Prove Yourself Mortal!……please?

It has been far too long since I last wrote for this site……..so what better way to get back into it than stealing my friend’s column!…….Okay, borrowing. I’ll give it right back, after I get all this out of my system…………all of what you ask? ‘the utter revulsion gurggling around inside me after enduring “Immortals.”

Miserably? I was quite looking forward to this. One, I thought it looked good; ‘simple as that. Two, it stars Henry Cavill, who will be soaring as Superman next year in the big screen “Man of Steel”……..and I haven’t seen him in anything before. (which, as a lifelong Superman fan, is not acceptable)…………Plus, as the father of 2 kids and 3 dogs; I get out to the movies just about never, so! Netflix is my way to go…………and when I decided to click on “Immortals,” I should have kept on going. ………..’Damn you hindsight and your 20/20 vision!!

I’ll start with the good points:

• Freida Pinto is so beautiful she makes my eyes hurt. Which, a majority of the world knows having seeing “Slumdog Millionaire”…but that’s one of those movies I can appreciate from a distance but am having zero luck motivating myself to watch. I’ll get around to it.
• Henry Cavill has my vote as Superman. He looks right, talks right and I believed his character……..I didn’t LIKE his character, but I believed it; so there’s that.
• aaaaaaaaaaaaand. done.

SPOILERS FROM HERE. IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE MOVIE UNBLEMISHED, TURN AROUND…………….AND THEN ASK YOURSELF, DO I REALLY HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO? NOTHING????

Who’s who? Who cares!

First, everybody dies. Everybody. Yep, even our hero. and I cannot stand movies like that. I avoid horror movies because they are, by definition, horrible things happening……..you know where else horrible things happen? Real life. So in my entertainment I want to be entertained! And no, that does not equal everybody smiling and happy jumpy by the credits rolling. (Note: yeah, I don’t know what ‘happy jumpy’ means; ‘just came out and seems to fit the thought)………..anyway, I had a great time at “300″ and love to pieces “The Great Escape” or “Magnificent Seven” where some to all of our likable heroes end up 6′ under. I can live with that when the movie structures itself that they’re heroically fighting impossible odds for a greater cause.  This movie? eh, I really doubt it had a structure of any sort. Mostly it’s  Mickey Rourke rambling  ALOT about spreading his seed (ew……….and! he never has sex once in the movie, so I assume all his “seed spreading” is the #1 ‘to do’ for the day after the battle) and Henry Cavill at various levels of irritation……..which I could understand because apparently anyone not his mother who looks at him? ‘hates him. Why? um……he’s too handsome? ‘the movie could care less to really explain it. Sort of like it could care less than to give Stephen Dorff’s character a reason for signing up as Mr. Cavill’s sidekick………….it’s depressing how many times I forgot Stephen Dorff was playing a character, and rather he seemed to have stumbled onto a set and decided to stick around for the fun of it. I kept waiting for him to make goofy faces into the camera when somebody else was talking.

The more I think on it, the more I’m convinced that the director had crazy ideas for imaginative visuals and simply HAD to get them all onto film, lack of coherent / interesting plot be damned! Certainly the movie has a visceral energy to it………..far too much so, like each scene is annoying the director as he wants to get to the NEXT one as soon as humanly possible!…….it’s akin to having my 5 year old show me a magazine and saying “what’s that Daddy?” and by the time I get 4 words out, she’s turning the page. ……..she cares what it is for a millisecond or three, but what oh what mystery delight could be on the next page?!?! we must know!……….’now add to it that that every 7pages my daughter decides to kill off a character. Why? because its been 7 and that’s too long without death!!!…………….really, halfway through I told myself to expect a mass suicide as the climax.

Those are the main points. Others abound too. ‘like when our hero finally hooks up with the stunning stunning (absolutely worth saying twice) Ms. Pinto, it’s in his dead mothers bed!…….gah!…..there was nowhere else on Earth to do it???  I get that their house is like, 4′ x 6′….but still, why not the floor? ‘his own bed?? …..whatever. Plus the movie is clueless on how to make any characters likable whether they’re mortal or God, and I get that in traditional storytelling the Gods aren’t the most appealing of folks anyway; but at the end when they confront the unleashed Titans and it’s like, 99 Titans vs. Zeus and the 4 other Gods he brought along? You could say that that’s a testament to the Gods’ arrogance……..but for my two cents? I got the suicide ending I expected.

Blah. skip this. Rent “300″ instead. Everybody dies in a MUCH better movie. win-win.

I Want My 2 Hours Back!! — Round 1. “Twilight”

Hello, I’m Rob. Nice to meet you.

How many times have you watched a movie and at the end of it exclaimed, in so many words,
“That sucked! I want my money back!!!”

For me, this happens quite rarely, ‘having watched thousands of movies, and having a pretty forgiving nature, I tend to find the good in most films. Sometimes this can be a little disconcerting to my friends and family, who describe my current movie collection as containing:

• good movies
• ok movies
• bad movies
• really bad movies
• really, really, really bad movies
• and Rob’s movies

That being said, on occasion there comes a movie that is so bereft of anything positive it leads me to exclaim aloud, “I want my two hours back!!! ‘getting the money back for this atrocity would not be enough, I would like for some great projectionist in the sky to rewind time to before I saw this ‘movie’ and reinstate the two hours it stole from my life!”   (more or less)

Now before you get all accusatory that I’m yet another Internet Whiner, I need to point out a couple of things. First, the movie selection and the decision to have it in this column are mine entirely, I, in no way pretend to know what I’m doing, I do not have a Masters in Film Studies, nor do I pretend to understand the intricacies of every ‘mind bending’ movie out there. That said, I am stating an opinion brought on by my countless years of watching bad movies and then applying that to the movies in question.

This brings me to the movie for today’s column and that movie is (cue drum roll) Twilight!

Now I know there are going to be a million people screaming, in very high pitched voices, about how wrong I am and wondering how could such a travesty like a negative thought on this Tween-nomenon exist; but the beauty of this column is it is a dictatorship, not a democracy, I get to pick the movie and I get to write about why I think in all truth it should be wiped from the face of the Earth, with every person forced to watch it re- credited with two hours on their life.

I will start with a caveat: I have not read the books. I know this puts me in a very small percentage of the world but after seeing the movie I have even less inclination than I did before. My opinions are based solely on what was represented in the film; include story, acting, direction, the whole shebang.

Ok! now we’ve got that straight; the first thing that irked me with this movie was a biggie, since vampires started showing their pointed teeth in literature around the 1800s, and at least after Bram Stokers seminal work in 1897 vampires have a variety of ways they can die, beheading (with or without a gravediggers shovel), stake through the heart, etc, but chief amongst these has always been sunlight kills them. Who knew at the turn of the century that vampires would be the chief advocate for Sunscreen? Anywho, I digress.  Sunlight + vampires = crispy critter. So imagine my chagrin when the first time that Edward gets subjected to sunlight ….does he start smoking? No! What happens? He starts glimmering! Yes, that’s right, for some strange reason when sunlight hits a vampire in “Twilight” world they turn into a man-size disco ball, and it is for that reason only that they must spend time at home; to avoid the Glee club dangling them from the nearest rafter and recreating Studio 54 no doubt. So the sunshine glimmering thing bugs me.

The second thing that I’m trying to get my head around is the angst. Now I know I’m no longer a teenager, and I also know that in my crazy teenage years angst was dealt with by the likes of John Hughes, but if we even want to go down the avenue of horror and teenage angst “Ginger Snaps” is a delightful example of the pain it is to be a teenager and misunderstood by everyone. Unfortunately “Twilight” just doesn’t do it for me. Yes Bella’s parents are divorced, yes she now lives in a little town in Washington state, with a father who surprise, surprise, doesn’t understand her, but seriously where is the angst coming from??? Her town seems to be a beautiful place, she is befriended near enough straight away, by the pretty people in town, and the dad even tries, in his way, to make her feel happy. Nope, it’s easier to mope around and feel like the world is against you. For 2 + hours. ‘not something I need to see.

Third! The ‘dialogue.’ Maybe because I haven’t read the books I’m missing something here, but the dialogue is so bad it nearly makes the “Phantom Menace” sound good; lines like “I hate you for making me want you so much” and “I’d rather die than stay away from you” delivered with such longing seriously it’s enough to make any sane person weep with despair.

Before you start complaining that I don’t understand romance, or passion, (well, my wife might disagree depending on the day)………. but I have enjoyed my fair share of romantic comedies, and found the dialogue to be the driving force for me to enjoy them. “When Harry met Sally,” “Gone with the Wind,” “Casablanca” are all examples of romance made real through grand dialogue, but this movie smacked of writers trapped in a room and threatened with permanent imprisonment  until they recreated “Dawson’s Creek “with vampires and werewolves!

There are a bunch of other things I really disliked about the movie, tone, score, acting to name a few but as you’ve no doubt already gathered it’s not a movie I will be revisiting anytime soon so I think I’ve wasted more than enough time on it.

My final thoughts are for those poor misguided people out there that still feel the need to see this travesty, despite my best efforts to sway you away from it, may I recommend the “30 Second Bunnies” version of “Twilight” instead. You get the gist of the movie with a lot more feeling, and I would argue better dialogue, and it only lasts 30 seconds………….. leaving you an extra 2 hours to enjoy life, or if you are that way inclined, contemplate the inconsequentialness of your own existence. Call it my gift to you.

Until the next time