Worst of 2009

Review will be subject to change, if I think of anything else to hate about this film. I'm sure I'm missing something.

I will preface my review by saying: If you think my review is long and drags, it's nothing compared to the drab slog that is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Transformers 2 is a movie so bad that the only way I can conceive it's existence is if it were an anthropological experiment on the slow, ceaseless decay of western culture. Screen this movie to the masses, if they respond to it in a positive way then they are morons and mankind is sliding ever closer to being a real-life Idiocracy. It's no exaggeration to say this movie has as much of a script as "Ass: The Movie".

While every blockbuster release this year was hit by the strike the telltale signs are buried to varying degrees. While Wolverine's momentum was inert and scenes existed for no reason other than to splice into a trailer, the basic structure of a plot existed there, even if that plot was bland and without drama. Star Trek's plot begins to collapse exactly around the time Kirk meets Future-Spock, but the entire film works because it's directed with energy and smarts and filled with a downright perfect cast. Terminator Salvation is half-way through a rewrite and the entire thing doesn't click together, but it's the general drabness that sinks it.

Transformers 2 is a film without the slightest sign of a script, it looks like a 10 page treatment expanded on the day of shooting. Nothing makes any sense, there's no structure, no character arcs, no drama. It seems clear that every positive thing to come out of the original movie were the work of Spielberg's input; the original screenplay was almost 100% Amblin in tone, some signs of that carry through to the finished product (such as the central friendship between Sam and Bumblebee and the funniest scene in the whole film, the Autobots hiding around the sides of the house) but the influence of Bay could also be seen - the inappropriate sex humour, the racism, the spastic editing.

Sadly, for this film Spielberg's eye was off the ball, and Bay just started kicking it around like a giggling little moron. Transformers 2 has completely and utterly lost that Spielberg touch, lost that heart, and now it is packed to the rafters with these painful Bayisms.

Now I have no problem with Michael Bay - Bad Boys 2 is indulgent and offensive and crude... but it's an R-rated action movie, so politically incorrect content is par for the course. Transformers 2 is utterly inappropriate for children, and they should be the target audience for this fucking film. I would not let a child sit through this, it's puerile, foul mouthed, racist and insultingly dumb. Simply having robots say "bitch", "shit", "fuck" and "pussy" doesn't make it ok for kids to hear it.

Another thing this applies to is racism. The Twins, Mudflap and Skids, are without a doubt some of the most bluntly racist creations since the crows in Dumbo. They make Jar Jar Binks look racially sensitive. Boasting big ears, buckteeth filled mouths (one of his being gold) spitting out jivetalk, and with some illiteracy thrown in for good measure. They are a mechanical emodiment of racial stereotypes that have been stamped out of most mainstream entertainment by now but are seemingly able to get a free pass because it's just robots. To anyone who will defend the Twins as entirely innocent due to their robotic nature, or even go to the lengths of saying "if you thought they were supposed to be black then maybe you've got the problem", then consider this... in the deli scene (when LeBeuf and Fox reunite with John Turturro) we see a black man with buckteeth, if Michael Bay didn't intend for us to make a connection between the Twins and African American stereotypes then why include this character? It's a pretty blatant visual link and one you simply can't argue against.

The bigger offense in having these characters present is their screentime. Optimus Prime spends a considerable chunk of screentime absent (even when he was alive), but he did get he movies ONE good sequence which I will touch on later. Bumblebee, the heart of the last movie, was largely absent too, even in scenes where he was present, he rarely communicated with Sam and the others and was merely a background present when the camera was on him. It's also telling that the one scene with even the slightest hint of heart was when Bumblebee mourned Sam's death - Bumbelbee and Sam's friendship was key to the original films success and here it is an afterthought. Every other Autobot from the original film is absent for the almost the entire film, so we are stuck with the Twins for most of it's runtime. Even then the amount of time dedicated to the transformers is slim. It's more human characters, once again.

I tolerated the abundance of humans in the original Transformers because (a) we were being introduced to the Transformers and needed audience surrogates to set things up and (b) at least Sam was entertaining, and to varying degrees so were his parents and John Turturro's Agent Simmons. Sadly Bay has beefed this element up instead of the robot presence, which was clearly the main draw for the audience. So now we get lots of Turturro (which gets old in this film) and Sam's parents are shoehorned into far more scenes (even the final battle, for no logical reason) and there is a brand new, annoying sidekick played by the alarmingly talentless Ramon Rodriguez. Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson are back, but in far shorter supply, as they spend most of their time with the Autobots we're not going to be seeing.

If the movie is racist, it's also heavily right wing in nature. This is a movie proudly part of the Bush years. The Autobots engage in a War On Terror-like hunt for Decepticons, with Optimus Prime and the others acting like murderous dirtbags. I would say he behaves out of character but the film has no concerns with characterization. The movie also paints the Obama adminstration as spineless pussies, with Obama's mouthpiece character ruining the armies fun by disapproving of their genocidal witchhunt which as likely killed thousands of innocents in collateral damage. The soldiers openly mock this character, and by extension the new left wing adminstration, as being anti-military.

It's telling when a plothole is the least of a movie's problems. The Fallen (the most underdeveloped villain in modern action cinema, he makes Star Trek's Nero look nuanced and well rounded) claims that only another Prime robot can kill him, which would be Optimus. So if only Primes can kill other Primes, then why was Optimus killed in a fight by three bog standard Decepticons? By that point in the film you really don't care, though, there is so much more to complain about than basic consistency.

Admittedly the Prime fight sequence is the only time in the film where the action is not only decipherable but has some vague hint of drama and intensity. Prime kicks some impressive ass and the action holds still with a surprisingly restrained eye, letting us take in the spectacle instead of barraging us with a whirling mass of visual noise. On an IMAX screen the result is absolutely stunning, the transition from the standard scenes to the IMAX shot scenes is a large scale equivalent of shifting from VHS to Blu Ray, it's astounding in it's clarity and scale. Beautiful stuff. Sadly this is the only scene where the IMAX technology is ever taken advantage of, the other scene including Devestator is boring and only seems to serve the purpose of giving us an extra clear view of Devestator's giant wrecking ball testes. A giant robot with testicles. I often thought Michael Bay had the sensibilities of a 13 year old, but I may downgrade that to 7.

There is very little in this film that has any bearing on story or character, there is possibly 1 hour 30 mins of screentime in a 2 hour 30 minute film that has no purpose at all. And barely any of it involves giant robots. For a film called TRANSFORMERS 2, it may have an even smaller ratio of human-to-robot screentime. All those claiming it is MORE action packed than it's predecessor are misremembering, because this is a movie almost devoid of momentum, tension, drama or even explosions. We get an action scene at the beginning, a brief action scene 40 or so minutes in (by that time it feels like the movie should be wrapping up, the film moves so slowly) and then a finale that focues more intently on the militaries participation in the fight than the robots. There's your army porn for you.

This is a movie utterly without discipline. The juvenile humour clashes with any semblance of drama, scenes flow with no rhyme nor reason, basic geography is given the middle finger. Bay's demented editing will intercut two dogs humping in the centre of a firefight. An airplane flying overhead is cut between a shot of a woman walking down a hall (why? as a shot it would serve a point, but in that sequence it makes no sense). Characters enter a building in D.C. but exit and find themselves in Arizona. One shot will show them driving across a desert plain in Egypt, next we see them on a tarmac road in Jordan. To say the visual storytelling of this film is off would imply there is any sense of storytelling to be found. Michael Bay has created, quite possibly, the dumbest movie ever made. If you could sit through this mental assault without noticing how profoundly fucked it all is, then I would put good money on you being a moron or someone with such low expectations out of life that you'd probably settle for domestic violence from a loved one.

Shia Labeuf continues to show that he can make good work out of the worst scripts and while he does his best here, he just cannot overcome the rest of the film's glaring, headpounding flaws. Megan Fox looks gorgeous but you can see that just about anywhere these days, so that's no reason to catch this film. Newcomer, Australian Isabel Lucas actually 'out-sexies' Fox in her short screentime, although the level of sexuality she exudes is just too much for a kid's film. It was a-ok for me, but I couldn't help but think of how wrong it felt in this film. Her presence raises another issue, and another example of the script being one of Bay's last concerns when making the film; her character is a Decepticon that can transform into a human being (as well as grow a mechanical tail from her what I can only imagine was her vagina as the anus would be too subtle for Bay). Absolutely no precedence was set for this, so if they can do this, then why don't they all disguise themselves as humans? It's highly likely such a thing never occurred to Bay, and the only reason she was there was there because he had recently sat through Terminator 3 and thought a shapeshifting, hot robot chick was "kewl". While the script was of little concern to Bay, as I said, it was clear that what was of primary concern to Bay was whatever random, asinine bullshit he thought was cool - regardless of whether it fit with the scenes or even made the slightest bit of sense. If you were to discover a portal into Michael Bay's head (like in Being John Malkovich), this is what we would see when looking at the world through his eyes. I'm almost positive Michael Bay is severely autistic.

It's hard to believe the summer blockbuster has come to this; a tradition that began with a bona fide masterpierce, Jaws, has devolved into Transformers 2, without question one of the dumbest movies ever made. Plan 9 From Outer Space possesses more good filmmaking instinct and basic script construction than this mess.

As an anthropolgical study, watching Transformers and taking in the audience reaction is a fascinating glimpse into how little people care about the basics of film - taking the notion of "shutting off your brain" and turning it into something quite literal. The only way to enjoy this film and come away without complaint is if you are medically braindead. If this is the kind of shit we reward as a culture with record breaking box office, then we deserve to be treated like morons. If word of mouth kills this film in the coming weeks my faith in humanity will be restored.

If you liked this movie, you should probably consider sterilizing yourself. I'm almost not joking. It's THAT bad, and you're THAT stupid.

"I need someone to tell me what is good, ok, and I need someone to tell me what's bad. Because if nobody tells you these things, Martin, then how do you know what's good and what's bad? And then what happens?"

A character in The Informers makes that impassioned plea roughly an hour and fifteen minutes into the film, and I feel he has a point, so it is my duty to tell you what is good and what is bad.

The Informers is bad. Just... really, really bad.

The early 80s were a hell of a time (apparently), it was a time of bad hair, loud fashion, consequence free sex, nose candy and rampant self-absorbtion. The Informers is set in the early 80s, a point it goes to great lengths to make with references to Devo, Safety Dance and on-the-nose fashion statements (when characters actually bother to wear clothes, that is), a point it couldn't have made more clear had it lit up a giant neon sign that said "THIS IS THE 1980's" and then proceded to have John Rambo (from Rambo III, obviously) blow it up with an rpg, all to the strains of Flock of Seagulls (they're actually on the soundtrack, by the way).

The Informers is an ensemble picture following several unrelated but (vaguely) interconnected characters, none of which are in any way likeable or interesting (a character need not be likeable if they are interesting, so The Informers fails twofold). The characters interconnected nature is almost pointless as there is no convergence, or pay off, at the end of the film, they may as well have been utterly seperate characters in utterly seperate stories. The stories would still be banal and uninvolving and the characters would still be loathsome, vapid fuckwits, but at least there would be no presumption that this horseshit is actually heading somewhere.

Mel Raido, lips locked in a perpetual pucker, affecting an accent like Ralph Brown from Withnail & I (or Wayne's World 2, if you're that way inclined. I actually half expected him to start talking about brown M&Ms), staggers through the entire film like he just crawled out of a car crash with a serious head injury. Quite what his story is about (beyond a slow crawling, pitifully dull examination of the emotional numbness that comes with a life of excess divorced of restriction) will continue to elude me and I will not revisit the film to figure it out.

Amber Heard prances around naked, gets fucked, or talks about fucking, and then dies of superAIDS. That's pretty much her contribution to the film. She contracts and dies of AIDS in a matter of days, somehow. There's no drawn out illness, she feels under the weather, and suddenly drops dead. Quite how this special strain of AIDS didn't wipe out most of the North American West coast in the 1980s is beyond me, it puts the Outbreak monkeys flu to shame.

Chris Isaak plays drunk, but I suspect he actually was drunk while filming this because only real drunks can be this boring and without charm.

Mickey Rourke earned enough good will from The Wrestler (which he shot after this, but still) that I won't hold this clunky performance against him, he's not bad but for a man of his talents it just screams of "coasting", while Billy Bob Thornton sleepwalks through yet another role. He gave more passion and conviction in Eagle Eye than he displayed here. Eagle bloody Eye. For fucksake, Billy Bob. Kim Basinger mostly just yells, increased volume and smeared mascara are a substitute for worthwhile acting but at least there's a semblance of life in her. It's fake and unconvincing but I admire the "effort" in a film almost devoid of it.

Brad Renfro shows the most life in his performance, erratic and twitchy though it may be (possibly more a drug issue than an acting choice), which is ironic given that for all outward appearances he does look like a bloated, rundown corpse before the heroin actually made him a bloated, rundown corpse. I would love to say Renfro got a fine send-off in The Informers, something enduring like Peter Finch or Heath Ledger, one deserving of the promise he showed in The Client, Apt Pupil or Bully but it's simply not the case. In fact, I'd say Renfro should count himself lucky he croaked when he did, because it means he got to miss out on the tidal wave of derision that would have swept his way when this film was finally released.

These bland, unlikeable characters meander through their boring, lifeless stories which mercifully just end. They barely reach a second act before they end abruptly. Renfro and Rourke are involved in the kidnapping of a small child, whom Rourke plans to sell to a group of vampires. In the book they're vampires, in the movie they're just nameless bad people who want a kid for some reason and we're supposed to be fearful when Renfro and Rourke are forced to flee these "bad people". They flee and Renfro lets the boy go. That's the end of that story. All that flaccid build up for nothing. The most closure we get from a story is when Amber Heard dies of fast acting AIDS. Dropping dead from SuperAIDS is the most elegant and thoughtful conclusion this film could manage.

The film is a relatively scant 98 minutes and yet it feels longer. Imagine the painful wait you endure when you're 10 minutes early for a dental appointment, sat in the waiting room and struggling to keep your composure. Time slows down and every second is a fresh hell of discomfort and tedium waiting to be unleashed. Now imagine being 98 minutes early for a dental appointment. That's the entire runtime for The Informers.

The direction is so lifeless and lacking in tone that no actor's performance escapes unharmed. Such a vacuum of energy it is, it even manages to make the near constant nudity of Amber Heard look utterly unsexy. Her particularly pleasing form is not enough to sit through this film, simply wait for Mr. Skin or somebody to compile all her nude scenes together into an mpeg. It obviously seems crass to dedicate an entire parageaph to talking almost exclusively about a naked girl but this really is the only positive thing I can think to say about the film.

My mind was telling me that this was satire, it's Bret Easton Ellis afterall, but at no point does the film show the slightest spark of energy, slyness or spite that informed both American Psycho and Rules of Attraction. It feels like somebody took Ellis' work and surgically removed the humour, leaving us with a very earnest and po-faced look at a group of people nobody likes and nobody should like, and feigning for profundity instead of maliciously sending up that false sense of importance that the rich and priveledged may or may not feel.

Basically it takes Ellis' bread and butter and replaces it with a ciabatta and pesto. Satirical vitriol replaced with unearned pretension, and without that mean, knowing edge we're left with a film about deeply boring and ugly people doing deeply boring and ugly things. There's nothing here worth spending your time on. Fuck this movie.

I say this as a longtime fan of The Whitest Kids U'Know, that this movie was profoundly awful. Juvenile in all the wrong ways, without any of the subversion or wit their sketch comedy manages to cram in between the crassness. I have no seen a greater disconnect between the director and the acting talent in some time, this is genuinely baffling because they are the same people.

Their sketch comedy sometimes has a problem wherein they drag out a scene for too long before getting to a punchline, or (worse yet) continue the scene long passed the punchline. Their punchier, more immediate scenes are their best. This movie, sadly, carries their flaws over and with it's feature length runtime, the problem feels a great deal more pronounced. The jokes are stretched out paperthin, and the ones we get just aren't funny.

Matthew Horne and James Corden fancy themselves as a new Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and director Phil Claydon seems to fancy himself a new Edgar Wright for that matter. None of which possess a fraction of the talent the Spaced/Shaun/Fuzz crew have in the tip of their smallest toe. The attempt to emulate Shaun of the Dead is so painfully transparent in it's execution and writing that it borders on insulting.

Whereas Shaun took it's cues from Romero, LVK takes it's from Hammer Horror, but where Wright/Pegg had a love and understanding of horror and it's conventions, creating a bona fide entry into the genre as well as a genuinely funny film, the clowns behind this film never rise above limp parody.

Horne and Corden continue to reveal themselves to be one hit wonders, completely without charm or range. Paul McGann seems game for it with his quite fun turn as an incredulous vicar. The female cast is almost exclusively populated with what appears to be Maxim models, taking hotness (of which there is an abundance of) over acting ability - I'm sure the terrible accents are an intentional nod to the women in Hammer movies but I have never been of the opinion that things should be intentionally shit just to pay homage to something that was shit. Tarantino doesn't do that and neither does Edgar Wright.

I will give the film one thing - it's very well lit. The colour and the light... it's almost enough to fool you into believing this was a professional production and not something cobbled together by a clan of dipshits.

As is apparent with a film that has this title, the movie is at times uncomfortably homophobic and misogynistic - it's not outright hateful but the conceit is that we laugh at two guys killing gay women with phallic objects (no exaggeration, the handle on the vampire slaying sword is clearly a gilded cock. And when said gay women are killed by said phallic objects, they appear to bleed white spooge.

I have no problem with trashy/offensive material but it's not even funny. I will forgive a lot if it makes me laugh, and I didn't even crack a smile watching this.

Defying my earlier promise of not wanting to see this, I found myself sitting through this ordeal. I hope the offer of prison shower rape is still open to me because I'd take one in the seat if it meant I could forget about this dire film.

A few things I picked up from this film -
(a) Tyler Perry is HUGE. I swear, that dude should give up cross dressing and start playing for the NFL. When I think man in drag I don't commonly picture them being built like a cement toilet.

(b) Tyler Perry likes to have it both ways. Intercutting jokes about sociopathic old ladies, weed smoking old men and stupendously camp fat bald men we are also treated to a tale of prostitution, corruption and gang rape. Uninitiated viewers and faithful fans alike, just try to rationally reconcile those two things: You're (supposedly) laughing about a man in drag threatening to assault people, and then you're supposed to be moved by the plight of a rape victim and social injustice? How does crude comedy about violence and drug abuse help service a morality play about violence and drug abuse? How does that work? Did Schindler's List need a few Marx Bros jokes to help make it's point?

(c) Rape turns women into whores.

(d) Apparently questionable depictions of women (practically every woman in the film is portrayed in a dubious light, either subservient to their men, devious bitches or as previously stated whores - Viola Davis is the closest to a respectable character as we get and even she is poorly realized) are ok if you have a dude in drag talking smack to people. The most popular female character in his movies isn't even played by a woman. Nor is she even remotely believable.

(e) Seriously, Tyler Perry is huge. Him and Terry Crewes should form a tag team and start busting heads on the wrestling circuits.

Basically, I wish I had listened to the voice of sanity in my head that told me there are 1000s of other movies I could sit through and that morbid curiousity isn't always a good enough reason to press play.

If you love Perry's work then more power to you. You're just part of a niche that enjoys awful fucking movies.

The conceit of this film is that a group of nerdy Star Wars fans are planning a break-in of the Skywalker Ranch in order to steal a print of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, as a final act of kindness towards one of their own, who will be dead from cancer before the film is even released.

With the magic of hindsight we can all agree that this plan is doomed to failure, because even if they did succeed the outcome would be that this dying guy's final days were spent knowing that Jar Jar Binks existed.

You also know you're on pretty thin ice when a movie posits that their Star Wars nerd protagonists are somehow less dorky than Star Trek nerds. Despite the movies best efforts to make the Trekkers look like sadcases and our heroes look awesome, the titular Fanboys don't fare much better; uninspired debates about Luke/Leia incest and Boba Fett are sub-Kevin Smith in quality and only go to further the impression that these Star Wars fans are retards.

Yet the movie has no intention of saying such a thing and is actively trying to make these rather detestable bores look cool. The movie could have used a little knowing self-deprecation to balance things out. For starters, the Fanboys (during a predictable little spat with some Trekkers, headed by Seth Rogen) ask the Trekkers to name ONE Star Wars character that's gay, in an attempt to prove which franchise is better (they posit that Picard is gay). Ignoring the juvenile homophobia, are the Fanboy so deluded that they can't see a very clear parallel between C3PO and R2D2 and a bitchy gay couple? It's hardly an original observation, The Simpsons managed to make the same joke during it's weak years, that shows you how hard it would have been to make that joke and it still managed to ellude the writers.

If the movie was to have no real plot or characters worth caring about, then a few sly jabs at their own fandom in the script could have saved the film from being a prolonged, listless act of nerd self-fellatio.

Simply referencing Star Wars characters or throwing in a cameo from a Star Wars (or even Star Trek, for that matter) actor is a good way to show how much you love the franchise, but when you're not doing anything with it, it isn't really going to cut it. There's always room for reverence to ones influences, but do something original with it in the process. Edgar Wright is a fine example of stitching ones influences seamlessly into a script whilst also knowing when to throw in a few jokes at their expense, yet still remembering to populate it with actual jokes that non-nerds will get.

Reference comedy has no legs to begin with, and this movie is off to a shaky start when it's referencing 30+ year old material.

It was a criminal waste of the acting talents of it's leads (other than Dan Fogler, who might have been beneath the material, to be honest) and the tacked on cancer subplot seems to shoot for sentimentality but misses by a mile.

I struggle to comprehend how anyone thought the cancer storyline helped the film in any way, it was barely touched upon to begin with, dropped almost entirely and then nodded towards briefly towards the end. It was a quick, cheap grab for involvement from the crowd and didn't work at all. A Judd Apatow production could have blended these two conflicting tones together, but this movie is not fit to sniff the crotch of one of Apatow's dick jokes.

Repeat after me, internet: Not everything with pirates/ninjas/zombies is cool. (Delete where applicable).

While Sweden reinvigorated the vampire genre with the beautiful Let The Right One In, Norway has decided to just chew up a bunch of older, better films in the zombie genre and vomit the results into the mouths of it's audience, like a mama bird of mediocrity.

Instead of blazing a new trail for the genre with a unique vision or novel angle, director Tommy Wirkola is merely trampling down the path laid down by Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, with none of the wit, energy or invention that informed their movies. He even flat out steals shots from their movies for no function beyond having no original ideas of his own. There is nothing distinctly unique about this movie, not in the way Shaun of the Dead managed to pay tribute to the genre but with a fresh, new visual stamp from Edgar Wright.

Another thing Wright and Pegg did better in Shaun of the Dead is their reverence for the genre; in Shaun the references are subtle, much like the way Tarantino would treat them. A visual cue that mimics a classic image, a sound effect or musical cue, a throwaway line of dialogue cherrypicked from classics. In Dead Snow things are merely named outright, there is no originality to the references, simply Family Guy/Epic Movie-esque references. Stating your references bluntly is not clever or original, it's just lazy and appeals to people who like to think they're pop culture fiends but they're just another cog in the lowest common denominator, low attention span clock that ticks ever-predictably on.

Nazi zombies look great, top notch make-up work there, but there's nothing unique about them. There's no reason they needed to be Nazis, it doesn't benefit the (empty) story, the (annoying) characters or the (non-existent) subtext.

If you call yourself a horror fan and you don't see the lazy transparency of this effort, then you really need to get better acquainted with Raimi and Jackson, because this crap isn't even fit to light the match to light the candle that Shaun of the Dead holds to their movies.

Things that happen in this movie -

(1) Wolverine's father is actually not his father, despite looking exactly like Hugh Jackman. That makes sense, casting department.

(2) Despite both being Canadian, Wolverine and Sabertooth fight in every single American conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam. Nobody seems to mind until one of them tries to rape a child.

(3) William Stryker has either forgotten that he is Southern, or simply hasn't developed the accent he used in X2 yet. Can we get an origins movie to explain how he becomes Bryan Cox?

(4) Ryan Reynolds continues his streak of being both the best thing about the film and also being criminally underused. A full movie starring his character would be greatly appreciated.

(5) In the X-Men universe wolverines can apparently howl at the moon, despite not actually being wolves. This flawed notion is the origin of the character's name. If only he could remember his entire identity is based on a misunderstanding

(6) Fun fact: In this movie Wolverine's claws were played by the Singing Sword special effect from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

(7) Heavily publicized supporting characters (Gambit, Cyclops, etc) have less screen time than Darth Maul in Episode 1.

(8) Amnesia bullets.

(9) Patrick Stewart's role was played by a sinister waxwork automoton.

(10) A little piece of Hugh Jackman's soul dies, knowing that his future will consist of nothing but more crappy X-Men films. We all feel his pain.

To quote Devin Faraci in his review of Gigantic, "quirky is a tone, not a plot."

That summarizes everything that is wrong with Gigantic, a tedious little indie effort from first time direcor Matt Aselton. Even the fucking poster is indie, it's insufferably yellow, whereas the film is just insufferably quirky.

Now, people are by their nature somewhat quirky, we all have our weird glitches buried beneath our personalities and some surface more than others, but at the end of the day there's more to the human animal than their idiosyncracies. Gigantic's characters have nothing but their idiosyncracies, remove all of their extraneous quirks and you are left with empty people, saying empty things and experiencing empty things. These people make the cardboard cut-out displays in theater lobbies look complex and layered. They have quirks with no personal throughline to justify them (almost all of my quirks stem from an irrational concern about what strangers might think about me), these just exist for the sake of amusing the audience.

Ed Asner and John Goodman make the most of what little they have to work with, but it's not enough to cover up the fact their characters exist because of their quirks, not the other way around.

So while Asner and Goodman keep their heads just above water, Paul Dano and Zooey Deschanel (two actors who are so increasingly uninteresting I fall asleep just reading their names on a poster) sink and drown without a fight. Dano is so subtley one-note that you might be convinced he has no notes at all, he simply reads his lines in every scene and walks when he's told to, there's nothing to him. PT Anderson channeled something in Dano to turn his limitations as an actor into something pious and arrogant and absolutely fitting, but Aselton is no PTA when it comes to dealing with actors (and while he's got a nice enough eye for a shot, he's no PTA in the technical side of things) and so we're left with regular boring, non-event Dano.

Deschanel is a joy to look at, but she appears to have nothing to offer as an actress, without the material to back her up and (a four minute appearance in The Assassination of Jesse James, aside) she hasn't really been given any material worth talking about since All The Real Girls, and even then she was a scant presence when the true compelling presence was Paul Schneider. If she in any way resembles her screen presence (especially here) then it effectively kills any fantasies one might have about making an honest woman of her, she's a beautiful, insufferable bore.

Zach Galifanakis shows up periodically to beat the shit out of Dano's character, which is something I can absolutely get behind but this takes a left turn from Quirky St into Fight Club Alley. Yes, Dano, for reasons utterly beyond comprehension suddenly becomes insane and has random battles with his bearded alter-ego. It makes no sense and only compounds every problem this film has, it's entirely too in love with being weird at the expense of character, story or even an ounce of human honesty.

James Cameron gave us two masterpieces of popcorn cinema. Then we got a rubbish sequel. That should've been the end, but like Judgment Day another Terminator sullying Cameron's grand legacy was inevitable. And here it is...


Outside of a slick appearance, competent choreography and a great performance by Anton Yelchin - this movie is an incomprehensible pile of crap.


Firstly, the Terminators are not scary and are not a threat. They don't even behave like Terminators. They prefer to throw their targets around like a puppy with a piece of rope, as opposed to, oh you know, terminating them. A contrived "trap" set up by Skynet makes no sense when considering the time travel crux of the series, why try to trap Connor when the whole point is to wipe him off the face of existence?


Bale is terrible. A genuine career worst. His role is underwritten (due to hasty rewrites beefing up the Connor role) which has an adverse effect on the one interesting character in the film, the fantastic Anton Yelchin. This should have been Kyle Reese's film and not John Connor's, and the vast difference between the two characters in terms of quality and interest proves this point profoundly. I'm also at a loss as to which scene Bale became so emotionally invested he had his on-set meltdown, because there isn't a single scene here where he appears to have more than a passing interest in the words he's saying.

The editing/storytelling is a clumsy, awkward, illogical mess. The plot needed another run through to iron out all the bafflingly stupid plotholes and more importantly (and this is what saved Star Trek from its own considerable plotholes) they needed to make more characters we care about and spend more time with the one character there that we could care about: Kyle Reese!


Sam Worthington does an ok job but it's down to Avatar and Clash of the Titans for his true movie star potential to be realized. He has a strong, manly look (something very few of our leading men have these days) and a good presence but had little to work with here. Marcus Wright is an interesting idea, but he belonged in a movie that ceased to exist post-rewrite, his entire purpose was altered and the reasoning they gave for him being there in this film was laughable at best. Again, it didn't play like something Skynet would do. Granted the original idea behind Marcus and Skynet manufactured cyborgs didn't make sense for a Terminator movie, but at least it was an idea... something Terminator Salvation lacked throughout. Even T3 had an idea in there somewhere.


I would rate T3 above this, purely because T3 (a) had that awesome crane chase, (b) had a ballsy ending which actually worked for the series and (c) had the good sense to use the original score as inspiration, as opposed to the bland mess Elfman vomited into my ears.


So things keeping me from writing this movie off altogether - Anton Yelchin, fantastic effects (a fine swan song for the dearly missed Stan Winston) and a lovely grain to the picture. Everything else ranges from meh to pure unadulterated crap.

Spoilers...

A movie that becomes an exercise in punishing inevitability due to the fact the whole thing hinges on a plot twist, and the movie shows it's hand within the first 10 minutes.

She's released from a psychiatric ward at the beginning of the movie, and we're supposed to be surprised that it turns out she's crazier than a shithouse rat?

A bigger problem stems from the fact I have seen the far superior, understated Korean original, A Tale of Two Sisters, and comparisons are going to be inevitable when one film did everything right. The two main issues are thus -

Issue #1 being, they made the wrong sister the imaginary one. In the original the meek and shy sister was the imaginary sister, this time it's the bold and headstrong sister. One reason this derails the film is that Arielle Kebbel's character spends most of her time mouthing off to character's that cannot hear her, and yet we're supposed to believe that everyone is just giving her the silent treatment. It makes no sense to have the most vocal of the sisters be the figment of imagination. The quiet sister could slip in and out of the story without impacting other characters, it's hard to do that with someone who is "in your face". Perhaps the writers thought they were being extra clever, but the film cannot help but draw attention to itself. On a more fundamental level, the living sisters guilt over the death of her sister should have spurred the protectiveness that drove the character to be suspicious of her new stepmother.

The second issue is they play the stepmother as a villain. She's outright cold and mean, whereas the original feigned civility and warmth, it made her more unhinged tendencies that much more striking. It was far creepier.

Emily Browning is impossibly adorable. She's got a face that was made for movies and I hope to see more of her because, while she doesn't really seem to have huge range, she's got a niche that she fills well.

Elizabeth Banks is misused here, she's fine but I think she would have been better utilized had she had played it "nicer" which is more in line with her acting style and would have matched up with the originals approach.

The rest of the cast are servicable, but David Strathairn is totally wasted in this empty role. His only real contribution to the film is to clarify a plot twist that was already obvious at the very beginning.