Pearl Before Swine.

In garish detail and stunning investigative probing, PEARL HARBOR digs deep below the surface of the gasoline embargoes and jingoistic fomenting and reveals exactly what this WWII conflict was all about – the love triangle between three young American Models.

You see, Ben loves Kate. And Kate loves Ben. But Ben’s best friend, Josh, also likes Kate. And there’s a war with Germany or something happening. Ben is a hot pilot, and reports to somewhere overseas that is Not America for hot dogfights that make his biceps thrum with the need to hold Kate.

Ben is shot down and reported Missing In Action back in the United States, a land where every waking hour is spent looking to get laid (if you were a nurse like Kate) or looking to get laid (if you were a flyboy like Josh). So when Ben is reported missing, Kate cannot face the next five long days wondering if she will ever get laid again, so she falls in love with Josh.

Now Josh loves Kate. And Kate loves Josh. But Ben comes back. And he hits Josh for falling in love with Kate. Then they have a beer. And then the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. The end.

Don’t even want to go into the real politics behind that Day of Infamy, December 7, 1941, when the Japanese launched a surprise attack that wasn’t really a surprise on the American Pacific Fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. God knows, director Michael Bay doesn’t.

Remember, if it weren’t for those young models in love, none of this woulda happened. Written with emotive overkill by Randall Wallace (BRAVEHEART, 1996, THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK, 1998), HARBOR reminds us of TITANIC (1997), where the insufferable love story sucked all the oxygen out of the movie until James Cameron redeemed himself with that magnificent CGI boat-tipping.

Michael Bay movies are like the women I date: beautiful but stupid. Discounting the three-way pap between Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale, PEARL HARBOR’s redeeming war scenes are why we go to the movies: fictional cinematography at its best! And by that I mean, this attack is not really happening, but onscreen, with CGI, models, mattes, process shots, etc., Bay has created Real War, scrappier and more authentic than every single war movie released before 1998. Spielberg never took to the air in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998) – he still holds the crown for best ground skirmishes – it takes Michael Bay’s sweeping cranes to now claim the crown for best air-to-sea battles and best dogfights. Affleck gets to fly a Spitfire – the coolest fighter plane ever – in rampaging skirmishes that put us so square in his hot pilot’s combat seat that we can feel the sweat puddling on the backs of our patriotic thighs.

The scenes of the stealth Japanese planes flying low over American farmers and people out enjoying the world, thinking the war was in some other country, look surreal enough now – imagine how it must have looked in 1941. The thunderous grumble of amassed Zero engines splitting the rural morning, each plane loaded with one bomb each, tilting low over fields and schools, under American radar, Bay’s characteristic American Blond Kids in slow motion below them.

The Pearl Harbor attack is launched with a tracking shot of a bomb loosed from a Japanese plane down to the USS Arizona, silently falling, then exploding and actually undulating the ship like a steel snake spasming. From there, the incredible realism of old school battle is more exhilarating than walking in on Kate Beckinsale sandwiched between Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett.

Bay and cinematographer John Schwartzman have such a knack for creating iconic images that even whilst we cringe at the melodramatic slomo and hero framing of certain scenes, they wring a tear as well, with their beautifully evocative composition. The art overshadows the story.

Cuba Gooding Jr. fires a big deck gun. Tom Sizemore runs around his airfield and swears. Jon Voight shucks off his Republican idiocy to play Democratic president, FDR with great empathy. Obvious that Bay believes HARBOR to be his MIDWAY (that 1976 war epic with A-Listers piled on A-Listers: Heston, Fonda, Coburn, Mitchum, Mifune, Wagner…), as he populates his film with numerous “names” in smaller roles: Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Garner, Mako, Colm Feore, Dan Aykroyd, Ewen Bremner…

Beckinsale – ever the female double standard bearer – asks boxer/cook, Cuba Gooding Jr., “So why do you have to fight with your fists to get respect?” completely forgetting that her own boyfriend is gunning down strangers in planes to keep her respect, with his big Spitfire-shaped penis.

Kate tells Josh as he’s going off to war, “I love you and I’ll be here waiting for you when you come back.” Of course, that’s provided you don’t go MIA and my thigh twitch compels me to turn to the Next Best Thing…

Cuba looked pretty hot on that big gun…

END

Arma Dyin’ Here.

Slomo Poffy

Imagine the worst pain and suffering ever. That’s how it’s gonna feel at the end of the world, the mythical Armageddon. Coincidentally, you can feel that exact same pain and suffering by watching Michael Bay‘s ARMAGEDDON.

ARMAGEDDON is a painful exercise in squeezing every cliché possible into 150 minutes of swooping camera moves, slomo shots of blond American farm kids, nauseous flag-waving and the movie’s heroes walking abreast towards the camera, with smoke billowing in the background in slow motion. At least twenty times.

ARMAGEDDON is also about an asteroid (“the size of Texas”) on a collision course with Earth, which only Bruce Willis’ team of oil-drillers can destroy, able to perform the requisite deep-core planting of a nuclear device on the asteroid to blow it up. You can’t train actual astronauts to do technical stuff like that, no way.

While a slightly perverted subplot revolves around Ben Affleck pursuing Willis’ daughter, Liv Tyler, a cavalcade of B-stars makes A-holes of themselves in the middle background: Billy Bob Thornton, Steve Buscemi, Michael Clarke Duncan, William Fichtner, Will Patton, Owen Wilson, and trusty Chris Ellis (Deke Slayton in APOLLO 13, and forever cast as Some Guy In Mission Control in all these space films).

A movie with less science than STAR WARS (if that’s even possible), less physics than MOONRAKER (which had none), less credible operating procedures than CAPRICORN ONE (which faked them), and less street cred than DEEP IMPACT (which preceded this film by two months). And – of course – ripping off Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov so bluntly and banally, the filmmakers should be roasted over an open spit when they make that big science fiction convention in the sky which Clarke and Asimov preside over.

Only one example of the thousands upon thousands of uneducated scenes should convince a viewer what an eye-candy fool’s joke ARMAGEDDON is: two space shuttles are launched simultaneously – okay, fine – but fifty feet apart? Just seeing them attain low Earth orbit together and jettisoning their Solid Rocket Boosters should give even the most “unscientific” bananahead (i.e. the filmmakers) an idea of why this was such a monkeybrain scene – the SRB’s are ejected via explosives which propel them away from each vehicle – into the flight path of any other vehicles in their vicinity. Of course, in the film, tragedy is averted by making the CGI SRB’s jettison AWAY from the path of the following shuttle. But anyone with common sense will look at this scene and realize what a brainless berk Michael Bay and his writers are for allowing it onscreen.

CAPRICORN ONE was an uneducated mess, but space movies made before the 90’s at least had True Ignorance on their side. The general public only knew so much about orbital mechanics and physics laws. Now there is NO EXCUSE for movies to treat outer space like a thrill ride at Six Flags. We’ve all seen footage of actual space shuttles in space – so how can Michael Bay’s shuttles fly around as if they’re in an atmosphere, following NO orbital mechanics, trajectories, or laws of physics. Why is there sound in space? Shouldn’t these people have their glare-shields down on EVA in sunlight?

We know all this via the very technology these movies flaunt, yet pretend to ignore, in order to serve the asinine plot.

Everyone in space shouting at each other like they’re actors doing something really hard and important – even though they’ve all got headset radios; everyone extolling information which should have been imparted in training (“you’re about to hit minimal gravity, so you might get nauseous” – thanks for telling me two seconds before I hit minimal gravity!); non-sequitur action, like Buscemi picking up a machine gun and firing arbitrarily, simply to cause concern for the characters (which I lost as soon as they started singing Leaving on a Jet Plane like the Oil Riggers Men’s Choir), rationalized as “space sickness.” THIS MOVIE is space sickness.

Every scene an epic moment waiting to happen, like Liv Tyler with her hand on a monitor after tearful goodbye to her father in space; camera pulls back and every single monitor in NASA is showing that same transmission – not like they have anything important to monitor, like the incoming space shuttle with a thousand malfunctions represented by all the white-hot Movie Sparks jumping off the consoles. And if the epic shot doesn’t happen, Michael Bay jumps on his Chapman crane and makes it happen, annoying inspirational music padding the faux-Six Flags thrill-ride-just-to-get-The-Shot.

Best line is when William Fichtner describes the other crashed shuttle as being “off the grid” and Buscemi retorts, “Off the grid?! What’re you, a freakin’ cyborg?!”

One redeeming factor of ARMAGEDDON is that it actually delineates what a “hero” is – for this society which tags foopball hooligans and people jumping out of buildings and army grunts doing their jobs as “heroes.” Bruce Willis stays behind to detonate the nuclear bomb. He is a hero because HE HAD THE OPTION NOT TO.

The two halves of the asteroid “miss the Earth by 400 miles” and around the globe everyone cheers, Chapman crane swooshing in ecstasy, blond American farm kids hugging their parents in slomo – with everyone once again ignoring the physics law that puts those pieces (each half the size of Texas, mind you) in orbit around Earth (unless they’re pulled out of orbit by another celestial body), which means, in Earth’s future, another flyby, another potential collision…

Let’s hope next time that ignorant human species is wiped out.

END

Just Another Con.

Nice mullet, Nic!

His pooch hairdo effectively takes attention away from his massively-developed arms and Kirk-body-oiled man-chest.

A prisoner plane, the CON AIR of the title, transporting the biggest bunch of cliched criminals this side of Blockbuster Screenwriting 101, is overrun by said archetypes, led by an exceptionally-maladjusted Malkovich. Elvis comes to the rescue in the form of morose Nicolas Cage (one of the “good” convicts – no rape, murder or listening to Hansen music – therefore the anti-hero), who eventually commandeers the craft and lands it ostentatiously on the Vegas strip amidst traffic.

Written by Scott Rosenberg (with that Blockbuster Screenwriting Guide on his lap): the twisted mastermind (John Malkovich), the quiet serial killer (Steve Buscemi), the Badd Mexx (Danny Trejo), the black guy (Ving Rhames), the gigantor redneck (M.C. Gainey), the gopher (Dave Chappelle), the sick con who is automatically regarded as “wrongfully jailed” simply because he’s sick and a friend of the Anti-Hero (Mykelti Washington), even the obligatory fruity gay guy). Simon West directs with the Michael Bay Handbook on his lap.

The great John Cusack is completely wasted as a Marshall pursuing the hijacked plane and bland Monica Potter has outdone herself – in a career of vapid, unconvincing roles, this is surely the best and blandest in her reel, as Cage’s wife, awaiting him in desperate ambivalence with a daughter who looks like she was cast five minutes before cameras rolled.

Everyone pretends to be really Hard (even the winsome Dave Chappelle!) and there are lots and lots and lots and lots of pretty orange explosions and guys diving in slow motion while shooting big guns, but ultimately this movie is just another excuse to land Nicolas Cage in Las Vegas.

So bad I accidentally grew a mullet.

END