The Last Shopping Days On Mars

Martian Cold War.

Life not as we know it takes down a Martian expedition. It’s a cold, people. Bacteria. Great, and I forgot to pack the Vicks Vaporub…

THE LAST DAYS ON MARS boldly breaks conventions even whilst being one big convention. Within the framework of this clichéd thriller, writers Sydney J. Bounds and Clive Dawson, and director Ruairi Robinson (his first directorial feature) insert subtle left turns that have obviously escaped the casual viewer, evidenced by this movie’s lackluster critical reception.

It’s the last day for a scientific expedition on Mars – within 19 hours a return ship is scheduled to land; meanwhile, a biological discovery has overrun the command center. Mission Captain is Elias Koteas (THE FOURTH KIND), with Liev Schreiber (SALT) as Vincent the lead astroboy, Romola Garai as his curvy adjutant Lane and Olivia Williams (THE GHOST WRITER) as veteran hard-nosed geologist Kim.

Movie bucks convention immediately as Vincent and Lane await Kim in a manned rover. Vincent has some taut words with Kim outside, who is resistant to stopping her experiment and getting back in the rover on orders from base camp. We feel a kind of sexual tension between grizzled Vince and the old gal in the field, like they’ve had a history, or are a current item on a rough patch. It’s how Hollywood writes characters: (reference THE ABYSS) two of the veteran characters have a rocky history but this mission will bring them together again– [needle scratch] But no. We find out Kim is not Vince’s girl, but just a pissy bitch. Period. Rather, there is a tentative romantic link between Vince and his co-driver Lane, but that doesn’t become apparent until later, and only implicitly, in the professional way they skirt around saying tender things to each other when they feel the end is near. It might be a small thing, but I was impressed the movie did not fall into the convention of making the lead female (Olivia Williams) the “property” of the lead male (Schrieber).

After that first example, I noticed many more bucking of conventions: no clunky exposition dialogue on who is who (the medic, the geologist, the pilot, etc. are all defined by their actions and posturing); the “zombie”-like condition of the infected scientists is explained biologically; trained human reactions to stressful conditions, rather than overacting Because It’s Space; astronaut helmets worn outdoors, rather than specious rationalizations on Why We Can Now Breathe On Mars; the stars die in arbitrary order; adherence to orbital mechanics; no guarantee of a happy ending, and so on…

The Last Baseball Days On Mars

The expedition’s biologist is the first to be infected, turning him into a – for want of a better word – zombie. The infected people resemble the modern cinematic version of the “zombie” – but they are not. The Martian bacteria kills its hosts and animates their dead bodies (giving them the illusion of life) in order to pursue and infect other bodies, like any virus. It’s no different than our own DNA, creating in us the desire to spread it for the species’ sake. (It’s not “evil,” it’s just one mode of genetic perpetuation.) So the movie bases its “monsters” and their motivations on a biological plot device. Yet if perceived incorrectly, this aspect of LAST DAYS oozes low-budget SciFi Channel. (And that “zombie” that uses a power drill on another guy’s stomach is not really “trying to infect him” but openly trying to kill him! Why don’t zombie infections cause power math or Gumby Flower Arranging?)

LAST DAYS takes itself very seriously, with excellent production values, authentic set design and seamless CGI. Ratcheting tension, taut soundtrack and energetic performances, with Liev providing a solid hunk of man to depend on through adversity.

LAST DAYS evokes far superior movies (2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, ALIEN, MOON, JOHN CARPENTER’S THE THING, ALIENS – especially when Vince crawls through that duct like Bishop), which may be its downfall – you just can’t make a regular good old-fashioned space thriller these days without evoking what came before. And its title waxes elegiac – like the tale should carry more weight. And maybe it could have: there is short shrift given to the fact that the infecting bacteria – is LIFE. Once it is identified, survival priority is that our heroes eradicate it from their crewmates and vicinity; but the fact that it is THE discovery that lends historical import to the mission itself is lost in the Running and Screaming.

Another reason LAST DAYS scores low with viewers is that we’ve been conditioned to accept “up” endings after suffering through tragedy vicariously with the stars, and LAST DAYS’ ambiguous “down” ending negates its good points in one fell swoop. We are that provincial. Waaah! It’s not what we’re used to. We’re babies with closed minds.

If it’s not Life As We Know It, we don’t wanna know it…

END

Angels In The Outhouse.

Angel Gabriel comes to Earth to extract a soul and destroy heaven. Like the catholic religion, THE PROPHECY is confused as hell.

A spine-shivering opening sequence: camera pans down on a lone figure standing over a charred skeleton – of what appears to be a human with wings, bird-like appendages scorched into the ochre stone ground. The figure narrates of a war in heaven… uh, okay, you’re losing me. The figure is Eric Stoltz, looking like Jesus (as usual, but playing Angel Simon), and his final words – as his pupils change from all-black to peachy – are, “I never thought the war would happen again.” After a few scenes, Stoltz would disappear from the story like sanity from christianity.

Acolyte Thomas (Elias Koteas) prostrates himself before some child-rapers– I mean, priests, to take his final vows of pedophilia– I mean, priesthood, when he is accosted by visions of priestly sexual pleasures– I mean, torment. He screams and goes home to become a detective instead. Now he starts narrating, “Some people lose their faith because heaven shows them too little, but how many lose their faith because heaven shows them too much?” I’d wager: zero. Because it’s not a case of “faith” – if heaven kept showing you visions, you’d have TOTAL FAITH in its reality; but he is confusing “faith” with “approval” or “endorsement.” He doesn’t enjoy the visions, but how is that in any way tied to believing they exist? If you believe they are, in fact, coming from heaven, then BOY have you got faith. Ironically, now I’ve lost all faith in the movie. In the first five minutes, writer-turned-director Gregory Widen (in his only directorial effort) proves he is clueless, and directing in limbo. You’ve got one hour and 25 more minutes to fill Gregory. Let fly the holy shit.

Feverish talk of Gabriel (Christopher Walken, talents wasted) creating two hells, “and that’s one too many.” So sayeth Lucifer (Viggo Mortensen, garbed in black clothes and blacker puns). Inane talk of a soul that Angel Simon hid in a little girl, Mary (Moriah Shining Dove Snyder), that Gabriel pursues, apparently having to “rip her apart” to get it. But, uh, when the soul went IN, there was no wetwork; why not extract it the same way? And isn’t a soul intangible; does one really need to rip through physical organs to get it? Two minutes after this incognizant statement, Gabriel boasts to the two people trying to stop him, Thomas and Katherine (Virginia Madsen, protector of Mary), “I’m an angel! I kill firstborns on their momma’s watch, I turn cities into salt…” Well, why are you having such a problem with two humans punching you like girls? Why even bother talking to them?

Religious-toned movies like THE PROPHECY would be far more enjoyable and respectable if there weren’t constant inconsistencies and contradictory rationalization in line after line of dialogue, in scene after scene. It’s about Catholicism – oh, that explains it… Like every priest who has to act like he really believes the guff he’s dribbling at the altar, THE PROPHECY is as scatterbrained as it is unholy and irreligious.

Explosion. Cops load the presumed-dead Gabriel into the back of their cruiser. Katherine and Thomas beseech the cops to cuff the presumed-dead man in the back. Cops humor them by cuffing Gabriel. Next scene, Katherine and Thomas drive by the shattered police car, both cops bloodied and dead on the road. Now why isn’t Gabriel using that kind of power on Katherine and Thomas?

In one scene, Gabriel puts his hand to the forehead of a nurse and says, “Shh.” She’s out like a light. There’s another power he could have used on Katherine and Thomas. Is this guy just toying with everyone like a Bond Villain?

Viggo Lucifer wants to defeat Gabriel because he doesn’t want Gabriel’s nuveau hell interfering with his own Original And Best Hell (or as some biblical scholars call it, Hell Classic), so he makes a deal with Katherine to help the humans (whom he calls “talking monkeys”). It’s as pathetic as two cover bands arguing in the parking lot of a rock venue, “We’re the better Boston Tribute band!” “Nah-uh! You don’t even do the Smokin’ solo correctly!” “Yeah, well, you don’t even have a keyboardist, so how you gonna do that solo on guitar?!”… Hell is already on Earth.

But what does Lucifer care if there are two hells? He says he wants heaven to reopen. Really? But doesn’t he get more business if heaven is closed to the public? How do you “close” heaven anyway? Is there a CLOSED sign on the pearly gates? Is there a street blocked off by divine orange cones that you drive around and then end up in purgatory instead?

Katherine flees with Mary to a Native American reservation/refuge. Because Indians are “spiritual,” see?

And Gabriel follows in a taxi. Apparently, he needs zombie Amanda Plummer to drive him around because he “can’t drive.” Uh, Mr. director, you are joking, right? Explain how he appears everywhere at will? Oh, that Uber account. Waitaminute, he can “turn cities to salt” – how about employing that kind of willpower to some driving lessons? Jesus Fucking Christ!

Gabriel finds it hard to attack Mary in the sweat lodge, so I guess the Native American religion is the right one. He proclaims: “I’ve come to feed on the guts of your little Mary!” I wonder what kind of nutrition angels gain from human guts.

Lucifer eventually kills Gabriel physically by tearing his heart out. I guess he couldn’t do that in the beginning and save us the whole charade of plotting with Katherine and whining about two hells and everything… because?

At the conclusion of battle, Thomas and Katherine are all bloody. He starts kissing her– Hey, hang on, buddy! I know we’ve been running from danger and beaten up by angels and seen the skies riven in fury together, but who exactly said we were an item?

A flesh-crawling voiceover about faith and souls and other crap ends this irrelevant, contradictory, ludicrous, witless prayer for the stupid, made by talking monkeys.

END

Just dropped in – to see what condition my condition was in…

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
–John Milton, Paradise Lost.

What a beautiful, sophisticated, mind-leveling thriller! SHUTTER ISLAND is not “scary,” but creepy, disturbing and filled with enough tension and intrigue to drown a plush toy.

1954: Detective Teddy Daniels (Leo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) on a mission to Shutter Island, an institution for the criminally insane, to investigate the disappearance of a female murderer. The head warden Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) outlines the mystery “as if she evaporated through the walls.”

As Teddy carries out his investigation, things start to fall out of place more readily than they fall into it, and events start to lead Teddy to the conclusion that everyone is conspiring to let this dangerous criminal disappear without helping him locate her. Why then, was he brought here? And why can’t he leave? At first, it’s because a raging storm cuts off the ferry service. And then…well…

SHUTTER ISLAND conjures those fears of walking into a psyche ward and not being able to walk out again, because people start treating YOU as insane. Didn’t we learn anything from ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST? Teddy arrived with his partner Chuck; halfway through his stay, Dr. Cawley begins asking him, “What partner? You came here alone.”

One of the characters nails the paradox: “People tell the world you’re crazy, and all your protests to the contrary just confirm what they’re saying. Once you’re declared insane, then anything you do is called part of that insanity; any reasonable protests are ‘denial,’ any valid fears are ‘paranoia’…”

Ruffalo is enjoyable as always, bringing a breezy humor to what could have turned into a darker role; Max von Sydow brings enough dark for everyone as a foreboding old doctor; even Elias Koteas, a prisoner whose face looks like it was put together by Victor Frankenstein, isn’t as scary as von Sydow; Patricia Clarkson makes an intriguing appearance as a woman hiding out in a cave, who may just be who Teddy is looking for. Or she may just be a figment of his imagination. Or our imagination. Or maybe we’re just watching INCEPTION and need to stop kidding ourselves that they’ll let us out of here alive…

From a novel by Dennis Lehane, Martin Scorsese directs – or should that be “misdirects”? – brilliantly, never revealing enough information to give away the game, yet egging us on with just enough to tie us into a straightjacket. SHUTTER ISLAND is a Hitchcockian mind-bender that springs such a head trip in its last few minutes that you will watch it again immediately with completely new eyes. And you will see every clue hidden subtly in plain sight.

Further, deponent sayeth not.

END

Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Idiocy.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
— Carl Sagan.

Someone’s been reading Whitley Strieber’s Communion. And believing it.

There are two kinds of hoaxes. The First Kind catches the public off guard with its ersatz authenticity (Piltdown Man, Orson Welles’s broadcast of War Of The Worlds, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT); the Second Kind requires but a minimal amount of rational thought to dispel its idiotic fakery. Olatunde Osunsanmi‘s film THE FOURTH KIND – is the Second Kind.

Full marks to Osunsanmi for getting it done, though: it’s hard work in Hollywood moving any project from conception to completion and he not only scored funding for his outdated, tired concept of extraterrestrial alien abduction, but also A-List stars to pretend to be abducted. He goes to great pains to stamp it with authenticity: names bleeped out, faces blurred, filmstock doctored to look like vidcam footage, bad angles – and then makes one fatal mistake…

He tells us it’s a movie. His lead characters tell us they are acting in a movie version of real events. Say wha–? Ironically, Osunsanmi thinks this pre-empting of our skepticism will make his fiction The First Kind. Instead, he shoots himself in the anal probe.

THE FOURTH KIND starts annoying us from its first frames, as Milla Jovovich walks toward the camera way too seriously for anyone with her do-me eyelashes and starts talking directly to the audience, telling us she will be portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler, while a title card appears, alerting us: “Milla Jovovich (actor).” To add to the irritation, it looks like an MTV VJ monologue.

Firstly, Jovo, you’re way too pretty to be Abigail Tyler (whom we see in “real footage” looking like a bloodless zombie), which raises another problem, in two parts:

1) you’re too sexy for me to care about paranormal events;
2) you’re too sexy for me to take you seriously.

Close Encounters of The Kind Cuke

When Will Patton appears in a sheriff’s car, we take it for granted he’s the sheriff in this movie – until Osunsanmi blows our contact-high with the title card: “Will Patton as Sheriff August.” In any film – even bad ones – our suspension of disbelief at least concedes that the actors ARE the people they’re playing, but if we keep getting told they’re actors, how do we invest our emotions in them? When Abigail (Milla Jovovich, actor) is hysterical over her daughter being kidnapped, after maintaining throughout the movie that she is just acting, now you want us to be concerned that she’s ‘acting’ hysterical? You can’t have it both ways, Osunsanmi!

One glance at the credits will reveal “The Real Dr. Abbey Tyler” is played by bedraggled Charlotte Milchard. (Yes, an actor too!) She appears in leached footage telling an interviewer (director Olatunde Osunsanmi – playing an interviewer named Olatunde Osunsanmi!) about her hypnosis experiments on residents of Nome, Alaska, and how those rednecks having seizures on her couch “proved” they were abducted by space aliens. She’s got the video to prove it. No, not video of them being abducted – video of them having seizures.

Royt…

The concept is ripped directly from Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book Communion – an autobiographical account of the author “remembering” being abducted by extra-terrestrials when he was put under hypnosis. When I was a kid, that book terrified me for its portrayal of otherworldly things that I, as a young person, could never hope to understand or experience; now, it’s not the book that terrifies me – it’s the adults who believe it’s true.

Split-screen during hypnosis sessions, showing ‘actors’ on one side and ‘real’ footage on the other, with ‘actual audio’ of Abigail Tyler. Which raises the most obvious issue: If they’ve got the REAL FOOTAGE, why bother with reenactments? What could be more disturbing, more authentic than the real thing?

Of course, even the ‘real’ footage is created by Osunsanmi, with its audio dialogue matching the actors’ dialogue in the ‘reenactment’ footage word for word – a perfect feedback loop of prosthetic-limb-sniffing stupidity.

If Osunsanmi wanted to scare youngsters and ET abduction knuckleheads, why couldn’t he simply tell us he’s showing as much actual footage that exists and then providing dramatizations also?

Abigail’s husband was killed mysteriously; apparently stabbed on their lover’s bed by an alien, no clues left behind. We later find out that he committed suicide, which is plausible for two reasons:

1) it explains why she was never arrested as a prime suspect in his murder;
2) he was married to HER.

Will Patton as Sheriff August even shows Abigail (Mila Jovovich, actor) photo evidence of the suicide and she refuses to believe it. Interviewer (Olatunde Osunsanmi, actor) asks The Real Dr. Abigail Tyler (Charlotte Milchard, actor, playing The Real Dr. Abigail Tyler), “How do you expect me or the audience to respect your credibility over anything else you’ve said?” She answers, “They weren’t hallucinations. It’s hard to face the truth.” How very Christian of her: even in the face of evidence, believe the fantasy. It’s almost like she’s an actor in a movie pretending that something is real when it’s not.

When one of Abigail’s patients (who suffers an inordinately violent seizure on her couch – and therefore must have been abducted real good) goes home and shoots his family (in more ‘real’ footage split-screened with asinine dramatizations), only Will Patton as Sheriff August dares to ask the pertinent question, “Without hypnosis, would he have killed his family?” Because if you truly believed the bullshit art of hypnosis is real, then it follows that human behavior could be adversely affected by it, which means you are admitting to being at least partly responsible for murder. But the fact that Abigail continues to remain free of custody means that no one is taking her little vocation or her claims seriously.

This raises ANOTHER question: if the city of Nome has established that Abigail’s husband suicided, it means they consider her extraterrestrial claims bogus, which means they are allowing a known delusional hypnotherapist to continue practicing in their town, and are derelict in their duties to protect the populace. Who is regulating these “doctors” – actors?!

Actor Elias Koteas plays Abel Campos, Abbey’s confidante and resident skeptic. Every ET abduction tale has a resident skeptic (like a gay beard or something) to allow ET lunkheads to pretend they really are considering the scientific side of abduction theories. But these skeptics are about as dedicated as gay chicks in Hollywood movies that go hetero at the drop of a trou.

Abigail plays us recordings of aliens speaking through her under hypnosis, in a dead Sumerian tongue. They say things like, “I am god,” “I am father,” “I am savior,” trying to hitch their wagon to Erich von Däniken’s Ancient Astronaut theories. So I guess if you speak with a basso intonation in a foreign language – you must have direct contact with extra-terrestrials! Now we’re at a level of stupidity that would make von Däniken proud.

…all of the “evidence” that a lot of people are willing to accept as “proof” of such phenomena is pure garbage. And 1 million pieces of garbage don’t add up to “evidence.” They just add up to a pile of garbage a million pieces high.
— blog comment, RationalResponder.

Redneck voiceover testimonials close the movie: “I saw somethin’ flyin’ with 20 red lights on it.” Well, that IS the technical definition of an Unidentified Flying Object. And guess what? YOU don’t have the authority to identify it. It’s being done on a military level far above your pay grade and small mind. Sighting that UFO didn’t prove how vast the universe is with its extraterrestrial technologies, it proves how insignificant YOU are when it comes to terrestrial technology.

I wish I was abducted while I watched this movie. Would’ve saved me two hours of my life, with the added bonus of being anal probed.

END

So silly it’s scary.

THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT is advertised as “the most terrifying movie ever made.” It is. If you’re five.

A family moves into a haunted house in Connecticut. Stupid things happen. The End.

Okay, okay, so you want some evidence…

Right outa the gate: “Based On True Events.” This phrase has become as meaningless as “whiter whites” or “bolder flavor.” We wonder where “based” ends and “true events” begins. But in the case of this movie – about a real house in Connecticut claimed haunted by the Snedeker family – we know it is untrue from the outset. This is not a war tale or a biography – this is about a “haunting”… and Victoria, there’s no such thing as ghosts.

For the sake of all the puling Christians who wish to believe in ghosts – even though it goes against their other supposedly Christian beliefs – let’s take it that disembodied souls DO exist. Now… it’s a good thing a belief in ghosts comes with the package deal of belief in ghost CLOTHING. Ain’t it considerate of spirits in all horror movies to wear the ghost apparel of the time period, and not embarrass anyone by appearing stark bollocks nekkid?

And still you want more?… but who are you to ask for evidence when you believe in “possession,” “haunting,” “angels,” “gods”? All without evidence.

Sara Campbell (Virginia Madsen) narrates the opening, with such an overused cliché, my head nearly exploded, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Just as my blood pressure was leveling out, she hits us with, “Everyone knows the feeling of having a sick child. You feel like there’s something pulling on him from The Other Side…” Uh, your boy has cancer, woman. If the doctors who diagnosed him put bones through their noses and chanted over him due to cancer being supernatural, I’m sure you’d have them committed.

The Campbell family moves into the Connecticut house to be closer to the cancer treatment center (even though cancer is apparently supernatural and should be treated by a witch doctor), and discover the house used to be a funeral home where the residing undertaker, instead of embalming the bodies and letting them rest, would experiment with them in the basement, using his son the medium (Erik Berg) to conjure their ectoplasm.

All this backstory is seen in visions by Cancer Boy (Kyle Gallner) and then corroborated by his sexy cousin (Amanda Crew, whose only purpose is a montage exposition of the mortuary while looking like she’s just been taken roughly from behind). For people superstitious enough to believe cancer is “something pulling from The Other Side,” the family sure takes the news calmly. And keep living there.

Oh, and apparently, ectoplasm is flammable (no wonder, since it looks like the finest Oriental silks), burning everyone to death at one séance. And The Superstitious Rulebook sez that the psychic boy who vomited the flammable material should appear as “charred” in visions (until Happily Ever After is attained, whereupon he should appear unburned).

Reliable character actor, Elias Koteas (as a cancer-afflicted priest), explains the asinine theory of Cancer Boy’s visions: most people cross over quickly to the other side, but being on the border of Death, Cancer Boy can see “the other side.” Royyyt…. And how does that explain the rest of the healthy family’s visions?….

Sara finds old 19th century photos of past tenants (like Nicole Kidman does in THE OTHERS), chairs pile up (POLTERGEIST), doors slam and people float (THE EXORCIST), stray sounds, birds indoors, windows slam (AMITYVILLE HORROR), ghosts suddenly appear and are kind enough to bring their orchestra stabs (any horror movie you’d care to mention); the ectoplasm bit would be kinda original if GHOSTBUSTERS didn’t spew it first; modern filmic techniques like speeded-up film and missing frames, as we’ve seen in THE RING, THE GRUDGE, SILENT HILL; and of course – The Cliché’s Cliché – people walk into dark basements without turning on the lights.

Then things start to get really scary, as Martin Donovan tries to act. He’s Peter Campbell, the dad, whose backstory of drunkenness gives him license to one day be mean and vicious unconvincingly. It was the spirits’ fault… heh, get it? If you’re going to attribute a physical disease like cancer to the supernatural, why not go all the way? The spirits were pulling Peter “from the other side” – yeh, the other side of the BAR. Every little thump and creak and slamming door becomes a portent of evil. Oh my god! – did you hear the wind in the trees? – the dead trying to speak!…

Cancer Boy smashes the walls and dead bodies fall out – this, we are told, is what the spirits wanted. So their bodies could find rest. Uh, I guess being piled up in a wall is somehow more uncomfortable for a dead person than being buried in suffocating soil. And in Connecticut, apparently decomposed bodies don’t smell, so no one could’ve guessed the walls were packed with them for decades.

But if these spirits can manipulate doors and chairs, why not grab a pickax and get their own bodies out? Talk about lazy bones.

Sara prays to God to keep her son alive – then it all gets as confusing as christianity likes to keep it: She rails at God, “You can’t have my son!” In other words, she’s gone from compliantly being a servant of her deity, asking It to grant her wish, to shouting It down angrily. So the deity you pray to for every little car breakdown and stomach problem, whom you believe is keeping you safe every time you pray to It, whom you believe grants your “prayers” when things go right; you now deign to deny this same powerful deity Its wishes? How dare you? Anyway, your God created all these ghosts, right? God created cancer, right? Maybe your deity is just working in Its vaunted Mysterious Ways.

Father Elias pulls out a cross made of iron, extemporizing, “Iron defends from evil; it’s no accident prisons have iron bars.” Unless I remember that from bible studies, I’m pretty sure he’s freestylin’ now… “fire to unbind the spirits…” Yep, definitely freestylin.’

The finale is as big and fiery and Hollywood as possible, which I’m sure happened in real life in Connecticut, after which, we are informed, “Matt Campbell’s cancer disappeared and he made a full recovery.” I’m sure it had nothing to do with his treatment, or the fact that many cancers go into remission for no apparent reason.

Also: “the house was rebuilt and resold. No other occupants have complained of any disturbing manifestations.” Of course they haven’t! Nothing was there in the first place.

But I think the filmmakers are missing the bigger picture: The Snedekers found the cure for cancer – exorcism!

The power of Christ compels you!
The power of Christ compels you!
The power of Christ compels you!

END

More powerful than a case of gout…

Youth is wasted on the Pitt.

For the longest time, I held off on watching this movie because I thought it would be as depressing as rain on a Monday morning. I was wrong. It’s worse; like seeing police lights in your rearview mirror, like finding your lover in bed with someone else, like watching an AMERICAN IDOL winner attempt a career in music… THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is nauseatingly painful.

David Fincher (SE7EN, FIGHT CLUB) directs – no wonder it’s so disturbing – from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

1918: At the end of WWI, a boy is born to Thomas Button (Jason Flemyng), the mother dying in labor. The baby Benjamin Button is somehow age-wrinkled and scares the pants off Thomas, who leaves Benjamin on the doorstep of a senior’s retirement home, where Queenie the caregiver (Taraji P. Henson) adopts him.

As the boy gets older, he gets “younger,” that is, even though he looks like a wizened old prune at age seven, his mind is that of a seven-year-old. During this period, Benjamin befriends a young girl named Daisy, even though, from an outsider view, it looks like a dirty old man cultivating an agenda with a seven-year-old girl.

Disturbing.

Benjamin grows (i.e. gets younger) until he is Brad Pitt, and Daisy becomes Cate Blanchett. Somewhere in the middle of her aging and his youthing, they move into an apartment together and do the nasty continually.

They even birth a child, normal in every way, until Benjamin (considering his bizarre fate) leaves Daisy without a word one morning.

Depressing.

Benjamin spends much of his screentime traveling the world and having non-sequitur adventures that have no bearing on the main theme of his horrifying brain malfunction. It’s like FORREST GUMP for opposite-aging freaks.

The filmmakers aim for relevancy by inserting “life messages” into Benjamin’s travels, but these messages of “power over one’s destiny” are unoriginal tropes.

The aging makeup is seamless and we never question the actors are doctored. The movie-making process is actually more transparent:

For the sake of the narrative to flow, characters talk to themselves, or do voiceover, with Daisy’s daughter (Julia Ormond) reading Benjamin’s diary for most of the movie, doing that annoying movie device of turning to pictures in the diary that reveal exact moments she is describing.

And that’s not even as contrived as the overwrought coincidence sequence in which Daisy breaks her leg and derails her dancing career – a woman missing a taxi, a man not setting his alarm, someone leaving one minute later than usual, blah blah – when she could’ve just as easily been hit by a truck, rather than Rod Serling’s TWILIGHT ZONE of coincidences.

In hospital, Benjamin visits Daisy, who hasn’t seen him in years. She exclaims, “My God, look at you! You’re perfect!” Well, he is Brad Pitt.

Jason Flemyng and Brad Pitt sit down to a beer, as same-aged father and son, reminiscing about SNATCH, that other movie they did together where no one could figure what was happening either.

Brad Pitt: too sexy for Time.

Benjamin’s autumn years get distressing again, as elderly Daisy cares for him when he physically reverts to a tiny, pink, smooth baby – with his mind at the stage of old-age dementia. It is disturbing to watch these scenes of Daisy cradling a baby trying to mouth something (as babies do) but imagining it is Benjamin Button, losing the power of speech, even as he loses his powers of cognition.

Is this some metaphor for the fact that both extremes of age – very young and very old – are seemingly the same? That if you were to transplant the mind of an infant into the mind of a senile person, or vice versa, that outwardly they would exhibit the same mental deficiencies? That the brain’s capacity to hold information is like a bell curve – very young, it holds nothing, but information is going in; middle age, it is “full” and working at peak capacity; old age, information is filtering out, down to a point of nothing again with death…? It’s too disturbing to consider.

BENJAMIN BUTTON is geared for tragedy overload, but can we really feel pity for Benjamin Button? For a whole bump-ugly segment of his life, he got to be Brad Pitt. How many people can be that lucky?

END

If the movie career tanks, the guns are still firing for the underpant career.

Shooter is Sharp but Misses the Marky.

SHOOTER achieves that balance between action, political skullduggery, pretty orange explosions and Mark Wahlberg’s big guns (and I don’t mean his military sniper rifles), which notches it a cut above most political thrillers of its paranoid ilk – until its pat ending.

Now that’s a shooter!

With his shrapnel-explosive performance in THE DEPARTED, Wahlberg shrugged off the last vestiges of Marky Mark, so from now on – in deference to this bona fide Actor – I respectfully abstain from any allusions to wigga rap, funky bunches and exposed underpant. (But we’ve still got his biceps and obliques – give a reviewer something to work with!)

Wahlberg is patriot Bob Lee Swagger, USMC sharpshooter, able to hit moving targets over a mile away, who leaves the corp disillusioned after a morally-ambiguous mission in Ethiopia goes all hela-snafu. After three idyllic years isolated in panoramic mountains with his big dog, a copy of the 9-11 Commission Report, and web-surfing to “see what propaganda they’re feeding us now,” he receives an unannounced, unwelcome visit from Colonel Isaac Johnson (Danny Glover, lisping badly through his dentures – he really is gettin’ too old for this shit), who wants to hire Swagger for a unique mission – to deter a presidential assassination by scoping out potential methods on how a sharpshooter of Swagger’s caliber may be able to pull it off.

Though we could hear a frame-up coming like an eighteen-wheeler with a bad clutch, our boy Swagger obliviously swaggers into it. If his mind is soft, his body is still hard (calm down, ladies!), and he fields two bullet wounds and a green FBI agent (Michael Peña – last seen under a WORLD TRADE CENTER) to escape narrowly with his life, while a whole government arm deploys to manhunt him when they should be saving hostages in Iran or fixing potholes on my street.

Peña is Nick Memphis, who refuses to accept the “official” FBI version of Swagger’s assassination attempt, due to inadvertently being bitch-slapped by Swagger himself during his escape. His jigsaw construction of the clues leads him to ally with Swagger, who has in turn allied with Sarah (Kate Mara), the girlfriend of a dead fellow soldier. Which kinda annoys for its cliché. Let’s not kid ourselves – when the “ally-with-the-dead-buddy’s-ex” scenario arises in a movie, the girl is ALWAYS single and it ALWAYS leads to panty – I think the first clue might have been when Sarah opens her door to the filthy, terrified, near-death Swagger (who is no more than a mild acquaintance), dressed in nothing but see-through top and undies, not bothering to close her robe. Then we just sit back and wait for Wahlberg to get the guns out… which he does, as she dresses his wounds, which in movie parlance is just another method of foreplay.

Swagger and Memphis uncover the all-purpose “corrupt government plot” behind Swagger’s setup, with quite obvious digs at the George W. administration along the way. (At this juncture – 2007, four years into an unwinnable war after two years in an unwon war – it’s quite easy to dig and get a collective amen.) When Colonel Johnson lisps, “Do we allow America to be ruled by thugs?” Swagger replies, “Some years we do.” Oh, snap!

Directed by Antoine Fuqua, from Jonathan Lemkin‘s screenplay of Stephen Hunter‘s novel, Point of Impact, Swagger’s quest terminates Rade Sherbedgia and Elias Koteas as bad guys along the ladder, Ned Beatty eventually uncovered as the corrupt senator atop the ladder, reveling in the nation’s political audacity and his perceived impunity, “We live in a country where the Secretary of Defense can go on national tv and say it’s about freedom and not about oil.” “The bosses know. We know their bosses know. The problem is in admitting that the leaders know.” With his words, this movie might as well be handing out subpoenas to Rumsfeld, Bush, Rove, Cheney and Wolfowitz.

It is astounding to realize that the definition of Patriot has flip-flopped to someone who DOES own a copy of the 9-11 Commission Report. Not ten years ago, anyone surfing the web, mumbling about propaganda would have been considered treasonous. But Swagger is painted as the reddest, whitest and bluest Patriot in this film – BECAUSE he questions the government. Illustrates how adversely the George W. Klan has affected the United States: that the HERO of a popular movie – not “anti-hero” or “ambiguous villain” – can criticize the administration so loudly and meet with vindication rather than stultification.

But this is where the film meanders into “We Can Dream, Can’t We?” status. The conspiracy reaches to such high government offices that Beatty’s character is right to contemptuously sneer about one sharpshooter not being able to curb it. But after a faux-climax that does not payoff (a grand, panoramic shootout in snowy mountains) and a military hearing which also does not payoff (where Swagger demonstrates his big gun – the one that can counter the earth’s Coriolis effect with its power, not the one that can make ladies drop trou when body-oiled), we know that a REAL climax is coming, one of insensible – yet Eastwood-ian avenger – proportions. (Cue pretty orange explosions.)

It doesn’t seem to matter to the film-makers that Swagger’s methodology is only the corrupt administration’s Decider-like tyranny and Might-Is-Right anarchy turned back on themselves – which therefore does not raise the Hero morally above his opponents but abandons him right amongst them. The paradox is that the parochial W. Bush administration regards only those people who support and behave like them (i.e. morally bankrupt) as the only true Patriots.

So after SHOOTER succinctly sends the disheartening, yet intrinsically correct message that you can’t clean up the insidious corruption amongst elected officials with a big gun – Bob Lee Swagger does just that.

Now that’s a Patriot.

END