If you get smart enough to read minds, you too can do this!

Dead on Arrival.

THE LAZARUS EFFECT, about a team of scientists trying to bring people back from the dead, ironically loses its effect when the person brought back from the dead starts killing people.

Talk about wasted opportunity! In the grand tradition of PET SEMATARY and FLATLINERS, documentarian David Gelb (on his first feature) directs a movie that thrums with solid ideas and philosophies, psychological terror and eeriness, up to the point when the objective of the movie is achieved – bringing someone back from the dead. Then, instead of all the tingling pathways the story could have pursued, the movie drops dead itself, devolving to a slasher film.

Mark Duplass (ZERO DARK THIRTY) heads a scientific team that includes his fiancé (Olivia Wilde, RUSH), Donald Glover (COMMUNITY) and Evan Peters (Quicksilver in X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. He’s wearing a Flash t-shirt here – didn’t think we’d notice, didja? Funnily enough, this movie was completed before X-MEN, only released afterwards. Make of that what you will). Hot redhead Sarah Bolger videocams.

They fail with a pig. They succeed with a dog. (Ah, tampering in DOG’S domain!)

Through a mishap, Fiancé dies during an experiment. Screenplayed sensibly up to that point, giving each character enough motivation to attempt an unauthorized “bringing back” of a human (ticking clocks, corporate takeovers, unrequited love triangles), movie then degenerates to zombie killer. We could see it coming a mile away when writers Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater (FANTASTIC FOUR 2015) foreshadowed which side of the afterlife issue they’re on – the wrong side.

Head scientist explains to Redhead about a chemical called DMT – which their reincarnation serum is based on – the most potent psychedelic on the planet, found in the human pineal gland. “Nobody knows why, but when you die, your brain floods your system with a massive blast of DMT. When you think you’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s just a big trip that you’re having.” (The fact this is a specious simplification is not relevant. In the world of this movie, the scientist has postulated a perfectly good physical explanation for the hallucinogenic euphoria you experience just before death.) Then Fiancé – a scientist herself, who is privy to the same evidence Scientist is – counters his pragmatic explanation with the idiocy that DMT is “to allow the soul to open doorways to other dimensions…” Where are you getting your evidence, Lady Scientist? Oh, no evidence – just a couple of gutless screenwriters appealing to the dumbass demographic that this movie will attract once word gets out it’s just a slasher film and not a true speculation on post-life animation.

LAZARUS EFFECT might have gone the way of a low rent EX MACHINA, but with that one lame speculation, we realize the movie’s task now is to illustrate “souls trying to open doorways” after they die. Y’know even that might have been tolerable, but why did they simply turn the reincarnated person into the Thing To Run From? If she’s so intellectually advanced after coming back from the dead (i.e. she can read minds, she can utilize 90% of her brain at once, she’s telekinetic), why doesn’t she do all the calculations for the DMT serum and figure the best way to make it work effectively? Or help the United Nations stop child abductions in Africa? Or close down all the undeserving-of-life computer hackers creating malware for the hell of it? I dunno – can you not find something more interesting than chasing people and killing them?

The actors do the best with what they’ve got and keep their conviction to their bitter ends, even though the smart dialogue and profundity is all tossed out the window after reincarnation is achieved. Filmmakers just didn’t care any more. One wonders why they went to so much trouble with the profound ideas and subplots (unrequited love, the university closing down their experiment, burning building backstory) if they were just aiming for Thing To Run From.

We know movie has degenerated to utter idiocy when Evolution is misunderstood and misrepresented yet again in a Hollywood movie (oh, like that’s a surprise!). “There’s a reason evolution happens slowly. Right now, her brain is doing things it was never meant to do, and it’s not taking millions of years, it’s taking minutes.” Yes, but that’s not “evolution” – that’s just ultra-fast development. Evolution cannot be applied to a solitary organism; evolution is a term applied to GROUPS OF ORGANISMS OVER TIME. Who cares, right? Just find a good hiding place.

Redhead is zombie chick’s final adversary – oh, woman empowerment time! And the hick who is adept at nothing defeats the scientist using 90% of her brain. In other words, hot redhead defeats chick whose brain is on fire.

Anyway, why bring people back from the dead? Like there’s not enough people on Earth already.

END

Money Is Time Is Life.

Time is money. Time is life. Time is everything IN TIME; a prescient concept underlying an enjoyable actioner that seems urgently plausible because we’re actually living it now.

Justin Timberlake stars as Will Salas in this ingenious thought experiment by writer-director Andrew Niccol (LORD OF WAR), where people are genetically engineered to live until 25, whereupon they live only one more year – unless they “get more time.” But now it’s earned, as currency, transferred to them via a digital countdown clock on their forearms.

Once we accept this concept – which is very close to reality (we are almost at the point of implanting chips under the skin that will monitor our bank accounts and such) – the drama unfolds: a hunted man bequeaths Will one century. And all Van Damme Timecop breaks loose…

“Timekeepers” – cops who monitor illegal exchanges of time – headed by Raymond (Cillian Murphy), pursue Will as he tries to figure what to do with the extra time. He crosses borders (from his poor time zone to a rich zone) until he ends up on the run with a billionaire-timer’s daughter, and his purpose becomes clear.

IN TIME starts with one of those great one-liners that frames the movie’s theme: Will narrates, “I don’t have time.”

Of course, in theory, by adding time indefinitely, people can live forever. But as the hunted man explains to Will, “Everyone can’t live forever. Where would we put them? Why do you think taxes and prices go up? Cost of living keeps rising to make sure people keep dying. How else could there be men with a million years while most live day to day? The truth is, there’s more than enough. No one has to die before their time… For a few to be immortal, many must die.” After Will discovers the man has given him the century and “timed out” (died), he sees the man’s message scrawled on the window, “Don’t waste my time.”

Olivia Wilde is Will’s mother (since everyone stops aging at 25, this has got to be one of the most beautiful cast movies ever). She gives Will 1/2 hour for his birthday that morning (no mention is made about the process – it’s enough to see people touch wrists and for one person’s clock to count down while the other’s gains time), then pays off a loan that night in town. But the bus home will cost her 2 hours, and she only has 1hr 30mins left! And the walk is 2 hours long! She makes a run for it. Her life literally depends on meeting her son, for him to give back some of the hours he earned at work that day. It’s a thrilling, tragic sequence, and makes us realize that this might be the one way to ensure that chicks get ready on time!

Toll booths to the upper class time zone cost 1 month, 2 months, etc., a high status car costs 59 years plus tax, a “voluntary donation” to a poker game costs a century; back in Will’s zone, a cup of coffee is a few minutes, and of course, there’s the 99 Second Store.

Ultimately, IN TIME is another story about class warfare, along the lines of ROBIN HOOD (redistribution of wealth), H.G. Wells’s THE TIME MACHINE (the two classes, Eloi and Morlocks), going all the way back to METROPOLIS (the suffering working class and the privileged upper class).

Timberlake makes a cool, relatable action hero, while his love interest makes a hot inflatable Real Doll – Amanda Seyfried is porcelain-skinned ultra-upper class Sylvia, who ends up on the run with Will, her father Phillipe (Vincent Kartheiser) a time-billionaire. Will breaks into Phillipe’s time-vault and steals the time capsules for the ghettos.

They eventually accrue a Ten Years Reward on their heads.

…and you can pose your Real Doll in any position, with dirty little skirts or guns or…

We’re conditioned/engineered to believe that by 18, we should be out earning a living. Then we’re living paycheck to paycheck for… how long? Are you still living between stabs of money? If we don’t make it to the next paycheck – we starve, become homeless, sick, die. If we can’t pay our bills, government fines, taxes, we are squeezed out of the system. We starve, become homeless, sick, die. It’s happening now. In this movie, cash has been replaced by time.It won’t be long before this imaginary substance called time is used as barter– but hang on! It IS being used: credit cards. We’ve exchanged those pesky pieces of paper currency with imaginary credit. It’s just called credit. Might as well call it anything: credit, finances… time left to live. If we run out of this currency on our pieces of plastic, our time left on this Earth becomes limited. How soon before our pieces of plastic are implanted in our forearms, keeping track of our finances, our credit… our time?

Yes, people have to die. The problem is that you send your most fit, your most virile and most sexually potent to die in wars; meanwhile, you try to keep those aged and useless, those crippled and non-contributing people alive as much as possible. Even those contributing great things to the human species or genome pool are living long past their Use By date. What kind of upside-down idiot society is this? When you meet with a debilitating accident, all your friends on your level of subsistence are the first to offer their help, their money, their time to you, while the corporations who could easily take care of you and a million others without the slightest dent to their profits look the other way and shout Fuck You. What kind of world is this? What kind of species are we?

No matter the patina of “government” or “social construct,” the few will always benefit at the expense of the many, even though there has always been enough to go around. It has been proven there are enough resources in the world to feed it many times over, with no one going hungry or homeless. But are you going to relinquish YOUR money to get that done? When the next guy is not relinquishing his? A sociological bog of complication will not allow this equable situation, even though it can be achieved at ANY TIME if everyone was indeed altruistic.

But it can’t and won’t happen – because if everyone was taken care of… Where would we put them all?

END

The Incredible Jim Carrey (and the Soporific Steve Carell).

Steve Carell is not a terrible comedian. Yet I still wonder how he gets starring roles as a comedian. Carell is THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE, a successful – yet boring – entertainer (much like Steve Carell), who must get his magician’s tricks and personal licks up to speed, to stave off a new breed of street magician, Steve Gray (Jim Carrey), who threatens his livelihood and legacy.

Carrey saves this movie from being unwatchable. As the edgy, bordering-on-insane street magician (styled after Criss Angel, performing “tricks” that involve self-mutilation and endurance, rather than “magic”), he bitchslaps any semblance of comedy off Steve Carell’s whole persona. Just take one look at that bi-colored leonine mane and try not to laugh. Carrey is not even at the top of his game – just miles above everyone else’s. His tattooed body ripped like Jesus, his primo endurance stunt is sleeping on red-hot coals, alternately snoring and screaming.

Remember back to BRUCE ALMIGHTY, when Carrey was the star and Carell was the B-character (admittedly doing an impressive job)? I constantly ask myself why those roles have changed. It started with EVAN ALMIGHTY, which was a sorta-sequel to BRUCE ALMIGHTY, but dumped Carrey in favor of Carell in the starring role. Under everyone’s noses, that was the beginning of the Apocalypse…

As a nerdy kid, Wonderstone got into magic so that people would like him, and he carries that monkey into adulthood. His old-school tricks (joining steel rings, pulling quarters from behind people’s necks, disappearing acts, etc.) see him to Las Vegas, but after ten years residence at one casino, his act has grown stale. He and his hetero soul mate/assistant, Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi), are given an ultimatum by the casino owner to update their act or face the axe. Olivia Wilde joins Wonderstone’s troupe and they continue to be unfunny and unimaginative on stage. Much like Steve Carell and Olivia Wilde.

The B-characters keep our juices flowing, despite Carell’s seemingly willful attempts to drive the movie into a ditch: Jay Mohr as a worshipful out-of-work magician, Alan Arkin as a legendary old magician, and the underplaying James Gandolfini as casino owner Doug Munny, whose role is actual magic, with his open contempt of Wonderstone and constant cluelessness over his own son’s age. (And why should he be concerned about his son’s age? He’s got important Mob business to think about. And I don’t mean THE SOPRANOS, I mean the casino business in Vegas.)

Munny opens a new casino and announces a competition for magicians, to win a residency. Of course, it’s Burt Wonderstone against Steve Gray. But there’s no denying that Gray’s stunts are spectacular crowd-pleasers, so in order for the boring guy to win the day, the filmmakers take Gray out of the competition in a very disturbing way, that not even Carrey’s mugging could alleviate. And Wonderstone’s premier trick that wins him the competition – making an audience disappear – might work for a more absurdist comedy, but here is just plain stupid.

The movie also loses its way with the shaky bromance between Wonderstone and Marvelton. We know that they must breakup and reconcile to show Wonderstone has learned maturity and humility, but then Wonderstone goes through the same process with Olivia Wilde (romance, breakup, reconcile). Enough already, in a movie already crippled by Steve Carell, doubly hobbling itself with bromance and romance piled penis over vagina.

Veteran TV director, Don Scardino (30 ROCK, LAW AND ORDER) tried to make a film about a boring magician. And succeeded.

END

A shallow ripple in the Force.

Is COWBOYS AND ALIENS a boring western movie, or a clichéd alien invasion movie?

At some point, I wondered whether it was just a tax write-off for Steven Spielberg, who seems to have phoned in his producer’s credit on this one. At least he hired Han Solo.

A cowboy (Daniel Craig) wakes in the desert with no memory and a futuristic bracelet attached to his wrist, which turns out to be a supercool weapon. A classic Eastwood-ian laconic avenger, this Stranger wanders into the nearest town, which is run by a mean-tempered rancher named Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford playing nasty). As the Stranger is run into jail, a strange anorexic woman with catlike eyes, a nice ass and an ironing board chest (Olivia Wilde) skulks around him and makes portentous remarks.

Then aliens attack. Sounds dumb. Plays dumber. At one point, we almost wish that the movie would just remain a good old-fashioned Western, as the production values are top-notch, and fine actors like Sam Rockwell, Clancy Brown and Paul Dano are creating memorable, dirt-smeared roles. When mosquito-like extraterrestrial alien ships swoop down and start grabbing people and blowing things up, the tone is meant to shift to fun and action, instead shifting to stupid and eyestrain.

(Note that even though the Stranger has that snappy arm-weapon, Han Solo is the first person to start firing back at the aliens! “Give me a good blaster any day…”)

Dolarhyde (great name, huh?) and the Stranger team up to lead a posse to rescue the snatched townsfolk from the aliens, who have parked their big cigar-like spaceship in the desert and are mining gold.

Poffbacca: a cowboy AND an alien

Like INDEPENDENCE DAY or STAR WARS, the writers’ lack of imagination for the aliens’ battle tactics is astounding: the extraterrestrials have those fancy laser arm-weapons (one of which was stolen by the Stranger), yet when the cowboys attack their ship, what do they do? Run outside naked and start punching everyone.

There are two good aspects to this poorly thought-out art experiment. One is the CGI. Far be it from me to praise CGI as a defining factor of a movie’s quality, but I only mention the Computer Graphics as a comment on the state of the art; the CGI extraterrestrial aliens (which resemble the DISTRICT 9 aliens – no points for originality) are completely IN the movie. There is no doubt at all that we are looking at anything but rampaging extraterrestrial marauders that fully interact with people and horses and the landscape. On the other hand, they are purely used as ‘device’ – no characterization, no depth, just faceless, nameless things that the humans must overcome.

The other powerful aspect of this film is the emotional connection that gradually grows between Dolarhyde and the young Native American Nat (Adam Beach – watch that boy! Oscars in his future!). When Dolarhyde eventually realizes Nat is the surrogate son he wished he had, special effects have already killed him – and through our tears we realize why the great Harrison Ford was chosen as Dolarhyde. Not just for the wealth of Han Solo gags – only Ford could begin as an unsympathetic, cantankerous villain and arc to touching his long-buried heart with such tear-welling effect. Making us weep like Ewoks.

From the comicbook by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg and directed by Jon Favreau, with enough screenwriters to guarantee it was going to be a circle jerk, the mashup of genres in COWBOYS AND ALIENS is almost as dissonant as the same mashup involving aliens in INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL.

Apparently, the overwhelming number of INDIANA JONES fans leaving that movie weeping in outrage was not enough to deter Spielberg from trying to “alien”-ate us again…

END

Another change-up, another plage-up.

How many times have we seen this movie? THE CHANGE-UP is the latest mystical body-switching movie from the venal plagiarists in the Hollywood Cookie Cutter Industrial Complex who have the audacity to call themselves writers. At least it’s funny.

Mitch (Ryan Reynolds) and Dave (Jason Bateman) are best friends but lead diametrically opposite lifestyles – Mitch is a shiftless, profligate bachelor and aspiring soft-porn actor, while Dave is a driven, stable married lawyer with a wife (Leslie Mann) and three kids. While pissing in a fountain together one night, they wish for the others’ life and – switcho-plagiaro! – the next morning they each inhabit the other guy’s body. Of course, the same plot point applies here as with all these switcho-chango movies – the fountain is moved and the subplot is the quest to find it and change back.

Cue fish-out-of-water gags that are admittedly very enjoyable due to the talents of the players – and Leslie Mann’s milky, creamy delicious naked mammii and pear-shaped posterior. (She lets it all hang out here – I guess she’s feeling the sting of advancing age and wanting to show off her Aphroditean bod before it starts to sunset – and Judd Apatow must be outa town.) Alabaster-faced and flat-chested Olivia Wilde is the other sexy lady slinking around another subplot, to give the rogering bachelor a happy ending. Not in that dirty way either – in that insufferable Romantic Ending Protocol that idiotically makes every male desire marriage as an ideal destination.

Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds sell the movie – and each other. We can see both their personalities in each other, even though their comedic film personas are quite similar. It’s a constant amazement to me that in all these “body-switching” movies the switched protagonists are always so convincing as the other person. In LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON (1987), Dudley Moore and – surprisingly – Kirk Cameron made it happen; Jamie Lee Curtis and – surprisingly – Lindsay Lohan pulled it off in FREAKY FRIDAY (2003) (as did the remarkable Jodie Foster in the 1976 original); Tom Hanks shone as a boy in BIG (1988) and Zack Ephron shone as a man in 17 AGAIN (2009); back when Steve Martin was brilliant, he showed us two personalities in one body in ALL OF ME (1984) and the brilliant John Malkovich showed us John Cusack in his body BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999).

Up to this point, body-switching movies have been family entertainment (except for MALKOVICH), but CHANGE-UP is decidedly R-rated: lots of swearing, lots of tit-tays, imperiling infants, vulgarity maximus and Leslie Mann gloriously nude. The dynamic between the two men is original for these movies – Dave doesn’t want the rampaging Mitch to nail his wife, while Mitch is constantly trying to get the uptight Dave laid.

Leslie Mann does another great breakdown scene (a la KNOCKED UP) and we all feel like mothering her and her perfect body. She spends a lot of time complaining about husband Dave’s law practice taking all his time, but when he later confesses he’ll quit his high-paying job for her, she says, “I don’t want you to quit your job – you love your job and I love that about you.” Really? You forgot to mention that his job pays for all the hedonistic chick crap that you buy unthinkingly, pays the medical bills and the kids’ college funds; you forgot to mention that though he spends more time at his job than with you, that job bought the mansion that you spend your time complaining in about his job, while there are people starving downtown in your own city.

As with the plots of all these movies, each man must lead the other’s life for a time and will eventually come to an epiphany and a character adjustment. One realizes he enjoys the rigors and ritual of married life while one finds he can have a little fun without responsibilities holding him back. The issue of the bachelor nailing his friend’s wife is not spoken of after the first night, and we just know that no matter how much the married man will try to get laid in the bachelor’s body – it won’t happen, or his “inherently good character” will be compromised. Though CHANGE-UP is actually laugh out loud on the journey (we learn about the Cancer List (the girls you’d fuck first if your wife died of cancer), how to fuck a Catholic schoolgirl, the shape of each man’s penis, the incident with Leslie Mann’s vibrator…), but the Predictability Express hits every stop.

END

Spandex Wonderland.

My eyes hurt. Can you dial down the neon knights to a 7, guys?

When I viewed the first trailers for TRON LEGACY, and saw that Jeff Bridges was involved, it was straight past buzz cool to grade school jubilation, “Ooh man! Yeees, my son!!” Jeff Bridges reprising the role that made his man-area famous for his tiny nite-glow skort! Casting just don’t get any better!

In that unmistakable rasp, Bridges (as Flynn) utters the first lines of TRON LEGACY: “The Grid. The digital frontier… I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day – that’s right, man! – I got in!” It is 1989 and a young Kevin Flynn (Bridges) speaks with his 7-year-old son, Sam. Camera opens behind Flynn and slowly pans around to the front as they talk. And that heady feeling of seeing our pal Jeff – suddenly gets weird. Because he is young again in this new film! Too young.

Is that–? Is that Jeff Bridges? Or is it a youthful stand-in as authentic as Toby Stephens for Clint Eastwood in SPACE COWBOYS? Is it the same airbrushing technique they used in X-MEN: THE LAST STAND on Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen? Or is it something more sinister? With a shock we realize we are looking at a COMPUTER SIMULATION of young Jeff Bridges! Oh, sweet irony of ironies! This film’s plot, after all, is about stopping computer programs escaping into the real world!

Program Poffy

TRON (1982) was iconoclastic – not just for Jeff’s man-area, but for its radical visual grabsplatter. Before computers were “legally” allowed to be a part of the movie-making process, TRON’s director Steve Lisberger employed them to create a singularly stunning visual experience. The Academy of Motion Pictures (those muttonheads responsible for giving out meaningless awards every year to the wrong movies) disqualified TRON for a Special Effects Award because they considered using computers “cheating.” But now – ALL effects in movies are “Computer Generated Imagery.” Consequently, the effects in TRON LEGACY don’t have as much a bearing on its ultimate quality and status as they did in TRON. We expect a certain level of quality from CGI these days. And TRON LEGACY delivers that quality – but it’s no jawdropping showstopper like its predecessor. Therefore, all we are left with is the story. And some nite-glow man-area.

Flynn has been missing for 20 years (all of Sam’s childhood) and his computer company Encom is being run by corporate baddies (Screenwriting Rule No.13: All Corporations Are Bad). Sam, now grown into Garret Hedlund (Hero Type No.7: Beautiful But Bland), who owns major stakes in the company, is uninterested in going into computers and would rather virus the corporate baddies. When Alan Bradley (is that Bruce Boxleitner? From the original TRON – the original Tron! Older but still major cool!) tells Sam he received a message from Flynn’s closed-down office, Sam investigates – and finds new meaning in “going into computers”…

Through an effect as specious as the last film’s, Sam is buzzed into the computer world of sentient programs and gladiatorial games, and forced to do battle to survive. We see all the old toys are still kicking in this neon-lined universe: the torpedo-shaped “lightbikes,” the pillared “recognizers,” the Frisbee “identity disks,” all upgraded for effects cred (the lightbikes now battling on a stunning multi-level grid).

Sam meets Clu – CGI Jeff Bridges again, but this time, we can live with this incarnation of Creepy-Eyed-Jeff because he’s meant to be a computer program (which Flynn created as his avatar in the computer world). Taking his job description to extremes, Clu is so intent on creating a perfect world within the computer that he wipes out any Programs even slightly imperfect. He hunts Sam, with intent to find the Real Flynn, who is in hiding somewhere in this geometrically luminous kingdom.

Just before Sam can emote that he’s in mortal danger on the game grid, a hot chick saves him in a lightsabre version of the Batmobile. As TRON had a token love interest, so too LEGACY drops the startlingly sexy Olivia Wilde in black leather. Yet she’s Disneyfied sexy, which means the only touch she’ll share with Sam is a handshake, and a meaningful look will have to suffice for sexual gratification.

She takes Sam to Flynn (the real Jeff Bridges), hiding out in what looks like a mansion in the Hollywood Hills overlooking LA.

Since Dennis Hopper’s death, Jeff Bridges has had free reign as World’s Oldest Hippy. (“You’re messin’ with my Zen thing, man!”) Bridges is the emotional link not only to TRON but to audiences as well, as all the other actors never connect with us, having left their emotional palettes in their other neon pants. (In the climactic finale, the expression on Garrett Hedlund’s face is meant to be tragedy that he might lose his father, but it looks more like he’s battling against the tightness of the spandex on his man-area.)

This is why all the computer-sim Jeffs are disorienting – because Bridges is such a fine actor. And they can’t match him. I know this sounds obvious, but when teen models are replaced by pixels in CGI films, it actually improves their performances and we could not care less, but Jeff’s pixels fall far short of the thesp juggernaut that is Jeff Bridges Actor. And all the Programs here know it. When Jeff Bridges Actor enters a room, all he has to do is touch the floor and all and sundry cower and run in fear. It’s not just the religious allegory of his User power either – it’s because he’s Jeff Bridges Actor, amongst the pixelating flubber and chicks in pearbottom rubber.

Michael Sheen is a Program unaffected by Flynn’s living-god status. He’s a cross between Ziggy Stardust and Liberace, and he overacts so much that a German cheese factory had to close down.

TRON LEGACY should have spotlighted its namesake character – Tron himself. Though a neon-orange, helmeted character flits about the gaming grid in the middle background, and though we see flashbacks of Tron (airbrushed Boxleitner) saving young Flynn, it is only towards the finale that we find out Tron has been on the side of the Clu clones, i.e. the villainous Programs. Only when Flynn looks up at the light-plane pursuing him and laments, “Tron, what have you become?” do we realize Tron’s supposed arc. He was good, turned bad, and at a crucial moment, comes back to good, reprising a line from TRON, “I fight – for the Users!” How do we process that in the film’s final moments when we’re trying not to laugh at Garrett Hedlund attempting to emote? This was not a twist or reveal – it was plain sloppy screenwriting and direction.

So when the bad Clu is destroyed, does this mean that all our computers are now free of viruses and are never going to crash again while we’re watching porn? Yay!

First thing I’m doing is a search for “Olivia Wilde nude.”

END

The Year of Living Safely.

Either Jack Black is being reined in with a poor script, squelched by a conventional director, or he’s just plain gettin’ too old for this shit.

Maybe a combo-wombo of all three? YEAR ONE is a missed comedic opportunity, crying in the wilderness like Charlton Heston as Moses; a biblical comedy of pamphlet proportions.

Black is Zed, an inept caveman hunter; his best friend is Oh (Michael Cera), a willowy gatherer from the same small tribe. To score a tribeswoman, Maya (June Diane Raphael, almost more luminous than Maggie Gyllenhaal in DONNIE DARKO), Zed eats of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (what are the odds it’s right near their village?). Zed and Oh are subsequently banished from the village – not by God but by their tribe – and what started as a promising premise (a comedy featuring cavemen with modern day sensibilities) loses itself by expanding way past its time period; past its Use By date, if you will.

Every time Zed and Oh meet new characters on their banishment trek, the characters are in a further evolutionary epoch – for example, the first people they encounter are Cain (David Cross) and Abel (Paul Rudd), with writer-director Harold Ramis himself cameoing as Adam. One funny night in Genesis, and the next day, Zed and Oh encounter Greek soldiers, circa 3,000 BC, led by Vinnie Jones (they look like Romans, but Ramis tells us the costumes were researched as Greek). Then we’re back to biblical times when Zed and Oh meet Abraham (Hank Azaria) and trek to Sodom.

Poffraham The Cukumciser

Azaria bludgeons us unrepentantly as Abraham, cutting his words like a machete (channeling George C. Scott’s Abraham from THE BIBLE: IN THE BEGINNING, 1966), as he would start cutting foreskins on a whim for the sake of honoring his god. Christopher Mintz-Plasse (aka McLovin) is Isaac, the son who was saved from being a human sacrifice by “an angel” in the bible, but here, by Zed and Oh. (Like McLovin, Isaac tries to scam liquor cos he’s too young.)

Oliver Platt goes fey-tilt as the high priest of Sodom, falling hopelessly in perverse love with Oh, who becomes his golden-painted bitch, forced to rub body-oil into the High Priest’s matted jungle of chest hair that makes Paul Stanley’s chest look like Hugh Grant’s.

Olivia Wilde is the princess of Sodom (chosen as Maxim’s Hottest Female of 2009 – guess there’s no accounting for taste – if a woman is that flat, is appearing topless any kind of coup?), who really has nothing to do except pretend to be hotter than June Diane Raphael.

Look for Kyle Gass (Tenacious D’s rage kage) as the Eunuch.

These are A-list comedians populating this sprawling tale, so each vignette is hilarious unto itself (David Cross’s constant underhandedness, Azaria’s obsession with circumcision, Platt’s obsession with body oil, etc.), but none of them stitch together into a cohesive whole. Besides a watery questioning of organized religion, YEAR ONE takes no risks, and resolves with little fanfare and nothing interesting to say. I had higher hopes, considering Judd Apatow is one of the producers.

An Alternate Ending on the DVD shows the destruction of Sodom. That might have worked better than the lame theatrical release. If you’ve got nothing to say, at least say it loud with fireballs.

END