ajy1

‎1 star. Shim Hyung-Rae has some kind of ego. He takes money from fellow Korean investors, goes to the Paramount lot in Hollywood, and shoots this self-indulgent and unwatchable "film." Harvey Keitel, Michael Rispoli, and Jason Mewes, am...ong others, try in absolute vain to save this wreck and bring some form of realism to the proceedings. Maybe they shouldn't have bothered. It's like Shim saw a couple mob films and wanted to recreate them without any knowledge of the genre. Worst of all, his Younggu character comes across as being the worst Asian stereotype to grace the screen in a long time...with his broken accent, combed over hair, stumbling, and bad teeth. It's impossible to even watch this thing. He even tries to throw in a "magical" musical number that is his montage to the Hollywood greats but just seems random. There were maybe 7 people in the auditorium....5 walked out before the end. Maybe I should've as well, I was just too curious to see how this monstrosity would end.

MARS NEEDS MOMS was a nice surprise. It certainly is not the "kids" film that they marketed....I'd say it's target aud is prob. a slightly older one. It's really a sci-fi adventure that's about alien abduction an...d enslavement, a pretty dark ...theme for a movie. Also some the dialogue is pretty wacky, references to botox and street art. One of the characters is an alien that learned English through a "Partridge Family" type show so they call her a hippie alien. The landscapes are quite awe-inspiring and the usage of 3D here makes absolute sense. The climax of the film was jaw dropping too, I was really surprised that they would try and go there....would be pretty disturbing for young kids. The end credits feature some action motion capture footage and it's pretty amazing what physicality the actors go through for the process.

Now I'm not a fan of the filmmakers and their last effort, MEET THE SPARTANS, was horrendously unfunny. So I was dreading DISASTER MOVIE but am surprised to admit that it actually had some solid laughs. The film is essentially a free form blender of pop culture references in scene after scene with a threadbare plot to connect them. However, the interesting thing about the satire here is how dark and cynical it is. The film rightly points out the cynicism and hypocrisy of teen entertainment (ex. the shallow consumerism and robotic nature of HANNAH MONTANA, the mindless songs and false chasteness of HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL, the overwritten, annoying banter of JUNO, et al.). Even family films are deservedly skewered (the heroine of ENCHANTED turned into a drugged out, homeless hooker, KUNG FU PANDA literally a guy in a costume brawling it out and best of all, the savage ALVIN & THE CHIPMUNKS sequence that turns them into CRITTERS style, metal loving evil puppets). And how true it is that the summer blockbusters consist of one comic book film after another being churned into the marketplace for our consumption (the film correctly portrays the "superheroes" in this fashion, with a cow splattering each of them one by one). Add to that a musical number that ties all of these references together in a seamless fashion. Friedberg and Seltzer still have an amateurish quality to their film-making and several sequences are allowed to drag on a bit to kill time. But overall this is definitely worth a look and maybe you'll be surprised.