FILM REVIEWS: Man of Steal Your Money

Wow. I am so f**king pissed right now I can't even see straight. I have a new contender for worst film of the year. And it's Man of f**king Steel. Although A Good Day to Die Hard gets honorable mention still, this one really takes the cake. It was the anus of cinema.

I mostly blame director Zack Snyder, who in the past has directed such masterpieces as 300, Watchmen, and Sucker Punch. If you didn't catch the innate sarcasm in that comment, well, this review won't make much sense to you. The guy knows how to create good visuals, but the stories and character development are consistently ABYSMAL. And Man of Steel is no exception.

Not since Superman IV: The Quest For Peace has the man of steel been so defiled onscreen. Taking a page from Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, Snyder gives Superman a dark, brooding persona, as well as an underdeveloped backstory told mostly in flashbacks, and a terrible series of action sequences. The Dark Knight worked perfectly for a hero as rough and gritty as Batman, but Superman... no. Henry Cavill is essentially useless and wooden as Superman himself, which really drags down the entire movie.

Never in my life would I have imagined that I would be so bored by a movie as loud as Man of Steel. It opens with one of the most idiotic and pointless battles ever, between General Zod, the bad guy (and that's all we basically know about him), and Jor-El, Superman's father. Another thing I never thought would happen: Russel Crowe screaming "KRYPTON IS DOOOOOOOMED!!!" Anyway, you know the rest of the story... Superman goes to Earth and meets Lois Lane, played by Amy Adams, who does a tremendous job of running around in high heels and screaming.

The characters do basically nothing in this film, a trait owed to Snyder, who in the past has given us such great dialogue as "Ready your breakfast and eat hearty... for TONIGHT WE DINE IN HELL!" There's a good twenty minutes of explosions at the beginning, followed by an hour of what SHOULD have been character development (but wasn't), culminating in a total clusterf**k of final battles at the end which lasted a full hour. Michael Shannon does his best as Zod, but even he can't save Man of Steel from its monotonous and soul-crushing finale.

The plot holes abound in this crappy film. In the first place, Zod is exiled to another dimension, just in time for Krypton to blow up. Because he was exiled, he stays alive. So... why exile him? They KNEW the friggin' planet was going to blow up. Then he finds Superman on Earth and tries to resurrect the dead Kryptonian race, but why did he have to terraform Earth first? It had already been proven that Kryptonians not only could live, but could thrive on Earth. In fact, they gain incredible powers and become Gods. But I guess Zod wasn't interested in that. Absolutely retarded. And for that matter, why not evacuate Krypton? According to Russel Crowe, "Everybody here is already dead." But he got Superman out just f**king fine! What the hell?

And the ending sucks. I cannot repeat that enough. There are about five climactic battles, and it is F**KING ENDLESS. I wanted to just fall into the core of the Earth and die while I was watching it. Just mindless, mindless action. And just when you think it's all done, and Superman is saying something corny to Lois, Zod is back and still alive, ready to keep fighting. So that's another 10 minutes of Superman and Zod slamming into buildings and f**king shit up.

Final Score for this travesty? THE COVETED DIEGO TUTWEILLER NEGATIVE ZERO OUT OF TEN STARS. This was actually worse than Green Lantern, DC's most prominent other recent failure. If the Justice League movie ends up getting made, it will totally suck. DC has now exhausted its three best heroes, and two of their movies stank (Batman being the exception). So who is going to save the franchise now? Wonder Woman? Flash? AQUAMAN? Be realistic.

In short, don't watch this pathetic excuse for a film. Stay home and rent The Dark Knight again. I am so, so, so incredibly disappointed.

FILM REVIEWS: World War Z

This year's movie season has been a bit of a dud, but it's picking up with a few unexpected hits, such as World War Z, one of the best zombie films I've ever seen. That's not really saying much, as the zombie genre is often pretty crappy. The only two notable films in the genre are Zombieland and 28 Days Later. And don't worry, although I liked this movie, this is not going to be a zombie fanboy review, where all I do is yell "OH MY GOD ZOMBIES! WASN'T IT COOL WHEN HE BIT THAT GUY'S HEAD OFF? AND BLOOD WENT EVERYWHERE? THAT WAS SO CLEVER."

So: World War Z is, of course, a zombie movie. But it's far more intelligent fare than you would expect from the genre that gave us the entire Resident Evil franchise. Brad Pitt plays a UN worker who, after securing his family aboard an aircraft carrier, travels the globe searching for a solution to the zombie apocalypse. This is the film's greatest asset, as it mirrors other great adventure films (like, dare I say it, Raiders of the Lost Ark), as Brad Pitt ventures from South Korea to Israel to try and discover the virus's origins-- and hopefully a cure.

Most of the film is taken up with zombies running amok, but the suspense is palpable in the final act, where Pitt must walk through a zombie-infested hallway in order to test his solution to the disease. Joining him on the way is an Israeli soldier who is bitten on the hand, and then gets her hand taken off in an improvised amputation by Pitt himself.

Pitt is good in the lead, and does thoughtful stares out of plane windows well, as always. Unfortunately, his hair is pretty distracting, as it whips around in the wind after a hole is blown in his plane. You would think that someone going into a combat situation would think to take a few inches off of his super-mullet before smacking zombies around, but... apparently not.

Also, there are a few plot holes-- Firstly, in Jerusalem, a woman picks up a bullhorn and starts yelling, which attracts the zombies. But are we really expected to believe that this massive city wasn't generating enough noise already? I can overlook minor things like that, but we're really never told what attracts the zombies, movement, smell, or noise. Also, I found it pretty hard to believe that some guy in Israel intercepted a message in INDIA that mentioned zombies, and then saw fit to build a wall around the entire city of Jerusalem. Things like that could have been fixed easily with a better explanation, but for some reason, the film's creators didn't see fit to do so.

In conclusion, World War Z is one of the rarest breeds of Hollywood film-- intelligent trash. Watch this instead of Man of Steel, which is basically just 'trash'. Final score: 6.5/10 stars.

FILM REVIEWS: Iron Man 3

After the semi-disappointing Avengers, I was more than a little worried that another legendary director would let me down. Shane Black, Iron Man 3's director, has worked with Robert Downey Jr. before in one of my favorite comedies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. And if you haven't seen this masterwork of a film, I suggest you drop everything and go watch it right now. Finish reading my blog post, though. I need the hits. I was also worried about another great film franchise dying a slow and painful death, like the year's first travesty, A Good Day to Die Hard. So I went into the theater understandably apprehensive.

And as I so often am these days, I was disappointed: Iron Man 3 is bad as fuck. First off, it gives very little depth to the basically one-dimensional character of Tony Stark, giving him silly anxiety attacks after the events of The Avengers. Secondly, the franchise finally had a massive setback (not quite on the level of The Avengers) in the form of Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin, an Osama bin Laden-Mummar Qadaffi mix who blows s**t up across the country on a regular basis... and then turns out to not even be the main villain. If this guy had been the actual bad guy, it would have been epic. But instead, the villain is some nerd who Tony Stark stood up one night. How exciting.

Tony's bodyguard is the victim of one of The Mandarin's bombs, and he puts out a message to The Mandarin, telling him that he isn't afraid. And so The Mandarin blows up his house. It's an incredibly sad scene, as this monumental bachelor pad, the very symbol of superhero-level decadence, is razed to the ground. Stark ends up flying to Tennessee, where he discovers that the bombs aren't bombs-- they're actually failed experiments.

Apparently, someone is giving amputees treatments that will allow them to magically regrow their limbs, but sometimes they 'overheat' and blow the f**king hell up. This is where the plot starts to unravel. Guy Pearce, the villain, has created an army of evil former-cripples... but how did they turn evil? Do we just assume that if an amputee is given new limbs, they will automatically turn evil? It makes not an ounce of sense.

In the final scenes, Stark saves the president from being killed (and stops Guy Pearce from installing the vice-president as a puppet leader), and Pepper Potts gets the limb-regrowing treatment. So instead of just sitting around like she did in The Avengers, she gets to kill Guy Pearce by blowing him up with a .50 caliber shell. Ben Kingsley and the VP are arrested, and everyone goes home happy.

So, what did I think? Well, as always, I loved RDJ as Tony Stark, and Ben Kingsley sure as hell didn't hurt anything. However, it too often delved into the range of generic action movies with the final ridiculous sequence. What's great about the Iron Man series is that it centers more around the characters than the explosions. But the final battle in this one was almost... dare I say it... reminiscent of Transformers. Still, the cast is great, it's funny, it's witty, and you shouldn't listen to the fanboys complaining about how it "Doesn't adhere to the comics." Nobody gives a flying f**k.

Final score for Iron Man 3? 5/10 stars. It's actually better than the second one, but at the end of the day, that's not saying much. The acting is good, but the silly plot and utterly ludicrous action sequences completely overshadow anything the movie is trying to do. But really, all it's trying to do is entertain. And on that front, sure, it succeeded. But much like this year's The Wolverine, this movie is nothing more than intermittent entertainment to tide Marvel fans over to The Avengers 2.

FILM REVIEWS: White House Down

Sometimes, I find that I'm bored with 'cerebral thrillers' and 'thought-provoking sci-fi', so I need to kick back, relax, and watch some really stupid entertainment. And the film I saw today, White House Down, is just that. It plays like Channing Tatum's test run for a Die Hard reboot, which (although slanderous) is certainly not the worst option for the continuation of the series (the worst being keeping Bruce Willis on as a bald old coot).

White House Down stars Tatum and Jamie Foxx of Django Unchained fame. Foxx is surprisingly good as the president, whose name I cannot remember, and will therefore refer to as Barack Obama. I say this because Roland Emmerich (the maestro of destruction who gave us such great films as Independence Day and 2012) clearly cast him because of his resemblance to the current president. And dammit, I wish Obama was really this badass. Sure, he apparently shoots skeet, but does he drive around the White House lawn with a rocket launcher shooting at terrorists?

Sticking to the aforementioned Die Hard formula, Channing Tatum plays John Cale (not John McClane), a rogue cop in the wrong place at the wrong time (still not John McClane) who has to escape a building that's been taken over by terrorists (no, not Alan Rickman) and stop their maniacal hacker (still not Die Hard) by climbing through secret passageways and elevator shafts (seriously, how much shit will this thing steal from Die Hard?). Someone close to him is taken hostage (his daughter, not his wife) and he has to save her from the terrorists who want him dead for killing their compatriots (yeah, it's pretty much Die Hard). Helicopters are sent in to take the terrorists out (again, Die Hard), but they're taken down in an elaborate explosion sequence (hey, what's that other movie that this happens in... oh, right, Die Hard).

Despite blatantly stealing from the greatest action film ever, White House Down is still amazingly fun to watch. It's easily one of the best White House takeover terrorist movies made in 2013. And that's not a joke, does anyone remember Olympus Has Fallen from a few months ago? Yeah, I didn't think so. And as another aside, Emmerich apparently couldn't resist making a little reference to Independence Day in this movie by having a tour guide MENTION THE MOVIE ITSELF! So now he's doing product placement FOR his movies IN his movies! I swear to God...

Seriously, how did Emmerich not get sued? It's Die Hard down to every last detail. Except in this one, the terrorists are all against each other, some want nuclear launch codes, some are white supremacists, and some (spoiler alert) want to become president. But I'll leave that for you to figure out as the movie progresses.

Actually, I won't-- The Speaker of the House is evil in this movie, and planned a coordinated attack in order to kill both the president and the vice-president and assume command. His goal is to prevent Jamie Foxx's Middle East peace process and help his buddies in the military industrial complex get rich off of war profiteering. And no, unfortunately, Dick Cheney turned down the role. Bummer; he wouldn't have even needed to act.

Kidding aside, as much as I get pissed with Republicans, there's an awful lot of right-bashing in this movie. Every terrorist has some ties with a right-wing organization or something. And although that does add some realism to the film, I don't know if now is a good time to piss off our rural Pennsylvania voters who cling to their guns and religion.

Final Score for White House Down? 4/10 stars. It's an enormous rip-off, but it somehow manages to be entertaining nonetheless. This film is an absolute thrill ride with no brain in it whatsoever. It's one of the silliest movies I've ever seen, but really, what more can you expect from Roland Emmerich, the man who gave us Independence Day and 2012? I hope he continues making these ludicrous, over-the-top popcorn flicks, because at this point I think I've formed a clinical addiction to them. However... that doesn't make them good.

FILM REVIEWS: A Good Day To Die Hard

And now we have A Good Day to Die Hard. To be honest, I haven't seen numbers 2, 3, and 4 recently, so I'm not sure that I'm calling this accurately... but I think it's safe to say that it's easily the worst movie in the whole franchise. It has taken the all-American spirit of the originals and stuck it in Moscow. PRONOUNCED MOS-CO, NOT MOS-COW. GET IT TOGETHER, YOU FRIGGING PEOPLE... Jesus Christ. Anyway, everything about this movie pisses me off, from the stupid characters to the stupid plot to the stupid... everything. The original Die Hard was great because it had a high-concept plot and Alan Rickman as one of the best screen villains of all time. Of course, this was lost on the creators of A Good Day to Die Hard.

Still, it had one of the best 'Yippee-ki-yay' moments in the franchise, where Willis says "The things we do for our kids. Yippee-ki-yay, motherf**kers." And then he drives a truck out of a helicopter and basically neuters it. But this is basically the only good thing I can say about this franchise-killing piece of shit. Willis just phones it in, and says only a few lines of dialogue in the whole movie. When he does talk, it's essentially repeating what he's already said (vacation, anyone?). Courtney, who plays his son, is basically 2013's Sam Worthington. So yes, I hate him passionately.

I could go on for days, but in the interest of conserving time, here's my list of EVERYTHING WRONG WITH A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD!!! John McClane is not a good father? You have to be kidding me. Nobody runs into Chernobyl without a shirt on. Nobody leaves a friggin' ammo dump in the trunk of a Maybach. Jai Courtney is not John McClane's son, don't you EVER FORGET IT. Why do all the Russians always turn on each other in these movies? Very little use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Does not take place on a major holiday. Bruce Willis is bald, again. Why are so many Russians walking in slow motion whenever someone makes a phone call? Why was the bad guy eating a carrot? How many times is Willis going to say 'I'm on vacation'? What were the Russians trying to accomplish, anyway... they had Uranium in a vault, but then... what? The bad guy gets caught monologuing. We don't get to see the pirate gun in action. The car chase scene lasts for fifteen minutes. Why did the Russian guy lie about there being a file...? How many innocent people were killed on the streets of Moscow? Why didn't McClane make fists with his toes? Why didn't he say 'Shoot the glass'? Does anyone really care? Why did John F**king Moore direct this thing? Just... WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Final score: 2/10 stars. It wasn't on the same level of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but it was still a franchise killer. If there is a Die Hard 6 (which seems impossible now), here's what needs to happen: They need to get a good script, a good director, and a cinematographer who doesn't suffer from dyslexia. They need to get McClane back in an enclosed space, hire someone GOOD to play the villain, and arm everyone to the teeth. Finally, it must be called 'Old Habits Die Hard.' And if they use this without consulting me, I'm suing.

FILM REVIEWS: Blue Jasmine

Although Woody Allen is definitely showing signs of repetition in his technique, you don't fix what isn't broken. Blue Jasmine is a stylish, eloquent, funny, and very realistic take on a trophy wife's fall from grace after her husband is exposed as a fraudulent, tax evading Bernie Madoff spoof. The film juxtaposes flashbacks to Jasmine's rich and spoiled past and her present state of affairs expertly, and although it definitely jumps around, the story is remarkably fluid. It might not reach the classic status of Allen's early-period films, but it's definitely a beautiful showcase of what this great director is capable of.

Blue Jasmine stars Cate Blanchett as the title character, a former Manhattan socialite forced out of her home and stripped of her money by the government. She is forced to move in with her sister in San Francisco. This is where my review becomes a little biased, as San Francisco is both my home city and the best city ever (what a coincidence!). So any film shot here is definitely going to get a bit of a bump in the Final Score. However, something annoyed me about this aspect of the film: When Allen films a city (New York, Rome, Paris), he makes a habit of romanticizing it. So why not do that for San Francisco, the original city of love? It smacks of East Coast pretentiousness.

However, the movie is superb. Cate Blanchett plays the part of a mentally unstable rags-to-riches-to-rags-again character with precision, believability, and grace. There's not a moment in which her tour de force becomes anything less than gripping. The supporting cast is also great, featuring Peter Sarsgaard, Alec Baldwin, Louis CK, and Andrew Dice Clay as... well... Andrew Dice Clay. This might be one of the best casting decisions of all time, as the innate unlikability that Clay carries with him makes the character even more obnoxious. Clay hasn't seemed to notice that audiences don't care for him, so everyone else is content to laugh at him behind his back.

The real achievement in Blue Jasmine is the resistance to making Jasmine a sympathetic character. She's a definite antihero, and at no point in this movie did I want things to end well for her. It's never quite clear whether she's willfully ignorant of her husband's law-bending, or if she's just apathetic and naive. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter, as both of these actions are reprehensible in their own ways.

The story is inspired, but the dialogue is really what makes this movie. It clicks along rapidly, never slowing down or giving the audience a breath. Even though a lot of themes and cliches seem recycled from previous Allen movies, it's not enough to drag Blue Jasmine down at all. Like Christopher Nolan, Allen tends to reuse his actors, but Alec Baldwin is perfectly cast here. After seeing him as the Capital One Venture card guy, you can't help but think that he's a little sleazy.

Much like his earlier films, Allen doesn't seem to feel the need to provide closure to this story. It ends with Jasmine just as despondent and seemingly hopeless as she was when the story began. But somehow, everyone else's lives have improved because of her. Perhaps it's just because she provides the perfect example of what not to do for people, but she's definitely had a positive effect on her sister's life by the end. And even if she didn't get to marry the State Department guy and go off to Vienna, you get the feeling that she won't have too much trouble becoming someone else's trophy wife further down the line.

Final Score for Blue Jasmine: 8/10 stars. If this were the first Woody Allen movie I had seen, I would probably have loved it, but I've seen enough of his other work to know that this is not his best. He has absolutely no range when it comes to the feel and themes of his films, but he's so assured in his direction that it doesn't matter. It's an articulate, authentic, thought-provoking film that could actually make you feel sorry for rich people. And that's an incredible feat just on its own.

FILM REVIEWS: The Spectacular Now

When a movie has a word in its title such as “Spectacular,” one expects it to live up to the bar set by that name. And although The Spectacular Now is a perfectly serviceable coming-of-age story, there’s nothing about it that makes it stand out from the pack. The film is well-acted, but in the places where it should soar, it just feels hopelessly generic. I really liked all of the characters in this movie, and the dialogue was often very well-written, but it never really cohered into a narrative that I cared about. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been looking forward to seeing this film for so long, but it was a tremendous letdown.

The Spectacular Now is the typical coming-of-age story, told from the perspective of Generic Party Animal Product of a Split Household Teenager Dealing With Teenage Problems (Miles Teller). His character, Sutter Keely, has trouble with geometry, doesn’t know his real father, has writer’s block trying to write a college admission assignment, and just got dumped by his girlfriend. Wow, could they have thrown any more things in there? I hate characters like this, where the director and writers try to come up with a typical teenager, but end up with a character whom real teenagers will simply laugh at and dismiss as a generic stereotype. And rightly so. Is it really too much to ask for some effort to be put into these creations? I’m not asking for the next Donnie Darko here (because God knows that’s pretty much impossible), but at least give us a fighting chance to like this character. Ugh.

Fortunately, he is balanced out by his co-star (Shailene Woodley), who is as far from generic as it gets. Her character, the nerdy and withdrawn girl who Sutter ends up falling for, actually feels real and her acting brings her to life. She actually reminded me of someone I know in real life, which is the sign of a realistic character. And when her character interacts with Sutter, they have legitimate screen chemistry that really starts to tie the film together. However, as the movie wears on, their story becomes more and more hamstrung and we start to lose interest. Minor things are thrown in one at a time, then (spoiler alert) WHAM! She gets hit by a car. Ten minutes later, she’s basically out of the movie, even though (spoiler alert again) she lives.

A lot of the problems with this movie could have been fixed if there was some central plot point tying all these things together, but all it really amounted to was Sutter trying to write his college application. I’m really disappointed by how weak the narrative was, because there were scenes-- such as the aforementioned car accident-- that left me in jaw-dropped, stunned silence. But even in gut-wrenching scenes like this, everything feels manipulative, shallow, and calculated. Like someone said “Hey, what’s another shitty thing we can throw in here to make people feel bad? Oh, I know! Car accidents!” Sutter also meets his deadbeat dad at one point, and although Kyle Chandler gives it his all, he never evolves his character past the typical Emotionally Unavailable Father With a Drinking Problem. Not very spectacular.

It really hurts me to say some of these things about this movie, because even though it’s often hollow and bland, a lot of it rings true. The main character doesn’t know what to do with his life, and he doesn’t care, a trait that all too many people my age have these days. I certainly subscribe to his ethos of “Living in the Now,” though, which gains the film a few points-- It’s always good when you agree with the fundamental core message of a movie. But it requires more, and this movie just doesn’t have it. I’m actually done with indie comedy/drama stuff like this now, because even the good movies of this genre leave people unsatisfied. The people who gave us The Spectacular Now also gave us 500 Days of Summer, one of the most overrated and disappointing movies ever. People seem to have run out of ways to tell romance and coming-of-age stories, so now whenever there’s the slightest alteration in the formula, the movie is hailed as “bravely original.”

Final Score for The Spectacular Now: 5/10 stars. Again, I give out this score to this movie with a heavy heart, because I really wanted to like it. But at the end of the day, it adds up to considerably less than the sum of its often scintillating parts, to the point where even a Bob Odenkirk cameo can’t save it. It’s such a bland and dulled-down little movie, and I can’t possibly recommend it to anyone. This seems like the kind of movie adults would watch to try and understand their kids. But until we see a coming-of-age movie actually written by teenagers, there won’t be anything very authentic in the genre.