-olds since the words are still cool and taboo. Seriously, what is it with most adults seeming to have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of what it was actually like to be a kid? Are they all putting up a big farce together or does every human being at age thirty suddenly undergo an overnight bout of intense amnesia and wake up believing that every child is pure as the driven snow? Someone older than thirty who reads my blog, help me out with this.

The outrage over her butchering dozens of mobsters might have a bit more validity were it not for the fact that it's a fictional movie with fictional blood, but it is, so it doesn't. Oh god won't someone think of the children?!

Director Matthew Vaughn has compiled an impressive filmography in his six short years behind the camera. First there was 2004's Layer Cake, a British crime flick that I liked but didn't love, then there was 2007's Stardust, an immensely charming family-friendly fantasy flick that I thought captured the spirit of The Princess Bride better than nearly any movie since 1987, and now we have Kick-Ass. More than just good movies, these are all good movies with completely disparate styles and genres and tones and settings and not even any recurring actors. I'm reminded of Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Slumdog Millionaire. The ability to take whatever's thrown at you and make it your own. That's true talent. I can't wait to see what Matthew Vaughn does next.


4 Stars out of 5

Legion

Legion is one of the worst things ever created by human hands in any field of endeavor through all recorded history. No, it's not "so bad it's good." Anyone who knows me knows I respect "so bad it's good." Dungeons & Dragons is one of my favorite movies. Legion is just inert and boring; a supernatural horror thriller where they forgot to add in the horror or the thriller, leaving just a supernatural. It's worse than reality TV. It's a shame it didn't come out a few months earlier because it would have found a proud home on my bottom 100 movies of the decade list.

In The Terminator Legion, the world is on the cusp of apocalypse at the hands of Skynet God that will leave humanity broken and scattered. But there's one last hope: an ordinary waitress is pregnant with the child that is fated to grow up to lead what's left of humanity in victorious rebellion against the robots the angels and save the world. Upon hearing of this, Skynet God sends the T-800 the archangel Gabriel from the future heaven to find her and kill her, while Kyle Reese the archangel Michael departs from the same place to protect her. Action scenes ensue.

There's a certain novel twist to the fact that the movie's villain is unapologetically God ― not a god, but the God, Yahweh standing in for Sauron ― but it doesn't make it any less boring. Legion steals every beat of The Terminator's plot by swapping the sci-fi elements out for religious ones but badly perverts its structure, replacing the aggressively-paced chase story and three strong central characters with a dull siege movie and a clusterfuck of interchangable redshirts. The movie is holed up in a diner until the final ten minutes and watching them repel enemy angels gets old very quickly. It's the same shit from every zombie movie going back to 1968's Night of the Living Dead reheated and served up for the thousandth time, and it's no longer appetizing.

All that said, I only saw this movie because the pregnant waitress / living MacGuffin is played by Adrianne Palicki from my favorite TV show Friday Night Lights, and on that count it delivered. She has the second most screentime of anyone besides Michael; even more than Dennis Quaid as the diner owner. But she's terrible here, as is Poor Man's Jude Law Paul Bettany performing Michael on the mistaken belief that a lack of any personality whatsoever equates to badass. The only hint of fun comes from Kevin Durand's Gabriel. He first caught my attention playing Martin Keamy, my all-time favorite antagonist from Lost, and he radiates awesome and deserves a big career. His talent is wasted in this movie but I'm looking forward to seeing him as Little John in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood come May.


1 Star out of 5

The Lovely Bones

If there's one thing I dislike more than a bad movie it's a bad movie with aspirations of greatness, and if mocking films for having ambition makes me an asshole, then buy me some toilet paper, 'cuz I'm an asshole. For example, of my worst movies of 2008 list the film outside of Babylon A.D. that I now most keenly recall as a shudder-inducing, revolting experience that keeps getting worse and worse in my mind isn't Disaster Movie, but Best Picture nominee The Reader. I mean, why be mad at Disaster Movie? It's shit, sure, but it's shit that was conceived, written, and produced specifically as shit for shitty people. So while it's a worse movie it's a lot less annoying than The Reader, a generic, saccharine melodrama that firmly believes itself to be a fucking masterpiece.

Which brings us to The Lovely Bones, based off a novel I've never read which people say is much better than the film. But I'm never gonna read it, so we won't dwell on that. This movie wants to be great. A work of art. Possibly a masterpiece. I have no doubt that Oscars were whispered of at some point during production. But here's the catch: it's no good. It sounded like a few of the blue-haired grannies in my audience were touched, but if all your synapses are still firing properly you won't be joining them. This is one of the most overwrought and mawkish films in years and the more it tries to move you the funnier and more cringe-inducing it becomes. An astounding misfire.

Okay, so a fourteen-year-old girl named Susie Salmon is murdered. Not a spoiler, that's how the movie starts. But oh, it's not over for her yet! We follow Susie on up into heaven where she gets to hang out with other murdered girls and party and everything is magical happiness. It's supposed to be ethereal but just comes off as creepy. She narrates constantly to let us know exactly what we're supposed to feeling at every given moment. The screenwriters leave nothing to chance.

Meanwhile back on earth the movie is going fucking nuts with genres and crazy mood whiplash from scene to scene. Susie's parents, played by the respectively brown and black-haired Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz whose daughters are somehow a pale redhead and a blonde (one of the film's many subtly retarded touches), grieve for Susie in a made-for-TV family melodrama while simultaneously hunting for her killer in a detective movie. Whoa. That's one of the most poorly conceived things I've ever heard of. The tone is manic depressive; at one point the film swerves with neck-snapping force by going from Susie's parents sobbing over their murdered daughter's empty room immediately into a cleaning the house / dance montage scored to upbeat pop rock. It was all I could do to not start convulsing with laughter right there in the aisles.

And let's talk about Mark Wahlberg for a second. He sailed to the raggedy edge of overacting in 2006's The Departed but somehow kept hold, turning in one of the most entertaining screen performances of the decade. But apparently M. Night replaced him with a pod because two years later in The Happening he stank up the joint like nothing I've ever seen from a Hollywood leading man and here in The Lovely Bones he's nearly as bad, still cartoonishly widening his eyes and whining in a high pitch to emote and failing spectacularly. The child playing his fourteen-year-old daughter acts fucking circles around him. Fuck it, kick him out of the industry and pretend The Departed was his swan song.

Okay, so spoilers now if anyone cares: the movie ends with Susie Salmon accepting her death and taking her place in heaven, her family accepting her death and moving on while retaining their fond memories, and her killer dying in a bizarre accident when he falls off a cliff and turns into CGI halfway down. Oh, then the CGI hits some rocks, but I don't know how anyone could have survived turning into CGI like that, so the rocks were really a moot point. And that bizarre, random, pointless, gaudy scene is the perfect ending to The Lovely Bones. Basically, movie sucks, but I still haven't mentioned the worst part: this piece of shit was directed by Peter Jackson.

The Lord of the Rings remains my personal favorite cinematic achievement of the last ten years. I'd been in love with epic fantasy literally since before I can remember, pretty much since I was physically capable of reading, and it was a fulfillment of my wildest childhood dreams to see the genre brought to life onscreen with such love and verve and style and imagination and success. So what happened? How could Peter have fucked up The Lovely Bones so badly? Was the problem the script and subject matter, or as a filmmaker is he just better at operating in the broad strokes of good vs. evil and creature design? Either way, Peter, please, run back to Middle-earth and stay there. I'm still stoked for The Hobbit but my enthusiasm for Jackson's next non-Tolkein movie has been blunted into virtual nonexistence. The Lovely Bones is pretty much a lock for my bottom ten of the year.


1 Star out of 5

Clash of the Titans

The B-movie lives! Make no mistake, Clash of the Titans is cinematic garbage. Stupid beyond belief. It makes Iron Man and Zombieland look like brainy art films. To argue otherwise is to be a twelve-year-old boy. But the real debate is whether or not it's glorious cinematic garbage, and while I need to mull it over, I may be leaning towards yes. I'm a dude who goes to the movies a lot — two, three, occasionally four times a week — and Clash of the Titans is the first movie in untold years that I've seen in a crowded opening night theater where half the audience was cracking up at the cheese with no one even bothering to shush the chortles and wisecracks because that was the treatment the film clearly demanded. A bad movie, absolutely, but a joyous moviegoing experience.

Okay, so get this: Clash of the Titans takes place in a mythical ancient Greece where the people know for a fact that Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, and all the other gods are real — they see them, they speak to them, they come down from Olympus from time to time — and decide to declare war on them. That just seems like a really awful idea on every level. Look, I'm all for mocking religion, but if I knew that God was real and could smite me you'd better believe I'd bend the knee before he could even issue the decree to do so. At one point in the movie Hades comes down and creates a black whirlwind that inhales half the soldiers in the castle with the apparent ease with which you or I would swat a mosquito. Yeah, humanity, going to war with that seems real smart.

Zeus and Hades are respectively played by Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes (making Clash of the Titans a sort of unofficial Schindler's List II) who engage in one of the most delicious duels of overacting I've ever seen. Fiennes hisses and drawls and leers and shuffles zombie-like in what's damn near a parody of his Voldemort while Neeson abandons all dignity and bellows his lines with scenery-chewing ham as befits the King of the Gods. There's a visceral thrill in watching talented actors debase themselves and while there's nothing here that measures up to my all-time favorite display of overacting, Jeremy Irons in Dungeons & Dragons, it's pretty great. Other than Pete Postlethwaite as the protagonist's father there's no other performances of note, especially not a wooden Sam Worthington as said protagonist who almost dares me to take back the praise I gave him after Terminator Salvation, but Neeson and Fiennes need no help from mortals to prop up a picture.

The film's narrative arc reminded me more than a little bit of an RPG video game. We begin with an opening sequence where we're introduced to our protagonist, meet the villain, and our hero gathers his party members and is sent off on his goodly quest. Along the way he powers up his stats, gathers superior equipment (at one point he's given a magical shield and told that it's "a very rare and high-quality item"), gains and loses party members, falls in love with the one female member of his party in occasional cutscenes, and of course has a series of boss fights; first with the cursed King Acrisius, then some giant scorpions, then Medusa, then a rematch with King Acrisius, then the Kraken, then the final boss battle with Hades (this is an alteration from the original 1981 Clash of the Titans, where the final boss was the Kraken). All that's missing is the victory music after each battle and superfluous minigames.

There's no moral gray. There's no politics. There's no socially relevant message. This a monster-fighting flick about swords and gods and magic. The dialogue is so much excrement rolling like shit gumballs from the actors' mouths. The romantic subplot will make you long for the days of Anakin and Padmé's nuanced courtship. At one point a pegasus flies in in glorious slow motion before the sun while unironically epic music plays to let us know that this is supposed to be a great cinematic image. And yes, just as a special "fuck you" to me, the film ends with my most hated trope (spoilers, I guess), a dead character being joyously revived with magic. This movie is fucking terrible. I hated it. I loved it. I don't regret seeing it, especially not with a packed audience in on the joke, but although I know my pleas fall on deaf ears I pray to Zeus that this is the stupidest of this summer's blockbuster extravaganzas.


2 Stars out of 5

The Book of Eli

The biggest mystery about The Book of Eli is why they didn't just openly market it as a Christian film. I mean, Christians aren't exactly a minority in this country and this is easily the most overtly religious film I've seen in theaters since 2004's The Passion of the Christ: the hero gets his goodliness from his faith and his strength from Jesus, he gives hope to the hopeless by teaching them to pray, protecting the last copy of the Bible is portrayed as tantamount to saving the human race, and there are lengthy discussions about said Bible and quoted passages from it. Sure, the explosions and gun battles and rape and cannibalism would have elderly churchgoers stumbling shellshocked towards the exit (although I don't think that crowd goes to the movies much anyway), but it could have made a killing with the young hip Christians.

But if what The Book of Eli is is religious, what it isn't is science fiction. Some websites absentmindedly shuffled it into that genre because of its post-apocalyptic settings, but outside of a few extremely vague references to an event called "the flash" that destroyed the world a few decades back there's no sci-fi trappings to be found at all. Don't expect any robots — hell, don't even expect any internet. If my memory serves, the only technology that appears in the entire film is guns, a water pump, a printing press, the protagonist's iPod, and a few cars (how exactly they get gasoline in this desolate wasteland would have to be the film's second biggest mystery).

What The Book of Eli is is a Western in the Man With No Name mold that happens to have automatic weaponry. Denzel Washington is a man wandering the lawless desert on a mysterious mission who rolls into a frontier town ruled by vile gangleader Carnegie, played by the always awesome Gary Oldman. If you've watched the old Eastwood Westerns you know how this goes: our protagonist isn't exactly a nice guy, in fact, he's kind of an asshole with no qualms about killing, but our villain who runs the town is still way worse so the two gotta end up in conflict. Expect standoffs and shootouts and tense confrontations! Just with an extra religious gloss to it this time, as Oldman desperately wants the holy book that Denzel carries as means to marshall the easily-led masses and expand his empire across the broken world.

Taken as a Western, the film is a flawed but mildly entertaining venture that achieves its modest success almost entirely on the strength of its two leads. You don't have to obsessively follow cinema to know that Denzel and Gary Oldman both rule and it's entertaining simply to watch them go up against each other. The supporting cast doesn't fare as well, particularly a spectacularly miscast Mila Kunis as a town girl who joins Denzel on his sojourn and fails to the point of it actually being funny any time she's asked to be badass. There's no hyper-speed cutting or shakeycam but there's no innovative or incredibly compelling action scenes either; the bloodshed is at its most entertaining whenever Denzel busts out his machete. The cinematography of the destroyed world is good but visually I preferred the silvery wasteland of Terminator Salvation.

All in all I don't think I'll ever watch The Book of Eli again, but I'd recommend giving it a rental if you're into post-apocalyptic settings, Westerns, or Christianity. I'm not interested in religion but I still marginally enjoyed the film as a violent shoot 'em up Wild West flick with cool stars enough that I didn't feel I'd totally wasted my time when the credits rolled round. Also, between Terminator Salvation, 9, 2012, The Road, and now The Book of Eli, I gotta ask, what's the deal with all the apocalypse, Hollywood? Lighten the fuck up!


2 Stars out of 5

Youth In Revolt

The problem with Michael Cera's latest vehicle Youth in Revolt is that it's a 90-minute adaptation of a 500-page source novel and even to someone like me who hasn't read the book it really, really shows. Potentially interesting characters flit in and out of the narrative with a few minutes of screentime apiece, subplots are glossed over so quickly you wonder why they even bothered introducing them, and the central romance has no time to breathe, let alone genuinely invest you. After the film my foremost thought was that I wish the concept of the miniseries was more prevalent in America, because told over four or five hour-long episodes I think Youth in Revolt could have been a much stronger work.

Although the trailer attempts to position the movie's tone as something more like Superbad than the low-key, dry quirkfest it actually is, it faithfully represents the plot: Michael Cera plays Nick Twisp, an aspiring novelist, horny virgin, and pushover omega male who's not only the biggest pussy Cera's ever played but almost a parody of his typical screen persona. In order to hold onto the love of his short life, the adorable Sheeni Saunders, he willingly plunges headlong into schizophrenia by creating an alter ego named Francois Dillinger, an ultra-suave hedonistic Frenchman who helps him with his girl problems but, like Fight Club's Tyler Durden, creates far worse problems with the law.

The film has an episodic feel, almost perfectly divided into frantically-paced fifteen-to-twenty minute segments that lead into one another but otherwise stand alone, each taking place in different locations with different narrative thrusts and even different sets of supporting characters. The first segment takes place in the trailer park where Nick meets Sheeni, the next back at Nick's house where he creates Francois to get himself in trouble and sent back to Sheeni, one at Nick's new school, one on an impromptu road trip to sneak into Sheeni's new private school to see her, one involving his final run from the law, and so on. Episodes. Again, I can't emphasize how much this average movie feels like a missed opportunity to make a great miniseries.

While Nick Twisp is a lukewarm retread of Cera's previous characters, Francois Dillinger is hilarious, almost to the movie's detriment as it only truly comes alive when he's onscreen and you spend the long stretches without him (nearly twenty minutes at some points) waiting for his return. As I said in my Year One review I continue to really like Michael Cera despite the predictable internet backlash against him, but with the increasing caricature of himself he's become since Arrested Development and Superbad occasionally making that fandom tough to defend it was nice to see him expand a little bit with the glorious dick that is Francois. I'd just like to see him expand in a better movie next time. Youth In Revolt isn't bad but fails to be memorable, and I'd skip it unless you're as big a Cera fan as I am.


2 Stars out of 5