absolutedreck

[absolutedreck]

"R.I.P.D., an action comedy about undead cop buddies starring Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds, is getting some good advance buzz ..." Whoa, whoa, what? "... as a front-runner for the single worst movie of 2013." Ah, there we go, Dana Stevens.

#R.I.P.D. #Dana Stevens #Slate

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A lackluster heist movie with terrible heists is no heist movie at all.

Parker

2013

Directed by Taylor Hackford

Starring Jason Statham, Jennifer Lopez and Michael Chiklis

You can forgive a heist movie a lot if the heists are done well. For example, John McTiernan’s Thomas Crown Affair remake with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo had some bumps, but when Brosnan got down to the art-thieving business, the whole movie was worthwhile. In the same way, the original Italian Job isn’t a tightly-wound masterpiece, but the final set piece (along with the humor throughout) makes it worthwhile.

Among the problems plaguing Parker –– the latest attempt to give the titular thief a film franchise to run with –– is that Jason Statham’s character is facing off against a group of astoundingly stupid thieves who perpetrate dumb, dumb crimes the movie wants you to think are clever. Who wants to watch a pack of dummies who the movie thinks are criminal masterminds?

That’s not the only issue with Parker. The movie fumbles the main character’s code of ethics, a kind thieves honor that comes off as arbitrary. Jennifer Lopez’s character is a roadblock to momentum. Nick Nolte is whispering, which always makes me worry for his health. Really, if he’s doing anything other than using a normal speaking voice these days, it sounds like he’s actively struggling to stay alive.

All that’s secondary to the dummies Parker faces against. At the start of the movie, he helps them rob a state fair (!), with unnecessary costumes masking that they just barged into the room, took the money and left. After that, gang leader Melander (Michael Chiklis) decides that, since Parker doesn’t want to join in on the next job, that Statham’s character should be shot right then, in the SUV they’re driving.

Parker survives and tracks Melander and his group down to Florida, where he meets Lopez’s real estate character, an unnecessary diversion in a plot that already doesn’t explode with excitement. There, he discovers the group’s big job that the movie has been leading towards, a crime embarrassing in how ridiculous the concept is and in that it actually works.

Melander and friends have been putting work into this. They bought a house near where the crime will take place to escape to and also to plan out the heist. You get the impression that they’ve spent a long time sitting around, pouring over maps and probably making dioramas.

The crime breaks down to this:

- A rich person has died and her jewelry collection, worth millions of dollars, will be auctioned off in a local mansion. The night of the auction is introduced with a montage of rich people ogling everything. In case the audience didn’t get that we’re supposed to hate them for their decadence, the movie supplies ADR’ed dialog, obviously done after the fact, all but has them saying “This will look mar-ve-lous in my diamond pile.”

- The speakers at the event start smoking, as Melander’s men put smoke bombs in them earlier in the week.

- The audience freaks out and leaves, security included.

- Melander et al show up dressed as firemen, insisting that everyone stays out of the building. Everyone complies.

- They gather up the diamonds, sneak out from the basement and swim to a waiting boat, as an accomplice distracts the cops by acting confused. 

- Now, they have diamonds.

It’s more complicated than stealing a chocolate bar from a convenience store as a kid, but isn’t the thrilling heist the buildup and screen time it’s given wants it to be. All it would take is one sensible person to say, “No, I think I’ll keep an eye on things to make sure you guys are really firefighters,” and then they’re fucked.

Statham movies aren’t built on compelling complications. Most rely on dumb satisfaction, with some notable exceptions. Parker can’t do either right, including it’s centerpiece heist.

#2010s #Parker #Thomas Crown Affair #Jason Statham #Italian Job

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We're always interested in new ways of looking at bad movies, and theAtlantic's Christopher Orr has come up with a great one: a chart.

He says his post, "How Broken is Mark Wahlberg's Box-Office Bomb Broken City?" isn't a review but an "autopsy". Orr doesn't see anything redeemable in the movie, and mostly wants to figure out how confused it is. He does so with a hand-drawn chart of the films characters and how they relate to each other. Mark Wahlberg is in the middle, and there's a line to each character but one that says "talks to; learns nothing". This is more informative than most reviews ofBroken City I've read.

Orr acknowledges that his chart can't address what will certainly be the most memorable part of this movie in years to come: Kiss of Life, a movie within the movie that sounds like director Allen Hughes' bizzaro idea of what independent films are.

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So it’s not as if there’s nothing to see in January. It’s just that the month has become, in terms of quality product, a time of catch-up. To studios and theater owners, it’s December-plus. But that’s only half the story. For the six major studios that release commercial films, January is also a time to flush out the pipes and take whatever profits or write-offs they can get. Whatever you think of their overall intelligence as a species, studio executives often know when a movie isn’t working as soon as they see the first cut. If it still isn’t working by the final cut, they know when to release it.

Ty Burr. "January Is Hollywood’s Very Own Leper Colony." The New York Times.

Burr isn't dropping any revolutionary knowledge here, though it is a good overview. I mostly like a) the phrase "December-plus" and b) the Tom Gauld illustration that goes along with this piece.

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You can make it if you're J. Lo

For all of its many narrative and cinematic sins, perhaps the most lingering problem I have with this lightweight romantic comedy is its politics.

I'm certain that 98% of the audience coming to see Maid in Manhattan have little to no interest in politics, and describing a movie like Maid in Manhattan as political seems absurd. Of course, the reality is that every movie - every text, in fact - is political, and this film is an example of wearing those particular politics right on its sleeve, built into the narrative foundation that the filmmakers have created. The movie feels like a sweet, slick hour and a half rom-com, but there are particularly rancid things going on underneath all that. And that's what makes a movie like Maid in Manhattan so dangerous.

The story concept (as provided by "Edmond Dantes," who is, of course, John Hughes, which I report with a heavy sigh) is pretty much an update of Cinderella. There are no wicked step-relatives, though, and no magic slippers - just a Latin-American maid at a fancy hotel named Marisa (Jennifer Lopez) who is trying to simply make ends meet, and provide for her child. After a series of extremely mild and not exactly gut-bursting "pratfalls" around the hotel, we're introduced to our Prince Charming - and boy, is it ever weird to put THAT label next to THIS actor - Ralph Fiennes, as the Republican Congressional District candidate Christopher Marshall. Because of a misunderstanding where Marisa is found wearing not wearing her usual Poor Person Uniform of Shame, Christopher believes that she is the high-society lady that she appears to be, albeit one who isn't soul-crushingly awful; and so, through a whirlwind of activity, the two fall in love, of course, until her secret is revealed, of course, until they make up and live happily ever after, of course.

Because of the presence of Hughes on this film, it's tempting to attribute the film's strengths and weaknesses to him solely. The film is certainly slick and smooth - I would argue too slick, but we'll get to that - and Hughes, for all of his films of teenaged rebellion (which were always set within upper-class Chicago neighbourhoods), really was a Republican die-hard, and that stamp can be found across the entire film. But, really, the person behind Pretty in Pink could not have had something to do with this film, surely? The idea that the "solution" to Hispanic poverty in America is to be, a) as beautiful as Jennifer Lopez, and b) saved by a wealthy Republican couldn't have sprung from the mind of the man I respect so very much for films like Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller, right?

The problems, of course, cannot be attributed to "Edmond Dantes" alone, of course - he only provided the "story idea." For there are problems that loom just as large as the film's problematic portrayal of serious social issues. For one, the script is absolutely atrocious - the lines that Fiennes in particular has to say, out loud, to other human beings, are flat-out awful, and it's a testament to how much of a thespian he is that he's able to make them sound in any way convincing (it's also telling that he went back to making films in his "dark drama" wheelhouse as soon as he could after this film). The film also looks like it was made in approximately 1996 and left on the shelf for six years - the aggressively pastel colour palette in particular makes Maid in Manhattan look like a floral arrangement's barf.

And really, the most irksome part about Maid in Manhattan is just how little it has any interest in spurning convention at any point. If you were to take one film and make a blueprint of every romantic comedy trope/stereotype out there, you could very easily use Maid in Manhattan. Sassy black friend? Check. Maudlin sentimentality in the form of a single mom/only child relationship? Check and check. Absurd romantic pairing with no regard for the actual state of the world that surrounds the film? Oh, absolutely a check. Plot contrivances thrown out like so much confetti over the entire film? Honey, if you got rid of those, you wouldn't have a movie.

And that brings us back to politics. Because, apparently, the secret motive of the film is to give us a Republican political candidate who is believable as a romantic lead - who actually cares about things like low-income housing and the disparity between white America and everyone else. Someone who has an ounce of empathy for the people around him. And while I'm sure that there must be ONE Republican like this somewhere (though why isn't he just a Democrat then? I guess hardcore Republicanism must have been focus-tested out of the film), the fact that this is built into the fabric of the movie's romantic comedy structure makes the film far more subversive (in a negative sense) than most movies I can think of.

Taken on the level of a mindless romantic comedy, Maid in Manhattan isn't the worst movie ever made - merely a very perfunctory one. With those politics in mind, though, it's a quietly awful film. But hey, Stanley Tucci plays Fiennes' campaign manager.

Final placement: 39%. Thanks to the "Tucci Bump". 

#Jennifer Lopez #Ralph Fiennes #Maid in Manhattan #2000s #rom-com prom #racial politics e'erywhere! #Republicans Who Care

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The Fifth Element is "crazy juice," apparently

When I was twelve years old, I remember wanting to see The Fifth Element so badly. I had just discovered Star Wars the year previous and I was eager to slurp up any and all science fiction that came my way. Sometimes, this was great - I have no regrets about seeing Blade Runner at that age, though I wish I spent less time considering the philosophical ramifications of the Matrix Trilogy in hindsight - but boy am I glad that I didn't see The Fifth Element until now.

I'm not even sure this is a "bad" movie per se. Luc Besson's film is just exceedingly, balls-out strange in the most garish, ludicrous ways. Even if it doesn't result in a film that's "coherent" in a traditional sense, there's so much... muchness on the screen that the sheer lunacy almost deserves commendation.

Again, as a twelve-year-old, I think I might have just gone along with this movie. Viewing it from a distance, especially as a particularly bizarre '90s curio, is probably a bit more rewarding (besides, I'd hate to see kids who took this movie to heart. From what I understand, this movie lived on in people's consciousness for a good deal longer than it probably deserves based on its endless TBS run, though thankfully, there aren't a lot of people who look like, say, Milla Jovovich up there at the top).

The Fifth Element feels like Besson took it upon himself to basically say "fuck it" at every opportunity. There's a narrative (a mystical "fifth element" needs to be placed inside one of the Egyptian pyramids to ward off an attack from an interstellar aggressor) that you'd be damned if you cared about. There are "characters," but they're all so outlandish that they hardly qualify as human beings (and sometimes they're not, especially when they're intergalactic warthogs). There's action that seems to have little consequence. There's elaborate world-building that's made to look intentionally plastic and fake (and bright - holy moly, this movie must have broke old CRT screens back in the day, because there is so much colour in every frame). In short, this feels like a huge-budget B-movie by design, but without any winking at the camera that might occur in a more modern version of this sort of thing.

The film stars Bruce Willis, who seems to have been cast because of his action star cred but seems wildly out of place in this universe (he's very game, mind you), as a futuristic floating car taxi driver slash ex-military type. He gets dragged into the plot when Milla Jovovich, who is I guess the human version of the fifth element (and who just learns English off-screen in one scene) drops into his cab from above. From there, Willis has to keep her safe from the likes of Gary Oldman (easily the most fun performance in the movie, and about a million miles away from most of his roles) and others who have, I don't know, vested interest in the destruction of the Earth from warthog people?

Fuck it. Who cares. The movie doesn't care about its plot, and neither should you. When you have a ludicrously over-the-top Chris Tucker in drag screaming at you for a good full half of the movie, and blue alien people doing fucking opera, and Gary Oldman's weird half-plastic half-Hitler hair, it's clear that focusing on this "tight plotting" nonsense never even entered into the equation. This isn't science-fiction, even, from a traditional standpoint; there's no broader issue being investigated through this futuristic context.

Rather, The Fifth Element shares more in common with circuses or freakshows - even more than that, I found it shared a sensibility with a lot of other French science-fiction-influenced media that I've come across, specifically in the adventure game genre of video games. I was reminded especially of Michel Ancel's approach in Beyond Good and Evil, which presents its future society through a panoply of stylistic change-ups and vaguely ethnic patois (and both The Fifth Element and Beyond Good and Evil like to use reggae in inappropriate situations; though The Fifth Element's soundtrack is infinitely worse, since it was scored by Eric Fucking Serra).

As a video game, I can see The Fifth Element kind of working (especially if it's a LucasArts-esque point and click adventure). That episodic nature and "what the hell" attitude works really well if the player can decide what to see and when to see it. In a movie, though, the endless lunacy and misplaced whimsy kind of eventually becomes grating (not helped by the fact that, again, Chris Tucker in drag), because movies (and sci-fi movies in particular) should be able to deliver something that vaguely matters. Larks are fun for awhile, but when you get the sense that making a lark was the entire purpose behind the movie, it feels a little bit like two hours wasted.

Still, there's something here - a commitment to sheer weirdness that just does not exist in this new millennium. The fact that The Fifth Element made over $150 million is mind-boggling to me, since it is no way a conventionally good movie. Still, there's something to be said for the way that the movie violates seemingly every rule of good filmmaking and comes back around to being somewhat enjoyable. Few bad movies are able to pull that off.

Final placement: 63%

#the fifth element #eric serra ruins movies #1990s #a big old pile of what the fuck

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Atlas Shrugged Part 1: Rise of the Planet of the Assholes

"But the consensus of the chief metallurgical experts is highly skeptical!"

I could go on and on about the rancid politics of Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, or deride its completely backwards ideas about what the CEOs of massive corporations might act like (hint: there's not a single proto-Marxist amongst them), or chortle at the film's asinine attempts at modernizing Ayn Rand's book, which, even if it fundamentally misunderstands its cultural milieu, at least makes a little bit more sense than having people, in 2011, debating the use of fucking trains.

But look at that line of dialogue, delivered, um, "expertly" by Jim Taggart (played by Matthew Marsden). That's a line that's supposed to be delivered with fire. James Taggart is supposed to sell that line. Even if anyone who isn't a completely blank robot person is supposed to look ridiculous and conniving and awful in Ayn Rand's world, we're at least supposed to kind of believe that this guy believes that trains are a great instrument of world equality.

Instead, like everything else about this unmitigated trainwreck of a movie (guffaw!), that line just clunks right down and lands in the viewer's lap like a cowpie. This is a film that's straight amateurish, and that's even before you begin to consider its complete and utter rancidity.

There are, of course, reasons to hate Atlas Shrugged Part 1 before you even see a second of its ridiculous handling by director Paul Johansson. Ayn Rand's book (which I'm hoping to finally have a review of up on sister site Review Times very soon) is one-thousand pages of complete and utter garbage. The book essentially stands as a totem for Rand's philosophy of "objectivism" - and the fact that my spell check just told me that objectivism isn't a real word is telling - wherein the unabashed pursuit of material wealth and the creation of "great human marvels" are the highest form of human purity, and not, you know, several thousand years of conventional morality.

The book, and consequently the movie, present this philosophy (which is, as you're likely aware, the current cause celebre of that other deluded group of people, the Tea Party) as a finely-tuned construction of straw man arguments. In Rand's world, government, regulators, and even the leaders of corporations themselves have bought wholeheartedly into socialism, forcing all companies to be "equal" in every which way, to the apparent detriment of the country at large (Rand never really specifies why these socialist practices - which, to be clear, represent no socialist practices in history in any part of the world ever - have destroyed the world to the degree it has, and why this philosophy of hardline value judgment, even as to the value of a person, would save it).

It's in this context that our supposed "heroes," Dagny Taggart (Rand really, really fucking sucks at naming characters)(also, Dagny is played by that most "emotive" of actors, Taylor Shilling) and Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler) are introduced. Taggart is the sister of James, and the apparent "brains" behind the operation at Taggart Transcontinental, a once-great train company that has been squandered by James' commitment to stupid fucking ideas like helping the Mexicans of all people. She's supposed to be dogged and determined, someone who doesn't take bullshit from anyone and who is singlemindedly determined to achieve great things. In reality, this comes across as nothing more than a complete lack of anything resembling humanity, especially from Shilling's, um, "icy" performance.

On the other side, we have Hank, who is apparently on the verge of a breakthrough with a "new kind of metal" called Rearden Metal that will allow trains to travel twice as fast as they currently do (side note: I know I mentioned it above, but again, this is a movie, set in 2016, that suggests that a breakthrough in train metal will fix the world economy. Yes, because things like train metal matter in 2016, when, you know, MagLev trains conveniently don't exist or anything). Unfortunately, awful people like the conniving Wesley Mooch or the State Science Institute are trying to keep him down.

It's in this context that we come to understand: these insanely wealthy tycoons are really the victims in this scenario. All of these poor, unwashed masses and these suddenly-Marxist-obsessed CEOs just don't appreciate the hard work that people like Hank and Dagny do on a daily basis. And also, who is this John Galt fellow?

Ripping on Atlas Shrugged Part 1 for its politics would be like criticizing a Jesus film for being about Jesus though (and in terms of its low production values and the particular people championing it, Atlas Shrugged Part 1 often feels a bit like evangelical fan service). Instead, a conscientious reviewer has to look at how the film takes these elements and makes them work. Here's the short answer: it doesn't.

Apparently, Johannson thought that the endless interminable conversations about metal, trains, and straw man philosophy could be taken straight from the book and plunked onto the screen, which has resulted in one of the limpest, dullest movies that I can remember. The only thing that kept me going was my restless urge to hate-watch my way through the thing, but if I didn't feel so passionately about how much I hate Ayn Rand, would I have watched all of these scenes of Dagny and Hank giving each other verbal blow jobs over their accomplishments? Would I have cared about the mysterious guy going around and plucking all of the world's most "accomplished" people out of thin air so that they could go live in harmony away from all these supposedly awful altruists? Would I have gotten angry that that same mysterious figure is played, M. Night Shyamalan-style, by Johannson himself? Would I sit through the laughably bad CGI that wants us to believe so badly that this "new metal" will revolutionize fucking train travel?

Well, this is Absolute Dreck, so the answer would probably be "yes," unfortunately. This is a boring-ass movie movie made about batshit-crazy things. That is just too weird to pass up.

Final placement: 7%. Bring on Part 2.

#illustrated bible stories for assholes #Why don't nobody love the rich folk? #Dugby Tagbart #Paul Johannsohn #atlas shrugged: part i #2010s

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I'd like to make this a true Double Jeopardy, Alex

At one point late in Double Jeopardy, Ashley Judd's Libby Parsons character has her husband pinned down in his office. See, he faked his own death earlier in the film and pinned his murder on his wife, who then spent six years in prison for supposedly killing him. And she's pissed, especially when she finds out that her husband, Nick (Bruce Greenwood), has changed his identity twice, absconded with his secretary and Libby's child, has possibly killed his second wife, and is now living the high life in New Orleans, selling Kandinsky paintings like it ain't no thang.

Libby believes that since she served her time for the original crime, and cannot be tried again for the same crime under double jeopardy laws (as enshrined in the fifth amendment of the American constitution). So she sets out for revenge, wanting to kill her husband for real this time.

As her husband looks on helplessly while she holds a loaded pistol at his face, Libby explains how she's going to get away with this crime, citing double jeopardy laws, and looking over to her newfound accomplice, her one-time parole officer Travis, played by Tommy Lee Jones, for approval. He says, "yep, I'm a lawyer, I know that's true," before... well, I don't want to spoil it anymore.

The point is, the whole concept that Double Jeopardy is based upon - that you can't be tried for the same crime, and thus have carte blanche to do whatever the fuck you want if it turns out your murder recipient isn't actually dead - is completely and totally nuts. It's a flimsy premise to begin with, but to base an entire movie on what is, essentially, a fallacy? That's just delicious.

The best part is that the film often justifies itself not through any sort of fact-checking or semblance of realism, but by simply stating that characters "used to be lawyers." How convenient for us, the viewer, that all of these characters have legitimate reasons to appeal to authority! How wonderful it is that the entirety of this movie world is inhabited by nobody but lawyers, past and present!

Double Jeopardy is a thoroughly ridiculous movie that completely and totally whiffs on building any sort of empathy, or even sympathy, for the plight that Judd's character is in. Maybe it's only in light of the Occupy Movement that making the main characters fabulously wealthy as a shorthand crutch to say, "well, obviously this woman is innocent," but I can't help but feel that all of the methods that the film attempts to garner sympathy - making Libby a wonderful mom and making her shriek that fact over and over again throughout the movie included - are repugnant. Not to mention that, on her quest for revenge, she commits probably no fewer than six major crimes, including parole violation, breaking and entering, theft and police brutality.

The worst part is that she's SO BAD at being a criminal. Part of this has to come down to Judd's lackadaisical acting style, which involves one part sly sleuthing, and another part bored disinterest. I guess that that portrayal maybe fits in with her character in a weird way, but it can't help but feel amateurish most of the time.

There are movies that are braindead, and then there are movies that also require you to be braindead; and then there's Double Jeopardy, a film that revels in its various plot contrivances (read: plot holes) to the point where asking any questions about the plot causes it all to come crashing down. It's not just the film's wonky appropriation of important constitutional amendments - it's stuff like Greenwood's ability to seemingly disappear for several years while living, essentially, the exact same life he did before (I doubt that there are many private sellers of Kandinsky paintings, for example); it's stuff like Travis's completely asinine and sketchy background, including a dead wife and child, alcoholism, and his aforementioned former lawyer-ing, that have seemingly been included in the film to, I don't know, make us care about a character that is still just a blank slate; it's stuff like Libby's shocking incompetence and stupidity; most of all, it's the complete, abject boredom with which this film was apparently made and produced, demonstrating not one lick of directorial flourish or anything resembling "passion" at all.

Even within the confines of the late-90s thriller genre, a genre about as formulaic as films get, Double Jeopardy looks especially rancid. That's not to say that it's not fun to get your hate on with it, and despite seemingly having been cast because he played more or less the same character in The Fugitive (maybe the producers thought that we'd carry over information from that far better film and apply it here?), it's still a lot of fun to watch Tommy Lee Jones, even in a shitboiler like this. There's something oddly comforting about the way in which Double Jeopardy manipulates its audience - this is about as blandly and baldly commercial as filmmaking gets, and yet that kind of slick "product" feel seems kind of quaint to me now. That doesn't make Double Jeopardy worth watching on its own merits, but it does at least provide some anthropological insight into a fascinatingly bland period in American cinema.

Final placement: 29%

#1990s #Ashley Judd #Tommy Lee Jones #shitboilers #90s thrillers #I will harm all parole officers if I can JUST HAVE MY BABY

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Absolute Trailers! Atlas Shrugged: Part II

"I didn't think the first movie was all that bad," writes David Weigel over at his Slate blog. "It definitely had less Inception-style clang-music than this, though."

He's more right on the second count than the first. Atlas Shrugged: Part Iwasn't awful, just clownish in its politics and boring everywhere else. The trailer for Atlas Shrugged: Part IIis more lively than anything the first film could offer, even while it continues Ayn Rand's Objectivist circle jerk.

#Atlas Shrugged: Part I #Atlas Shrugged: Part II

[absolutedreck]

Lusty Boos

Word's been traveling around about the Venice premier of Terence Malick's latest film, To the Wonder. Namely, how audience members have been booing it.

I'm still one of those delinquent film fans who hasn't seenThe Tree of Lifeyet. But, through snippets of online reading and bits of conversation from friends and podcasts, I could definitely see how Mallick's ambitious style, when done poorly, could be a joy to heckle. A director making these kinds of films need a certain amount of confidence. That confidence making a film that's a dud makes it worse than any movie that aims for the middle, worse in big, slap-you-in-the-face kind of ways.

Of course, it could just be an ignorant audience. The wire report I link to above is conflicted on the film. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave To the Wondera glowing, four-out-of-five review, saying that it's "unfashionably and unironically concerned with love and God". The line reads like something from a culture warrior, though part of Bradshaw's ire seems directed at Venice crowds.

"Malick gets this treatment," he writes, "while the most insipid, unadventurous movies here can fade to black and roll credits in respectful quiet."

But again, I can imagine myself in a theater, watching To the Wondergo off the rails at moments and the only available reaction being whatCinema Scope describes as "lustily booing" the film. When a movie like this goes wrong, it goes wrong in big ways. We'll all have to see when it's released.

#2010s #The Tree of Life #To the Wonder #Terence Malick

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So Much Glorious Schlock For Free

Techdirt reports that Troma, some of the most prolific and wonderful purveyors of schlock the film world has ever seen, have posted 150 of their movies on YouTube. And you can watch them for no charge.

150 Troma films. For free.

For B-movie fans, this is crazy good news. I know I'll be diving into this when I'm not on bus wireless, which will put up with any streaming video nonsense.

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Everything That Went Right With Spring Break

Spring Break (1983)

Directed by Sean S. Cunningham

Starring David Knell, Steve Bassett, Perry Lang

Welcome, dear Tumblrs, to the new Absolute Dreck! We'll have to see whether this new era for us will mean a million posts a week or our current, contemplative trickle. It'll be one or the other, that's for sure.

The strange thing with this first post is, I'm not actually writing about a movie that's dreck.No one will be mistaking the '80s sex comedy Spring Breakwith any masterpiece, comedic or otherwise.

Any delight I found in this movie was slightly hampered by what plot there was, featuring an evil senatorial candidate/stepfather who doesn't want to son to party and is also hellbent on shutting down a legendary Fort Lauderdale party hotel. For the most part, though, the plot gets out the way.

Here are the four best things about Spring Break.

1. The friendship between the bros and dweebs.I wound up watching this movie, expecting a platonic version of She's All That. The short synopsis I read said a pair of popular dudes teach a couple of geeks how to pick up chicks. In truth, the geeks have it covered; they find their own girls. The best part of the relationship, though, is that bros never condescend to less fit, less socially able roommates. It's an easy and immediate friendship that's a joy to watch.

2. It is entirely a movie of its time.I don't know what it would take to get me to Fort Lauderdale for spring break these days. A grant. A nighttime abduction. Something on that scale. There is no question that I would go to 1983 Fort Lauderdale for spring break. The fashion is magical. The songs –– always played in full in this movie -- are perfect party tunes.

3. Its episodic plot.To give viewers the salacious parts of the spring break experience (read: boobies and drunkenness) the movie spends a lot of its run time focused in a few extended scenes, like a beach sequence, a belly-flop competition, and a series of wet t-shirt contests (for men and women) along with banana eating and whatnot. Because of that, outside of the main plot I describe earlier, the stakes are incredibly low, and strangely enough it makes the whole thing feel more real to life. That's right: I just described Spring Breakas, in some way, real to life.

4. The movie's Coke sponsorship.Coke is all over this movie. I couldn't tell the brand of a single beer the four main guys were drinking, but Coke was always prominently placed. In this titty comedy. The best example is when the stepson of the evil politician is about to hook up with a Shelley Long lookalike when he gets nerves and says he's thirsty to get out of her hotel room. He then forgets which room is hers after buying an armful of cans, forcing him to run around this hotel awkward cradling them before getting kicked out.

#Spring Break #1980s #She's All That #Shelley Long

[absolutedreck]

Blade Runner’s Weird Cousin

Or, I Came for Selleck and Got a Dash of Simmons Runaway (1984) Directed by Michael Crichton Starring Tom Selleck, Kirstie Alley, Gene Simmons A quick premise rundown gave me the wrong impression of Runaway. A future cop takes down rebelling robots -- well, if you want to paint it broadly, that sounds at least a bit like Blade Runner. Not so -- the movie is basically your standard thriller but with flying Roombas. I’m not too clear when all of us citizens of the 21st century can look forward to the advancements of Runaway, or if we can really look forward to them at all. Writer/director Michael Crichton -- who you might recognize as the novelist behind books like Jurassic Park -- almost boldly decides to essentially set the film in an alt-history 1980s, where cops drive shitty sedans for cop cars and fashion and every other part of life haven’t changed. If it is in the future, then that’s some chutzpa on Crichton’s part -- it takes guts to predict that the only thing that will change is that shitty robots will do everything for us. Tom Selleck, looking as fit, trim, and vital as ever, plays a police officer who responds to calls regarding these robots. Despite the fact that we’ve developed this robot workforce and we trust them with everything to cooking to childcare to building, they’re still all fairly P.O.S. The film starts with Selleck in your standard police precinct, being introduced to his new partner when they get a call. The film cuts to a little box of a machine, rolling over some crops. Selleck and his partner respond to the call. She runs out into the field, lugs the robot above her head, and cheers “Yay!” before it sparks and she drops it. Farmers look on, laughing. Moments like this aren’t the core of the movie. The real framework of the movie is the dastardly villain, conspiring to get his Red Herring at any cost, while Selleck pursues him, mostly using his wits. At one point, I thought that this could be tweaked into a respectable spec script for The Commish, albeit one where Michael Chiklis got bonked on the head and thinks he’s in the future. But Crichton leaves in a lot of glimpses of weirdness; whether come from him intentionally or from his occasionally incompetent writing, I can’t really tell. Weirdness like forcing Kirstie Alley to strip, because a bug scanner keeps finding them on her clothes; like Selleck’s son’s robo-nanny excitedly saying “Hot dogs!” when she’s asked what Selleckson had for supper; like a T.V. cameraman wandering into a house where a robot is holding a baby hostage and no one giving a shit after Selleck tried waving him away a couple of times. (To be fair, Selleck did warn the news crew that “you’re broadcasting on an electromagnetic frequency that the robot reads”, but that doesn’t stop him from letting the camera man follow him in.) The movie isn’t entirely incompetent -- it at least moves along quick enough -- but it is very, very stupid, showing little to no regard for the world they’re building. There are some isolated pleasures. Like Selleck beating a robot into a neat scrap heap with a chair as Alley looks on. Or the nagging feeling that Alley, still pre-Cheers at this point, might at any point yell, “Sam Malone, you pull this robot-driven cop car over right now!” Mostly, if you’re coming to this movie, you’re coming to bask in Selleck and delight at Gene Simmons. Yep, Gene Simmons of Kiss is the villain in this movie, a tradition Mick Jagger would take up again in Freejack. A young, pre-cosmetic surgery Simmons isn’t a half-bad villain. He’s got some menace and a hint of evil to him, which is no surprise as the man himself is generally an amoral bastard. He even gets a real villain death, dying at the hands of a bunch of Erector Set spiders filled with acid. When Simmons seems dead, Selleck goes over to check his pulse and Simmons jerks and screams. Once Simmons is done dying, Selleck almost nods to himself, like it’s another day done. More than any other moment, they seem like characters from two different movies -- Selleck in the standard thriller, Simmons in a hammy and entertaining sci-fi flick. Runaway would’ve been better with a lot more of the latter. Final Placement: 50%. Too much that’s incongruous to make this pure fluff fun, while Crichton’s vision of the future is surprisingly limited.

[absolutedreck]

I Wish Canadian Netflix Would Shape Up

Quick notes before the brief complain that'll follow: 1. This isn't a new thing. The comparative lack of selection on Canadian Netflix is a drag, and a lot of people have noted it. 2. I at least partially understand why it is the way it is. International rights for this kind of thing can be a complicated matter. 3. The size of Canada's market probably isn't helping anything. All that said, Mark Duplass is torturing the fuck out of me. The actor/writer/director, behind movies like Cyrus and Baghead and starring in The League, has been using his Twitter account for his #netflix365 project, where he recommends a different film available on American Netflix every day. Well, they all sound like interesting movies, but I can't really double check that since they are overwhelmingly not on Canadian Netflix. I checked the last 10 as of today, June 13. Only one of them, Brother's Keeper, was available up here in the Great White North. The other nine -- no go. When I searched "pianist", as in the Roman Polanski movie, the second film to pop up was Lindsay Lohan's Labor Pains. I already live in a place where, when it comes to small release or independent films, we feel like a second run city. I don't want a limited Netflix, too.

[absolutedreck]

Any more shampoo and we'd have a John Waters movie

The 1990s were a golden time for light teen comedies, especially pre-American Pie. None of these films (I'm thinking, primarily, of films like She's All That, Can't Hardly Wait, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Clueless, though the latter of these is significantly better than all of the former ones) are particularly great cinema, and a good deal of them fall into the same traps that adult romantic comedies would, with expedient and ridiculous plotting and surface-level characterization and all of that. And yet, it feels as though enough time has passed from that period to now to have these films feel like real comfort food, warts and all. You know you're getting into something that's ultimately going to be shallow and meaningless (and excessively white, I might add), but that won't actively offend your sensibilities.

I admit that I structured that first paragraph in the way I did for a reason, bringing up key components like "pre-American Pie" and two films that feature Freddie Prinz Jr. and Julia Stiles in an effort to, I guess, poison the well before I even started into my review proper of Down to You (that's called foreshadowing, kids!). Because Down to You isn't from the 90s -  it's post-American Pie in a way that feels considerably more obvious now than I'm sure it did twelve years ago, and it comfortably resides as the worst in that particular line of teen romantic comedies that I've ever seen, a film that absolutely deserves to have ended Freddie Prinz Jr.'s career and nearly ended Julia Stiles'.

Before diving into the film, my friends and I had almost no idea what to expect from the film, considering that all we had to go on was a typically vague Netflix description and the poster featuring Prinz Jr. and Stiles smiling and hugging each other. If that doesn't seem like perfect movie watching fodder, especially when two of us were pretty much sick out of our minds, then it's likely that you're reading the wrong blog, pal.

But Down to You, apparently a legendarily bad film (ranking in at #40 for the entire decade on Rotten Tomatoes' "Worst of the 2000s," it holds an astounding 3% with 59 critic reviews), is the kind of movie that telegraphs its badness almost instantaneously, and doesn't let up for the entirety of its runtime, even (or maybe even especially) as it tries its hand at a "Before Sunrise-lite" structure at times (at other times, it's a Frankensteinian mashup of She's All That, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and god knows what else).

The main issue is just how formless the whole thing feels. A plot that's essentially "two people meet and fall in love, then fall out of love, and then reconcile," isn't just tired and overused, but doesn't feel like much of an impetus to make a film, especially in a notoriously high-concept genre as the teen romantic comedy. And maybe that's a fault of my own, too: I keep calling it a comedy when any comedy is almost assuredly incidental. This is pretty clearly a project designed for Prinz Jr. and Stiles to transition out of the teen subgenre they'd been forced into and into legitimate adult drama, and on that count, it fails especially badly.

Freddie Prinz Jr. plays Al, a senior at an unnamed college whose dream is to become a serious chef, somewhat in the vein of his famous TV chef father, played by Henry Winkler (who is the only person on set who can apparently recognize the awfulness of the film; or perhaps he's simply hamming it up because he's not a very good actor. I don't know). One night at a bar, Al meets Imogen (Stiles), and like Al, she too wants to do something other than what she's studying for at college, as she maintains a hobby as an artist. I call it a hobby not to be derisive to visual artists, but because she's perhaps the worst fucking self-proclaimed artist in any film I've ever seen. There's a scene at the end of the film that is supposed to represent their reconciliation, where Imogen gives Al a book cover featuring the two of them embracing each other, that is perhaps the closest representation to an Eldritch Abomination that I've ever seen on the screen.

Anyways, they're cute and in love, which requires Stiles to be quirky and squinty and Prinz Jr. to be smirky and squinty, and the two of them move in together and are in love. The end, right? NOT SO FAST, BUSTER. See, Imogen is afraid of commitment! She's afraid that if she stays with Al, she'll be locked into a marriage with thirty-seven kids and a station wagon! And Al, Al's afraid that he's becoming less of a man (driven home by a dream sequence where he's a guest on the Man Show)! Imogen becomes weirdly distant, Al starts thinking about having sex with Selma Blair, and before you know it, their relationship is over.

If this was the entirety of the film, it'd be hackneyed and tired and cliched beyond all repair, but it wouldn't awful necessarily, just endlessly boring. But Kris Isaacson, the "auteur" of Down to You, couldn't help but throw in weird and oddly dark detours, and then promptly ignore said detours in perhaps one of the best examples I can think of of test audience meddling with a film (though I can't imagine that following any of these things would lead to a better movie, so... yikes). Selma Blair's character is a good, if oddly minor, example - it's hinted at that Al is going to mess up and sleep with her the whole way through the film... and then he doesn't. She just kind of disappears. Instead, Isaacson seems to place most of the blame on Imogen for the breakup, having her have sex with Ashton Kutcher (!) as... a response to not wanting to have sex at all? It's a strange sequence, made stranger by the fact that Kutcher wasn't even trying to not play Kelso from That '70s Show.

But it goes further than plotting, into the very fabric of the film itself. The film is apparently attempting to show both sides of the relationship, and rather than cross-cutting or using the perspectives of the characters effectively, Isaacson thought it would be better to simply have Prinz Jr. and Stiles deliver Matthew Broderick-esque fourth-wall-shattering monologues to describe what they were feeling and what was happening at that moment. These are heinous and awful to watch, not only because Prinz Jr. and Stiles seemingly couldn't deliver a monologue to save their lives (Stiles, it must be said, did go on to have reasonably OK roles after this), but because the actual things they have to say could conquer the most practiced of thespians. The best analogue we could find to the writing of these monologues was high school collectives, and not even very good ones.

I like to think that teenagers are smarter than we give them credit for. Much like children, if all you show them is shitty movies like G-Force or Cats and Dogs, then of course they're going to have shitty taste in general. Give them the good stuff and they'll grow up just fine. Likewise, while teenagers obviously have a lot more freedom to choose what they want to see and movie executives were all to pleased to pander to them in awful ways (a practice that has, depending on your perspective, either stopped completely or has expanded outwards to treat all moviegoers as if they're teenagers), there was and is still enough good out there that teenagers don't have to sit through crud that treats them like imbeciles. To Down to You's credit, its central gambit, which is the attempted suicide of Al after the dissolution of his and Imogen's relationship, attempts to throw in some poetic imagery to spruce up this storyline. But the problem is that: a) a suicide storyline of this sort is fucking inane and insulting to its target audience and b) the method that Al attempts to use, which is drinking Imogen's shampoo, is so absurd, so ridiculous and so nauseating that it collapses the entire film along with it. After Al tries to kill himself, the movie seems to recognize just how much this act has the ability to destroy the pacing of the film, and basically tries to make us forget that it happens, even throwing in snide little "ha ha, isn't it funny I almost killed myself with shampoo?" jokes that go beyond awful filmmaking and into the realm of the offensive.

Honestly, there's no reason for a teen romantic drama to fly off the rails like this. If there's any genre more formulaic than this one (besides things like Bond movies, of course, where the formula is the point of the film), I'm not aware of it. It shouldn't be so easy to fuck up a film to the point where it stays in the mind as a series of slightly baffling and surreal vignettes, punctuated by the vacant stare of Freddie Prinz Jr. But that's all that remains to me of Down to You, a real candidate for one of the worst romantic comedies I've ever seen, a real Manos: Hands of Fate of the 90s teen romance genre.

Final Placement: for more "poetic imagery," let's go with the Rotten Tomatoes-sanctioned 3%.

[absolutedreck]

With a smile on your face and a spring in your step

I think that if there's one genre from this new millennium that James and I have both nearly pounded to death, it's the street dance film. And yet, despite having subjected ourselves to the likes of StreetDance 3D, You Got Served, the Step Up series and countless others that I can't pull the names of right at this moment, neither of us got around to seeing Honey, the 2005 Jessica Alba dance vehicle with the hoary "save the dance school" plot.

Six years later, in 2011, I'm certain that there was just a massive outcry for a sequel to that original film, but without any of its stars and with only a tangential connection to the first film (you know, the same folks behind that other massive fan campaign, for Blue Crush 2). And so, with the straight to DVD release of Honey 2, those people got their wish. Good for them.

Honey 2 tells the story of one Maria Ramirez (Kat Graham), who is in some hot water when the film cold opens in a juvenile prison. See, as with most depictions of juvie, Honey 2 features intense, gritty dance battles to solve their issues. The audience is led to believe that Maria has been doing hard time in the slammer, but it seems a little bit closer to a hip-hop-ified West Side Story or something.

Anyways, Maria is released from prison in short order (like, before the opening credits roll, and kudos to Dreck friend Rhiannon Ward for finally proving the theory of inverse quality between opening credits and the actual film contained within, as Honey 2 has some very lovely opening credits indeed) and sets about finding her old love interest and the dude who, incidentally enough, put her in prison, the excessively slimy Luis (Christopher "War" Martinez, his actual credit apparently).

Honey 2 also proves the old truism that if you're a greasy-looking Hispanic man, that you will almost certainly be a villain (a stereotype that the film is all too happy to run with), and that if you're a clean-cut, white Abercrombie and Fitch reject, that you will both nonsensically be in the plot to start with, and you will be the film's main love interest. See, Maria isn't so keen to join back up with the 718 dance crew because Luis is still all about stealing and drug dealing and all of that, and so she ends up with the ragtag underdog HD Crew, led by Brandon, the aforementioned white dude (Randy Wayne). Unfortunately, Graham and Wayne don't even get to have a good "dance as a metaphor for all the sex we're having" scene, which is just too bad. It's such a staple!

And once that particular plot point occurs, the film is basically on cruise control. Knock the street dance genre all you want for its crass commercialization of a legitimately underground phenomenon (though, of course, it hasn't been that for years now) or for their nonsense plotting or whatever, but they are certainly familiar, all kind of running on the same template. Indeed, Honey 2 seems to be most indebted to the granddaddy of the genre, the I-can't-believe-I'm-going-to-call-it-seminal You Got Served, featuring not only almost the exact same plot points, but the same plot points in the same order and delivered in the same way. You've got: dancer who betrays her team and joins up with the bad guys; the primary motivation for the entire plot being an inane reality TV show (at least You Got Served could get MTV sponsorship; Honey 2, despite being produced by MTV Films, has instead the unfortunately named "Dance Battle Zone" as an America's Best Dance Crew stand-in. Seriously, you can get Mario Lopez but not the presumably dirt-cheap ABDC rights?); and even some of the same outrageously terrible acting done by the most outrageously terrible looking actors.

Ah, but who is even the main audience for Honey 2? It's certainly not people who appreciate experimental plot structures or quality dialog or whatever. A dance film is primarily, maybe even entirely, about hot people doing cool dance moves, and in these terms, Honey 2 is certainly not the worst dance crew movie I've ever seen. Sure, there are still a few too many edits that prevent the viewer from appreciating the scope of the dance moves, and nothing on display seems extremely complex or mind-blowing (in fact, in the final dance competition sequence, a few of the actual dance crews on display seem considerably better than the HD Crew, which is like, come on), but overall the main actors acquit themselves nicely. Even if they're baldly functional as actors, their dancing is pretty OK. I do find it hilarious how dance battles are handled in much the same vein as Pokemon battles, though. Who knew so many issues could be solved through the transformative power of dance? I sure didn't.

Final placement: 36%. A thoroughly "eh, there that was" experience. Though it is hilariously, frightfully bad in places, it's mostly a completely harmless, functional, perfunctory piece of tween entertainment.

[absolutedreck]

Leonard Maltin #1: American Dreamz, The Animal Factory, Better Than Sex

I appreciate what reviewer Leonard Maltin is going for in his book, 151 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen. I also have an affinity for movies that aren’t great. Not just the kind of movies we review here at Absolute Dreck!, the awful often fascinating films that I watch a regular basis, but minor films that don’t aspire to greatness. Something I admire about the career of someone like Roman Polanski is that he makes films so regularly -- annually these days -- that he can fit in a small film full of quirks like Carnage. Maltin is doing something slightly different. In compiling this book, he wanted to bring to light good movies that weren’t necessarily masterpieces. I’m partial to the concept. I watched three of these movies recently, and they run from good to OK to terrible. Let’s start with the best. Better Than Sex isn’t immune to all the cliches courtship inspires in film -- there is an extended riff on how men pee in toilets. At its best, the 2000 Australian film brings out some real honesty. Cin (Susie Porter) and Josh (David Wenham, or Farramir from the Lord of the Rings series) shared a cab then a bed shortly before the movie started. Over the course of a few days, they have a whole lot of sex and feelings start to develop. It’s not a sweeping film or a romance for the ages, but the technique of having the characters speak in talking-head segments brings some insight into the movie. The couple at the heart of the film are charming and watchable. The Animal Factory, Steve Buscemi’s second feature film, stars Willem Dafoe as Earl Copen, the man to know inside a prison. Edward Furlong plays Ron Decker, a new, young inmate in on drug charges. Buscemi’s idea of what this film could be is right-headed; the movie can’t really be seen as one narrative push but as a series of episodes. Plus, Furlong does well playing a snotty dipshit, while Dafoe is commanding as the charismatic, shaved-head leader. Even Tom Arnold, playing the worst kind of creep all too well, is fun to watch. The movie doesn’t gel when it comes to fully conveying prison life by the end. American Dreamz is one of the worst movies I’ve seen in some time, if we forget about Pledge This! Now, Pledge This! is an unforgettable film and incomparably bad. But, as Pledge This! will forever reset the scales of what is good and bad, let’s forget that for a moment and recognize how bad American Dreamz is. Formally, it’s a satire of American culture, encompassing the government, attitudes towards terrorism, and reality show culture. Writer/director Paul Weitz -- who Maltin helpfully mentions co-directed About a Boy -- doesn’t seem to have any familiarity at all with how any of these things work. Having some understanding of the thing you want to critique is important if you want anything to actually land. If American Idol were anything like the similar show Weitz presents in the movie, well, yeah, it would be an abomination. If the Bush administration were anything like it’s laid out here, than it would be a thousand times worse than anyone actually imagines. Group that with a script that’s dead to begin with, and performances from the likes of Hugh Grant, Dennis Quaid, Mandy Moore, Willem Dafoe, and Chris Klein that can’t live without anything to support them, and American Dreamz is terrible, a complete and utter humorless mess.