Olympus Has Fallen kicks off the summer movie season…sorta…I mean, it’s not even April yet, but what the hell. Think of it as palate-cleanser before the main course—not quite substantial enough to stand among the big boys of summer, but also not a complete embarrassment to be ignominiously shuffled into theaters during the dead zone of January. You can see why: It’s a big-budget, big body-count, action spectacle starring, ah…well, something approaching an action-movie star. It was also massively successful and spawned a lucrative franchise, you know, when it was released in 1988 and called Die Hard.

So, in Olympus, Gerard Butler stars as Mike Banning, a disgraced Secret Service agent who was once the Agent-in-Charge of the President’s security detail. Unfortunately, after a tragic accident in which Banning was able to save the President (Aaron Eckhart), but not the First Lady (Ashley Judd), he has been banished to humiliating gig with the US Treasury. Now, if it seems odd that this would be considered a humiliation—given that one of the Service’s mandates is to investigate counterfeiting and used to be a part of the Treasury—and like the movie has no idea how the Secret Service works, don’t worry about it. This movie has no idea how anything works.

The varsity team in action…

Fortunately for Banning, redemption beckons when a South Korean diplomatic delegation visiting the White House turns out to be comprised solely of North Korean moles. Yeah, that happens. They are the spearhead of a massive assault on the White House that includes multiple municipal vehicles with crew-served weapons, about a hundred armed soldiers armed with combat rifles and RPG-7 missile launchers, and an AC-130 Gunship. Goddamn it, wasn’t the Assault Weapons Ban supposed to prevent this?

So, long story short, Banning makes it into the white house manages to get his war kit on. Meanwhile, the terrorists North Koreans, led by Rick Yune, (who played the diamond-faced bad guy in Die Another Day), have holed up in the White House’s emergency bunker with POTUS, the Defense Secretary, and some other people whose only purpose is to be summarily-executed whenever the terrorists North Koreans don’t feel they’re being taken seriously enough.

Well, of course the terrorists North Koreans make their demands—full withdrawal of US troops from South Korea—while they desperately try to hack some magical computer whateverthefuck. At the same time, Banning must wage a guerrilla fight against the terrorists North Korean occupiers. Yeah, you’ve seen this movie before: not only with Die Hard, but with every Die Hard ripoff of the past 25 years.

“Yeah, I’m totally as cool as Bruce Willis…”

I mean, not only is the whole scenario “Die Hard in the White House,” but we have a clone of the scene in which the SWAT team rushes into an ambush at Nakatomi Tower, despite McClain’s pleas for them to stop; a copy of the scene in which the bad guy is encountered by the hero, who doesn’t know who he is; hell, even the terrorists North Korean’s getaway plan is copied directly from Die Hard. What did it take, like, 20 minutes to write this movie? Just a script from Die Hard and a lot of FIND/REPLACE commands?

As Banning, Butler is…well, he’s Butler. Another generic slab of beefcake that manages to be an absolute charisma-suck when placed at the center of movie. Really, they might as well just put a human-shaped void in the middle of the screen. It’d be more or less the same thing. Also, halfway through the movie, Butler adopts this weird Sylvester Stallone cadence, like he forgot how to speak English or had a mini-stroke or something.

He’s like the baddest chipmunk ever.

But there’s more:

* Characters in this movie get dumber or smarter as the plot needs. The best example of this is Morgan Freeman’s Speaker of the House, who assumes the Presidency during the crisis. He flips-flops between being the wise, stentorian Morgan Freeman we know and love, and being a complete moron, willing to risk South Korea’s total annihilation just to get the President back.

“Sure, we can give them that. How about Montana, too? Do they want Montana?”

* THIS MOVIE DOESN’T KNOW HOW ANYTHING WORKS (TMDKHAW) #1: Speaking of, in the beginning of the film, the President has a high-level strategy meeting about a response to North Korea’s bellicosity that is attended by the Speaker of the House, the Defense Secretary, and the Vice President…but not the Secretary of State, whose job it is to, you know, do foreign policy stuff. The Speaker of the House has jack-shit to do with that…the VP, even less. Hell, the Secretary of Indian Affairs has more to do with foreign policy than these jokers.

* One unintentionally-hilarious scene occurs during the assault on the White House: as the terrorists North Korean irregulars are blasting away from the Great Lawn with RPGs and machine guns, one security dude unleashes a couple of Rottweilers at the attackers. Yep, that oughta do it.

* TMDKHAW #2: The point-defense of the White House consists of a wrought-iron fence and about two-dozen Secret Service agents. No Uniformed Division guys, none of the paramilitary that exists solely to defend this building, no vehicle barriers…oh, and it takes the military fifteen minutes to respond to the attack…which, you know, seems long.

Pictured: The sum total of the White House perimeter defenses.

* This movie traffics in the casual brutality that kills all the fun of a decent action movie. I mean, Die Hard managed to be a fun movie that tells the same story without any scenes of a woman having the shit beaten out of her.

* Oh, yeah, and when Melissa Leo’s character is dragged away by bad guys, she defiantly recites the Pledge of Allegiance. You know, it’s not really that badass to go out shouting something you say every morning in grade school.

* TMDKHAW #3: The Speaker of the House never confers with the leaders of either Korea during this movie. He mentions he wants a meeting with them, but the time-frame makes it doubtful that ever happens. Boy, they’re gonna be pissed when they find out he plans on abandoning South Korea…you know, when they hear about it from CNN. 

* Banning tortures a couple dudes to death for information. Now, this is basically the same thing the bad guys are doing down in the bunker, but, see, when Banning does it, it’s totally cool. Because he’s the good guy. See how that works?

Goddamn it, stop saluting! You’re not a soldier or American!

* Movies have gotten worse in 25 years. Remember “Yippiekayay, mutherfucker!” in response to Hans Gruber’s taunts about America’s cultural bankruptcy? Yeah, with this movie, Banning just says, “Let’s have a fuck-off contest. You go first.” Uh…what? Later, he threatens to stab the bad guy through the brain, which is…not that interesting (especially compared to, “I’m gonna kill ya! I’m gonna cook ya! And I’m gonna eat ya!”)

* TMDKHAW #4: This movie thinks that the US military presence can be withdrawn from South Korea like, I guess, pulling out of a parking lot. And not removing a massive military presence that’s been amassing for 50 years. 

* The last fight scene is just a boring fistfight, in which Banning basically just beats Rick Yune up. Remember how John McClain used his wits and had a gun taped to neck, and lulled Hans into lowering his guard…yeah, but, hey, being imaginative is a lot of work.

* The Chair of the Joint Chiefs goes ahead with an assault on the White House, even after Banning tells him the bad guys have installed sophisticated air-defense systems. Then everyone is all surprised when those same defenses repel the military. Uh…what did you think was gonna happen?

TMDKHAW #5: Okay, I’m not an engineer, but I highly doubt the wing of a C-130 could shear off the top of the Washington Monument. I base this opinion on two facts: 1) a plane’s wing is made out of materials lightweight enough to allow it the ability to take flight; 2) the Washington Monument is made out of stone, which is really, really hard to make fly.

So, that’s Olympus Has Fallen.  At the end, Banning has been redeemed, his relationship with the President restored—they even crack wise as they stagger out of the ruined White House…and over the bodies of dozens of dead civilians. Yeah, Clint Eastwood managed to do this same thing without nearly the collateral damage. Just sayin’.

Okay, so GI Joe: Retaliation. Yeah, here’s my experience with that movie. I went with a buddy of mine—a fellow Gunmonkey—and he basically boiled his expectations down as thus:

“Dude, don’t sit next to me. People will think we’re gay. I didn’t go through a shit-ton of work marrying a beautiful woman who’s also a totally cool chick just so people could think I’m gay. You picking up what I’m putting down?”

And:

“What the hell was up with the last movie? Like, laser guns and shit? I don’t sign on to a GI Joe movie to see laser guns. I want a dude with an M203 spraying a curtain of lead when he’s not lobbing grenades. That’s GI Joe. Why can’t I have an M203? Where’s my M203?”

This man served in the Iraq War, so, hey, what am I gonna do? Deny him his non-gay buffer seat and wait for him to go all PTSD on me? But beyond that, he and I were on the same wavelength. The last GI Joe movie sucked, and that’s pretty much the reason GI Joe: Retaliation was green-lit. It’s a rare instance where Hollywood says to American public, “Whoa! Yeah, that sucked. Even by our standards, that sucked. So, um, do-over?” So, that’s GI Joe: Retaliation: a big do-over. And, know what? That’s not a bad thing.

Okay, so I don’t want you to re-watch GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra—I’m not a monster—but you do have to remember that as the movie ended, shapeshifter Zartan was impersonating the President. Okay, cool. That’s all you need to know about to remember about the first movie, because this installment does its level best to erase that flick from our memory.

The first thing it does is eliminate the Joes from that movie. Now, for the most part that’s okay, because that movie saddled us with both Marlon Wayans—who, let’s be clear here, may, in fact, be mentally retarded, because there’s nothing onscreen to suggest otherwise—and Dennis Quaid, who in cinematic terms is the harbinger of the apocalypse. We do, however, have a bit of a sticky wicket with Channing Tatum, who, between 2009 and now, has matured into a genuinely good actor. However, Retaliation  makes good use of his limited screen time.

And there’s this, which certainly helps…

Then, it constricts the scope of the film to a couple of old-school, Joes—Roadblock, Lady Jaye, and Flint—who were members back when the toy line relaunched and anchored the comic book in some semblance of reality. See, the evil doppelPresident launches an attack that wiped out damn near all the Joes except these three and sets them up to carry the story.

Finally, the movie strikes a vein of ore by casting Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Roadblock, their commanding officer. I’ve mentioned before that Johnson is a genuinely fun actor—whether he’s playing an existential goof in Southland Tales or a grittily-realistic DSS Agent in Fast Five. The guy can hold the screen, and is  a throwback to Schwarzenegger in his heyday—an amazing physical specimen, who nonetheless is always in on the joke of the movie.

“What? I don’t see what the size of my penis has to do with anything…”

Now, the temptation is to go through everything thi film does better than its predecessor, but that would simply be a litany of the past movie’s missteps, which is ground well-trod. Instead, let’s go through what works with this movie:

* It takes its cue from the comic books and not the cartoon: Yeah, I’m a purist. I came to GI Joe as a kid, not through the wildly-overpraised cartoon, but through the comic book (and toys), which strove to tell modern-day (for the early ‘80s) military stories. The Joes were soldiers with real specialties, weapons, and training. It seemed very grown-up to a kid of ten years-old, with references to the Vietnam War, branches of service, and NATO. Sure, the movie can’t replicate all that, but at the end of the day, these people are soldiers with real weapons and not weird-ass suits and laser guns.

Bruce Willis scoffs at your pitiable lasers…

* It has a lower budget: Weird, right? This should be a liability, and yet without the means to, say, computer-animate a fleet of submarines that attack an underwater base, it constrains its action to realistic shootouts and fistfights that are a ton more fun.

* It hews closer to the source material: Yee-ha! We get Hiss Tanks! And Cobra Commander in a shiny mask and not that weird-ass cow-udder thing he wore in the last movie. Seriously, what the hell was that?

* Snake-eyes: Yeah, he’s still a ninja. But he’s also a commando who faces Storm Shadow’s shurinken with his submachine gun. Also, he has a proper mask (to cover his disfigured face), and not that…um…look, there’s no easy way to say this, but in the last movie he was basically in black-face. I don’t why they did that.

You know, there’s a time for ninja-swords, and a time for submachine guns. This is the latter.

* The ninja fight: Yeah! Atop a mountain. It’s a great, show-stopping scene that harkens back to one of the best comic books Silent Interlude. It was a comic book that stopped me dead in my tracks, thinking, Holy crap! These things are capable of amazing stories!

* Bruce Willis: As General Joe Colton (ret), founder of GI Joe, he livens up every scene and brings a bit of adult-supervision to the proceedings. And, here’s the thing about Bruce Willis as an actor, 1) he will appear in anything, no matter the quality, and 2) somehow you will only remember him in Die Hard. The guy is less an actor than a sentient dose of A1 sauce that makes everything better.

* Jonathan Pryce: As the President and his Presidopelgangager, he’s clearly having a blast overacting, chewing scenery and hamming it up. Here’s a dude who has established himself as a great thespian, and yet he shows up in Retaliation so he can deliver lines like, “I don’t know why they call it water boarding. I never get bored with it!”

“I won a Tony, so I can joke about torture.”

* Action, not violence: This is a hobby horse many a time, but Retaliation is as good an example of it as any. Coming a week after Olympus Has Fallen, in which Gerard Butler brutally tortures bad guys to the roar of the audience, GI Joe: Retaliation gives us some exhilarating action sequences devoid of blood or misery. Of course, they’re not realistic—it’s a movie. We go to movies for fun, not sadism. Somewhere along the line, movies forgot this.

* Genuine chemistry: The actors all seem to be having fun, and it comes out in their relationships. Tatums’s Duke and Roadblock evince an easy friendship that sells their esprit de corps. It sets the emotional stakes better than any CGI setpiece.

Sure, there are problems with the movie—Adrienne Paliki’s Lady Jaye is offered up as cheesecake more often than she should, and I don’t for a moment believe Ray Stevenson’s Firefly could best Roadblock in  a fistfight—but they’re not the kind of problems that scuttle a movie. At the end of the day, GI Joe: Retaliation is dumb, disposable fun. Which, let’s face it, is the best some movies can hope to aspire to.

Anyway, my buddy liked it. Even without an M203.

“From the Mists of Time” is a new, semi-regular filler feature based upon Sci-Fi Invasion, a cheapie DVD set of 50 films that was an impulse buy as I was killing time until it was a more respectable hour to hit the local bars.  These are all largely-forgotten movies that span the history of cinema. They’re not good—Lord, they’re not—but some of them are entertaining enough to warrant a mini-review…

Installment #1: Assassin (1986): You know, you just can’t go wrong with Robert Conrad. He was the essential ‘60s and ‘70s tough-guy—a gravely-voices, ruggedly handsome leading man for the small-screen, equally comfortable slipping into the Cockpit of an F4U Corsair in Baa Baa Black Sheep as he was into a pair of the tightest pants in existence for The Wild Wild West (you know, before the inevitable scene where he’s stripped to the wait and tied up…man, that show had issues.) Anyway, in this made-for-TV movie he plays a retired CIA operative called back in to hunt a rogue—you guessed it!—assassin. It’s a fairly solid setup for an intrepidly-goofy movie.

Why bring Conrad back in, you ask? Well, it seems the assassin, Robert Gollum stole the file on every other active operative (literally, it’s a manila file-folder, not even that thick), so see? Makes perfect sense.

Unfortunately, after his first run-in with the assassin, Conrad—being the professional super-spook he is—recognizes something unusual about this assassin: he is unfazed by multiple, close-range handgun hits before jumping out a five-story window and running away. In Conrad’s professional judgment that’s pretty weird—even more than his CIA handlers’ continues entreaties to shoot for the stomach (“uh…er…he wears body armor…look, just target the stomach, would ya!”)

Soon enough, the truth wills out: Gollum is actually the code-name for a super-high-tech android that the agency built to, you know, kill people. Unfortunately, his creator was a bit of a lunatic war hawk, who sends the thing off after anyone he felt was weakening national security. Yeah, apparently, no one else on the project thought of adding a “no treason” subroutine. Maybe they were gonna save that for V1.2.

So, the rest of the movie is Conrad and a hawt computer engineer chasing down Gollum before he can kill everyone on his list. They, uh, they don’t do a great job. But, hey, we get some pretty TV-friendly good action sequences, so what the heck.

Finally, they manage to trap the thing in an impenetrable bunker, which kicks off its self-destruct protocol—seems if it ran into a situation it couldn’t escape from it just blows up (the command “think harder” was probably also gonna be in V1.2). And Conrad goes off with the girl. Like we knew he would.

Interesting stuff:

* Robert Conrad’s Seduction Techniques: When it told the thing can do anything a human being can, he replies, “Can it make love to a beautiful woman?” You sly dog, Rob.

* Conrad just hates the H&K VP70 he’s armed with. “This thing has all the finesse of a flintlock.” Uh, I know the trigger-pull is a bit heavy, but you got 18 rounds of ammo to use against the android. Might want to concentrate on the positive.

* When the android enters a room, it does a weird little 360-degree pirouette to look for targets. Even watching this when I was 13 years-old, that seemed dumb.

* People in this movie keep asking the CIA director why the CIA is operating on US soil. His attempts to justify this massively-illegal are never not funny.

* The engineer is hawt in that ‘80s way—lots of shoulder pads and poofy hair which somehow manage to make 30 year-old women look no older than 45.

* The CIA approaches Conrad by dropping in—literally. They arrive in a helicopter in his backyard. Even Conrad asks them why they didn’t just call.

* The android hides out by picking up a lonely woman in a bar and then boning her silly all night. That must have been his “What the hell, it’s the ‘80s” subroutine.

* Jonathan Banks is in this (hi Mike!), because, well, of course he would be.

* When the robot self-destructs, he begins spinning in circles very, very fast. I guess because his inventors couldn’t think of anything goofier for him to do.

* Great dialogue moment: CIA FLUNKIE: “This door is locked from the inside! How do we open it?” CONRAD (aggrieved): “Use your foot.”

So, that’s Assassin. If you’re gonna send anyone after a horny, killer-android, it might as well be Robert Conrad. Now please enjoy this clip dubbed in French.

This one is just sad. No, not the movie—it’s not good, but not terrible—but what’s on display in the movie. And that is Burt Reynolds on the edge of his long fall from grace. Stick was made in 1984, and was the first movie he made after his flop City Heat—on the set of which, he was struck with a metal chair that basically broke his face and left him in chronic pain, addicted to painkiller, and, for a time, unable to eat solid food. Stick is the project of a broken man, desperately trying to evade the truth of his situation, and that’s sad. Plus it’s another failed adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, and that’s never fun.

So, Stick begins with Ernest “Stick” Stickley (Reynolds) arriving in Miami via freight train like a Depression-era hobo. Stick hooks up with a buddy of his, who offers him easy money helping him in his job as a bag man for a local cocaine distributer  named Chucky (Charles Durning in a fright wig and eyebrows that will make your nightmares seem tame by comparison). Stick does it, and gets a front-row seat to an ambush that leaves his buddy dead a big swath of Everglades in flames.

Stick tries to shrug it off, but…well, we wouldn’t have much of a movie if he did that. Instead, he gets close to Chucky by getting hired on as a chauffeur for an eccentric multimillionaire (George Segal—always fun), who likes ex-con’s on his staff. In the meantime, he starts an affair with the guy’s foxy accountant (a pre-Murphy Brown Candace Bergin), and reconnects with his teenaged daughter.

“Aaaaaaargh! My eyes! The goggles do nothing!”

And not much happens for most of the middle section, until the movie kicks into high gear at the end as the drug kingpin who set up Stick’s buddy decides to clear the decks (for no reason I could pick up on), and puts Stick on a collision course with him and his creepy albino hit man (stuntman Dar Robinson). The film hits a climax straight out of a Miami Vice episode as Stick goes all Rambo on the dude by attacking his home with an MP-5 submachine gun, which, I’m pretty sure isn’t in Leonard’s book.

Reynolds directed Stick as well as starred in it, and it’s clear this project was beyond him in his damaged state. In the film’s early scenes, it’s obvious that Reynolds was having trouble delivering his lines. His voice is weak and reedy, and by the time he manages to put some tone in his breathy rasps (either he rallied, or these were the best scenes he could manage, or he ADRed them later) it’s too late not to see him as physically diminished. It also makes it impossible not to notice the 30 pounds Reynolds lost while his jaw was wired shut after his accident and the fact that he’s smaller and slighter than everyone around him.

No, the bad guy is not a Morlock.

But even without Reynolds’ damage, the movie would still be a wobbly goblin due to the studio-mandated action scenes. Allegedly unhappy with the light, breezy tone of Leonard’s story, they forced Reynolds to amp up the violence, which is why the movie’s languid pace is jarringly interrupted by scenes straight out of a gritty crime-thriller. This becomes even more problematic when it’s clear Reynolds was in no shape to do action scenes (he could barely run, and doesn’t move very fast for much of the film).

On top of that, there are just some unfortunate choices in this movie. To wit:

* Enough cannot be said about Durning’s look. It’s so bad it borders on evil, except I suspect even Satan himself would take one look and back away slowly, saying, “uh…nope…no…I’m not having anything to do with that.”

* The kingpin wears the requisite Latin-drug-kingpin linen suit and Panama hat. When did this look get started? And why? Anyone know?

* Some bad costuming choices begin with Reynolds’ workout gear: shin-high socks, nuthugger shorts, and a denim shirt tied-off at the waist like Daisy Duke! Watch these scenes and not feel your sex organs recoil in horror, I dare you.

* The creepy albino likes to dress like a cowboy. It drains quite a bit of the menace.

* But… he does feature in one amazing scene, choreographed by Robinson himself as he plummets from an insanely-high balcony without an airbag. Robinson used a system of cables of his own design called a decelerator, which allows the camera to shoot him face-on, showing the ground sans airbag behind him.

* It’s too bad this film had so much against it, because Reynolds’ easy charm is actually a good fit for Leonard’s dialogue.

* When Stick’s buddy gets shot he flies backward a solid ten feet into a swimming pool. No, he wasn’t shot by a howitzer.

So, that’s Stick. Like I said, it’s pretty sad. It’s never fun to watch a genuine star on the wane—especially when it’s not through hubris or bad judgment, but because of changing times, and outside forces. Oh well, in hindsight it’s easy to remember that Boogie Nights was a scant fourteen years off…

 I’m not sure why I watched this movie, but hey, why does anyone do anything, right? Yeah, humanity is just one big unknowable riddle, but then, that’s also what makes us so amazing. We are unlike anything else in creation in our capacity for self-determination, and its forays into unpredictability. That having been said, there’s really no good reason to watch 8 Million Ways to Die. Maybe I was bored. I know wasn’t drunk. Whatever, I watched it. Wanna hear about it? Oh yes you do…

Okay, so 8 Million (yeah, I know: you write out numerals below two digits, hey I didn’t title the movie) is the first—and, to the best of my knowledge, last—big-screen adaptation of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder series. In Block’s books, Scudder is an ex-NYPD cop and recovering alcoholic who pulled the pin after he accidentally killed a kid with a stray bullet. The movie transplants him to LA (because the two cities are pretty much the same, right?), and proceeds to give us his backstory—which is changed a little.

So, this Scudder (Jeff Bridges) is an LA Sheriff Deputy who kills a suspect in what looks like a justified shooting (the suspect attacked two cops with a baseball bat and was clubbing one of them on the ground), but he’d had a few swigs from a flask, and, well, that’s a no-no—even for the LASD, even in 1986—and he gets thrown out.

Grooming standards for deputies were different in the ’80s.

Well, Scudder is on the long fall, but then he gets approached in an incredibly labyrinthine manner and ends up at a swanky party thrown by an ex-con Scudder busted named Chance. There, he meets a couple high-class escorts; one named Sunny (a pre-Baywatch, often-naked Alexandra Paul), and a wilier one named Sarah (Rosanna Arquette, not nearly naked enough), as well as a slicker-than-snot drug dealer named Angel (a young Andy Garcia).

Sunny, as it turns out, is who he is there for, and she goes home with him, does some blow, tries to seduce him, and then when he she straighten out asks him for help going independent from Chance. Which doesn’t make much sense at this or any other point in the movie.

Oh, yeah, this movie is slow as hell. Uh…spoiler?

Well, Scudder helps Sunny, but Chance is all like, “WTF, man? I’m not a pimp.” And Scudder just sorta shrugs, ”Hey, I can’t tell where this story is going, either.” Except, see, this is a good time to point out that Director Hal Ashby basically threw out the dialogue from Oliver Stone’s script and encouraged the actors to just improvise, so the exchange goes more like this: “WHAT THE FUCK MAN! I AIN’T NO PIMP! I AIN’T NO PIMP! YOU LISTENING MAN! AW MAN, YOU COME UP HERE AND GET ALL UP IN MY FACE…” “Dude, I hear you, but the chick asked me, and she was naked…” “I AIN’T NO PIMP! I AIN’T NO PIMP! I AIN’T NO PIMP!” For about five solid minutes.

“See all those words? Just ignore them.”

Okay, so Scudder takes Sunny to the airport, but she’s snatched along the way and killed more or less in front of him.

Scudder falls off the wagon and hits rock-bottom, but after checking out of detox, he pulls himself together and goes after Sunny’s killer. Who, he discovers in short order, is Angel. The rest of the movie is a tense three-way (not the cool kind) dance between Scudder, Chance, and Angel. Seems Angel—who is a major-league drug kingpin—wants to buy into Chance’s nightclubs to launder his money.

No, they don’t actually kiss…

So, 8 Million… the takes about 70  minutes to do what could have been wrapped up in ten, as Scudder discovers that Angel has been smuggling his coke through Chance’s grocery stores. They hijack a big shipment and hold it for ransom, which forces a big confrontation between he and Angel and Chance, with Scudder threatening to torch Angel’s drugs, and Angel threatening to blow Sarah away (she’s become important to Scudder—just…don’t ask).  And we get, like ten minutes of:

Angel: “AAAARRGH!!! YOU BURNED A KILO OF COKE! I’LL KILL YOU, SCUDDER! YOU’RE DEAD! YOU’RE A DEAD MAN! YOU’RE DEAD!

Chance: “IMMA KILL YOU! YEAH, I’MMA KILL YOU, PUSSY! IMMA KILL YOU!

Scudder: “JUST CALM DOWN! JUST CALM DOWN, OKAY? YOU WANT ME TO BURN ANOTHER KEY? I”LL BURN A NOTHER KEY! LET HE GO! YOU JUST LET HER GO! I’LL BURN ANOTHER KEY! WHOA, THERE, JUST CALM DOWN!”

Angel: “AAAARRGH!!! I’LL KILL YOU, SCUDDER! I’LL KILL HER! YOU WANT ME TO BLOW HER AWAY! I’LL KILL YOU TOO, CHANCE! AAAAAH, MY DRUGS! MY BEAUTIFUL DRUGS!”

Sarah: “EEEK! I’VE GOT A SHOTGUN TAPED TO MY HEAD!”

No shit. Ten minutes.

Effing finally, Scudder’s LASD buddies rappel in and blow away all the nameless flunkies. Angel kills Chance, and Angel manages to get away, because the Sheriff Department forgot to put any guys outside the warehouse.

One scene just has these guys eating Sno-Cones.

But, then Angel attacks Scudder and Sarah at Chance’s house and Scudder blow him away, and—thank Jesus—the movie finally ends, with Chance in AA and dating Sarah. Because the best romantic partner to have when you’re a struggling alcoholic is a hard-drinking prostitute.

8 Million Ways to Die wants to be a gritty, urban thriller in the mold of To Live and Die in LA or the movie the studios wanted Stick to be. Problem is, director Hal Ashby made his (considerable) bones during the loosey-goosey maverick days of the 1970s with Harold and Maude, Shampoo, and Coming Home. Tightness of narrative was not a hallmark of those types of movies, but that meandering pace doesn’t suit a noir film, which needs a plot constructed like a Swiss watch, or at least a cold portrait of the uncaring world these characters must navigate.

Goddammit, more Sno-Cones?

Ashby, however, wants to make a character/recovery piece. His decision to let his actors improvise leads to endless scenes in which the characters barely make sense, let alone communicate. Consequently, the movie just drags.

The actors are all game. Bridges is affable enough, and Arquette plays Sarah’s flintiness and her vulnerability like a pro. In his first major role, Garcia shows off his live-wire  acting chops, but with no one guiding or shaping the scenes, they all just become tedious at best. At worst, well, we get the end of the warehouse sting, in which Scudder’s buddy just watches Angel run off with a shrug.

Anyway, that’s 8 Million Ways to Die. I don’t know why I watched this. People are weird.

Well, summer is here, and with it the first big action vehicle of the season. If Oblivion is a harbinger of the movies to come, then this summer will be…ah…I hesitate to use the word good, necessarily, so let’s just say interesting. Because that’s an apt enough description for Tom Cruise’s latest charm-blitzkrieg, hot on the heels of his borderline-flop Jack Reacher (real-world violence interfered with Tom’s hero fantasies). It’s a lopsided beast, a visually-spectacular, languidly-paced minor head-trip that serves to give Tom another chance to run, squint, be heroic, and save humanity. Because what the hell else would Tom Cruise be doing in a Tom Cruise movie?

The world  of Oblivion is established through a long (really, really long) opening monologue which establishes that, yeah, Earth is pretty much trashed. A nasty war with some aliens called Scavengers (really? A hundred years of sci-fi movies and “Scavengers” is the best we as a species could come up with?) They blew up the moon—which, if you know anything about, well, the moon then you know that caused massive ecological damage. Then, for good measure, we used nukes to repel the landing invaders. And that pretty much took care of Earth.

The House on the Rock has nothing on this…

The begins fifty years later as humanity holes up in a massive space station called the Tet awaiting relocation to a moon of Saturn. Which seems like the perfect place to live, right? Nice, habitable Saturn? Anyway, Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, who, along with his lover Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) manage the maintenance of the massive hydro-collectors sucking the oceans dry to fuel to trip to Saturn (I don’t know, just go with it), as well as the armed drones that protect them from the remaining Scavengers.

Jack and Victoria live in a house seemingly built from scratch by IKEA high above the clouds. Every day, while Victoria manages comms with the Tet, Jack heads out in his nifty little spaceship to tool around the now-empty Earth. To, uh, kill time I guess, Jack likes to visit the relics of our lost civilization, scrounging little knick-knacks and boogieing down to classic tunes. So, yeah, writer/director Andrew Kosinski is a big fan of at least one Pixar movie.

It’s like WALL-E’s ex-con brother-in-law.

Anyway, one day while TOMM-E is fixing a drone, he is attacked by Scavengers. Weird thing is, they seemed more interested in catching him than killing him. This is odd, since Jack has always heard that Scavs have no interest in people aside from killing them. Shortly after this, something seriously weird happens. An old, pre-war NASA ship crash lands, spewing cryo-pods. One of those pods contains a woman Jack has been seeing in his dreams—dreams of a life and a love he couldn’t have lived, for it happened long before the war began.

Unfortunately, that’s as far as I can go in this SPOILER-FREE review without giving up the movie’s secrets, and since it takes over two hours to get the whole story (usually delivered in large barfs of exposition), it would be kind of a disservice to ruin it all.

“This is pretty much all I do in this movie.”

There’s a real tension at the core of Oblivion, one that makes an already somewhat lumpy screenplay even more uneven. Kosinski is clearly trying to make a combination of ‘70s-era sci-fi movies—an eco-thriller grafted to a psychological drama. This isn’t impossible, but Kosinski hasn’t yet learned how to tell a story cleanly and efficiently—witness Tron: Legacy. He is very good at visuals, and with Oblivion, he ups the promise he showed with that earlier movie. The movie never fails to look not only great, but also genuinely imaginative.

This is just cool.

The problem is, this is also a Tom Cruise vehicle, which means that even if Kosinski wants to have some languid moments of beautiful scenes, pretty soon, we gotta have Tom saving the world, and…hoo-boy, I’m not giving anything away, but the denouement has to be some high-water mark in Tom’s celluloid edifices to himself. Just see the movie. You’ll see what I mean.

Also hobbling the film is Kosinski’s utter disinterest in most of the characters. Jack is never more than a cartoon hero, imbued with strength, bravery, and wisdom, because, well, everyone says so. As Victoria, Andrea Riseborough, gives the best performance. She’s always just a little off—enough to destabilize the viewer—eventually becoming tragic in her own way. Everyone else is pretty much a blank. Even Olga Kurylenko as Jack’s dream woman is, well, she’s Olga Kurylenko. Of course she’s his One True Love. She’s hot. Unfortunately, the dubbing they used to eliminate her accent severely compromises her performance.

“Love me! Love me! DON’T INCUR THE WRATH OF XENU!”

So, is Oblivion any good? Yeah, it’s not bad. It’s draggy in places. The story is moderately clever. But it looks great, even if it isn’t as smart as it wants to be. Kosinski may yet grow into a good filmmaker, rather than a competent one with a good eye. Cruise, however, reeks of desperation. He’s pushing 50 and still wants to pretend he’s a kid. There’s nothing sadder than a movie star blowing 120 million bucks in an attempt to remind the world they should still think he’s awesome.

Okay, so this review is more of a discussion of Oblivion for everyone who has already seen the movie or doesn’t mind it being spoiled. If you’re game, then click below. If not, just reread the first review. I could use the hits to bolster my fragile ego. You ready? All right, let’s get to it…

I know, right! This movie totally ripped-off a fuck-tom of other movies. How do you do that? Wait, no, let me rephrase—how do you get away with that? How did Disney not sue the holy living crap out of these people? It’s Disney, they’d’ve sued Mother Theresa is she hummed a few bars of “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

Let’s start with the big one, yeah, Wall-E. Tom scuttles around the Cursed Earth and collects little doo-dads, and then brings them back to his Unabomber shack, where he carefully pores over them and dreams of the world that was…and it was done better by Pixar. I mean, holy shit, how did Andrew Kosinski watch those scenes are not realize, “Holy fuck! I just ripped off Wall-E!” Maybe he did. All I know is that it takes a special kind of chutzpah to replicate scenes from a hugely-successful, massively-popular family movie and expect no one isn’t going to notice. Which brings us to…

Yeah, Kosinski liked Independence Day a lot too…because that ending in which Jack flies into the Alien Mothership Tet is pretty much straight out of that movie. It’s even filmed the same way. Of course, that movie came out in 1996, so, yeah, I doubt anybody remembers it. Hell, it’s probably due for a remake.

And then there’s Moon. Yeah, the big twist is copped directly from Moon. It was pretty much a mind-fuck in that movie. In this one it’s just a lazy plot-point. Also, in Moon, the clones served to open a Pandora’s Box of questions about self, identity, and agency. In this movie it pretty much existed to provide Jack with a spare of himself. Which, while we’re at it, brings up…

Whoa! Tom Cruise is more egomaniacal than I ever imagined.  I mean, this movie posits not only that when the aliens he met him he was so freaking awesome they basically decided to create an army of him to subjugate Earth, but he is also so freaking awesome that he can shake loose of his programming and throw off the yoke of our alien overlords and rescue humanity from extinction. So, um, yeah, Tom Cruise is basically mankind’s omega and alpha. You cannot convince me that the guy doesn’t jerk off to the scene of the thousands of nude clones of himself. Every night. But that also begs the question…

Why did the aliens have to build this elaborate lie to get Jack and Victoria to do their jobs? Why not just tell them, “Hey, we made you, so…yeah, we’re your creators. Now go maintain our little killbots, okay?” I mean, it’s not like thee clones know any better, right? They used a clone army of Jack to take over Earth, and presumably didn’t need to give them a whole cock-and-bull story. They probably just said, “Kill anything that looks like you,” and left it at that.

How does the Earth work without the moon? Now, I’m not what you would call smart, but even I know that the moon pretty much makes most stuff on Earth work right. And…

How did the Earth get so overgrown in 50 years? I mean, yeah, to some extent there’d be some growth, but what we saw was, like, centuries of nature run rampant. Not something that could happen within one Morgan Freeman lifetime.

How long does it take to drain the oceans? Seriously, how long? I kinda think they’d be gone at the rate the Tet was hovering them down.

Anyway, I think you get the gist: this movie makes no sense.

It’s tempting to say that with Pain and Gain, Michael Bay has finally found a movie about as vulgar and excessive as he is…and I’m not going to resist the temptation. He has. He’s found his Holy Grail. With this, his first film in six years not to feature giant robots—let alone gunfights, car chases or his usual hallmarks—Bay has moved in a direction that’s actually fairly bold…for him, anyway. This departure from form sharply divided critics, with some so effusive in their praise that you’d think he’d made Citizen freaking Kane, and other so automatically inclined to hate anything the guy produces, they’d heap on the vitriol even he actually made Citizen Kane. By objective standards, Pain and Gain is an okay movie, but by Michael Bay standards, it’s actually pretty darn good.
Pain and Gain is a surprisingly-faithful telling of a Miami crime-spree first reported in a novella-length series of articles by Pete Collins in the Miami New Times. In the mid-‘90s, a group of steroid-addled employees at a flailing fitness center, called Sun Gym, decided to make a quick buck by kidnapping one of the gym’s members, holding him in a warehouse, and torturing him until he signed over most of his money and property. Wackiness, as I’m sure you can imagine, ensued.

Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, the ringleader, a personal trainer with ridonkulous biceps and history of white-collar crime. Lugo is portrayed as a kind of brain-dead, ‘90s-afflcited Willie Loman—a man of limited capabilities, obsessed with the idea that he deserves a much bigger slice of the American dream than he’s thus far been getting.

So he recruits fellow gym-rats Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) to back him. Doorbal is after his slice of the pie, sidelined as he is by a menial job at a taco joint and steroid-incapacitated tackle-box. Doyle is perhaps the most interesting character—a former thief and cokehead ex-con who found Jesus in prison, who is trying to go straight, but has no prospects to do so.

Together they conspire to kidnap Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), an Argentinian-Jewish businessman who joins the gym and boasts a little too loudly about his huge house, nice car, cigarette boat and offshore accounts. And so, after a series of hilariously-inept abortive attempts (though fewer than occurred in reality), the Sun Gym gang manages to snatch Kershaw and spirit him away to a sex-toy warehouse, where they work him over.

Now, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with this plan, and, yeah, they all do, but the biggest problem is Kershaw himself. More stubborn and resilient than they thought, he refuses to break. Worse, he recognizes Lugo even through his blindfold. Pretty soon, the quick shakedown turns into a mini-Gotmo-ing as the group spends weeks trying to breakdown the guy. When he finally cracks, the next step is simple: they have to kill him.

Entering the movie late is Ed Harris as Ed Dubois, a private investigator who becomes intrigued by the case, and pretty soon he is assembling a case against these three lunkheads with all the sensibility and cleverness they sorely lack. DuBois is like a shot of epinephrine to the hyperkinetic, credulity-straining proceedings, acting as a welcome oasis of normalcy and decency in what increasingly becomes a portrayal of a Miami so rancid even Elmore Leonard would walk away in disgust.

From the beginning, Pain and Gain puzzles with the question of weather or not Bay is in on his own joke. The movie is rife with his usual excesses—stylized visuals, hyper-masculine men, women who are porno fantasies come to life—but these things are also how the Sun Gym gang saw the world, dating strippers, snorting coke, and generally embracing the sleaze that was ‘90s Miami (and maybe still is). The story may give Bay an excuse to wallow in his patented built-from-the-id-of-a-15 year-old-boy worldview, but at points he does seem to remember to step back and say, “Oh…uh…not everyone is like this.”

But it doesn’t happen enough, as too much of his mean-spiritedness seeps through. When Lugo shows palpable disgust at overweight gym members it’s clearly his perspective, but when Bay characterizes a cruddy motel by showing overweight children lolling in a pool, well, that’s all him.

Likewise, Bay can’t create an emotional arc for his characters. Their fortunes rise and fall due to their own excesses and vices, but they never actually grapple with the consequences of what they do or what it does to them. Unlike, say, Henry Hill in Goodfellas, the members of the Sun Gym gang never have to contend with their venality.

There are a half-dozen better movies lurking in Pain and Gain, (it’s best if you don’t think about them) but the one we get still works pretty well. Bay has a lot of good actors at his disposal, with Wahlberg anchoring the film nicely and giving the other actors room to move. Dwayne Johnson, however, is the huge find of this movie, imbuing his Paul Doyle (in reality a compilation of other accomplices) with a genuine sense of tragedy, while being funny as hell. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger at his best, Johnson knows how to subvert his own freakish physicality, playing Doyle as a lost little boy trapped in the shell of a battle-‘bot. If this isn’t a career-making performance, it certainly should be.

In the end, you end up with a choice when it comes to Pain and Gain. You can decry the movie it’s not—a sharply-viewed portrait of a place and time of inexplicable, strangely-intangible wealth and the glitzy, boorish people who had it (the kind of people who probably sympathize with the folks in The Queen of Versailles)—or accept the movie on its own terms.

So Bay didn’t make a great movie. But, hey, when the D- student manages to turn in a C+ paper about why blowing shit up is awesome, or why the porn stars in Vivid Entertainment movies are hotter than the ones from Wicked Pictures, you might as well just chalk it up as a win.

Another school year is drawing to a close, and another class of students is advancing—maybe to a new grade, or maybe out into the world. The leave behind them scores of proud, satisfied teachers—men and women who spent the past nine or so months giving everything to classroom after classroom of students. Amid a barrage of public criticism unprecedented in history, vilified by pundits, scapegoated by politicians, they still get up at the crack of dawn every day to stand in front of dozens of students crammed into too-small schools and shape the very future of America. No film I’ve ever seen has really communicated the nigh-miraculous  job these people do better than 1996’s The Substitute, a film which shows us if this if we are to fix our ailing school system it’s going to take more than budget cuts and empty rhetoric. It’s going to take Tom Berenger and a team of heavily-armed mercenaries.

So, Berenger plays Tom Shale, a freelance mercenary bugging out from a mission gone bad in Cuba (goddamn, are we ever gonna invade that place right?) along with his team (a pre-Law & Order Richard Brooks, Raymond Cruz, William Forsythe, and Luis Guzman). He arrives home to his domestic bliss in South Miami with girlfriend Jane (mannish-faced ‘90s mainstay Diane Venora).

Alas, this bliss is not to be permanent, as Jane has gotten on the wrong side of a high-school gang-leader named Juan Lacas (Marc Anthony, acting about as scary as is possible for Marc Anthony). Jane tries to get him transferred to a school more hellish than theirs (pretty tough, that), but Principal Claude Rolle (Ernie Hudson) tells her he can’t do a thing without proof. Goddamn system! With all its bullshit rules! So Juan has Jane kneecapped during her morning jog. This makes Shale mad.

There is nothing more terrifying than a ballad-crooner with a gun.

With a little document-jiggering, Shale goes undercover as Jane’s substitute, Mr. Smith. At first Jane’s class is a tough nut to crack—what with being populated exclusively with minority teenagers torn straight from middle-class white America’s deepest anxieties. He tries to teach them about the Vietnam War, but they just wanna dance to their ghetto-blasters and throw gang-signs, and say “yo, dawg!” a lot.

Realizing these kids are merely putting up a brave front to cope with the danger and disappointment of lives lived as members of an ignored, discarded underclass, Shale bonds with them by giving him this inspiring speech: “I’m in charge of this class! I’m the warrior chief! I’m the merciless god of anything that stirs in my universe. You fuck with me, and you will suffer my wrath!” I know, I’m getting misty just transcribing it.

And then he transfixes him with a story of his days in the ‘Nam when his unit totally wiped-out a bunch of Viet Cong, so they could give their AK-47s to the Montagnard hill-people they were training, so that the ‘Yards could launch attacks against the VC without their ammo being traced to the US. You know, like all good teachers do.

“And then, naturally, we desecrated the corpses. Ears and tongues make good necklaces…”

Well, this little story of black-ops builds a bridge of understanding and respect with these kids that Shale uses to warm them about the evils of gang-life. Evils Shale knows personally from his time in a youth gang. Shale calls upon his personal history to explain to them precisely why gang-life is a road to nowhere: they’ll all end up either dead or in prison, where they’ll almost certainly be sodomized.

[Side note: I don’t know why more teachers don’t use the threat of imminent butt-rape to bond with their students. Probably some PTA rule against it or something. Man, the system sucks.]

Well, this puts Shale on the radar of Rolle, who, it turns out, is on the payroll of a drug-kingpin and muleing his coke through the school, using Juan’s gang as muscle. Now, Shale is a hunted man, but he fends off an ambush in the school library by throwing books at the kids and then tossing them out a window. The school board frowns on this, too, but what the hell.

“Better put this on. We’re talking about the Louisiana Purchase today.”

Then Juan goes after Jane, but Shale and some of his now-allied students kill them all (it’s like the triumphant math-test scene in Stand and Deliver except with less math and more German firearms). And now it’s on like Donkey Kong. It all ends with a balls-to-the-wall firefight between Shale’s team of mercs and Rolle, the kingpin, and his goons. They all use silencers, so it’s, like, the politest gunfight ever, but they do use an AT-4 anti-tank missile on the Home-Ec room, which all sorts of awesome.

In the end, order has been restored: the kingpin has been killed, Juan’s gang exterminated, and Rolle gets the bridge of his nose rammed through his brain (though, he probably never gets officially fired—stupid, screwed-up system). And the education can continued unhindered by drug-trafficking and targeted assassinations.

In all, The Substitute unflinchingly points to some uncomfortable truths about the state of our public schools. Such as:

* All inner-city schools are hellholes, dominated by ruthless, future ex-husbands of Jennifer Lopez.

* The best way to improve our ailing schools is with stories of off-the-books wartime ambushes and automatic weapons.

* If you’re the drama teacher, don’t try to escape from ruthless gang members by trying to climb one of the ropes in the gym. Gang members can climb like spider monkeys.

* Your students probably want to maim you.

* The system is all sorts of screwed-up, having been bought by narcotrafficantes.

* Home Ec rooms are not missile-proof.

* If you’re a principal on the take, don’t wear your Rolex to work—no matter how well it complements your silk suits.

* And while you’re at it, give the new substitute teacher with the face scars and head like a cinder block a little extra scrutiny.

* Books really are more powerful than guns. Particularly when hurled at someone’s head.

* The threat of inevitable buggering is an invaluable educational tool.

Anyway, this one goes out to all of you teachers out there. Thank you for your tireless efforts. Know that whatever is said about you or your noble profession, you have made this world a better place. And remember to always keep one in the chamber.

Well, that kicked just about as much ass as there was to kick, didn’t it?

I gotta admit, I didn’t go into Iron Man 3 with high hopes. It’s not that I set the bar low—quite the contrary. After The Avengers served pretty much as the Omega of the Marvel comic superhero franchise, and especially after the obnoxious, deadly-dull Iron Man 2, I set the bar very high for this movie. I didn’t think there was any way it couldn’t suck. Well, it looks like my instincts are a nothing if not consistent (though, I’m still pretty sure that Kozmo.com stock will go through the roof any day now…), because it’s pretty tough to see how this movie can be topped—whatever else comes out this summer.

Okay, so I’m not going to ruin anything for you. I’ll try and stick to what it’s in the trailers: Tony Stark is a bit of a mess these days. After the events of The Avengers, he’s prone to anxiety attacks, and so he works feverishly in his lab, cranking out suit after suit in lieu of sleeping or spending quality time with live-in gf Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Remember all that domestic drama between Tony and Pepper in Iron Man 2? Yeah, that doesn’t happen here.

Because in short order, the US is gripped by a series of terrorist attacks masterminded by the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), a madman who looks like bin Laden, sounds like a news broadcaster, and has the viral video marketing skills of that dude who made the Kony video (with less ham-spanking).

At the same time, Pepper is approached by an oily researcher, first introduced in a prologue set in 1999, named Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) who is perfecting a type of bio-engineering which allows him to, essentially, upgrade the human body. Think these things are related? Well, duh.

After an especially brutal bombing at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—the run up to which we see and, frankly, don’t understand—Stark chooses to challenge to Mandarin to come after him, so he can take the guy down. It goes poorly, as you know if you’ve seen the trailers.

Beaten, shorn of his tech, and halfway across the country, Tony must start from scratch to unravel the mystery of the Mandarin, and end his reign of terror. Aiding him is, well, no one. He makes friends with a lonely kid, and if you’re like me this is the part where you groan loudly. But fear not, gentle reader! Children have no power to melt Tony Stark’s misanthropic heart, as he treats the kid with the same impatience and dickishness he reserves for everyone else. And that is hilarious, because if you don’t enjoy watching Robert Downey Jr. snark at a cherubic, prepubescent boy…well, you may just not have a soul.

Look, we know that Downey can deliver the goods—we’ve known that since the first movie, but as we saw from the last film, he needs a decent movie around him. And on that note, venerable action-man Shane Black—he who created the Lethal Weapon series and with it pretty much the modern action genre—has written and directed a superhero movie that serves to inject the franchise with some needed brashness and bravado. Black swaggers into this movie like the cool kid, breaking up a Dungeons and Dragons game to both give the story some testosterone and subtly mock it at the same time.

Like Whedon, Black knows the territory of blockbusters films well enough to subvert our expectations to hilarious effect, such as when Iron Man pwns a house full of bad guys, only for the last henchman to drop his gun and exclaim, “Hey, look, I don’t even like working here. These people are so weird!” He also imports his trademark witty banter whenever Tony is onscreen with, well, anyone. I mean, this is the first summer in a long time to have great dialogue.

But the most surprising thing is how deftly Black handles massive action scenes. Yeah, you have to wait for long spells before you get them (long spells broken by hilarious conversations and smaller, cop-movie set-pieces), but when they come, Black knows precisely where to put the camera for maximum impact and coherence. A late-in-the-game mid-air rescue attempt had my theater’s crowd practically on its feet.

Some other points to consider:

* Wait, Tony had a fling with Rebecca Hall’s Maya in 1999? Uh, that would make her 16. Ick.

* Gwyneth is surprisingly not bad in these movies. I credit Downey with being able to make Paltrow tolerable.

* The climax is like the end of Lethal Weapon 2 cranked to 11.

* The movie includes some very sly social commentary.

* James Badge Dale is very, very good. How is this the same guy that was in Rubicon? The dude’s a shapeshifter.

Seriously, this film roxxx (no, I’m not giving away the joke).

 In preparation for my review of Star Trek: Into Darkness, which will be posting soon, I’m re-posting a couple of previous Star Trek reviews. Live and long and prosper, amigos.

Is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan the most successful film sequel ever? Yes. Yes it is. Oh, I’m sorry—that was not rhetorical. It’s almost impossible to overstate how important this film is in the Star Trek canon. In June of 1982, when it first hit screens, Trek was still just a short-lived, but well-known TV show that had spawned a logy, overblown movie that had failed to fulfill Paramount’s dreams of creating a franchise that could compete with Star Wars. Writer-director Nicolas Meyer was given a substantially-reduced budget, but made a film that was fleet, exciting, and most importantly tapped into the humanism of Trek that made people like it. Not only did it draw non-Trek fans, but it created a visual and storytelling template that would successfully carry Trek for thirty years, four additional series, nine more films, and earn Paramount billions (that is with a B) of dollars from the franchise they so desperately wanted. If any sequel did more heavy lifting than that, I don’t know what it is. But what’s so great about it? Here are a couple of things:

1) Action: Where the first film was a journey into “the human adventure” or some such twaddle, TWOK was basically all about the big spaceship shooting at each other. Remember what the USS Enterprise shot in Star Trek: The Motion Picture? An asteroid. That’s exciting, right? Oh wait, no, that’s actually the opposite of exciting. Meyer seemed to understand what every adolescent geek in the audience did: if you’re going to have these beautifully-rendered starships soaring gracefully across the screen, you gotta have them thrash each other in massive space battles.

2) Ricardo Montalban: So, here’s your dilemma: you’re making a Star Trek movie, which means your main character is played by one of the hammiest over-actors ever to gulp down the scenery like a famished great white shark stumbling upon a swimming club populated exclusively by Midwestern housewives. Who, possibly, can you cast opposite such a voracious force of nature that won’t be blown off the screen? If you’re Meyer, you cast William Shatner’s Mexican doppelganger—Ricardo Montalban. Yes, Mr. Rourke himself, a man who can match Shatner’s impassioned histrionics with his own over-the-top “smoldering Latin” shtick. He’s the man who made us believe the Chrysler Cordoba’s “fine Corrrinthean leather” was a thing (it’s not a thing). When Khan hisses, “I will leave you…buried alive…buried alive…” and Kirk responds by wailing, “KHHHAAANNNN!” so loudly it echoes in the vacuum of space, it’s a clash of two titans of the overdramatic. The heavens shuddered.

“Submit to the power of my pecs, Kirk!”

3) No bald chicks, but one hottie: Okay, so Star Trek–like many sci-fi franchises—is pretty light on the chicks (they scare us geeks). But if you’re gonna throw one into the mix, she might as well be a comely space-wench. I mean, hey, if you’re the kind of kid who memorized the specifications of all Federation ships of the line, you really can’t trust puberty to just jump-start itself, right? So, in The Motion Picture, Gene Roddenberry gives us an intergalactic nymphomaniac…who happens to be bald. In TWOK, the creative staff, having come to the (totally reasonable) conclusion that Roddenberry is just twisted, give us a very young, very fit Kirstie Alley. Not only is she a stone hottie, but as an emotionless Vulcan, she inflicts on the male audience the same desire to melt that icy heart that female fans long harbpored for Spock. Of course, in later years Alley would inflate like a Macy’s Day balloon, but in 1982, she was the hottest thing outside of a Jabba Slave Girl costume (oh wait…crossover fanfic idea, right there!)

Time kills everything good…

4) A simple, engaging plot: In TWOK, Kirk does battle with an old nemesis who is out for revenge and steals a futuristic WMD. There we go, that’s the plot in one sentence, and it seems pretty interesting too, right? Lot of potential there. Compare that to, “The USS Enterprise must save Earth from a giant, malevolent cloud.” Yeah, you see where I’m going with that.

Make no mistake: this is the face of great acting.

5) The human adventure: Yeah, that was the tagline for the first movie, but damned if anyone in that movie displays anything like an actual human emotion. In TWOK, by contrast, we see Captain Kirk grappling with a mid-life crisis. He’s a paper-pushing Admiral, unsatisfied with his life. But he still has his friends, and at their urging, he undertakes one last mission. Throughout the film, he is confronted with the consequences of his actions, and increasingly relies upon the support of his closest friends and confidants. Even as a ten year-old kid, I understood this story was deeper and more satisfying than the simple hero’s journey of Star Wars. The depth of characterization even leads to one of the film’s best elements.

6) Humor: There’s a lot of it, which contrasts with The Motion Picture’s ridiculously self-serious tone. Spock subtly screws with Kirk, but letting an untested rookie steer the ship out of dry-dock, prompting Bones to offer Kirk a tranquilizer. Bones and Spock bicker like they did in the original series. Spock and Kirk play nicely off Kirstie Alley’s befuddlement at a ruse (“You lied?’ “I exaggerated.”) It’s great, warm humor that comes naturally from the characters and their longtime relationships and makes the audience a part of this family.

7) The uniforms: The Motion Picture had money to burn, and created alien landscapes, and super-giant mechanical vessels, and massive crowd scenes, and…what the fuck are they wearing?!? Okay, so basically they wore either weird-ass unitards with computer readouts on their junk (Kirk so totally designed that feature—prove he didn’t yo,) or short-sleeved jerseys to show off Shatner’s guns. In TWOK, Meyer put them in genuine, military-style uniforms, which, along with being pretty snappy, allowed you to take these people seriously.

“According to my groin-computer it’s time for an orgy…”

8) The Ceti eels: Damn, those things were creepy. I mean, just…ick…

9) The final knockdown: The wounded Enterprise plays a game of cat-and-mouse with Khan’s ship in a nebula, as Meyer creates a sequence that harkens back to old, submarine warfare movies. It’s gorgeously rendered with practical effects—big ship models and painted glass. It looks amazing and is suspenseful as hell. Remember the suspenseful part in The Motion Picture? Oh yeah…there wasn’t one!

“Who’s your daddy, huh? Yeah, Kirk’s your daddy. Bitch.”

10) Spock’s death: Oh, um, spoiler? Spock’s self-sacrifice is perfectly in character, and helps to complete Kirk’s journey of self in recognizing the limitless potential of the human spirit he has so missed since giving up command of the Enterprise. And as played by Nimoy and Shatner (who doesn’t take the opportunity to ham it up), it’s simply heart-wrenching. When Spock delivered his last words, “I have been—and always shall be—your friend,” I was crying harder than I did when E.T. bit it later that summer. It’s one of the best scenes of a franchise that has spanned four decades.

Yeah, Wrath of Khan. Man, that was a movie.

Finally, the new Star Trek movie. And it only took four freaking years! Hey thanks, J.J. Abrams, for taking time out of your busy schedule to make good on the promise of the franchise reboot. I mean, I know you had to make that E.T.-Meets-My-Midlife-Crisis movie about the kids who dick around for two hours and then meet a monster. And, yeah, that was totally worth putting off the new Star Trek film for a couple more years. But, hey, the new movie is here and it was almost worth the wait.

I’m gonna talk about Star Trek: Into Darkness in the broadest terms possible, since the movie contains some killer plot twists, which I’d rather not spoil (even if some other sites haven’t exactly been diligent about that *coughIMDBcough*). I was lucky enough to go into this movie unspoiled, and I’d like to preserve that for anyone else who might also be in that boat.

I am contractually-obligated by Paramount to show this image.

Star Trek: Into Darkness stars in media res, with Kirk and Scotty (Chris Pine and Karl Urban) being chased by some funky-looking primitives through a lush, scarlet forest, while Spock (Zachary Quinto) plunges into a volcano in an attempt to neutralize it before it can erupt and kill all the villagers. This is Abrams way of reminding us that his view of Star Trek is much more adrenalized than traditional Trek. No singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” around a campfire here.

Well, Kirk’s flagrant flouting of the Prime Directive has not gone unnoticed by Starfleet Command, and Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood rocking some seriously troubling sideburns—no, really, they made me agitated and uncomfortable) informs him that he’s been busted down to Commander and has lost command of the Enterprise.

Fortunately, this status quo lasts about ten minutes, as John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), a rogue member of Section 31—Starfleet’s black ops corps—launches a series of attacks on Earth, including one which kills most of Starfleet’s top brass. Why does he do this? Because he’s a real tool, that’s why. Or at least the story given by Admiral Marcus (the always-awesome Peter Weller), who takes control of the situation and gives Kirk back the Enterprise so he can travel to Klingon space and kill Harrison via long-range bombardment.

He traded super-human hair for a super-human tan.

And so, against his better judgment and the entreaties of Spock and Scotty, Kirk undertakes what is an unethical, and, you know, probably illegal mission. Wackiness ensues.

So, as you can probably tell from the setup, Abrams kinda ripped off Skyfall with this premise. Fortunately, he takes the film in some different directions before it gets too derivative. If anything, Into Darkness is more of a spiritual successor to The Dark Knight than anything. It also uses analogy to raise troubling questions about the War of Terror, as well as how we’ve come to define ourselves in the post-9/11 age. Early on, when Scotty laments, “We’re supposed to be explorers,” it’s impossible to know how heavily it will weigh over the events of this movie.

Jumpsuits: Forever the garb of the future.

Of course the big difference between The Dark Knight and Into Darkness is the latter plays out these themes with a morose, borderline-sociopath who likes to dress like a bat and spend his free time hanging out in a cave with an old British dude, and the latter gives us Captain James T. Kirk, who wants nothing more than to command the flag ship of planet Earth and have threesomes with twin hotties with prehensile tails (tell me you wouldn’t hit that…you’d hit that). So, yeah, this movie is going to be more fun.

Abrams works the same magic with the cast’s chemistry as he did with the last film, and it helps make the movie breezier and more enjoyable than it has any right to be. It helps that Abrams loads up on the derring-do, and enough cannot be said about this. Abrams may have his faults, but he’s one of the few filmmakers working that seem to understand the difference between action and violence, and as a result, Star Trek feels like a throwback to a more innocent time (which, I guess, by definition it is) when movies could have great fight scenes that were divorced enough from reality and infused with enough moral direction that they didn’t seem pulled from the id of an antisocial teenager.

“Oh, shit.”

That having been said, Abrams added Damon Lindelof to the writing stable this time, and that…(sigh). That’s just not a good idea. Look, I know that he created the first couple seasons of Lost, but if Prometheus and Cowboys and Aliens have taught us anything it’s that he has no sense for writing feature films. His pacing is weird, his storytelling is usually riven with inconsistencies, and he seems to forget that movies are a one-shot deal with 20 more installments to flesh out their ideas.

As a result, Into Darkness has more than its share of WTF moments, which never quite come around to making sense in the end. The third act is a bit of mess, too, lurching from action setpieces to smothering emotional drama and back again. Abrams’s direction is always assured, but it never unfolds cleanly, like an action movie should. Compare this to the ending of Wrath of Khan, which manages the same feat with far more economy and narrative cohesion and you’ll see what I mean.

‘Safe to say our insurance premiums are going up.”

Still, Star Trek: Into Darkness is a fun, summer movie. It’s a nice follow-up to the original, and if its plot never quite makes sense, it’s still nice to spend time with these folks and look at the pretty pictures Abrams and his FX team come up with. Was this worth a four-year wait? Probably not, but it’s what we got and it’s more than adequate.

Okay, my initial review of Star Trek: Into Darkness (is there a colon in the title? It feels like there should be a colon) was a bit threadbare. Yeah, it’s hard to talk about the movie without getting neck-deep into spoiler territory. So, here is my SPOILERRIFFIC™ discussion of Into Darkness. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t click the READ MORE link. Just, uh, hey click this link and read about another movie with Darkness in the title. It’s called Creature of Darkness, and it really crazy. Seriously. It’s got this alien that dresses in a raincoat and hat and hunts people, and…well, just read it. Unless you’ve seen Into Darkness. Then, click away…

So, I assume we’ve all seen the movie, right? Okay, cool. Now, let’s unpack some of the problems I had with the movie in gory detail. First off, remaking The Wrath of Khan is a truly awful idea. As I pointed out in my review of it, TWOK basically created Trek as we know it. They essentially remade it when they rebooted the series.

But the biggest problem is that TWOK is a damn-near perfect storytelling machine. There is nothing extraneous, nothing overly ambitious, and the screenplay moves with the precision of an Omega Seamaster. It establishes emotional stakes, tells a rollicking story, and ends with an emotional catharsis, and everything in the movie works to those ends. Monkeying with that is a fool’s errand.

Into Darkness, on the other hand, is rife with problems that nag as soon as you leave the theater, to wit:

* Khan: He makes no sense in the context of this story. He worked perfectly in TWOK, because he is an enemy from Kirk’s past, repercussions of a long ago judgment call that turned out bad. This fits perfectly in a movie about Kirk reckoning with middle age. In this he’s just, well, there. He has no history in the rebooted series and is barely introduced through some rushed exposition. Rather than have a tangible story that establishes his ferocity, we’re expected to understand the danger he poses, because, well,  we all liked TWOK. Dude, that’s just lazy.

* Admiral Robocop: Are any Admirals in Starfleet not criminals? I mean, we had that one is DS9 that tried to impose martial law, the one in TNG that brokered a backdoor deal with the Cardassians, the one who collaborated with Klingon assassins to derail the Federation/Klingon peace negations…I mean, aside from Kirk, it seems like once you get those Admiral’s bars you immediately become power-mad, hatch the worst scheme possible, and maybe end up facelifted to death for your troubles.

* The Plan: So, can someone explain this to me? Admiral Robocop’s plot seems to be: 1) thaw out Khan, 2) ???, 3) win the war they aren’t fighting. Uh…a lot of this is confusing. Mostly that middle part, wherein Khan helps design war machines for the Federation. The guy who’s been on ice since before the invention of warp drive. Sure. And if we had a TARDIS we could ask Alexander the Great for help upgrading our drones.

* The torpedoes: Khan puts his crewsicles inside the torpedoes he designed. Admiral Robocop kept them there for leverage against Khan. Neither of these seem like good ideas. Or even ideas any rational human being would come up with. Or ideas any human being blitzed on Boone’s Farm and mescaline would come up with. This is a bad MacGuffin.

* Kirk’s sacrifice: In the context of this story it’s pretty meaningless, and has no emotional stakes. Think he’ll stay dead? Of course not. Further, his relationship with Spock is still new, so the moment lacks any emotional fission. Certainly, it shouldn’t send Spock on a rage-fueled quest for vengeance.

* War with the Klingons: Like every other motive in this movie, the reasons for this are heard and not seen. Why does Admiral Robocop want a war with them so badly? Is he bored? Desk getting a bit constricting? I mean, he gives a little speech before he sends Kirk on his kamikaze mission, but it lacks any real rationale. Couldn’t we at least see some sign of aggression from them? Get some idea of the threat they pose? This would give us some idea of why he hatched the Worst Plan in History and give the film the moral complexity it wants to have. And hey, is it a good idea to have a model of your Super-Mega-Banzai battleship right there on your desk?

With all that, why do I still like this movie so much? I’ve been pondering this question for several days now, and finally it hit me: because I’m a Star Trek fan. I’ve been with it since my uncle took me to see TWOK in 1982, through thick and thin, and you know what? This is still a good Trek movie. I mean, we’ve had Kirk makes jokes about farting, Spock nerve-pinch a horse, Kirk die by falling off a bridge on a shithole planet, a movie about a bunch of Space Amish people, Data clowning around, and that last Next Gen movie made by a director who couldn’t even be bothered to remember his actor’s names. I mean, c’mon! We’ve been through so much mediocrity a big, exciting, well-made spectacle is still heads-and-shoulders above a lot of the series, even if it had severe narrative problems.

Plus, you know, Kirk threesome with some alien twins with tails. Something well suspected went on, but never had the proof.

Engage, amigos.

Every year around this time millions of parents throughout the country live on tenterhooks as the future of their children is decided by various groups of strangers in darkened rooms that smell of cigarettes and sweat and barely-repressed hostility. These people are college-admissions officers and while you and/or your teenager live in a state of perpetual anxiety, they are busy sizing up your financial status and deciding whether or not your money will go far enough toward paying off their various debts to the finest brothels and cockfighting syndicates in Tijuana to make it worth their effort to let your kid into their school. And since that season is upon us, it’s a good time to review the little-seen, barely-known, utterly charming 1989 comedy How I Got Into College.

I had almost forgotten this movie existed, since it ran for only a few weeks at the tired, third-tier mall theater where I began my cinematic career. For a while I thought I may have simply imagined it during a feverish episode of malaria or something—which would be really weird, since I’ve never had malaria. But wouldn’t it be cool to have it? Malaria always struck me as the most romantic of the tropical diseases. Like, it’d just be cool to be able to casually drop into conversation, “Well, I was struggling with one of my periodic bouts of malaria. Picked it up in ruddy Siam, I did.” Seems very Kipling-esque.

Yeah, this is more or less what I suspected.

Anyway, HIGIC mostly follows the travails of Marlon Browne, (Corey Parker) a pleasant, but uninspired high school senior, who, as the film begins, mainly avoids any decisions about college by immersing himself in Silver Surfer comic books and wistfully pining for overachieving, class president, cheerleader Jessica Kailo (Lara Flynn Boyle, before she grew up to become a stick-insect). One day, Marlon makes his decision: he’ll apply to Ramsey College—the same place Jessica has her heart set upon—so that he can one day win her heart. It’s a stupid idea, he knows, but what the hell? It’s not like he has any better ones.

Marlon has a few challenges, however. First off, he’s a bit of an underachiever, so he doesn’t have great grades. Also, he was destroyed on the SAT (as represented by two fully realized guys—A and B—trapped in the story problems on the math portion who implore him to try harder before their trains collide or they’re eaten by sharks or whatever). So he embarks on a bunch of fairly-absurd, but utterly convincing endeavors to shore up his chances of acceptance. He patronizes a patently-shady college-acceptance clinic run—hilariously—by a couple of slickly obvious hucksters (Nora Dunn and…sniff…Phil Hartman). At their insistence he tries to bulk up his transcripts with extracurriculars like babysitting (he’s held hostage in a preschool prison break) and wrestling (he’s beaten to a pulp).

Be warned, there is A LOT of plaid in this movie.

At the same time, Jessica is facing her own set of challenges. Her parents want her to go to Michigan State (their alma matter), and once she visits Ramsey for an interview, she realizes that her achievements aren’t actually that special. There is (gasp) a country full of class presidents, cheerleading captains, yearbook editors angling for a spot at that school. After her interview goes bad (it involves a stuffed pig and her exposing herself) she’s thrown into a spiral of despair. Which ends after she begins to notice Marlon noticing her.

In a parallel plot line that occasionally intersects with Marlon and Jessica’s story, a couple of romantically-involved admissions counselors, Kip and Nina (Anthony Edwards, reminding why he’s the nicest presence onscreen ever, and Finn Carter sporting an adorable bob) struggle to champion students who are more than just the sum of their SAT scores against an increasingly-robotic admissions staff. The staff includes a perfectly oily Charles Rocket (RIP) as a smug suck-up and an imperious Philip Baker Hall (who, as near as I can tell, looks pretty much the same today as he did then).

Bob’s are hawt…

So, yeah, it’s pretty standard stuff, but what makes HIGIC so good is how well the story is told. Director Savage Steve Holland brings the same sweet, oddness to this movie as he did to Better off Dead and One Crazy Summer. John Hughes is regularly cited as the best observer of ‘80s high school life, but Holland delights in a level of surrealism which perfectly realizes the confusion of teenagers teetering on the brink of adulthood.

The movie’s also funny as hell, with Holland and writer Terrell Seltzer stuffing gags into every nook and cranny—whether they make sense or not. The laconic admissions secretary admonishes Marlon, “You can’t reschedule the interview, pup…pup…puppy!” and then promptly makes googly eyes at the framed picture of her dog. At a recruitment party, football coach Brian Doyle Murray wears a party hat over his face like a beak and pecks at one of the recruits. What do any of these things have to do with the story? Nothing, but they’re hilarious in their weirdness and help build this world.

I have no idea.

Eventually, everything turns out okay—did you expect anything else—but the movie makes it’s point: every kid applying to college is a human being and more than the sum of their grades, scores, and activities.

Other notes:

* I really love Finn Carter’s bob. I know I mentioned it already, but, well, it’s just so darn cute.

Let’s look at the bob again…

* Diane Franklin plays Marlon’s stepmom, and, sweet crap, if there is a bigger Oedipal nightmare for a teenager than having the unbearably-cute girl from Better Off Dead as a mom, I can’t imagine what it would be.

“Just call me mom…” Aaaaagh!

* Phil Hartman…(sigh)…it’s so damn unfair.

* People really loved patterns in the late-‘80s. Especially plaids. Holy shit, did we love plaids back then.

Even Lara is getting freaked out by all the plaid.

* The running gag with the A and B guys plays off in a hilariously magical-realist way.

* Richard Jenkins is in this. Extra awesome points.

It’s really too bad that How I Got Into College is so obscure. It should be a cult classic with Holland’s other films. And to all you kids sweating out your college decisions: don’t worry about it. They’re all more or less the same. If you actually buy that bill of goods about college life being the best years of your life, then your life will suck. There’s a lot more life that comes after it (no really, you can prove this with math). It’s what happens after college that matters. That’s where the real adventure begins.

Hey, Fast and Furious 6  is here! Yay! I’m totally stoked because, well, I’ve been using my brain a lot lately and you know what? It kinda sucks. It’s tough and not very much fun and it never results in a car chase, shootout or hot chicks twerking. It’s like, I don’t know why we have the things in the first place. That’s what makes this movie so welcome: it requires no brain power at all beyond the ability to recognize, “Holy shit, that was pure awesomesauce!” You can do it in your sleep.  Seriously, this movie was made to just let your brain not go to sleep and let your id do all the work.

What’s this movie about? What, did you miss it? Car chases, shootouts, and hot chicks twerking. I just told you that. Okay, yeah, there’s some semblance of a plot. Basically the now-sprawling cast of Fast Five (or as I like to think of it, “The Story of the Awesomest DSS Agent Ever and a Some Other People) has settled into happy exile/retirement after dividing the spoils of the last movie’s heist. Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster (yes they have names, but I didn’t bother to remember them—too much brainwork) have just had their first child, and Vin Diesel is just sort of hanging out and banging Elsa Pataky. Good for them.

Alas, their idyll is short-lived as they are approached by Awesomest DSS Agent Ever Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson and a big winner this summer) and his new partner Gina Carano (top of her class at FLETC and youngest ever RSO of Kabul) approach them. Seems an international crew of villains has been stealing components of, uh, something that controls the weather or time or whatever—it’s bad juju. Hobbs needs “wolves to catch wolves.” But there’s more: one of the members of the crew is Michelle Rodriguez—Vin’s girlfriend from the earlier installments (which didn’t feature DSS agents) and was killed by drug lords in the Fast and Furious. Weird right?

The DSS–the face of America overseas.

So, Vin gets the gang back together to rally up in London and hunt down the evil Shaw (Luke Evans) and his team. In the process, they basically lay waste to London on a level not seen since the blitz. But Vin must also unravel The Riddle of the Reappearing Michelle Rodriguez, which entails Paul Walker going into a US prison to suss out the truth. And that truth when revealed…is pretty dumb actually.

Also, Han is falling in love with his trophy girlfriend (Gal Gadot), and he’s growing more and more concerned about the danger they keep putting themselves in the midst of. So, you can probably guess that’s not going to go smoothly.

When these are your masterminds you might be in trouble.

But really, all this is a set up for a loosely-strung-together action set-pieces which director Justin Lin crafts with remarkable efficiency and skill. I mean, we get car vs. car, car vs. weird-ramp-car, car vs. tank, and car vs. massive-Russian-cargo-plane. We also get multiple shootouts and a fistfight between Dwayne Johnson and the only human being larger than he is (doubtless the casting director had to tour many a Mongolian penal work-camp to find that thing.) We also get a couple of chick fights, and those are always awesome.

The laws of physics mean nothing in this world.

So, what else is there to ponder:

* Okay, watching Michelle Rodriguez hold her own in a fistfight with Gina Carano requires an awful lot of suspension of disbelief, since we know that in reality Carano destroyed people as a job.

* Sad to say, but the original cast is getting a bit too old for these flicks. Vin, in particular, is looking jowly.

* The first thing my date asked when we left the movie? “How come Paul Walker didn’t get raped while he was in prison?” Actually, that’s a good question.

* The cast list of these movies is getting a bit too expansive, so it was nice to see them trim it back a bit in course of this movie.

It’s like they got every b-list actor available.

* Okay, so maybe Luke Hobbs is the second awesomest DSS Agent ever.

* There is a lot of plate glass in London just waiting to get smashed.

* Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez still have about as much chemistry as you’d expect.

* Shaw is described as former SAS who specialized in “vehicular warfare” in Afghanistan. Because A) yeah, that’s a thing, and B) that’s the best tactic to use in a ground insurgency in a country without improved roads.

* The credits scene sets up the next movie…which looks awesome!

Yeah, that’s Fast and Furious 6. No need to use your brain.

I’ve already chronicled the evolution of Will Smith’s ego into a sentient, malevolent force that visits misery such as Seven Pounds and The Pursuit of Happyness upon us. And, it should be noted, Smith seems to want us to understand this as well, given his completely unselfaware and totally asshole-ish reason for not taking the lead in Django Unchained—a role conceived with him in mind. Well, hey, great news! He’s now convinced that we need to love and adore his family as much as we venerate him. To that end, he’s brought us After Earth—a sci-fi Jack London tale that serves as a means for Smith to jam his obnoxious son Jaden in our faces while the Smith-Pinkett conglomerate’s accumulated egotism screams “HE IS THE SON OF THE CHOSEN ONE! LOVE HIM! LOVE HIM! BUILT GRAVEN IMAGES TO HIM! Seriously. If there was a scene in this movie where the two simply shouted this at the audience it would still be less egotistical and monkeynuts insane than anything they said in this interview.

Anyway, that’s the set up. Let’s get to the movie.

After Earth begins with a voiceover that sets up this world. It starts out okay—we left Earth a millennium ago because it was too polluted and set up someplace else, cool—but quickly gets dopely intricate and proves a long-held theory of mine: the more specific the VO, the worse the storytelling chops. In this one we move from the macro to the, uh, fuzzy in warp  speed. Seems there are aliens who don’t like us out there (who are they? Dunno, but they don’t have “Smith” in their names so it’s not important) who have loosed big CGI beasties to kill humans. These things can smell fear, but one man—one amazing, god among men—General Cypher Raige (Will Smith, and…bwahahahahahahaha!), learned he could turn his fear off. This technique is called “ghosting.” (Sigh) you’ll hear that a lot, so get used to it.

“You’re awesomer!’ “No, you’re awesomer!” “No, you’re awesomer!”

Okay, now we got that out of the way. Raige’s son Kitai (Jaden Smith) is an arrogant, rebellious little brat who is still reeling from the death of his sister at the hands of one of the fear-smelllers. Raige decides to take the kid on a space trip someplace, but things go haywire when the ship crashes on Earth, killing everyone aboard but, uh, the Raiges. Cypher (ugh, do I have to keep typing this?) has broken both his legs, leaving it up to Kitai to make the 100 kilometer trek through the dangerous wilderness of a post-Humanity Earth to recover a beacon that will send an SOS.

Since (sigh) Cypher is immobile, Kitai has a technological doohickey which allows Cypher to monitor Kitai and keep in constant communication with him. Putting a clock on the whole matter is that 1) Cypher is bleeding out internally, 2) Kitai has only a limited number of ampules that allow him to breathe Earth air, and 3) one of those CGI beasties was on the ship and is now loose and tracking Kitai.

In broad strokes, the story works just fine. It’s lean, spare, and economical. Once the details get filled in, well, that’s where it goes off the rails.

Jesus. Donkeyhumping. Christ.

Okay, first off our characters. Cypher is played less as fearless, and more like a totally emotionless mandroid. Seriously, Will Smith makes Leonard Nimoy’s Spock seem like late-period Al Pacino. This is especially problematic since the subplot is about the emotional bond between a father and a son. The whole things seems utterly unbelievable, since Will Smith barely registers any kind of a feeling, even when rigging a makeshift stent in his bad leg.

The other problem is Jaden Smith. He was an insufferable presence in The Day the Earth Stood Still, and he hasn’t gotten any better. Inexplicably, the movie (co-written by Smith) gives him a number of big emotional scenes he simply doesn’t have the chops for. He also seems to have trouble enunciating—he pronounces “sir” as “sooer.” I’m not sure if it’s his problem, or if the movie was shooting for some sort of future-accent (some of the other characters have weird diction, too, but it’s never consistent), but either way it undercuts an already wobbly performance by the guy carrying 70% of the movie.

“BEHOLD THE SON OF THE GOLDEN ONE! SACRIFICE YOUR FIRST BORN TO HIS MAGNIFICENCE!”

On top of that, the effects on the movie are shockingly subpar for a $130 million movie. The beasts that inhabit Earth are hit-and-miss at best—some ferocious tiger-thingees are only a step up from your average Syfy offering. On top of that, the laws of nature on Earth make no natural sense. For example, every night the verdant forests of Earth freeze over, but every morning it thaws and they’re fresh and green as ever. Um…apparently our absence has made Earth magic.

But there’s more:

* Kitai survives the cold nights by finding “geothermic hot spots,” which, in one case, means sitting under a tree. Well, hey, no need to knock yourself out there, Mr. $130 million screenplay.

* Cypher has all sorts of aphorisms to impart to young Kitai which all sound like something Yoda would say if Yoda was a ‘70s cult leader. [UPDATE: Apparently, these are thinly-veiled Scientology maxims, so, you know, that explains that].

* Kitai is rescued by a giant vulture, which is, apparently, sentient enough to know he tried (unsuccessfully) to protect her chicks from the aforementioned CGI tiger-thingees. Seriously, a big bird rescues him and his name isn’t even Gandolf. What motherfuckery is this?

* Zoe Kravitz plays Kitai’s sister, whose death at the claws of a beastie is the wedge between he and Cypher. She’s such a winning presence I really wished she was the kid we were following for this movie.

“You wait here while I get the hell out of this movie.”

* Okay, “ghosting” makes no sense. You don’t turn of fear like it was Data’s emotion chip. People do heroic things despite the fear. That’s why they’re heroic.

* Kitai has a dream in which he asks his dead sister why she couldn’t ghost when she was attacked. I would have paid a lot of money if she just answered, “because ghosting is crap, Kitai! Dad’s just a sociopath!”

* There’s an exceedingly awkward scene near the beginning in which we’re (again) told how amazing Cypher is when an amputee struggles to his feet to salute him.

* Technology is magic in this movie. The beacon just zaps a ray into the solar system, which, apparently, can reach the fleet millions of light-years away in mere minutes.

* The future commandos use some kind of weapon that’s like a cross between a Transformer and a harpoon. Like the lightsaber, it really looks neat, but makes no sense. I mean, if these future-folk had brains enough to fight the CGI beasties with long-ranged weapons, like, say GUNS THAT EXIST TODAY, they wouldn’t need “ghosting.”

Yeah, good luck with the harpoon. I’ll just be a mile away with my rocket-launcher…

* This film was directed by M. Night Shyamalan in full gun-for-hire mode. He’s a pretty competent action director.

* Seriously, you should the read the interview. It’s totally fucking insane.

Anyway, that’s After Earth. It’s already tanked at the box office, so you might not want to start building that pagan idol just yet.

Like pretty much every other carbon-based life-form, I saw Man of Steel last week (and to the few who didn’t: you really should check it out—don’t worry, He Who Walks Behind the Rows won’t mind), and I walked out deeply conflicted about it. Of course I wanted to love it. It’s Superman fer crissakes! Who doesn’t love Superman? Who hasn’t spent the bulk of their childhood years running around with a dishtowel fastened around their neck with a clothespin, their arms stretched out in front of them, pretending to fly? We all did that, right? Some of us as recently as last week. And after the disappointment of Superman Returns—itself not a bad film, just a deeply stagnant one—I think we all wanted this movie to do the same as Richard Donner’s 1978 original: use modern-day filmmaking techniques and effects to make the comic-book hero real again. So, did Zack Snyder succeed or fail? In a word, yes.

So, let’s start out with what this film gets right—and it’s a considerable amount. First off, the storytelling is pretty brisk and mostly clear. Snyder, working off a script by David Goyer, takes a good twenty minutes or so setting up Kryptonian society, and since the movie will dwell on the prospect of recreating Krypton, it’s a wise narrative move. As his father, Russell Crowe is appropriately regal and commanding, and it gives a good context for the motivations of the villains when they show up. On top of that the art design is truly remarkable, creating one of the first palpably alien worlds since the original Star Wars trilogy that didn’t look like a screensaver ginned up by ILM.

Likewise, Clark’s life—told in non-linear style with flashbacks seems credible and is anchored by great performances by Diane Lane and Kevin Costner—he, in particular, is a great casting choice, because if there’s any actor today who better embodies basic, Midwestern decency, I can’t think of who it is.

Unlike Donner’s version, MoS doesn’t spend a huge amount of time with young Clark flailing about, trying to understand his powers or with his eventual decision to become Superman. He finds a spaceship, virtual Russell Crowe shows up, gives him a suit, and we’re off to races. Again, so far so good. Snyder and Goyer are canny enough not to spend too much time getting us to where we know we’ll get.

Finally, when Kryptonian meanies General Zod (Michael Shannon) and his fellow arrive, it sets up a showdown which basically forces Superman to choose between his adopted civilization, and his native one. This is a very, very good idea, since it cuts to one of the most primal elements of the Superman character—the immigrant story. Not for nothing, was Superman created by two young, first-generation Jewish immigrants, who, along with a healthy dollop of the Moses story, created an uber-immigrant.

Superman isn’t simply not American, but also not human, and yet he embraces his new home with the zeal that characterized the first three great waves of immigration. Like those people, Superman left his alien home behind and adopted the culture of his new home with such force and zeal that he literaly wears its colors on his body at all times. By forcing Superman to confront the possibility of trading this world for Krypton, MoS places that element of the Superman story front and center.

And yet…

Okay, this is why Man of Steel doesn’t completely work for me—Superman doesn’t rescue enough people. He has some epic superbrawls with the bad guys—a nice corrective to Superman Returns, in which Superman never seems to come into conflict with anyone except Lois Lane over their Superkid—but catching criminals is only a small part of Superman’s character. Batman is the superhero who clobbers the muggers that try to take your wallet when you’ve stumbled into the wrong alley. Superman is the superhero who soft-lands your plane when the wings fall off. And that is the most vital part of Superman’s appeal.  He’s the corrective for an uncaring universe. He’s guy who prevents the disasters that have no human agency at their root. He puts out forest fires, plugs up volcanoes, keeps the San Andreas fault from wrecking California, and basically saves people from all sorts of disasters, except maybe credit-default swaps.

And yet, when Metropolis is being pwned by an alien terraforming machine—a disaster that some estimate would have killed hundreds of thousands of people—he’s fixing things on the other side of the world. The destruction of Metropolis gives Laurence Fishburne’s Perry White a great moment of action—as pointed out by the dudes at Overthinking It Podcast, it’s one of the movie’s emotional climaxes—but, dammit, Superman should have been witness to it. After all, it gives the most compelling reason why he would chose Earth over Krypton.

Which begs the question: why should Superman protect us? A key part of his upbringing, we are told, is Pa Kent’s insistence that if people know what he is they’ll be terrified of him. So, if he’s lived his whole life with that fear, why does he feel such a connection to us? Sure, he was raised among the basic decency of Midwestern America, but when do we actually see him come to understand and value that decency? In the flashbacks to his youth we see him regularly taunted by damn near everyone, but never actually having a fulfilling relationship with anyone other than his parents. Hell, even when he dons the suit the military greets him with a blast of 30mm cannon-fire from a couple A-10 Thunderbolts. Why doesn’t he just say, “Hey, screw you, cockbags! I was gonna protect you from Michael Shannon, but you can just take your chances now!”

At the end of the day, Superman is the hero we make the most emotional connection with, because he makes us into children–hell, he made the Iron Giant into a child (yeah, watch that last scene and try not to get misty-eyed). When we cheer on Superman as he rescues an airliner or puts out a forest fire, we’re indulging in the fantasy that someone–some superhuman–is there to protect us from the indifference of fate. More than that, we ta directly into the base, child-like vulnerability we feel in the face of all the terrible things that can routinely happen. Haven’t we all watched some disaster unfold on TV–9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Thailand–and wondered why there wasn’t a Superman to push against the horror of those disasters? That’s why we needed those scenes in this movie–so we could have a moment when we could pretend he existed.

In stripping these elements out of the story, they’ve made Superman, well, a bit less super.

Okay, so what’s up next this summer? World War Z? Wow, what a lousy movie. Crud! I’m supposed to  build to that. Goddamn, I’m a bad reviewer after four beers. Okay, let’s start this again: World War Z is the big-screen adaptation of Max Brooks’ well-regarded novel, starring Brad Pitt. The film (as with the book) posits the scenario of total global breakdown in the face of a zombie apocalypse. It takes us from a crumbling US to a darkened South Korea, through a heavily-barricaded Israel, and finally finds a glimmer of hope in Cardiff. And boy, is it a crappy movie. Damn! I did it again! This is why I switched to water? Ah, the hell with it, let’s just dive in…

So, yeah, that’s World War Z. If you read Max Brooks’ novel (incidentally, Max Brooks is the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft—how much you wanna bet he doesn’t pick up his own bar tab?), then you know his book is written as an oral history in the manner of Studs Terkel’s accounts of World War Two or Michael Herr’s Dispatches (yeah, I was an English major). Now, if you have a scintilla of common sense (more, it should be noted, than the makers of this movie) then you recognize right away that this really doesn’t lend itself to a blockbuster summer movie format.

So, how does director Marc Forster (he of the sub-par 007 outing Quantum of Solace) and a regular screenwriting gumbo handle this? Well, they all pretty much ignore the source material and just tell a wan story against a world zombie takeover. Yeah, that’s…that’s a bad idea.

Okay, so in WWZ, Brad Pitt stars as a former UN…uh…I’m not real sure. They never make it clear. He’s not a doctor—he says that explicitly. Does the UN have underwear models? Maybe he’s one of those. Anyway, he gets called into action when zombies overrun his home in Philadelphia. Now, ordinarily, this would not be a huge issue—I mean, is anyone really gonna miss Philadelphia? For most of my life I just assumed Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were the same place. They’re both largely-unimportant cities in Pennsylvania that begin with P…yeah, but the rest of the US is also boned, so this is kind of a big deal.

Anyway, Pitt and his wife (The Killing’s Mireille Enos) and their useless kids get airlifted to a UN flotilla, which is running the rescue operations. Because that’s how things work, right? There’s a major crisis and the UN just steps in and handles it. Yeah? No? Well, at this point you’ve already been eating your popcorn, so just go with it.

Pitt gets recruited on a mission to South Korea to find Patient Zero, who, hopefully, holds the key to the zombie virus. Except this mission turns out to be a bust. From there, Pitt jaunts to a heavily-fortified Jerusalem, and eventually to Cardiff, which, it should be said, looks nothing like the city shown in Torchwood. In the end, Pitt never finds Patient Zero but he does realize that the zombies ignore sick people, so he infects himself with, uh, something, and it camouflages him from the zombies. Yay! We win, right? Or not? The movie is not real clear on this.

Yeah, World War Z is a real mess. It had a famously-troubled production history which jettisoned its big-scale climax for a low-stakes sequence in which Brad Pitt sneaks past one zombie. It was subject to an eleventh-hour rewrite by Damon Lindelof—and let’s just think about that for a moment: bringing in Lindelof—he of the narratively-incoherent movies Cowboys and Aliens and Prometheus—to clean up your script is a little like bringing in Boss Tweed to implement your anti-corruption initiatives. On top of that, the studios mandated WWZ would have a summer-friendly PG-13 rating, ensuring that the zombie decimation of the world would be as bloodless as possible. Truly. A PG-13 zombie movie is like making a porno film for NBC. You’re never gonna get the goods. And this movie proves it. I mean, sweet crap, it’s more bloodless than Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom—the PG movie that created the PG-13 rating. There is nothing scary or thrilling about this movie. Shit, Gremlins 2 was PG-13. You seen any of those little bastards eating people’s guts?

Man, gremlins would have totally made this movie better.

On top of that we have stupidity like:

* Talk about bloodless, Pitt cuts the hand off a IMI soldier to keep her from being infected. Not only does the battlefield amputation not bleed, but apparently it also requires no tourniquet,  just a bandage. I guess those things don’t bleed, right?

* David Morse plays a batshit-insane CIA operative held prisoner in a cage in the US Air Force base in South Korea, showing that the filmmakers have no idea 1) what Air Forces bases do, and 2) how the CIA works.

* In one scene the Pitt family raids a drug store for food and medicine. It’s important to remember what Hurricane Katrina taught us about such things: it’s not looting if white people do it.

* When Pitt makes his big breakthrough, one scientist exclaims, “If we infect our troops with a deadly virus the zombies will ignore them. They’ll be perfectly camouflaged!” Yeah, uh, I can think of one big flaw in that plan.

* And yet, they implement it anyway.

* Finally the movie with a big, “Well, yeah, I guess we win. Sure. Just imagine it.” Hey, thanks 200 million dollar movie.

That’s World War Z. Man, this movie isn’t even worth catching on Netflix. Read the book instead.

Pacific Rim, ah Pacific Rim. Well, this is pretty much the reason motion pictures were invented. About 120 years ago some dudes figured out a way to project moving images against a white background, and one of them—I think his name was Dave–said to the other (Lyle, I believe), “Awesome! Now we just gotta wait until CGI is invented so we can show giant robots punching monsters in the face!” It’s true. That’s a fact. You can look it up in, like, books and stuff. But don’t do it now, because right now you should be seeing Pacific Rim. Are you seeing Pacific Rim right now? If not, why not? This movie is pretty much the alpha and the omega of the art form. Because—let me restate—Giant. Robots. Punching. Monsters. In. The. Face.

I could pretty much end this review right here, but I’ve got nothing better to do, so lemme roll out why Pacific Rim is such a shot of awesomesauce straight to the nutsack. So, this movie does some serious world-building in its first ten minutes or so. Taking place in the 2020s or so, Director Guillermo del Toro presents us with a world besieged by giant monsters—called kaiju, after the genre of Japanese monster movies that began with Godzilla—which have emerged from another universe through and inter dimensional rift deep beneath the Pacific Ocean.

As the film explains, when humanity realized that conventional weapons were largely ineffective against the kaiju they banded together to create massive hunter-killer robots called Jaegers (“hunter” in German). Jaegers are piloted by two humans who’s brains are linked directly with the robot creating a kind of gestalt called “the drift.”

Jaegers worked for a while, but soon the kaiju became more ferocious and their attacks more numerous, and the Jaegers were outmatched. Humanity decided to build a giant wall—called, literally, “The Wall of Life,” a name that just begs for a kaiju to smash through the thing. And that’s where this movie begins.

“Oh shit.”

A former Jaeger pilot, Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam), is coaxed back to the program from a self-imposed exile following the death of his brother and co-pilot five years earlier. Coxing him is his former CO Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), once the Supreme Allied Commander of the Jaegers, but now reduced to slapping together a small resistance force of Jaegers that the rest of the world doesn’t have much faith in anymore.

Well, you can probably see where the movie is headed: Pentecost is launching a last-ditch effort to destroy the rift, and needs Beckett to lead the charge. Beckett must come to trust his new co-pilot, the tough (and very fetching) Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), and regain the respect of the rest of his squad. Meanwhile, two eccentric scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) tackle the problem from the analytical end in an homage to all those ‘50s monster movies in which egg-headed scientists toil away over test-tubes and beakers while the military blast away infectively at the invaders.

Oh yeah, and Ron Perlman’s in it too. He’s just freaking awesome. You gotta see him.

So, wow, that’s a lot of unpacking, and yet the movie zips right along. Say this for del Toro, he can create worlds with a minimum of effort. What’s more, he populates them with vividly-drawn characters. Now, sure, the characters in Pacific Rim are all fairly stereotypical—the unsure hero, the stalwart commander, the goofy scientists—but you have to remember this is a movie in which a giant robot uses an oil-tanker as a baseball bat! So…what? You’re expecting Altmanesque naturalism here?

The point is, every character has an arc, and every arc has a payoff. Sweet Lord, I’d almost given up on Hollywood’s ability to craft a coherent screenplay, but del Toro spins a neat, effective screenplay that every author of every bloated, nigh-incoherent summer blockbuster should be forced to study.

And action directors should be forced to study del Toro’s directoral style, which manages to be thrilling and cheeky in equal measures. He frames his shots to perfectly capture the epic scale of these beasts and make their battles both exciting and coherent.

Del Toro wisely makes Pacific Rim an ensemble piece, which helps cover for the fact that Hunnam really isn’t a very strong actor. His face is all doughy and his American accent is all over the place (I should say accents since he seems to adopt a different one from scene to scene).

Yeah, this dude is gonna save us from giant monsters.

But, hey, you got Elba filling the testosterone quota, and Gorman and Day playing up the broad comedy of their characters (Day is a slight variation on his It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia character, while Gorman plays his character like a tweedy professor, transplanted from the 1800s). And then you have Ron Perlman showing up in steampunk goggles and gold-plated shoes, making this the best movie ever.

I’m so stealing this outfit for the next casual Friday.

Man, there’s so much good stuff to say about this movie I could go on and on. But that would be wasting valuable time you could use to see Pacific Rim. Because, at last, Hollywood managed to cough up a light, fun summer spectacle. I mean, giant robots fighting monsters, fer chrissakes! How do you go wrong with that?

Stray thoughts:

* Beckett and Mori’s robot has a ginormous sword that can turn any kaiju into sushi with a minimum of effort, but they only remember they have it after they’ve spent most of the fight hitting the monsters with their fists. Apparently Voltron was one of their training officers or something.

* Have I mentioned how cute Rinko Kikuchi is? She’s really cute.

* Ron Perlman makes everything more awesome.

* Really, how was that wall idea supposed to work? What, were the kaiju supposed to just get bored and go away?

* The Jaeger HQ is called “The Shatterdome.” If I ever have a secret lair, I’m totally calling it that.

Let me be clear: Giant Robots. That fight giant monsters. Okay, Hollywood, you can stop now. Your work is done.

So, at some point since its release James Wan’s Insidious has come to be regarded as a great horror film. This genuinely befuddles me since, as I pointed out in my review, it’s pretty much okay at best. I mean, yeah, the movie had some effective chills in its first half, but once the ghost chasers start wearing WWI gas masks during their séance, and a demon that looks like a queenier Darth Maul starts prancing around to “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” well, I pretty much checked out. But, hey, I guess the rest of America finds a mincing draq queen version of Hellboy a lot scarier than I do. Anyway, it’s enough to build a good deal of anticipation for Wan’s latest horror outing, The Conjuring. Having seen it I can say it’s much more derivative than Insidious—ripping off pretty much every haunted house movie made since, oh, 1979. But this also means it’s a lot less batshit crazy than Insidious, so, um, hey let’s just call it a win, okay?

The Conjuring claims to be based upon a true story. Now, I haven’t done any research on this, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that claim is complete horseshit. Because, well, for chrissakes…anyway, now that that’s out of the way we can continue.

So the movie takes place in 1971 and introduces us to a married couple of paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson, sporting some formidable sideburns, and Vera Farmiga, sporting some truly terrible outfits). As the movie begins they’re helping out some nubile young nurses who’ve come to be tormented by a demonic doll that they sorta sensed was haunted but figured they’d keep anyway (making them possibly the dumbest people in the history of horror movies—top ten, anyhow). Well, they take care of the situation offscreen, and we leave them for a while.

“Well, this thing is horrific. Let’s keep it.”

Next we meet the Perrons, Carolyn and Roger (Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston) and their five daughters who have traded a life in New Jersey for a large farmhouse in rural Rhode Island. Of course, this being 1) an old house, and 2) in the country, naturally it’s freaking haunted.

Now, we don’t get this all at once, but instead through a series of escalating weirdness after the youngest daughter finds an old music box and begins talking to an imaginary friend names Rory. Like Insidious, this is best part of Wan’s movie. He does a good job of ratcheting up the scares from bumps in the night, to the slow accumulation of mundane—yet unsettling—events. One of the daughter begins sleepwalking and clawing at a an old wardrobe, Carolyn begins developing weird bruises after she sleeps.

“Rory says that blouse is hideous.”

Finally, after one terrifying night when the supernatural harassment hits a crescendo (possibly the scariest sequence in the film), Roger and Carolyn seek out someone who can help them. This leads them to Ed and Lorraine. The Ghost Hunters promptly move in with one of their own investigators and a local Sheriff’s deputy who doesn’t carry a gun, but wears the tightest pants ever molded from a sheet of polyester (neither of which being particularly helpful in this situation).

So, they set up a bunch of cameras and stuff and watch while the house goes monkeynuts on them. And monkeynuts it do go. We get more bumps in the night and some spectral manhandling (one daughter gets dragged through the house by her hair, causing the mother to hack it off—oh well, in a couple years she’d trade it for a Dorothy Hamill ‘do anyway). They also get a bunch of visits from a bunch of spectral figures who wail stuff like “Look at what she made me do!”

“We’re just gonna move in for a few weeks and eat all your food…”

Well, the Ghost Hunters do some research and pretty soon figure out that the house is cursed by an accused witch who killed her son as a sacrifice to Satan and she’s been dicking with people who live there ever since.

Blah blah blah there’s an exorcism, the doll shows up again, Lili Taylor is possessed by the witch and almost kills her youngest daughter, but everyone helps her shake it off and everyone lives happily after ever after. The film ends with the Warrens receiving a call from the church asking them to investigate a haunted house in Long Island—surely the Amityville house—which is weird since that’s pretty much the movie we’ve been watching.

Yeah, we’re in good hands with these people.

So, yeah, that’s The Conjuring. It starts off as The Amityville Horror, turns into Poltergeist, then becomes more or less every possession movie ever made. Oh well, no one ever accused James Wan of being an original filmmaker. And, hey, if you’re gonna rip off a bunch of movies, might as well rip off the good ones. And he is an effective filmmaker. Say this for him, he makes scary derivative movies. Unfortunately, he makes the same mistakes he did in Insidious by giving an elaborate reason for the paranormal events, which, in the end, reduces them to a simple problem to be solved. You can almost pinpoint the scene when all the terror drains away and it becomes a rote thriller.

Oh well, it’s enough to get a scary movie, and one without that damn Tiny Tim song.