Screenhead

Before we begin today’s proceedings, let me preface my remarks by saying that Michael Moore better go get a cheesecake and a bottle of scotch RIGHT NOW because he’s probably about to lose a world record.

The best sales record for a theatrically released documentary ever was Fahrenheit 9/11 by Moore, and it brought in a whomping one hundred and nineteen million dollars.

The final biography about Michael Jackson, This Is It, has already sold out a hundred and sixty showings at the official site.  Online ticket vendor Fandango reports that its available ticket stock of a hundred and ten showings have sold likewise out.

This one releases October 28th, and with all those showtimes sold out, sounds like businesses all around the country better prepare for a massive outbreak of flu, colds, and bad backs, because no one’s gonna show up with that huge wad of tickets outstanding.  In fact, from the look of things, even Saw VI might get a run for its money.  Man, how creepy is that?  The biggest seller of Halloween weekend might be a documentary….

Weak sauce, Movieline.  Weak. SAUCE.

So the folks out at Movieline were trying to figure out why Jennifer’s Body turned out to be a stink bomb that audiences could actually smell coming, and they’ve got plenty of blame to go around.  Lousy distro, lousy marketing–pretty much everything except a godawful and derivative script that heavily featured nonsense words.

And then they got to point five: the critics.  Dig the spectacularly pretentious word:

5. The critics. Horror and teen comedy are two genres proven time and again to be invulnerable to reviewers (when they’re even screened for reviewers). Put them together, though — especially in a semi-satirical fashion that turns the first genre’s sex-and-death conventions on their heads — and you get a whole lot of dickheads sniping that Body didn’t do enough to adhere to convention. “Jennifer’s Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr. Sigh.

First off, what drove you to actually WRITE “sigh” in there as if you were so deeply stricken with the ennui of the whole mess that you were about to collapse in a graceful heap on your fainting couch? Oh, Little Lord Fauntleroy can’t hang because we’re trashing his favorite movie so he’s just overwrought!

Man up or hang it up, jackass.  And you want to call me a dickhead?  Fine.  I reserve the right to call you jackass.  Of course, considering that this was written by one S.T. Vanairsdale, there’s no way to know whether I’m using the right gender or not, so we’re using the ROYAL he just in case.

Granted, S.T. did call a lot of the problems.  This really should’ve taken advantage of Halloween instead of gunning for last-gasp on summer.  But don’t blame the critics.  That’s just low.  We didn’t like it.  We thought it sucked.  I got sick of this derivative knockoff spewing gibberish every few minutes.

Critics didn’t kill it.  They just wrote the obituary.

Well well…isn’t this a surprise?  The newest actuals have emerged, and it seems that the Joe team isn’t quite as beaten as I thought.  While they only took in an anemic twelve million over the week that was, they’re managing to do pretty well in the aggregate sense.

At last count, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra had brought in a whopping one hundred twenty two million in its seventeen days of existence.

However, it’s still got a good long way to go yet before it makes back its monstrous one hundred seventy five million shooting budget.  And with its returns slowly petering out, will the Joes manage to scrape up even the barest of profits for the studio?  Or will the movie that cost more to make than some countries make in a year manage to turn out as a bigger bomb than anything Cobra Commander could ever conceive?

Bad news: it only represents nineteen percent of all tickets sold online in the last few days on Movietickets.com.

The next competitors are tied for second, as District 9 and G-Force are running neck and neck with eleven percent each.

Ouch.

Look, we all knew District 9 was going to be a big deal.  It’s one of the first truly original movies to come our way this summer, based only vaguely on a short film by the original director.  There was just no way it wasn’t going to be big.  Meanwhile, along comes yet another brain fart from Tarantino, who’s clearly stuck in the seventies, doing REMAKES no less and being so transparent about them that he’s MISSPELLING THE TITLE to make it look slightly less obvious.

But considering the fact that Tarantino’s getting a run for his money from gerbils who are on like week four of their theatrical run?  That’s just a low blow.

You know, for a guy whose movie just cleared fifty million at the box office his first weekend, Stephen Sommers doesn’t seem like a happy guy.  In fact, the crew out at Movieline compiled ten great quotes from him about how he feels about critics.  Let’s have some fun with a couple!

“I know it sounds cliche, but I don’t read them (reviews). Why would I? I make the kind of movies critics love to hate. They love dark and depressing movies. If you make those, you expect they will love you, you need them to love you. The kind of movies I make? They don’t enjoy commercial or popular movies.”

Except the Harry Potter movies…and Disney / Pixar movies…and the new Star Trek…and The Hangover…and I wish Sommers could enlighten me: did he KNOW there were this many counterexamples when he said it, or did he just not care?

“It is funny when the studios tell me, `the movie is the star! You’re the star.’ I suspect what they’re saying is, `we don’t want to pay a star.’”

Considering the studio already shelled out a hundred and seventy five million that you pretty much have NO chance of making back, I don’t blame them.  Lotsa luck finding a new job, Mr. Money Sink! Bet there are TONS of companies out there who are looking for a guy who can burn through a hundred and seventy five million dollars and only lose two thirds of it!

The best part is, he goes on like this for PAGES.  Producers lie to his own son about him–he’s even off quoting MICHAEL BAY for inspirational effect!  This guy’s one scary individual–I can only hope his next job isn’t quite so public.

So Michael Moore’s looking to drum up a little advance attention ahead of his upcoming “documentary”, Capitalism: A Love Story by announcing that it just might be his last.

Quoth Moore: “I have been working on two screenplays over the last couple of years.  One’s a comedy, one’s a mystery, and I really want to do this.”

It’s not such a stretch to believe that Moore wants to become a filmmaker; his “documentaries”, meanwhile, have been at least partially fiction for years, so why not lose that “true-story” veneer completely?  Even better, a movie merely written by Moore would mean that he’d be out of the shot, and we could actually see background for once.

Would the audience follow?  Possibly but not necessarily–Moore could probably do a very interesting political satire, assuming he actually took a run at it.  There’s no word as to what the content of his comedy or his mystery entails, so we’ll have a good long while to wait before we get to see just how Moore’s filmography turns out.

Uh-oh, folks…we’ve got some serious problems here.  Seems that virtually all the early buzz around the trailers and such for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra has been almost universally negative.  And worse yet, Paramount will be running critics’ screenings for the sci-fi actioner, but they’ll only be running them about a week before the movie opens, leaving in some cases precious little time to release reviews ahead of deadline.

For those of you out there who don’t follow the industry, or aren’t film critics like myself, if a studio won’t put up a movie for critics’ screenings, that generally means they’re not counting on it to do very well.  They want to get one big weekend out of it to try and get its shooting budget back, but then word of mouth–not to mention the delayed critics’ reaction–will kick in and pretty much sink repeat business.

The excuses are already flying hot and fast around this one’s nigh-inevitable financial castigation, including my personal favorite: “We wuz trying to beat the writer’s strike!”

Way to pass the buck, fellas…anyway, we won’t have too much longer to wait to see just how this one turns out–you know I’ll be hitting this one opening day for you.

You’d think that, if Will Ferrell were involved in a movie, especially one that purports to be a comedy, it would wind up being, you know, funny.  But apparently Ferrell’s comedy chops have been badly dulled by being chased by dinosaurs and dressing up like elves, because if this is Ferrell’s standard, he wouldn’t recognize a comedy if it crawled up his pant leg and started licking him.

Today we’re tackling The Foot Fist Way, a comedy in name only that will thoroughly fail on many levels.

When a small-town tae kwon do instructor, a lunatic obsessive control-freak by the name of Mr. Simmons, gets wind of his wife’s infidelities, he snaps completely.  Forced to confront his own inner nature, he sets out on a pilgrimage to meet his personal hero, martial arts legend Chuck “The Truck” Wallace.  But when he discovers that the Truck has more problems than he does, will it break the snapped man completely, or will it help the man heal by showing him worse than he is?

As a comedy, The Foot Fist Way  falls tremendously flat.  In all honesty, I didn’t laugh for the first half hour.  I could spot several jokes, but not one of them managed to hit.  Simmons is way too big of a jerk to be that entertaining, especially early on as he doesn’t get much of a comeuppance for his unseemly behavior.  When he does, it seems too much like karma biting him hard in the ass to be anything funny.  It’s more satisfying than funny, but it’s a bitter sort of satisfaction.  Frankly, I want to beat the hell out of this guy myself.  By the time the movie was half over I found myself desperately longing to douse his little porn-star mustache in kerosene and light it up.

That having been said,  I did manage to get some laughs out of the second half, but even then, these were uncomfortable laughs coming from a guy who was so thoroughly unsettling that the only thing left to do was to laugh.

It tried, really it did, but the end result was just so flat, the jokes so frequently unsuccessful that it generated few laughs.  Half of those laughs were sad ones, besides.  The point of this, at the end of it all, just escapes me.  I spent this movie bored out of my skull, and how anyone could be interested in this is quite thoroughly beyond me.

You know there’s no way I’m going to recommend this slag heap to anyone.  It’s dull, it’s shoddy, the production values are like something out of the very worst direct to video sludge pile.  The dialogue is overblown and vastly overdone.  It makes entirely too much out of itself, and falls apart in virtually every point.

The Foot Fist Way is a sad little wreck of a film.  It fails on virtually every front–a comedy that can’t elicit laughs is meaningless–and may well be the single dullest thing I’ve seen in weeks.  The Screenhead Ten Scale is going to punish this lump of solid misery by giving it a full one out of ten.

At least it showed up.  It didn’t do much else, though.

When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born.  The curse gathers in that place of death.  Those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury.  Those who survive will carry the curse with them…until it is reborn.

If that sounds familiar, especially to horror buffs, there’s a good reason—it’s pretty much the plotline of the last two Grudge titles, and now, thanks to Sam Raimi and the crew at Ghost House, there’s a third.  I bucked convention with this series, with the belief that the second was, in a limited way, just as good as the first one.  I felt it was a lot more authentic, and not having Sarah Michelle Gellar around for long to Buffy her way through really perked things up, making them a whole lot less “action hero”.

This time around, we’ll be back in the apartment complex we left in the second installment.  The young survivor of the last installment managed to get locked up in an insane asylum, where he was promptly and messily killed by unknown forces. Of course, we know EXACTLY what those forces were—homicidal wackjob ghost extraordinaire Kayako and her squatting harbinger, son Toshio.

Meanwhile, the young survivor’s doctor (played halfassedly by Shawnee Smith) has gone to Chicago in search of answers, and that’s when the killing starts up again.

Frankly, watching this thing was a disaster.  They took all the worst parts of the first two—shoddy explanations, some for-no-clear-reason style killing, plot elements they clearly just pulled out of their asses—and introduced them all into one.  The Grudge 3 isn’t as atmospherically scary as the first one, nor is it as implicitly scary as the second.  All The Grudge 3 can do is do a whole lot of killing of characters we really don’t care about because we barely know who they are.

There will be so many elements of this movie that don’t even try to make sense that listing them all would require me to describe roughly a quarter of the movie.  And even worse, there are elements of the movie that make sense, but only because they’ve been doing them since the beginning.   For instance, I’m getting abundantly tired of Toshio showing up at random intervals and yowling.  Okay, I get it, you died just before your cat so you scream like one at every given opportunity.  And I’m also getting sick of Kayako stumbling around in that weird boneless fashion of hers and killing whatever happens to get in front of her for absolutely no reason at all.  Okay, I get that TOO, you’re a ghost and you’re just plain old enraged, but for crying out loud, absolutely none of these people you’re killing did ANYTHING to you.  Most of them weren’t even in the same TIME ZONE as you when your husband killed you.  Just lay off the random strangers, huh?

Perhaps the worst part about the whole thing is that they weren’t content to just let this misery pass by unchallenged and let the whole thing fade away into trilogy status.  The ending makes it crystalline-clear that there will be, at some point, a Grudge 4, and frankly, after this wreck of a movie I’m not looking forward to it.  At ALL.

I can’t imagine future sequels managing to save this wreck—though I have been wrong before—at this point, I’m not even cautiously optimistic.  I EXPECT this to continue to be a wreck.  If The Grudge 3 is any indication, look for this one to suck hard for years to come.

So I have to admit, I was baffled by the recent release of Will Smith’s movie Seven Pounds.  Why?  Because I had no idea at all what relevance the title had to the rest of the movie.  Normally the title tells you something about what’s going on, or maybe about a main character, but Seven Pounds?  What did that have to do with anything?

Thankfully, over the course of the movie, we’ll get at least an idea of  just what that whole “seven pounds” thing is.  But that really doesn’t answer the main question here—is Seven Pounds worth perfectly good time and money to watch?

Describing the plot is impossible to do without spoilers, since so much of the plot isn’t actually revealed until the ending, so I’m going to have to REALLY pussyfoot around here—basically, an aeronautical engineer is looking for a way to make seven people’s lives better, by any means necessary and at any cost necessary.

There are a lot of choice words and phrases to apply to Seven Pounds.  Most of them involve obscenities and a lot of screaming.  Some of them involve the little vein on my forehead popping out so far it looks fit to burst.  But some of them that are fit for family dinner table consumption are words like:

Overwrought. I really can’t remember the last time I heard so many Drama Screaming Rants in one movie.  Seriously—listening to Will Smith cut THREE of them short with a bark of “stop it” sounded almost EXACTLY like when Peter Griffin was dressed up like Jesus in that one episode of Family Guy.  And when Will Smith, who has shown himself to be at least a decent actor on several occasions, starts to sound like Seth MacFarlane, you know somewhere the world just split open and the Crack of Doom is shining a dull red.

Confused.  It took me better than an HOUR into the movie before I even understood the TITLE.  Even worse it took better than an hour before I managed to get a decent sense of the plot out of this.  They’re going to space the exposition throughout almost the entire movie, making it one of those strange sort of movies in which you can only watch it forward but understand it backward.  In some cases, that’s actually a good thing—it adds to the unexpected nature of things, and actually makes some things, especially in a horror setting, extra creepy for the unexpectedness.  But in Seven Pounds’ case, all it does is make an already impenetrable plot all the more obscured.

Preachy. If Will Smith’s character tried to put one more word out there about who deserved what I was going to throw something large, heavy and preferably pointed right into his smug little face.  Seriously, this was just the most preachy thing ever—the only way it could have been more so was if Will Smith looked into the camera and said “MESSAGE!” right before he said something preachy, like they did in Don’t Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.

It’s a bad sign when I spend half a movie perplexed and the other half enraged.  Oh, and bored.  There was also a lot of boring—I think those were the parts where perplexed and enraged mixed and became kind of a brackish sludge that felt like boring.

The answer, folks, to the question I asked above is an unequivocal no.  Emphatically no.  I can’t be clearer, this is godawful tripe.  This is an overdramatic, overwrought slag heap that practically begs to be put out of its—and my—misery.  There is no scrap of comedy in here to separate it from being a vein of melodrama so pure it will likely blow out your drama lobe.  Its vague attempts at being a romance are awkward and uneven.  It’s a mess.  A pure-on mess.

In no way can I recommend this to you unless you’re truly desperate for Will Smith or you’re a masochist and just plain old love the pain of a pompous, overblown wreck of a movie.