bigfanofthebob42
Joined Jan 2006
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If Bobby Kennedy was the reincarnation of Nostradamus instead of the reincarnation of Jesus that this movie makes him out to be and knew this movie was going to be made one day, he would have done a Matrix move that night and dodged those bullets. Headlines around the country would have read "BOBBY DODGES ASSASSIN'S BULLETS; BECOMES AWESOMEST PERSON TO EVER LIVE;CHUCK NORRIS ROUNDHOUSE KICKS SELF IN DEFEAT".
Emilio Estevez, attempting to make a Robert Altman movie about that tragic night when Kennedy did not dodge those bullets while forgetting that Altman makes (well, made, rest his soul) movies about real people as opposed to symbolic mouthpieces for misguided speechifying and transparent, heavy-handed period-evocation, has made what some might call this year's Crash: a big ensemble drama that is About Things with all the subtlety of one of Charlton Heston's climactic outbursts at the end of almost every movie he was ever in. But Crash was competently written, acted, and directed, and is a fairly interesting and lucid piece of thought-provocation, regardless of its contrived, sledgehammer tactics. I'm not sure what Bobby wants to be about. It would appear to be an attempt to explore via cross-section what was probably the most turbulent passage of 1960's American history, but the writing is so awkward and the interconnected stories so hamfisted that the final product seems to suggest that the second Kennedy assassination of the decade was simply the only thing that wasn't boring and ridiculous about the day on which it occurred.
The final passage, in which the characters shut up and the event the whole mess has been building up to finally occurs, has an undeniable power, but all that's left after the smoke has cleared is inept pseudo-liberal pornography, saying nothing in particular with anything approaching actual eloquence. The most laughable passages involve two campaign workers doing acid with possibly the most glaring and unintentionally hilarious hippie stereotype seen on film since the anti-drug propaganda of the day, played perhaps fittingly by master thespian Ashton Kutcher. His performance suggests a degree of self-awareness that the more respectable actors in the cast (let's see...that's all of them, barring perhaps Christian Slater, fresh off his performances in Uwe Boll's apocalyptic semi-masterpiece Alone in the Dark and the direct-to-video Hollow Man 2) miss entirely in their desperate, flailing grabs for emotional resonance in Estevez's graceless prose. While Kutcher's (possibly unintentional) aura of self-awareness is perhaps the only thing that sustains his career, here he seems to be the only one who realizes that he's being Punk'd by this well-meaning garbage.
It also has been made with a disrespect for non-Kennedy-related history and plain old facts. A large part of it tells the stories of the other people who were shot that night, but their stories here are entirely fictional. The subplot involving Elijah Wood marrying Lindsay Lohan to get out of the draft is completely worthless, not just because Lohan is a bad actress and every subplot in this mess is worthless, but because even the users of the IMDb apparently knew more about this than the filmmakers did and have, God bless them, pointed out the fact that the marriage loophole was closed several years before the events in the film. The film traffics in faux-liberal "truthiness" like Stephen Colbert's faux-conservatism does. While I can get behind artistic license being taken when it makes a true story more cinematic, here it just allows the creatively bankrupt but morally righteous Estevez to drag the proceedings into a mire of clichés that might not have been there in the first place.
The whole cast, even the talented portion, (William H. Macy, Anthony Hopkins, Morpheus) does work ranging from mediocre to outright embarrassing. It's hard to tell whether Demi Moore's horrible performance as an alcoholic singer was just because of Estevez's script or the fact that she should be kept as far away as possible from a camera at all times. There's also some inexplicable rambling from the inexplicable Helen Hunt, whom within her first minute of screen time I wanted to reach through the screen and sucker punch in the ovaries. It gets so bad that her husband, Martin Sheen, grabs her and says "YOU ARE NOT YOUR SHOES!" This isn't what I would have done, but it makes about as much sense as the rest of the script.
Bobby is the worst film I've sat through in a theater all year. This might say something about how choosy I am with which films I see, but here the writing is so bad and the storytelling so misguided that I was squirming in my seat for long stretches of the film, and I never do that. That it's been nominated for Best Drama at the Golden Globes says more about the relevance of the Globes than it does about the quality of this abortion.
Emilio Estevez, attempting to make a Robert Altman movie about that tragic night when Kennedy did not dodge those bullets while forgetting that Altman makes (well, made, rest his soul) movies about real people as opposed to symbolic mouthpieces for misguided speechifying and transparent, heavy-handed period-evocation, has made what some might call this year's Crash: a big ensemble drama that is About Things with all the subtlety of one of Charlton Heston's climactic outbursts at the end of almost every movie he was ever in. But Crash was competently written, acted, and directed, and is a fairly interesting and lucid piece of thought-provocation, regardless of its contrived, sledgehammer tactics. I'm not sure what Bobby wants to be about. It would appear to be an attempt to explore via cross-section what was probably the most turbulent passage of 1960's American history, but the writing is so awkward and the interconnected stories so hamfisted that the final product seems to suggest that the second Kennedy assassination of the decade was simply the only thing that wasn't boring and ridiculous about the day on which it occurred.
The final passage, in which the characters shut up and the event the whole mess has been building up to finally occurs, has an undeniable power, but all that's left after the smoke has cleared is inept pseudo-liberal pornography, saying nothing in particular with anything approaching actual eloquence. The most laughable passages involve two campaign workers doing acid with possibly the most glaring and unintentionally hilarious hippie stereotype seen on film since the anti-drug propaganda of the day, played perhaps fittingly by master thespian Ashton Kutcher. His performance suggests a degree of self-awareness that the more respectable actors in the cast (let's see...that's all of them, barring perhaps Christian Slater, fresh off his performances in Uwe Boll's apocalyptic semi-masterpiece Alone in the Dark and the direct-to-video Hollow Man 2) miss entirely in their desperate, flailing grabs for emotional resonance in Estevez's graceless prose. While Kutcher's (possibly unintentional) aura of self-awareness is perhaps the only thing that sustains his career, here he seems to be the only one who realizes that he's being Punk'd by this well-meaning garbage.
It also has been made with a disrespect for non-Kennedy-related history and plain old facts. A large part of it tells the stories of the other people who were shot that night, but their stories here are entirely fictional. The subplot involving Elijah Wood marrying Lindsay Lohan to get out of the draft is completely worthless, not just because Lohan is a bad actress and every subplot in this mess is worthless, but because even the users of the IMDb apparently knew more about this than the filmmakers did and have, God bless them, pointed out the fact that the marriage loophole was closed several years before the events in the film. The film traffics in faux-liberal "truthiness" like Stephen Colbert's faux-conservatism does. While I can get behind artistic license being taken when it makes a true story more cinematic, here it just allows the creatively bankrupt but morally righteous Estevez to drag the proceedings into a mire of clichés that might not have been there in the first place.
The whole cast, even the talented portion, (William H. Macy, Anthony Hopkins, Morpheus) does work ranging from mediocre to outright embarrassing. It's hard to tell whether Demi Moore's horrible performance as an alcoholic singer was just because of Estevez's script or the fact that she should be kept as far away as possible from a camera at all times. There's also some inexplicable rambling from the inexplicable Helen Hunt, whom within her first minute of screen time I wanted to reach through the screen and sucker punch in the ovaries. It gets so bad that her husband, Martin Sheen, grabs her and says "YOU ARE NOT YOUR SHOES!" This isn't what I would have done, but it makes about as much sense as the rest of the script.
Bobby is the worst film I've sat through in a theater all year. This might say something about how choosy I am with which films I see, but here the writing is so bad and the storytelling so misguided that I was squirming in my seat for long stretches of the film, and I never do that. That it's been nominated for Best Drama at the Golden Globes says more about the relevance of the Globes than it does about the quality of this abortion.
What a disappointment. Or not. What the hell is Silent Hill, anyway?
Silent Hill is the best video game adaptation made so far. If anyone makes a list of the ten greatest images in the history of horror films, if this doesn't have at least one spot on there, then there is no such thing as justice. This movie looks fantastic. The set design by Cronenberg Woman is astounding and evocative, the cinematography is pretty much perfect, the creature effects are magnificent, the direction is amazingly confident.
Having said that, it just doesn't connect.
The script, by Roger Avary, seems to be attempting to sound like a video game. In other words, the dialogue is mostly not so good at all. Almost all of the dialogue feels off, both in delivery and in the actual writing. While the movie is going for a surreal, dream-like feeling, the middle section has a few major groaners, once it turns into downright flat exposition it gets next to impossible to stay in the movie. Of course Christophe Gans, a fellow whose visual skill is impeccable in my opinion, thought the script was great, but that's because he speaks English as a second, or maybe even third language.
Anyway, the exposition part is done in this cool-looking flashback, but it's totally unnecessary. As is Boromir of Gondor even being in the movie. The movie's central problem is that its story, while initially intriguing (that's because there really isn't much of any for the first hour, just wandering), just doesn't work. It doesn't work because it doesn't connect emotionally with the audience. Even when it has the potential to, it segues into its middle hour, which is by far the worst part of the movie.
But the problem with calling the movie bad is that it's way too damn cool. I think someone else said that it's good in all the right places and bad in all the wrong ones. It's the very definition of an uneven movie. There is so much right in this movie. The soundtrack, from the games, is brilliant. And as I said, the way everything is visualized is fantastic, although the parts where the monsters melt into ash is a bit excessive and unnecessary.
A lot of people, mainly the ones who haven't played the games, will have no idea what is going on. This is only partially the fault of the filmmakers, because the studio's handling of the movie attracted the wrong crowd. It got teenage guys taking their girlfriends to a scary movie on Friday nights, and by not screening it for critics in the US it got the grouchy, fairly unintellectual Saturday critics, who totally missed the point, or at least the good parts.
The studio's handling of it is worse than any element of the movie, except maybe the part where Radha Mitchell (who is pretty terrific, if slightly awkward due to accent change) and Laurie Holden (who plays the cop who wears sunglasses 24 hours a day and who every critic thinks is a lesbian because she wears tight pants and has short hair) are walking down the street: Laurie Holden:They used to say this town was haunted. Radha Mitchell:It looks like they were right.
Except for that part, the studio's handling of it is much, much worse than the worst parts of this movie.
I dearly hope that Silent Hill is successful enough for a sequel to be produced, because although it's definitely a love-it-or-hate-it affair (sometimes both at the same time), if Gans and company realized the mistakes they made the first time, the Silent Hill universe still holds bountiful possibilities.
Silent Hill is the best video game adaptation made so far. If anyone makes a list of the ten greatest images in the history of horror films, if this doesn't have at least one spot on there, then there is no such thing as justice. This movie looks fantastic. The set design by Cronenberg Woman is astounding and evocative, the cinematography is pretty much perfect, the creature effects are magnificent, the direction is amazingly confident.
Having said that, it just doesn't connect.
The script, by Roger Avary, seems to be attempting to sound like a video game. In other words, the dialogue is mostly not so good at all. Almost all of the dialogue feels off, both in delivery and in the actual writing. While the movie is going for a surreal, dream-like feeling, the middle section has a few major groaners, once it turns into downright flat exposition it gets next to impossible to stay in the movie. Of course Christophe Gans, a fellow whose visual skill is impeccable in my opinion, thought the script was great, but that's because he speaks English as a second, or maybe even third language.
Anyway, the exposition part is done in this cool-looking flashback, but it's totally unnecessary. As is Boromir of Gondor even being in the movie. The movie's central problem is that its story, while initially intriguing (that's because there really isn't much of any for the first hour, just wandering), just doesn't work. It doesn't work because it doesn't connect emotionally with the audience. Even when it has the potential to, it segues into its middle hour, which is by far the worst part of the movie.
But the problem with calling the movie bad is that it's way too damn cool. I think someone else said that it's good in all the right places and bad in all the wrong ones. It's the very definition of an uneven movie. There is so much right in this movie. The soundtrack, from the games, is brilliant. And as I said, the way everything is visualized is fantastic, although the parts where the monsters melt into ash is a bit excessive and unnecessary.
A lot of people, mainly the ones who haven't played the games, will have no idea what is going on. This is only partially the fault of the filmmakers, because the studio's handling of the movie attracted the wrong crowd. It got teenage guys taking their girlfriends to a scary movie on Friday nights, and by not screening it for critics in the US it got the grouchy, fairly unintellectual Saturday critics, who totally missed the point, or at least the good parts.
The studio's handling of it is worse than any element of the movie, except maybe the part where Radha Mitchell (who is pretty terrific, if slightly awkward due to accent change) and Laurie Holden (who plays the cop who wears sunglasses 24 hours a day and who every critic thinks is a lesbian because she wears tight pants and has short hair) are walking down the street: Laurie Holden:They used to say this town was haunted. Radha Mitchell:It looks like they were right.
Except for that part, the studio's handling of it is much, much worse than the worst parts of this movie.
I dearly hope that Silent Hill is successful enough for a sequel to be produced, because although it's definitely a love-it-or-hate-it affair (sometimes both at the same time), if Gans and company realized the mistakes they made the first time, the Silent Hill universe still holds bountiful possibilities.
Event Horizon has the two distinctions of being the only Paul WS Anderson movie that does not feel like it was shat out by a monkey with ADD and smeared onto celluloid, and off being one of the few movies that have genuinely traumatized me. Today, Event Horizon doesn't really freak me out anymore, but it's still an underrated freakout for anyone who hasn't seen it that can accept the weak script and lackluster third act.
So basically it's about this spaceship that gets possessed by evil and terrorizes people by making them go crazy or showing them flashes of their friends screaming and being mutilated in some freaky dimension of chaos or something. The flash parts are really freaky, and along with the scene where the ship's log suddenly starts playing by itself without static over what happened after evil took over--it looks like the kind of porn the dark lord Sauron watches, but with tighter editing. By just flashing crazy gory stuff at you, it makes you think you've seen things that are worse than what you have, since most of it consists of people screaming and bloody or nude corpses impaled through the face hanging around covered in maggots. (on second thought, that is freaky) But it tricks you into thinking you're seeing people being graphically dissected and people eating themselves and gay people getting married.
A lot of people upon release found it to be really derivative of Alien, among other things, but I don't think it's derivative, because it feels like it's taking place somewhere else in the same universe, which is also how it gets away with having everyone smoke 50 years into the future.
The script is lame. "I'm now walking. I'm now entering the medical bay. I'm now picking my nose." a lot of the dialogue can be like that. Or there's the other, non-Morpheus black guy, who seems to be attempting to be the best Funny, But Clumsy Negro stereotype in the history of the cinema, and unfortunately he fails because it takes you out of the movie whenever he appears. They might as well have had Paul WS Anderson play the part in blackface. Also, there's a lot of talk about "hell" and "a dimension of pure chaos", and it all sounds a little silly no matter how freakishly disturbing the visions of it are.
The last half hour houses the biggest shocks, for me, but the movie sort of falls apart into a series of action sequences before the big explosion. You know, the kind that happens in any sci-fi horror movie. It's also unfortunate that they turned the Jurassic Park 1 and 3 guy into the outright villain--it's less scary when you can see the bad guy, particularly if he looks like a more lame, naked version of Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies, but with no pins, so he's really just Head, and that's not a cool name for anybody. The whole last half hour reeks of studio impatience and interference. There was originally another half hour that was cut out, and probably contained a lot of stuff that should have been in the movie, but the studio was a jerk and made them cut a lot of the gore, or the "character" and "story development", you know, things that aren't necessary to Hollywood studios. It's a shame, because with that footage, Event Horizon might have been an actually good movie, and a jewel amidst the chunks of corn in the turd of Paul WS Anderson's filmography.
If Anderson made it today, it would be scored entirely with Marilyn Manson, the action scenes would be hyper-edited and incomprehensible, the characters wouldn't even have personalities, and it would end with Morpheus making friends with the evil force so that together they can battle the alien zombies that Anderson felt were necessary to add to make the movie cooler. And it ends with Morpheus and the Weir-beast walking off into the sunset, holding hands.
So basically it's about this spaceship that gets possessed by evil and terrorizes people by making them go crazy or showing them flashes of their friends screaming and being mutilated in some freaky dimension of chaos or something. The flash parts are really freaky, and along with the scene where the ship's log suddenly starts playing by itself without static over what happened after evil took over--it looks like the kind of porn the dark lord Sauron watches, but with tighter editing. By just flashing crazy gory stuff at you, it makes you think you've seen things that are worse than what you have, since most of it consists of people screaming and bloody or nude corpses impaled through the face hanging around covered in maggots. (on second thought, that is freaky) But it tricks you into thinking you're seeing people being graphically dissected and people eating themselves and gay people getting married.
A lot of people upon release found it to be really derivative of Alien, among other things, but I don't think it's derivative, because it feels like it's taking place somewhere else in the same universe, which is also how it gets away with having everyone smoke 50 years into the future.
The script is lame. "I'm now walking. I'm now entering the medical bay. I'm now picking my nose." a lot of the dialogue can be like that. Or there's the other, non-Morpheus black guy, who seems to be attempting to be the best Funny, But Clumsy Negro stereotype in the history of the cinema, and unfortunately he fails because it takes you out of the movie whenever he appears. They might as well have had Paul WS Anderson play the part in blackface. Also, there's a lot of talk about "hell" and "a dimension of pure chaos", and it all sounds a little silly no matter how freakishly disturbing the visions of it are.
The last half hour houses the biggest shocks, for me, but the movie sort of falls apart into a series of action sequences before the big explosion. You know, the kind that happens in any sci-fi horror movie. It's also unfortunate that they turned the Jurassic Park 1 and 3 guy into the outright villain--it's less scary when you can see the bad guy, particularly if he looks like a more lame, naked version of Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies, but with no pins, so he's really just Head, and that's not a cool name for anybody. The whole last half hour reeks of studio impatience and interference. There was originally another half hour that was cut out, and probably contained a lot of stuff that should have been in the movie, but the studio was a jerk and made them cut a lot of the gore, or the "character" and "story development", you know, things that aren't necessary to Hollywood studios. It's a shame, because with that footage, Event Horizon might have been an actually good movie, and a jewel amidst the chunks of corn in the turd of Paul WS Anderson's filmography.
If Anderson made it today, it would be scored entirely with Marilyn Manson, the action scenes would be hyper-edited and incomprehensible, the characters wouldn't even have personalities, and it would end with Morpheus making friends with the evil force so that together they can battle the alien zombies that Anderson felt were necessary to add to make the movie cooler. And it ends with Morpheus and the Weir-beast walking off into the sunset, holding hands.