The Boat, The Wave, The Snake.

One scene in POSEIDON will live with you long after you’ve dried off and found your land legs: Kurt Russell actually drowning. Literally. In a move that is half-Method/half-Madness, Russell lets his lungs purposely fill with water to achieve what looks like someone actually drowning. And actually drowns! It was arranged that lifeguards retrieve him before he went all the way – yet what a risk for a few seconds of disturbing realism! Where is that fine line that separates the spark of life from the nullity of death? He might have escaped from New York and LA, but could Snake Plissken actually escape Death itself?

POSEIDON is the well-made remake of THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972), with much more water and a lot less shouting.

After we meet the human-interest stories onboard, the titular ocean liner is capsized by a tidal wave and floats upside down, leaving those human-interest stories to battle their way to the bottom of the ship to escape through its hull, amidst explosions, rising seawater, and the two leads trying not to be the bottom in their uneasy macho alliance.

Starring Kurt Russell and Josh Lucas in the wet roles made famous by Ernest Borgnine and Gene Hackman shouting at each other. Lucas is kinda Hackman’s role, not a priest but just as randy, a professional gambler hunting a MILF in the form of Jacinda Barrett. Russell takes up the slack in the kinda-Borgnine role, though not husband to a hooker, but something far more psychologically damaging – father to a libidinous chick (Emmy Rossum), whom he is constantly blocking from having The Sex with her boyfriend, (Mike Vogel). He’s a former mayor, at one point, establishing his bona fides in a rescue, by claiming, “I used to be a fireman.” Yeh, we saw BACKDRAFT – but can you lift this frickin’ girder off my legs?! People are so stupid, they’d more likely trust you if you claimed to be Snake Plissken.

In the pathos Red Buttons role, Richard Dreyfuss, as a sad gay man (is that an oxymoron?) waiting for a call from his ex-lover on this New Year’s Eve. A bittersweet humor in his suicide attempt: forlornly stepping out onto the deck to make a call at midnight, no reply; he throws his phone overboard, steps to the railing, climbs with the intent to follow his phone… and sees the tidal wave in the distance. Here’s the funny part: he steps down from the railing. Uh, wouldn’t it have been easier to die by actually jumping into the tidal wave than going back into the ship and suffering bruises, blood, lungfuls of seawater, people kicking your face as they’re climbing over you and Republican anti-gay policies?

Kevin Dillon as Lucky Larry. With a personality as conceited as his name, yeah, we’re pretty much rooting for the tsunami. Singer with Black Eyed Peas and the ship band, Fergie, hugs Captain Andre Braugher during a fatal dunking. For them, there’ll be no morning after…

Some gruesome deaths when the ship capsizes, but none more personal and disturbing than that of Freddy Rodriguez (in the Roddy MacDowall role as the waiter); a seemingly un-human decision made by Dreyfuss to sacrifice Rodriguez. But we need to look past the “social” contract to basic human survival. Dreyfuss (complicit with everyone else) exhibited nothing that our species doesn’t exhibit every second of every day – selfishness – to ensure survival. So much for No Man Left Behind.

Director Wolfgang Petersen and screenwriter Mark Protosevich (from Paul Gallico‘s The Poseidon Adventure) have inserted more terrifying primal fear sequences than Irwin Allen’s ’76 blockbuster; like being caught in an air shaft while water is rising, a grate at the top that won’t open; or forced to fill a chamber with water to force its valve to open and let them through – not one sliver of air at the top of the chamber, waiting in solid liquid for the valve to clank open. And then there’s Kurt’s disturbing paroxysms gulping water to actually drown…

At one point, Josh Lucas does what Hackman did at the climax of POSEIDON ADVENTURE. He dives into a lake of fire. As I thought, he simply passed through the flames on the surface and swam under them. I thought Hackman would do the same thing back in ’72 – but why and how did he die at that moment? Was it the fall? Surely not the fire on the surface of the water. In that king of disaster movies, that was the real disaster – giving up Hackman to the flames. At least he went out doing what he did best – shouting at Ernest Borgnine.

END

Dying is Easy, Scriptwriting is Hard.

Ian Stone (Mike Vogel) keeps dying. Stalked by Stan Winston demon-thingy creations, he is killed at the same time every day, and then keeps waking in different lives with different professions.

THE DEATHS OF IAN STONE is an original premise, the first act, dynamite, as Vogel gets his Ewan McGregor on and tries to avoid being killed in creative ways. Because we cannot clearly see his demons, we presume there may be more than meets the metaphysical eye here and we are the heart in Ian Stone’s throat as he is pursued relentlessly.

No matter every new life of his, Jenny (Christina Cole) is always around, as Ian’s co-worker or girlfriend or neighbor, unaware she is living through multiple lives with him.

Unfortunately, the breakneck pace of this horror thriller cannot be sustained without some plodding exposition. Some old guy gives Ian the lowdown: the demons are Harvesters and they feed off people’s fear. They keep killing him because… well, this is where the illogic starts bleeding through the fabric of the writer’s nice blood-red cardigan.

At first, we hope there is redemption in the mythical allusions – in the form of a dominatrix-demon named after the Greek wife of Argonaut Jason, Medea (Jaime Murray) – before we realize writer Brendan Hood probably just named the villainess after his cat. Then DEATHS OF IAN STONE quickly degenerates into standard “monster” fare with latex facemasks, grumbling gore and supernatural “rules” spewed at us at lightning speed to reconcile all the physics laws being broken to serve the asinine plot.

Inexperienced director Dario Piana held a smacking hot property, but failed to follow through. Whereas the first act sang like a slayer’s scream, the third act quickly starts looking and feeling like a TV movie starring Eric Roberts. For example, the Harvesters in the first act were chilling; by the time Ian Stone turns into a Harvester himself, he looks like Eric Stoltz in MASK. Ironically, Ian Stone looks like the one with the mask on.

Even with all these rules shoved into our skulls at the last minute, no one explains why all the other Harvesters, when they change from people to monsters, lose their clothes, yet Ian Stone retains his edgy Runway Model shirt. (Well, so we can identify him from the others, of course – the edgy modelwear for the ladies who like bad boys.)

Turns out the Harvesters are after Ian’s girl! For reasons as equally inane and illogical as his being a Harvester. And after all the stalking and attempts on her life, when the Harvesters eventually acquire her, they don’t kill her immediately; they wait for Ian Stone aka Eric Stoltz to arrive and beat the special effects out of them.

After all, dying is easy. Comedy is hard.

END

Blair Witch meets Godzilla meets YouTube.

Big secret: what is Cloverfield? They kept the secret pretty well when this movie was in theaters.

Not much of a secret. It’s a monster. That does the Godzilla through Manhattan. The good thing about this banal ripoff is that it is never explained. If you’re waiting for the obligatory “radiation” or “extra-terrestrial” origin, it won’t come.

The monster goes “RAAARRGH!”, buildings get broke, people get dead. The End.

So what’s the rest of this writing? I got nothing better to do – and you’re pretty much in the same boat.

“Cloverfield” is the code name given to the patch of East Coast that has to be nuked to eradicate the monster threat. (And on the DVD, we see that the film-makers affectionately referred to the funny-looking, twenty-story monster as “Clover.” How cute.)

Movie opens with a bunch of New York college kids in a high-rise apartment, throwing a surprise party for one of their own who has scored a VP job overseas, leaving shortly. Was it too clever-clever foreshadowy that he was going to Japan?… You know, city of GODZILLA?

The Poffy of Liberty

The opening party scene is made to look as if it was done on a hand-held digital camera, operated by one of the douchebags at the party. So it’s choppy, shaky, amateurish and – here’s the teeth-grinding part – supposedly unscripted. Scenes of people interacting, giving “impromptu” testimonials, camera walking in on scenes in progress; reminds us of the grand opening wedding sequence in THE GODFATHER – only shit.

I kept thinking, “If this hand-held gimmick goes on for very much longer, I’m gonna start peeling my skin off.” It’s not that the kids are bad actors – they’re just bad “natural” actors. The irony in this age of YouTube and teens-filming-teen-bashings is that these kids can’t act like they’re NOT on camera!

Just as Brando raged onto the scene with The Method, overshadowing the “theatrical” actors of his day, now we have a new wave of “reality acting” insinuating itself into our culture, not necessarily “overshadowing” The Method, but carving a place for itself in certain types of media.

On film, unless you do it really well (Gary Oldman’s NIL BY MOUTH, Paul Greengrass’s UNITED 93), stick to The Method. These kids are, in effect, too trained in Method. They don’t look like they’re naturally reacting on a hand-held level – they look like they’re ACTING. And it screams inauthentic louder than the monster knocking down buildings.

Michael Stahl-David is the young VP, who, amongst the decimation, goes in search of his hot girlfriend despite her skyscraper leaning against another one; Jessica Lucas and Lizzy Caplan tag along; T.J. Miller is the douchebag who won’t stop filming even when his life depends on it – literally – and Odette Yustman is the hot gf.

Written by Dave Goddard, the hand-held format is ingenious in one way, as it provides exposition creatively, and only focuses on the action from the P.O.V. of these few kids, but all the little things start to bother: battery life – unlimited; audio – clear as Pro Tools can make it; the date stamp onscreen – whenever necessary, absent when intruding on the action…

…and it is not implausible that Douche should continue filming through all the adversity – we’re in the generation that does that, unmindful of consequences – but it’s implausible WHAT he films. For instance, when a screaming 20-story monster is rampaging one block away, in clear view, with soldiers firing on it, what sort of a retard would focus on his friends across the street?

For the movie’s purposes, the camera has to take in as much of the story as possible, whereas a real-life partying douchebag would no doubt be transfixed for all of this cam’s unlimited battery life by the skyscraper-sized terror right in front of him.

There is the iconic image of the decapitated Statue of Liberty – used in all the trailers. Question is: unless this thing came out of the water near Ellis Island, why would it make the tourist trip TO Ellis just to knock the head off that lady in the harbor?

The monster effects are extremely realistic, and its unique design was reasonably cool – but then it started dropping off insectoid creatures for the sake of the special effects techs who find it so easy to generate these things now (STARSHIP TROOPERS, KING KONG 2005, LOST IN SPACE 1998). Those little crab-like things were a continual annoyance. The movie was on its downslide at this point.

Then it really lost me – when it did that thing that all these teen movies do eventually – make unintelligence a favorable trait. The camera guy says, “Maybe the monster came from a crevasse under the ocean,” and one of the girls gives him a look like he’s talking Plutonian, whereupon this gutless dweeb immediately changes his wording: “I mean – a crevice.” Nice flip-flop, tool! Systematically driving down not only the intelligence level of the country, but the DESIRE to possess intelligence. How come no one ever retorts with, “I’m not using any words that aren’t in the English dictionary. What’s your problem, not educated enough?!”

Immediately on the heels of this stupidity, the chick who gave him the look criticizes him for being stupid!

This whole plot device of a guy going after his girl is wearing thin with me. After all the mundanity of a monster knocking over buildings, they dial it down to the level of boring chick-rescue movie, then dial it down further with the deplorable acting when we find the gf with a rebar beam through her shoulder and in the next scenes, she is raising her arms as if there isn’t a gaping wound through her torso. Oh, and that shoddy hand-held camera-work? It’s there for the whole nauseous movie! (I need a skin graft…)

Then the film-makers pretend like they’re blasting out on the edge of originality when they have all our stars die at the end. By that point, I was kinda glad.

Oh, did I ruin it for you?

END