Would you rescue a princess with THIS man?

Oh Han, where did you Kessel Run to?

What we do in life – echoes in eternity.
— Russell Crowe as Maximus, GLADIATOR

Just how did Han Solo come by his beloved Millennium Falcon? (He told us in Episode IV he won it gambling.) And how did he get his trusty blaster? (Uh, I guess he either bought it, stole it, or was gifted it.) And why – oh why?! – does he call Chewbacca “Chewie”? (I guess it’s a nickname – ?) That wasn’t so hard. You can go now— oh, but wait! – Why not watch a WHOLE MOVIE that explains all these totally mundane things?

YEEEAH!, said no one from this galaxy, or any galaxy far, far away…

Thus, SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY hits us square in the indifference nerve with the impact of a Wookiee knocking over a game of holo-chess. The irony is: if we take it as “A Star Wars Story” it comes off as hubristic, redundant and a little naff, but if we just dispense with our expectations, preconceptions and nerf-herding, and take it as an exciting heist movie in space, it’s pretty darn hubristic, redundant and a little naff…

Poffbacca and Han Poffo get the drop on you!

Join young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) as he loses his girl, Queero (Emilia Clarke), joins the Empire with the intent to steal a ship and fly back to her, hooks up with master thief Beckett (Woody Harrelson) to rob a train, finds Queero working for the gangster who hired them to rob the train, Vos (Paul Bettany), allies with Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), beats Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and does the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. Leaving you not as excited as you probably would have been if you were 10. And leaving Han Solo not as familiar as he used to be just 2 hours and 15 minutes ago…

For all you Movie Maniacs who find fault with every little aspect of, not just SOLO, but all the newer STAR WARS movies – pesky little things like plot and motivations and narrative flow – Congratulations! You’re growing up. If you keep in mind these movies are for kids, you won’t suffer so many aneurysms wondering how a giant squidworm can live near a black hole that no one goes near and still have a regular food supply…

We loved every STAR WARS movie as a kid because we never bothered with logic, inauthentic headmasks (cough—Mos Eisley!), or whether to go SJW before or after we masturbated to Princess Leia in that slave bikini.

In SOLO, the main things we Movie Maniacs are watching for are elements that might compromise Han’s character in EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE (us Movie Maniacs remember when that movie was called simply “STAR WARS”). For example, when Han said to Luke, “…I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything. There’s no mystical energy field that controls my destiny!” it means this movie has to avoid Jedi, or if there are Jedi and they do something mystical, Han should not be aware of them, nor should any of his actions or plans be affected by them. SOLO gets that right.

BUT THEN…

Han arcs from selfish to altruistic in the third act. But – but – isn’t he that lovable rogue whose only motivation is money? Ideally, by the end of SOLO, we should still see Han as we saw him in the first two acts of NEW HOPE, when Luke tells him he’ll receive more wealth than he can imagine, and he replies, “I dunno, I can imagine quite a bit.”

The train heist keeps that greed dynamic alive (featuring the criminal stylings of Thandie Newton, and Jon Favreau as the voice of a CGI ape-thingy; and I love the design of the mirrored monorail – one set of cars above the track, one set of cars below!), but then SOLO gives Han the same arc as in NEW HOPE, where Han goes from smuggler to helping resistance fighters (led by Erin Kellyman here). Thus, in NEW HOPE, when Han takes his reward and flees, it is now NO SURPRISE when he comes diving out of the sun to save Luke in the final Trench Run. For it is not the act of a man discovering his inner hero, nor the audience discovering that Han is heroic and not cowardly or selfish, but Han just doing something congruent with his altruistic character that he reveals here. (See how one movie made over 40 years after its source movie affects that source movie so adversely?! Another argument for maybe writing and producing something original once in awhile, Hollywood!)

Disney, Lucasfilm, Admiral Ackbar, whoever is to blame: that’s why people hate your film – because there are subliminal monkey wrenches like this scattered passim.

OR – Will Lucasfilm argue that in the planned sequels to this film [snigger – good luck with that!] Han gets butt-hurt so badly that he becomes hard and cold and merc? (That still doesn’t negate his intrinsic principles, which, once seen here, can never be un-seen.) It surely looks like they’re setting it up that way, with Han’s treacherous bimbo playing every side of the fence, eventually skyping with a guy wearing KISS makeup named Maul. (Fanboys ejaculate, “Oooh! Aaah!” and slap their thighs in recognition.)

But not only is Han’s character ruined/revealed, his emotional drive – his reason for striving – is completely negated about halfway through the film when he reunites with Queero in Vos’s den of thieves. Goal achieved. Now what? But then Han, whose goal was finding Queero, now seems completely unmoved by the fact that she is Vos’s bottom bitch. She confesses to Han that to retain her post, she “has done things.” (That’s Disneyspeak for Balthuvian gangbanging.) And then Vos blithely sends her on a heist with this strapping young fella whom she claims she knows from the past. Is Vos being the idiot sending his girlfriend, or is he playing her against Han?

And yet Han, besides trying to snog her in the cape closet, seems pretty ambivalent that Queero is onboard, not trying to be with her every moment and touch her breasts and kiss her thighs and try to re-ignite her desire for him, like any red-blooded rogue would. Ironic that in a plot about heisting a chemical so kinetic it will blow the knickers off a Balthuvian gangbanger, there is absolutely zero chemistry between the leading man and leading lady.

At least Han shoots first here.

a bacca’s backstory

The mighty Chewing Tobacco.

Chewie, on the other hand, is the unwitting beneficiary of a great character build in SOLO. If you liked him before, you’re gonna love the more energetic Joonas Suotamo in the role of “young” Chewbacca (he’s only 190 years old here), pummeling and blasting and rowwrrrring his way through Empire troops and gangsters alike…

In a mudpit where he is thrown to be dismembered, Han meets the towering fuzzball named Chewbacca, whose name was already a contraction for Chewing Tobacco, but which Han contracted even more into “Chewie,” disrespecting Chewing Tobacco’s wish that the contraction stop at Chewbacca. Chewing Tobacco has been imprisoned by the Empire and has been eating humans thrown to him as sport! So, uh… are we now meant to watch all the other STAR WARS movies while monkey-wrenching that Chewing Tobacco has been a people-eater all along?! Han only escapes Chewing Tobacco’s jaws because he implores him in Chewing Tobacco’s native Wookiee tongue. And people thought Superman saying “Martha” was stupid…

After that, Chewing Tobacco basically goes anywhere Han goes – rescuing miners, heisting hyperfuel, into the shower—wait, what? But really, who needs this crap on why Han nicknames Chewie? – I wanna know how Solo learned to speak Wookiee-ese!

a glover lover

Donald Glover is smooth criminal Lando Calrissian (channeling Billy Dee Williams like a pimp), who cheats at cards, wears capes, writes insurrect songs about America, and loves himself some robot tail. And he owns the fastest ship around – the Millennium Falcon. Han, Beckett and Lando inexplicably team up to steal the Falcon from impound, even though Han lost the card game– I dunno, I think the scriptwriters collided in the hallway and got their pages mixed up— and we meet Lando’s bottom bitch, a female droid named L3-37 (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge with her SJW setting dialed up to Obnoxious C-Word).

“I’m too sexy for my double-necked heebee-jeebus.”

Always yapping about “equal rights” for robots (even though the meaning of the word “robot” is slave, and the reason for creating droids in the first place was to aid people unquestioningly), at one point, L3 removes the restraining bolts of a number of droids going about their droid-y tasks, which prompts the droids to cheer and rebel because they’re, uh, “free.” But what are they going to do with their “freedom”? They’re programmed to perform only the exact tasks that they’re doing now. They weren’t built with a plethora of options on what to do with their lives! Now was this an isolated incident or do all droids possess this desire to be “free” and have they been serving people begrudgingly since their invention? How then, can you trust that they are doing their ONE JOB correctly?

Think, filmmakers, think! What you do here, echoes into the SW Universe, from The Prequel Trilogy to The Original Trilogy, from The Clone Wars to the modern trilogy in progress, which I think is called The Whiner’s Trilogy.

L3’s fate is disturbing. She gets shot down while mouthing off (that’s the fun part), and Lando cannot bear to part with her, so instead of saving her CPU, or downloading her hard drive into another robot, he takes her program/her essence/ her computer vagina parts/ whatever, and implants them into the Millennium Falcon. Y’see, what the filmmakers are trying to do, Movie Maniacs, is give context to the line Future Han barks at R2-D2, something about connecting him “and letting him talk to the Falcon.” And that fembot’s essence is meant to be the “soul” of the Millennium Falcon. Heebee-Jeebus! That’s an even nuttier retcon than midi-chlorians. So the activist screaming for freedom and equal rights is force-fed into being trapped in the wiring of the Falcon. Irony, or just desserts? Ask a Social Justice Warrior. Be sure to wear ear plugs.

my kessel runneth over

Physics Nerds: They fixed the Kessel Run Anomaly. Kinda.

In A NEW HOPE, Han boasts, “It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.” As wrong as that phrase is, it has embedded itself in Earth culture. It’s been debated and dissected and elevated to importance, but let’s face it, STAR WARS creator George Lucas, in his brazen ignorance of spacetime vernacular, put that line in as throwaway jargon in what was then his second ever film, because it sounded science-y. The film would probably be quickly forgotten, along with its cheesy dialect consisting of “parsecs” and “droids.” How was he to know STAR WARS would become such a cultural behemoth, with every detail pored over with a fine-tooth Wookiee-brush?

The Kessel Squidworm: Eating people in less than twelve parsecs…

A parsec is a measurement of DISTANCE, not time; short for PARallax arcSECond; approximately 19 trillion miles.

Thus you can see how irrelevant it is to boast of your ship’s speed by citing the distance it traveled, but not the time it took to travel that distance. It’s like boasting how fast you drove across America by saying, “I drove the United States in 3,000 miles.” The correct phrasing should have been something like, “It made the Kessel Run – which is 12 parsecs long – in under 15 hours,” or something to that effect. The velvety voice helps.

In SOLO, Han must deliver a shipment of radioactive material to a refinery, before it deteriorates to the point of explosion. Thus, it behooves him to find the quickest route. When a character says, “That can’t be done in under 20 parsecs,” they’re talking about Distance – taking the long way ‘round a black hole – but it still sounds vaguely like they are talking about Time, which is the writers’ fault. Or the writers’ intention. (That is, maybe they kept the dialogue ambiguous to try to retcon our memories; to say that Han ALWAYS meant distance, but we elven folk didn’t understand what he meant. If that is the case, I say – fuck off! We got ears!)

There IS a shortcut – through a wormhole with a GIANT SQUIDWORM living near it that devours ships – and that shortcut happens to be a distance of only 12 parsecs. Due to his ticking clock cargo, Han MUST attempt it. So why not clarify by saying, “In 20 parsecs the material would degrade and explode over that distance; either we find a shorter route – or we die”? Simple. Yet apparently too hard for these pudknockers to comprehend.

So now that the squidworm in the wormhole has been destroyed, it means EVERY ship can make the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs, no? Making it more appropriate to state the Falcon was merely the FIRST ship to do so.

sending a boy to do a han’s work

The rogue Hannibal Solo.

Poor Alden Ehrenreich. In a role made famous by Harrison Ford in 1978’s STAR WARS, Ehrenreich is a flimsy simulacrum of the young Han Solo. Because we’ve already seen young Han Solo – AND HE LOOKED LIKE HARRISON FORD! There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Boy Alden – he can act and take a punch and will probably set many teen girls’ hearts aflutter with those dreamy eyes (and when he fires his blaster, it’s like we’re looking at Harrison!), but he lacks that indefinable quality that Ford oozed like Corellian wine: charisma.

Ehrenreich doesn’t carry the movie LIKE A BOSS. He’s just one of the characters.

Also, how does one rebound from all that bad press?! Before the release of SOLO, frenzied reports of the filmmakers being dissatisfied with Ehrenreich’s performance and hiring acting coaches – acting coaches?! – for him. How do you even walk out the door let alone swagger and quip and make love to your leading woman?

Then there is the fan outcry that Anthony Ingruber wasn’t cast as Solo, on the strength of his striking Han impression, and the fact that he was already on filmmakers’ radar as a young Harrison Ford –having played a young Harrison Ford in AGE OF ADALINE (2015)!

Cinematography and production values are stellar, and we can see the detail in the world-creation during the landspeeder chase, with many shots being actually outdoors – a condition that most tentpole movies forget exists these days! Yet we can never begin to comprehend the production problems that would arise with the firing of the original directors (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller), and the hiring of veteran monolith Ron Howard to bring the production home under the watchful eye of Lucasfilm president/producer Kathleen Kennedy. With enough SJW shit to apparently keep her happy. Now, not only were writers Jonathan Kasdan (son of Lawrence) and Lawrence Kasdan (writer of EMPIRE and RAIDERS, father of Jonathan) colliding in the hallways and mixing up their pages, they were also colliding with Richie Cunningham pulling the disjointed threads together to try to make sense of their mixed up pages.

“What’s this Vermilion Dusk shit?”
“That’s the name of Vos’s outfit.”
“Really? Sounds like the name of a Fleetwood Mac cover band. Change it!”
“Okay, Sir Ron, how about Crimson Dawn?”
“Tons better! Sounds like a bunch of environmentalists from the 1980s. Kathleen’s gonna love it!”

For Wookiee lovers and nerf herders.

END

Highway to the Ambivalent Zone.

Exciting? Yes. Stupid? Impossibly.

Super spy Ethan Hunt (an incredibly smug Tom Cruise) must stop villain Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) from spreading a genetically modified disease in Australia.

Taking his cues from every reputable pharm corporation, Ambrose wants to spread the Chimera virus in order to sell the cure, called Bellerophon, buying enough stocks in the cure to make him a billionaire. (The names from Greek myth serve no purpose, merely adding a patina of credibility to an otherwise prosaic tale of basic human duplicity and greed.)

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2 is your typical John Woo bullet-fest with Pretty Orange Explosions. The plot is suitably overwhelming enough for an Impossible Missions guy, so when Hunt complains to his boss (an impossibly detached Anthony Hopkins) that it’s going to be difficult stopping Ambrose, Hopkins replies, “It’s not called ‘Mission: Difficult,’ it’s ‘Mission: Impossible’ – ‘difficult’ should be a walk in the park.”

Rade Sherbedgia is a scientist who smuggles the Chimera virus from America to Australia by injecting himself with it. To receive the antidote, “I must arrive at my destination within 20 hours of departure.” Well, he’d better not fly Delta Airlines then.

Brendan Gleeson is a businessman who cuts dirty deals with Ambrose behind the scientist’s back. And uh-oh! — Ambrose has brought not only his ambiguously fey right-hand liege Richard Roxburgh, but his coterie of Euro bad guys who can only get killed in slow motion.

Filmed on location around Sydney, Australia, Hunt recruits dependable Ving Rhames and Aussie John Polson, as well as the unappealing, smug Thandie Newton as Nyah (with her A-cups crushed together to create B-cleavage), as infiltrator into Ambrose’s pants – I mean, plans.

And the film exposes its fatal flaw. You see, they’re trying to sell us on Hunt and Nyah “falling in love” after just one night of naked smugness. The Impossible Mission Plan calls for Nyah – who is Ambrose’s ex-girlfriend – to infiltrate Ambrose’s lair by seducing him into taking her back. And Mr. Kidman gets all pouty. And this is because… ?

Now it’s not the fact Nyah is prostituting herself for the Impossible Mission guys that irks me; it’s that the filmmakers are saying Hunt and Nyah – two world-weary, guarded, inshape, cynical gangsters – would have “emotions” for each other after one night of sexual chocolate. They want us to believe Hunt is sooooo enamored with this woman, that he is actually emotionally suffering when she walks into Ambrose’s den. Not suffering over her safety, or over the safety of the free world, but suffering over her soon-to-be ravaged poonanny, which he just recently shredded. And of course, when Nyah undresses for Ambrose, we have to see an unimpeded shot of her pained face, so we can be certain she’s not enjoying it either (although I’ve seen women use that same expression during o-face). In the R-rated world of killing millions for profit, it’s still PG-13 morality when it comes to sharing poonanny.

When Nyah injects herself with the Chimera poison to stop Ambrose from possessing it, the plot becomes Hunt trying to get to her with the antidote and all other evil dealings are shunted to the background. So all the “good” Hunt is doing in trying to stop Ambrose is for THE WRONG REASON. It’s like Superman spinning the Earth backwards in SUPERMAN – he didn’t do it to reset the mass destruction to the world, he did it to revive Lois Lane’s Panty. So too with Hunt. Whereas he started the film isolated (in an extreme mountain-climbing sequence that is vertiginous heart-in-throat), he ends as a romantic whippee.

Speaking of Superman, Tom Cruise flounces through MI2 like a superhero. I guess you have to be pretty proficient in many disciplines to be an Impossible Missions agent, but as the film wears on and the stunts and hand-to-hand combat and bullet-fests and gadgetry and Pretty Orange Explosions get bigger and badder, Ethan Hunt becomes so all-powerful that our patience with his proficiency wears thin. Film opens with Cruise himself scaling rock overhangs with no ropes or pitons, primal fear of falling dizzying us; then he’s hang-gliding, now he’s stunt-driving, now he’s doing the wire-suspension gag again, jumping out of a skyscraper, aikido, crack shot, samurai, pilot… By the time he is hand-braking a motorbike and pivoting around on the front wheel and shooting behind him while looking in the mirror to aim, we’re wondering whether anything can kill this guy short of kryptonite.

Hunt’s only shortcoming is that he can’t kill anyone unless it’s in slow motion, or unless he’s framed to look like the Second Coming of Christ Almighty. Or unless there are doves. Director John Woo just loves to pretend his movies are more art than they really are. Then he falls into juvenile lapses of concentration: the scene with Brendan Gleeson in a hospital bed spilling his guts in such stunted Screenwriting Exposition that it looks like a comedy satire on Screenwriting Exposition.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2 will leave the action crowd sated, but lacks the darkness and steady hand of Brian De Palma’s MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (1996). John Woo does to the franchise what Joel Schumacher did to Tim Burton’s BATMAN franchise – gay it up. And Tom Cruise is only helping.

END

And he’ll have fun fun fun ’til his daddy takes the CG away…

As disaster movies go, 2012 is definitely the big one. I mean, how do you outrun the world?

An inordinately large neutrino burst from the sun causes the Earth to break, and creates much employment for special effects companies. Also, the planets in our solar system have aligned (which doesn’t really mean anything, considering the gravitational force they would exert is microscopic) and narcissistic humans who still can’t shake the fact that the universe does not revolve around them, seem to think it affects tectonic activity on little old Earth. Also – Mayan Prophecy. At last, something REALLY scientific that proves all this is true!

The Poffyan Calendar

The Mayans predicted that in 2012, Digital Domain would have the computer graphic technology to wipe out the Himalayas and New York with tsunamis. This they do, as well as other cool shit like showing skyscrapers collapsing and people hanging onto the edges of floors that no longer have walls; blowing up Yellowstone park with fireballs, sinkholes and lava; collapsing Los Angeles into the Pacific, and raining down the John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier on top of the White House and the noble president, who is tending injured people on the White House lawn by asking them if they’d vote for a public option.

In 2012, writer-director Roland Emmerich has balanced his admittedly masterful use of CGI with his usually prosaic handling of human stereotypes. All the stereotypes are still here – the Everyman (John Cusack), the young scientist with all the answers and the body to go with them (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the noble President (Danny Glover – being black is now less of a fantasy than the nobility he displays in staying behind, which is absolute fantasy), the wacky prophet (Woody Harrelson), the ambitious politician (Oliver Platt), the brainless automaton military – but they either feel more organic to the plot, or the trillion dollar promotional campaign which could have gone towards bailing out another crybaby corporation on Wall Street affected my Discernment Gland.

John Cusack uses his plot armor as Leading Man to narrowly escape Earth-splitting cracks and falling objects, while wife Amanda Peet does her job of looking hot and screaming a lot; while her New Boyfriend (Thomas McCarthy, who can’t stop looking like Patrick Wilson from WATCHMEN) pilots all of them unselfishly away from danger, when he should be familiar with enough disaster movies to realize he has to fall down a crevasse or something soon because his salary is nowhere near the Leading Man’s.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Emmerich, Chiwetel Ejiofor actually does some exceptional acting up against Oliver Platt, causing them to almost disappear into another movie with more credibility and less screaming.

Amidst Roland’s advertisement for a suite of outboard tools, there are some genuine touching moments: Chiwetel’s father onboard a cruise ship that ultimately goes Poseidon; Russian pilot Sasha’s (Johann Urb) camaraderie with fellow pilot New Boyfriend – that’s not to say there’s anything original about these moments. Apart from the Leading Man’s relationships, the strongest emotional bonds are the ones set up to specifically destroy and target our Weeping Gland.

“Chiwetel – relax, man! Why’re you acting the shit out of this shit?!”

Final scenes show desperate humanity trying to board gargantuan “arks” that billionaires have paid to have a berth on. Chiwetel curbs the inherent selfishness of the species by giving Oscar Speech Number 23-a, “What is it that makes us human?” rolling smoothly into importuning, “What will we tell our children?” and ending with the glorious “We can’t build a civilization if our first act is one of cruelty!” which amazes us at how much it makes our flesh crawl.

Okay, so let’s deconstruct.

1) “What is it that makes us human?” Apparently, money. The people clamoring to get onboard the arks, who are in danger of being left behind on the docks – ARE OTHER BILLIONAIRES who already paid for a berth, whom the arks were leaving behind because tsunamis were almost upon them. Opening the giant doors to let them in was not an act of kindness towards homeless bums and underprivileged day workers – it was a contractual obligation to other billionaires!

2) “What will we tell our children?” How about, “I paid a billion Euros to save your necks and you should be building a shrine to thank me!”? Now go clean out the poo in the gorilla cage.

3 ) “We can’t build a civilization if our first act is one of cruelty!” Sounds kinda morally correct – but is demonstrably wrong. Firstly, you already HAVE a civilization built on cruelty. The passengers onboard the arks were chosen because their pockets were one billion Euros deep. What exactly happened to all the middle class personnel who built the ships and maintained the infrastructure while you collected your billion-Euro payments? Oh, that’s right, after they complete their menial jobs, they’re dead to you. At least, they will be when that tsunami hits ’em in their poverty-stricken asses. Secondly, Mr. Black White House Official, have you forgotten that America’s “civilization” was built on the skulls of Native Americans and African slaves?

It’s a good thing no one is paying attention to anything except the special effects. Or we’d all be dead.

END

High Voltage Rock n Roll.

“Where do you wanna eat? What? At that new place called “Hell”? Okay, so tonight we dine in Hell.”

Another twisty, spanky, kablooey tale from the dirty messiah madman who gave us LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS (1998), Guy Ritchie, about expensive hoods, cheap hoods, indestructible hoods, Russian hoods, and a McGuffin painting that we never see that everyone wants.

As with Ritchie’s other slambanging movies, describing the plot is a futile exercise, and the intricacies of the interconnecting throughlines is best left to a viewing while drunk on cheap port.

But here goes [deep breath]: Set in the snarling British real estate underworld where crime lord Lenny (Tom Wilkinson) handshakes a multi-million dollar land deal with Russian Uri (Karel Roden), with intent to scam him, even whilst Uri’s own accountant (Thandie Newton) is scamming Uri by setting up robberies of his money transfers, using a gang of small-time hoods known as The Wild Bunch (led by Gerard “Spartans! Prepare for glory!” Butler), while a painting of Uri’s, that he lent to Lenny, goes missing, stolen by Lenny’s rock star junkie son, Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell, ripped like Crucified Jesus), who has faked his own death to boost album sales, Uri dispatching two relentless Russian wardogs to find the painting, find the traitor, find his money, and find the Wild Bunch, who discover they not only have to deal with an informer in their midst, but a homosexual as well…

It’s definitely another intricately thug-woven Guy Ritchie story – but ROCK N ROLLA lacks the verve of Ritchie’s cinematic flamethrowers, SNATCH and LOCK, STOCK. The execution seems like a poor man playing Ritchie. It’s him at the wheel, so we can only contend that Ritchie’s Madonna years somehow softened his wolverine bite – after all, he did give us SWEPT AWAY. (‘Scuse me while I kiss the toilet.)

END

Running Gag.

I have a newfound respect for that unfunny dork, David Schwimmer, after RUN FATBOY RUN.

Run Poffboy Run

Schwimmer directs Simon Pegg as Dennis, a man who ran from his pregnant bride at the altar five years ago and now decides to win her back by beating her current boyfriend at his own game – marathon running.

The plot only seems ludicrous until the hilarious performances take hold. Once Pegg (as the titular “fatboy”) and Dylan Moran (as best friend, Gordon) find their comedy stride, so to speak, there are no stops for any pisses by the roadside in this quirky buddy flick disguised as a romantic comedy (blecch, hang on while I wash my mouth out…). In RUN FATBOY RUN, it’s tough man-love all the way, as one buddy actually betrays the other – but makes up for this darkness by getting naked at every opportunity.

Thandie Newton is the jilted ex and Hank Azaria (gloriously body-shaved) is the current rich, athletic – yet shallow – boyfriend. (Azaria’s roles sweep the gamut – from his Guatemalan housekeeper in THE BIRDCAGE to his French scuba instructor in ALONG CAME POLLY – and amazes here by showing he can actually play straight.)

Written by solid American comedian, Michael Ian Black, and tightened up by Simon Pegg himself, RUN FATBOY RUN is very much a “British” movie (set in Britain, peopled by Brits) with very little dumb American slapstick; only rarely do we feel Schwimmer’s stupid FRIENDS fingerprints sullying the production.

In the Training Montage (which involves tiny short shorts and spatulas), the filmmakers tip their hat to Trey Parker and Matt Stone by having a TEAM AMERICA poster in the background (a movie in which The Montage is satirized with sharp teeth by the SOUTH PARK team).

Though the movie foists its poignant messages and silly character arcs on us (Dennis has never committed to or finished anything in his life; with the marathon he has the chance to change his destiny!), it actually ends on a note of possibility rather than blah marriage blah Hollywood. Like I said, “British” sensibility, regarding the audience as marginally intelligent, rather than popcorn automatons.

Why do women regard a man running from the altar as cowardly and impotent, but a woman running from her responsibilities as a bride “adorable”? Answer me that and stay big-mouthed, Julia Roberts.

The irony is: the best aspect of Dennis’s shiftless character might actually be the one thing they all vilify him for – running from that altar!

END

Hi. We’re the Ku Bush Klan. And we’re gonna FUCK EVERYONE!

Putting the W in WMD.

First came RAIN MAN. Then FORREST GUMP. Now, in a long line of congenital idiots, comes W.

But wait, Bushies! Do not dismiss this movie as leftie revisionist conspiracy. Director Oliver Stone‘s W. is a fair and balanced representation of America’s 43rd president, George Walker Bush. Insert joke: “which means it shows him as the imbecile he is.”

No, W. is too fair. Not because the movie portrays George W Bush (affectionately known as “W,” redneckingly pronounced, “Dubya”) as intelligent, lucid or principled – on the contrary, he’s portrayed as the enabled, amoral, irreconcilably ignorant rich brat he’s always been; it is “too fair” because it clobbers us with one small aspect of W’s psyche – his relationship with “Poppy” (father, George Herbert Walker Bush), the 41st president – instead of examining the adverse affects that W’s obsessing over his father’s approbation brought down on planet Earth.

Oliver Stone (writer/director of 1991’s JFK and 1995’s NIXON) seems to miss all potential target audiences: Bushies will hate W. for the irrational reason that anything remotely disparaging toward their sheltered idiot-child “should” be hated, and the other 75% of America will find no red meat to indict the doofus C-student they so stupidly elected twice.

Movie opens after 9/11, in the Oval Egg, with the Bush cabinet creating a vivid catchphrase for the group of countries ideologically opposed to America, settling on Axis of Evil, the president flippantly throwing Iran, Iraq and North Korea into the pot – even though none of those countries acted in concert against the U.S., unlike the WWII Axis countries.

This should reveal something to America: there IS no Axis of Evil; merely a concoction of a few dappled minds (including, but not limited to, the fear-swillers: David Frum, Michael Gerson, Dick Cheney, W) who portrayed merely religious contingents as whole countries.

Hate those dangerous Arab WMD’s…

The primary players in this Greek tragedy are introduced, with varying success: Josh Brolin is the eponymous W, channeling the spirit of doofus admirably (with the light at the right angle, the resemblance is scary); Bruce McGill makes a reasonable George Tenet (CIA); Toby Jones is a slimmer version of walking rectum, Karl Rove; Jeffrey Wright leans hard on his General Colin Powell; Richard Dreyfuss cannot possibly plumb the depths of the slime-pit Dick Cheney crawled from, but tries hard (it is common knowledge Cheney runs the Ku Bush Klan, but movie marginalizes his involvement); Dennis Boutsikaris is not frog-faced enough to play Wolfowitz; I always thought Barbara Bush was a 1920 storeroom mannequin in disrepair – apparently not, as Ellen Burstyn gives her voice here; Scott Glenn is way too noble to be the ludicrous Donald Rumsfeld; Ioan Gruffudd brings the British accent (and a sensible sweater) for his Prime Minister Tony Blair; and Thandie Newton does Condoleeza Rice like a caricature audition for Saturday Night Live.

Movie follows three segments of W.’s life (a pre-pol in college in 1966, pre-pres, and post-9/11), skipping back and forth as often as W skipped out of day jobs; at one point, W simply walks off an oil-rig mid-shift – a directionless, privileged quitter, with not a shred of responsibility. Bush Snr (James Cromwell as Poppy) pulls strings to get W out of jail, land him summer jobs, slide him into Harvard, yet W keeps disappointing with his vacuous and impulsive irresponsibility. It would be the same traits he would bring to the stolen presidency in the dark winter of 2000, along with his “gut” decision-making (rather than informed leadership), to earn him the lowest favorability rating of any president in America’s history. Imagine how disappointed his father is NOW…

The performances are uneven – Brolin, Wright, Cromwell, Dreyfuss pulling the weight of all the others who seem miscast – but Stone’s direction is stellar. Written by Stanley Weiser, these characters exist in a vacuum; a disconnect between backstage and the world stage.

Richard Dreyfuss remarked on THE VIEW: “It leaves out how terrified people were of their own president.”

The film won’t have historical legs because the issues that defined the W presidency are given short shrift or glaringly omitted. Authorizing torture is mentioned once, over breakfast – there is no Abu Ghraib, no Guantanamo, no John Yoo; that scene (like other allusions and brief intimations), is more an inside wink to audiences well-versed in that travesty of justice, who will nod their heads and say to themselves: “Ah! Look at the mess he got into with that one!” There is no contention over the 2000 or 2004 elections, no dirty Swift Boating campaign, no massage gaffes at the G8 Summit – we just don’t see these events.

As for the lie of WMD in Iraq (this is not contention any more – it’s in all the literature), Frank Rich, Vincent Bugliosi, Bob Woodward and countless others have researched and concluded that W knew he was lying when selling the “mushroom cloud” to America as justification to invade. Whereas this lie should be a defining moment in any George W. Bush character study (What kind of a man would do this?), we get the barest rationalization that W is going after Saddam to finish what his father started. “My dream is to see peace break out in the Middle East! …UN resolution or not – we’re going to war!” Again, the real reasons are not slammed up against the real outcomes of this ignoble, ignorant, unlawful decision.

W’s life seems free of consequences, when we all know that isn’t true, and – worse – the consequences affecting planet Earth are ignored.

Bush had asked the two men [Rumsfeld and Bremer] point-blank who was in charge of finding the WMD… Bremer indicated it was Rumsfeld’s responsibility. Rumsfeld said Bremer was in charge. [Bush] wanted someone in charge… Since the CIA had insisted Iraq had WMD, the agency could go find the weapons. So finally, two and a half months into the war, the administration was going to give some focus to the hunt.
— “State Of Denial,” Bob Woodward.

Powell protests over America’s ideology going astray over a few terrorists, “We blew it before 9/11, because people weren’t doing their jobs right,” attacking Iraq is “not New World Order – that’s World Gone Mad.” (Powell’s character is prescient screenwriting from Weiser, as this movie was completed before the actual Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama in 2008). Cheney clarifies the admin’s position: It’s about energy resources. And – “there is NO exit strategy.”

As sinister as Cheney’s “no exit strategy” sounds, there is no mention of the chilling callousness of having no “infrastructure” strategy. Forget “empire-building” – what these meatheads called their grandiose intrusive blunder – even running water and electricity in war zones was out of the Bushies’ purview. Further, no mention is made of W running on the ticket of “no empire-building” then immediately using the excuse of 9/11 to go empire-building (which was in reality a euphemism for “energy-controlling”).

A movie about the world’s biggest meathead – with so little meat.

Not even an accurate biopic, W. is an insular, one-dimensional fairytale of a cowboy moron’s rise to power, from an alcoholic tail-chaser to the bumbling, born-again dumbest president of the United States. Like W, the movie talks a lot but says nothing.

Key events in W’s life are condensed, making the movie one big montage: W’s alcoholism, subsequent conversion to born again soberness, early political life; his wife (Elizabeth Banks – way too sexy to play W’s man-boy Laura); his decision not to be out-christianed or out-Texaned on the campaign trail; coached by Karl Rove…

And here we shake our heads in outrage again: when Rove coaches W, a picture is presented of a Rain Man cramming for an exam, not someone educating himself, studying documents and assessing intelligent solutions to national issues; we never see W reading – a salient point. Rove would coach W to counter attacks from the hostile press or public, not through knowledge, but memorization. Exactly like the 2008 Repub VP nominee, Sarah Palin. Sure, Dems and Repubs all work this way, but with this particular pol, his duplicity and ignorance became so transparently obvious through his public actions and responses. Still, Brolin never quite grasps W’s condescension. (The real W explains political strategy to the press as if speaking to five-year-olds because that’s how political processes are explained to HIM.)

Rove coins the public catchcry of W “being someone they’d like to have a beer with” – but didn’t W stop drinking long before he ran? Which made even that phrase just another lie…

W’s embarrassing and laughable malapropisms and dysfunctional grammar are slotted in offhandedly – not disparagingly – almost as comic relief. Movie shies away from WHY he is such an abysmal communicator – his low intelligence, hence, zero credentials to run a “nookuler” superpower. Grandest irony is that he married a librarian! (Holding stark, opposing political views to W, we can only presume Laura is a weak, unprincipled gold-digger for marrying him.)

Stone emulates Marty Scorcese in juxtaposing disturbing visuals over jovial soundtrack (Adventures of Robin Hood under W’s cavalier decision to run for politics, Yellow Rose of Texas under war scenes, The Battle Hymn of the Republic scoring the Mission Accomplished moment), yet this ain’t no laughing matter. When Rumsfeld says of Afghanistan “It’s not a war – it’s an exercise”; when W quotes St. Augustine to rationalize “Just” War; when W as Texas governor never pardoned anyone on Death Row, presiding over 152 executions (the highest number in modern history); when the Real World consequences of the Middle East conflict have displaced/ destroyed/ debilitated over 2 million people, it becomes too serious to satire, only proving what a soulless, murderous hypocrite this supposed “christian” is.

In the movie, W gives up pie as “sacrifice for the war” (we don’t see the 2004 public dinner where he tastelessly jokes about his inability to find WMD – bet the dead soldiers’ families were laffing their asses off); film doesn’t show him “giving up golf” because he “shouldn’t be enjoying himself while young men and women are dying” (then filmed on a golf course after making this statement); film doesn’t show W’s statement about bin Laden “dead or alive” (six months later: “I don’t know where he is… I just don’t spend that much time on him”)…

W is half a movie, like PASSION OF THE CHRIST or STAR WARS EPISODE III, where the film-makers took it for granted the world knew the story, so did not bother to develop it cogently. The movie poses questions and pretends no answers – when even a precocious cucumber like me, only mildly interested in politics, KNOWS the real-world answers. Mention is made of Carter installing solar panels on the Shite House roof (before “green” was an admirable fad), yet no talk of Reagan immediately ripping down the panels when he took office (That’s Our Republican Hypocrite!); W’s cabinet issues a media blackout on soldier caskets returning from war – but we don’t see press secretary Tony Snow lying “There is no media blackout”; W is told Saddam didn’t have WMD but pretended to – but the movie posits wrong reasons for Saddam’s pretense. (The real reason is simple: with a dangerous neighbor like Iran, Iraq didn’t want to publicly announce it was defenseless, so Saddam had to cooperate with the U.S., letting inspectors swarm his military facilities, while snickering over his shoulder to Iran as if he was duping the U.S. The U.S., as usual, too blunt-headed to discern this subtlety.)

The last question posed to W at a press conference, “What were your mistakes?” culls the Obligatory Hollywood Introspective Moment from Brolin, rather than the weak-chested, blank-eyed, weasel-sniveling backpedaling and stuttering that the real life W met that question with. Maybe Stone is trying to be ironic or subtle, because his film is LOADED with W’s mistakes, but because they are mentioned so fleetingly with no follow-through, the audience can’t see them as mistakes.

But that “mistake” scene highlights the film’s overall “mistake”: casting Josh Brolin. Y’see, Brolin is cool. Always will be. And he’s playing a guy who is just an intrinsic fuckin’ douchebag. And Brolin just can’t quite make it to that deep a level of douchebaggery… No one is that good an actor.

Movie ends abruptly during a dream sequence where W is waiting for a fly ball that is not coming down, and we see in Brolin’s eyes the most prominent unanswered question of the W era: “Where do we go from here?” Either that, or “What the hell am I doing here?” Or “How the hell did I get here?” Most likely, “I wonder if I’ll have time for a bike ride before breakfast tomorrow?”

With W’s lame duckidency limping to a shameful, disgraced end, we can only be thankful that the real Axis of Evil – George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove – will soon be disbanded.

END

Dispiritying, Disheartenying, Distressying.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS needs to take a Prozac.

Capturing happyness

Relentlessly depressing, director Gabriele Muccino’s first English feature film is Inspired by a True Story – which only inspires nausea with their ubiquity these days – and though its intent is to be a “feel-good” movie, it goes awry in its execution, paying such sadistic detail to every mishap, misfortune and misstep of its hero that it loses all semblance of entertainment. (And why that annoying “y”? We find that there is nothing intriguing in the misspelling of “Happyness,” simply a reference to graffiti on a day care center wall.)

Will Smith trades his Actionman for an Everyman, playing Chris Gardner, a late-thirty-something in 1981 San Francisco, with a Bitching Wife and Convenient Kid. Gardner is a bone density scanner salesman – as hard to sell as they sound – he investing his life savings purchasing them on spec, only to have his prospective clients (hospitals) consider them unnecessary icing; hence, to pay the 3-month-late rent and offer his five-year-old son better opportunities, whilst trying to pay bills with the few-and-far sales of scanners (simultaneously his albatross and his bread), Gardner gambles on a long shot, a six-month non-paying broker’s internship which may lead to financial stability – if he is chosen over hundreds of more qualified applicants. A Rubik’s Cube comes to his rescue. True? Who knows – but it was fun to see that old demon puzzle resurrected.

Thandie Newton is Bitching Wife, almost a caricature, providing emotional baggage when necessary and excised when she might start convoluting the plot with realistic action or threatening Will Smith’s screen time. Smith’s real son, Jaden, is Convenient Kid, with nothing noteworthy to offer (except maybe his Boondocks hairdo), who only once acts like a real kid – when he irrationally screams to be let into a hotel room they’ve been evicted from; otherwise ambivalently following his father into destitution with nary a whimper for ice cream and dangerous toys. Dan Castellaneta is the intern trainer, not being very Homer Simpson about it.

Over the course of Gardner’s internship, he loses his wife, his car, his friends, his apartment, his shoe, and at various intervals, his scanners (for which he must pour on the Will Smith Sprint to recover them from thieving hippies – Smith spends so much time in full stride, it almost becomes The Pursuit of Bone Density Scanners); his one constant is his son, for whom he is enduring this hell. When is this guy going to catch a break?

Yet we are never allowed to consider that Gardner just might be irresponsible in pursuing a six-month dream which may end in failure through no fault of his own, instead of simply bellying up as a McDonalds cashier. You need to feed your son NOW, Horatio Alger! While pretending solvency to appear well-adjusted – at one point surrendering his last five bucks to a millionaire boss who forgot his wallet – Gardner and son spend the night in flophouses, homeless shelters and on the streets, at one point sleeping in a railway public toilet, leg propped against door to stop people entering. Smith’s acting takes us to this place, with such a traumatic look of dejection and loss and fear for his son’s wellbeing that the insistent knocking on the door becomes scarier than any axe-murderer or twenty-foot bug.

Apparently there’s a message to this onerous exercise: follow your dreams and don’t listen to anybody who says you can’t. In which ten billion Disney movies have we heard that before? Trouble is, we’ll never hear from the millions who actually go Gardner’s route and fail. That’s a reality too, more so than Gardner’s.

Anyone who has been in Gardner’s state of impoverishment would quickly notice how this movie conspicuously neglects one aspect of dire realism – at his lowest ebb, Gardner never once considers stealing, not even hooking a lone apple from a streetside fruit stand; his one act of depravity being stiffing a taxicab for the fare. When flensed of all humanity, the human animal will survive via any means possible, morals be damned. Or Gardner’s situation (as purveyed by this movie) could not have been as dire as it was painted.

And it wasn’t. This movie was “written by” Steve Conrad (THE WEATHER MAN, 2005). It is only “inspired by” a true story. The real Chris Gardner story will show that he worked as a research lab assistant, then actually doubled his salary when he started selling the medical equipment; that his internship actually paid $1,000 per month; that, though life on the streets was demeaning, there were friends and acquaintances that lent a hand up when needed. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS is a badly-made film of an inspiring story just waiting to be made into a formulaic film.

Smith’s occasional unnecessary voiceover is like some kind of perverse attempt at irony. When he’s running, he informs us, “This part of my life, I call ‘running'”; when he’s riding the bus, he cleverly intones, “This part of my life is called ‘riding the bus.'” It ain’t irony if it is what it is. His voiceover laments, “Maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and never have.” “When I’d get an A on a test, I’d get this good feeling about all the things I could be – and I never became any of them.”

Welcome to the real world, Chris.

We are shown so much misery (Gardner has to sell his blood to pay for a bulb for his scanner, he spends a night in jail for parking tickets, after painting his apartment for free for his landlord, then having to attend his first broker interview in paint-smeared rags – and on it goes) that by the time the movie tries to perk us up with the mandatory upbeat ending, it comes too late and we don’t want to forgive it. Who can blame us?

A text screen informs us Gardner became a multi-millionaire, but this manipulative text is only inserted for the True Story value, and used as a technique to wrap the movie hastily. An example of Chris’ success should have been built into the movie – as payoff for OUR suffering – not thrown up as afterthought. Voiceover and screen text are generally regarded as the easy way around having to create visual story. PURSUIT makes this look all too obvious.

With his gamble paying off, Voiceover Gardner informs us that “this is called happiness.” So money DOES buy it…

END