Sam Jackson calls a phone-sex operator and chokes his snake.

Reptile Dysfunction.

A young motocross rider witnesses a mob murder in Hawaii and is scooped up by the FBI to testify in Los Angeles. On the plane journey to the mainland, the mobster releases hundreds of SNAKES ON A PLANE to wipe out the witness. If this method seems a little hit-or-miss, expensive, inefficient and downright stupid, you’re absolutely right.

SNAKES ON A PLANE is as much a waste of time as you imagine it to be. It gained internet notoriety during its production and therefore has an aura of unwarranted fame/quality surrounding it. (It was the SHARKNADO of its day!) Thankfully, it was recognized as the piece of shit it is upon its release, and lost money. From its opening scenes that reek of TV movie production levels, to its execrable acting and idiotic storyline, to its CGI snakes and attempted humor, it is one hot reptilian mess.

Australian Nathan Phillips is witness Sean, on the run from mob boss Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson, whose acting is as stiff as his six-pack), and saved by FBI agent Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson, who inexplicably agreed to do this movie not despite its title, but because of it!).

The stupidest part of this stupid movie is the framing of the opening murder scene and how Sean witnesses it. After Eddie Kim, surrounded by his henchmen, beats a lawyer to death with a baseball bat, they hear a scuffle in the bushes and see: the tail-end of a bike disappearing out of frame. On this millisecond sighting of Sean (wearing a helmet and full gear, and not seeing his license plate, and not able to distinguish the bike model as 95% of it is out of frame by the time they see it), they track Sean to his apartment (which, by the way, looks like a hotel) and try to whack him.

But Flynn is there first, to save Sean and shoot the henchmen who can’t aim. But consider: If the above non-sighting applies to Kim and his henchies, then the same applies to the FBI. How did the FBI ever track down Sean? Okay, so one of the FBI guys shows Sean a Red Bull can in a baggie – the same one he was drinking at the murder site (this assumes they discovered the lawyer’s body – how? when?) – and also assumes they are frickin’ magicians for lifting Sean’s fingerprints from the condensed liquid on the can’s surface! This also assumes they’ve got his fingerprints on file to verify his address; also discovering that Eddie Kim has put a hit out on him, thus sending a macho agent to scoop him up rather than a routine donut gobbler. If this Hawaiian FBI branch is this good, why couldn’t they track down that lawyer before Eddie Kim beat him to death? And why can’t they find Obama’s birth certificate?!

So Eddie discovers which plane Flynn and Sean are taking back to Los Angeles and plants hundreds of dormant snakes in the cargo hold, with a time-release chemical that would drive them wild enough to escape the hold and bite everyone to death after the plane takes off. Remember, human beings with brains are writing this shit.

The filmmakers are too cute by half by actually introducing a crapload of characters that we’re meant to care about. Which we don’t. Julianna Margulies is the head stewardess, Kenan Thompson is bodyguard to a rapper (Flex Alexander), David Koechner is the pilot; watch for Taylor Kitsch as a mile-high banger with his big-titted bitch in the bathroom (that one we care about).

Once the CGI snakes are loose and start attacking all the passengers, and are dispatched in various ways by Flynn and the desperate victims, you can safely fall asleep and won’t miss anything interesting.

SNAKES ON A PLANE is R-rated, simply so Jackson can do his Jules Winfield and say, “I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” Hey, that’s how we ALL feel, you mushroom-cloud-layin’ motherfucker…

END

NUMBER FOUR is number two.

Like a turd falling from the sky and hitting every branch of the Cliché Tree on the way down, I AM NUMBER FOUR dumps on us by way of TWILIGHT and the Uncanny X-Men. And every other superhero/teen/action/alien movie it can possibly steal from.

A couple of sexy aliens are fugitives on Earth from a race of evil aliens called Mogadorians. Yes, before we go one step further, they used that name. Say it out loud and taste the kindergarten toughness: Mogadorians. Really? Was the word “Zambathustian” taken? Or how about “Bombalambian”? (Vonnegut did call his fictional alien civilization Tralfamadorians – but they were meant to be satirical.)

You’d never know these guys were aliens though – they are Alex Pettyfer (blond as a supermodel and twice as bland) and Timothy Olyphant (somehow retaining his characteristic ice cool through this idiotic role). Normal humans in every aspect, except they can fire energy bolts from their hands and say Mogadorians with a straight face.

But let’s get past the utter lack of imagination in once again making intergalactic aliens able to morph into human shape (and then not utilizing that shape-shifting ability when it would actually be worthwhile – like when they’re recognized by Mogador– sorry, I refuse to say that word again, in case I have to run for Congress one day).

In a movie rife with stupidities, here’s the apex stupidity that drives the prosaic plot: the good aliens (the ones who have morphed into blond supermodels) can only be killed in numerical order. Pettyfer, so he tells us, is “Number Four,” and One through Three have been killed in requisite order, so now it’s his turn. Again, I urge you to discard any queries about how aliens have a numbering system that is identical to our Roman/Western European idiom that developed over millennia. Any pondering over this fact will result in running for Congress.

Number Four falls for a blond high school chick with a big nose who is actually blander than he is (Dianna Agron) and before we can question whether convergent evolution has outfitted his intergalactic man parts to fit her trailer trash girlie parts, they are bonding on dates by running from evil aliens together. Big Kevin Durand is the eight-foot tall evil alien commander, whose gilled nose is even uglier than Agron’s. And before we can ask why alien Four would be attracted to an organism who isn’t even on his species line, we realize the story has gotten too stupid for us to care, as big special effects battle other special effects and in the midst of running from aliens on one of their dates, Four and Big-Nose stop at her high school dark room to develop some sweet 35mm pictures. Now before we can ask why this teen in 2011 is still using film rolls in her camera instead of using a digital camera like everyone else on planet Earth, we realize there are some questions best left unasked, in case some idiot answers.

Australian Teresa Palmer is Number Six, one of the New Wave Of Fantastically Gorgeous Blonde Bims, flaunting her bim-bone like a baboon in leather-panted estrus. When Number Four meets her in a blaze of sensual lightning, teleportation dynamism and Thigh Kwon Do, we wonder how he could ever consider going back to the ugly-nosed human chick who isn’t putting out because of primitive Earth customs.

When you aim your movie at teens, I guess you’re hoping that none of them realize every single frame is ripping off someone else’s style, story, substance, character, concept, clothing, hairdo, jawline and telekinetic abilities. D.J. Caruso directs this milky ride into explosive mediocrity, from a series of novels by two witless authors whom it is no surprise use a collective pseudonym – Pittacus Lore (Jobie Hughes and James Frey).

To top off the clichés, they literally ride into the sunset… If there’s anything we learn from I AM NUMBER FOUR, it’s that teen love can cross intergalactic species lines (but I just want to see the startling deformity they call a baby); and that evil aliens are quite anal about killing people in order of ascending integers; and that no matter how much Alex Pettyfer poses, he’ll never be as cool as Timothy Olyphant.

Mogadorian. Really?

END

I’m going to take a Treasure Bath!

For all its contrived clue-solving and annoying coincidences and tiresome car chases, and even Nicolas Cage‘s mourning face, NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS is a lot of fun.

Cuxocoatl

Maybe producer Jerry Bruckheimer had something to do with the fact we can hardly take a breath before the next relentless action sequence derived from chalky historical jargon disguised as clues to something only the inventor of Sudoku can understand.

Sequel to the less-fun NATIONAL TREASURE, this film finds Benjamin Franklin Gates (Cage) mourning-face-deep in another treasure hunt, this time for a Mayan City of Gold. Pointless outlining the roundabout manner in which the Mayan City becomes his goal, suffice to say the clues involve McGuffin piled on McGuffin piled on Abe Lincoln’s assassination with Ed Harris on top like a cherry.

Harris is villain Wilkinson, who also seeks the City for his own reasons. It is a thankless role, for he imbues the obvious “villain” with many layers. His motivations are not evil, though his actions are, and there is always doubt on how far he is willing to go for his “noble” cause. It is a subtlely shaded character that all villainous actors can learn from.

All the principal cast return, Jon Voight as Ben’s dad, Justin Bartha as Riley (given a little more to do this time round than just whine), Diane Kruger as Ben’s girl (whose stage direction was simply “whine louder than Justin Bartha”) and Helen Mirren (three times older than Diane Kruger and twice as sexy) as Voight’s estranged wife, for feisty comedic arguing. Even Harvey Keitel returns, to mill aimlessly on a professional basis.

Written by The Wibberlys (which sound like a couple of furry things from another planet) and once again directed by Jon Turteltaub, BOOK OF SECRETS takes our intrepid adventurers to Paris (where – so it says in the Foreign Director’s Handbook – the Eiffel Tower must be in every shot), to London’s Buckingham Palace, to the White House and into the Oval Office itself, to the revelation that “Mount Rushmore is a coverup…”

Nic Cage gets his Gom Jabbar moment when he puts his hand blindly into a rock orifice; the cast gets to tramp around blindly in labyrinthine passageways, but the coolest sequence by far is a Mayan death trap – a gigantic, tottering square slab that they must all balance, using each other’s weight as counterbalances.

The Book of Secrets is supposedly a Presidential tome – a captain’s log, if you will – of all the nation’s secrets tabulated by presidents for presidents, covering Area 51, the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, etc. Movie plays it like a gag (with Bruce Greenwood as Pres) but we all know there really are secrets that only one president may pass onto the next, maybe not in an all-encompassing book, but surely in documentation which, if exposed, would lead to impeachment, jail, or being slapped to death with a cabbage.

When Candy Crowley of CNN asked newly-inaugurated President Obama in 2009 whether he had seen anything in his new job that had “given him pause,” he simply shot that gleaming smile at her and refused to comment. Why? Because he saw the real world analog of that Book of Secrets.

Yet the biggest mystery remains: What exactly is Harvey Keitel doing in this movie?

END

Get Dumb. And Dumber.

Who wrote this crap? Would you believe…?

Well, it wasn’t Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. Their Maxwell Smart (personified by Don Adams) was hilarious. As the creators-writers of the 1965 television series, GET SMART, they are listed as “creative consultants” as soon as the end credits roll. It’s as if the writers of this torpid remake (Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember) were trying to pass the blame as soon as the movie ended and you realized you hadn’t laughed once. (That half-cough when Hymie appeared in the last five minutes didn’t count.)

Do they think we’re as dumb as Smart? We know it’s their fault this GET SMART movie retains none of the magic and vitality of Brooks’s and Henry’s TV series. Director Peter Segal‘s pedigree does not bode well either, his last three films trumpeting his mediocrity: THE LONGEST YARD, 50 FIRST DATES, ANGER MANAGEMENT.

Segal and Astle and Ember forgot that 1965’s GET SMART was a cheeky spoof of the spy movie genre. GET SMART 2008 is an espionage action movie. But someone forgot to tell Steve Carell, who thinks he’s being paid for a slapstick comedy. Movie takes itself so seriously, with insufferable CGI (the iconic corridor of security doors, the Cone of Silence), real-world technology and even murders, that Carell looks like an idiot savant dropped into THE BOURNE IDENTITY.

Maxwell Smart (Carell) is an analyst at the modern spy agency, CONTROL. He aspires to be a field agent, like the legendary Agent 23 (Dwayne Johnson) or Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway). Throw in an unnecessary backstory about Max being overweight and we have our first waste of screentime in the can. At headquarters, two Information Tech dweebs make the usual IT jokes, while two Agents (David Koechner and Terry Crews) make the usual dweeb jokes about the IT guys. More lost screentime.

After CONTROL HQ is destroyed by KAOS, the organization intent on spreading… uh, chaos, Max is made a field agent and sent on a mission that I didn’t pay enough attention to for it to be worth mentioning. The mission is the McGuffin, serving only to give Max something serious to aim for while he misses the mark with unfunny gags, including shooting himself with tiny darts, dancing with a fat lady, being dragged by a train… while we, the Susceptible Audience, are hopefully busting a gut.

Suffice to say, Max and 99 eventually blow up a WMD facility (oh, how very Dubya of them!), while fighting a villain who looks like Jaws from THE SPY WHO LOVED ME.

Instead of the coy bedroom eyes of Barbara Feldon, Anne Hathaway plays Agent 99 as if she’s on a constant period. Dwayne (formerly The Rock) Johnson is given too little screentime for his smarmy assassin character. Alan Arkin plays The Chief almost as flustered as the original’s Edward Platt. Instead of the fruitiness of Bernie Kopell’s Siegfried, Terence Stamp plays the “Cherman” villain as if he’s on a constant period. Stamp is almost the same age as Bernie Kopell (who is relegated to a cameo), so the question is, why couldn’t the real Siegfried play Siegfried?

Max’s iconic one-liners just don’t work – “Sorry about that, Chief!” “Missed it by that much!” “Would you believe…?” – because they are said only once and never given the chance to grow into callbacks.

This movie would be enjoyable for youngsters who have never seen the original television series (which would look dated and unfunny to them anyway). The only way for it to be enjoyable for those of us who have seen the television series – is to watch the television series.

I miss Don Adams’s slapshot delivery. I miss Thaddeus’s furrowed brow. I miss 99 saving Max’s life and not turning it into a fist-up for feminists. It is obvious the filmmakers don’t “get” GET SMART. They missed it… by THAT much.

The DVD features a “Comedy Optimization Mode” with “hilarious alternative jokes.” That’s a good thing, since the actual jokes in the film are not “hilarious.” One alternative gag shows two Middle Eastern “terrorists” (they must be terrorists cos they’re Middle Eastern, right?), wearing their white thobes, commenting to each other, “I’m not wearing any underwear.” “Neither am I.” When I rail at movies and songs stealing ideas of mine, I didn’t think they’d actually steal one of my gags from fourth grade.

According to IMDb, Steve Carell and B.J. Novak did uncredited work on the script. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t put my name on this stinker either.

END

Arma Dyin’ Here.

Slomo Poffy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

END

Snot Rod.

Here’s one you can watch with a straight face, with a script so bad, even Will Ferrell wouldn’t be in it.

There are two laughs in HOT ROD.

1. The Punch-Dance. Stunt rider Rod (Andy Samberg) “needs to go to his quiet place” and before anyone can say Kevin Bacon, he is footloosing a passionate, overwrought bodyswerve to the strains of a band who wishes they had the big-hair faux-metal chops of Europe.

2. John Farnham‘s You’re The Voice. In one of those epic sequences where the star and his cohorts do The Slomo Walk down Main Street and the townsfolk follow on their heels in support, the soundtrack is the gag. How did the filmmakers even come across this Aussie recording artist? A major Australian vocalist (and a genuine talent) who shot to fame in the early ’70s covering Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head, then disappeared until 1986 for The Big Comeback with You’re The Voice, John Farnham’s anthem is so bewitchingly cheesy, it leveled mountains in Switzerland.

Besides these two high points in the film – both ruined anyway with slipshod writing – the rest of the film is like choking on someone else’s vomit.

Rod is a stunt jumper who has never made a jump. Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact he’s driving a moped into the heart of darkness. Or his fake mustache. Yeh, someone actually thought that was funny. One of the instigators of comedy team The Lonely Island, Samberg is actually a funny, funny guy, but has yet to find a movie role and director that can bring out the best in him.

With only wipeouts and missed ramps under his starry belt, Rod plans for a 15-bus extravaganza – which would surely kill a lesser bad comedian, like Jason Biggs or Rob Schneider – to win the day and save his stepfather (Ian McShane, SEXY BEAST) and simultaneously wipe out cancer and whatever… Who watches these movies for plot anyway? Along the way (as usual for moronic leads in these comedies), he scores a salubrious chick (Isla Fisher), who must surely be retarded to consider swapping chromosomes with this loser. Will Arnett is Rod’s nemesis. Bill Hader and Danny McBride play the stupid supportive friends, and Jorma Taccome (also Lonely Island alum) is along for the crash-prone ride.

Sissy Spacek (CARRIE, 1976) has so little to do as Rod’s mum she almost phoned in her performance – then changed her mind and just hung up. Ian McShane must’ve lost a bet to be here.

Akiva Schaffer (the third leg of Lonely Island) is director – but helming a feature film is a far cry from Dick In A Box.

END

Just Another Con.

Nice mullet, Nic!

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

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

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

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

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

So bad I accidentally grew a mullet.

END

Precious Little.

NATIONAL TREASURE is an old-fashioned treasure hunt, amped with modern technological idiocy, salted with a snide dig at the political laziness of the American people coupled with a sly j’accuse at their insuperably asinine government.

Clueless

Treasure hunter Benjamin Franklin Gates (a characteristically mourning-faced Nicolas Cage, as the descendant of the descendant twice-removed of whatever) must steal the original Declaration of Independence before an unethical colleague (Sean Bean, whose Bad Guy coterie all wear black for convenience) steals it first. Both are after a hidden map on its back, leading to a treasure unimaginable, involving the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, and Harvey Keitel as some kind of “cleaner” (oh, like that’s believable!).

Insipid Diane Kruger and ineffectual Justin Bartha are along for the joyless ride, with Jon Voight trying not so hard to convince us he didn’t do this for the pay.

Director Jon Turteltaub, old hand at vapid cinema (PHENOMENON, 1996; WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING, 1995), finds a moment of crystallization – when Gates quotes what he describes as the defining tenet of the Declaration: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such government, and provide new guards for their future security.”

Considering this movie was released in 2004, when W was busy rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, it seems obvious this message was addressed to the American populace, who somehow still couldn’t throw off that despot’s yoke.

But Gates fails to take into account the twisted methodology written into the American Constitution that makes it almost impossible to actually perform what was so idealistically envisioned by this country’s founders.

Firstly, ideological tenets cannot stand against a tyrannical government that refuses to acknowledge them; that is, how do you overthrow a government intent on staying in power by any means possible, legal or otherwise? Paraphrasing Lord Acton, John Roche warns: “It is not so much power that corrupts, as the prospect of losing power.” (Our Undemocratic Constitution, Sanford Levinson.)

“Indeed more than one representative and senator has accompanied retirement from Congress with comments about their own frustration at the difficulty of actually getting anything done with regard to the issues that motivated them to run for public office in the first place.” (ibid.)

It is simultaneously at this point in the film that it loses all integrity – for after Gates recites this King’s English (not one word lifted from anything other than the dictionary we all subscribe to, but admittedly phrased in a vernacular lost on this inbred iPod generation of gameslayers), Riley (Bartha) responds with “I have no idea what you just said.”

Gates even meditates after the recitation, “People don’t talk like that anymore.” Why? Because “people” are Riley. They need the OBVIOUS spelled out, which Gates proceeds to do – in lay-moron terms for the audience’s benefit – the audience being made up of more Rileys.

Immediately, this supposed dunderhead Riley, goes into a detailed description of the security measures that surround the hardcopy Declaration, complete with the smash-cutting visuals that this short attention span audience seems to need in order to comprehend words with over two syllables. Riley knows all the angles – except the weakest link in the security chain – the Preservation Room – because we need The Hero, Gates, to do that transparent ‘splaining for the benefit of the audience once again.

The movie quickly degenerates to car chases, foot chases, unbelievably tenuous clues and arbitrary shooting. Factoring for inflation, all this trouble was probably for a treasure that was worth – oh, about $2.67.

During the heist, to rationalize his “honest theft” of the document, Gates toasts, “Here’s to the men who did what was considered wrong in order to do what they knew was right.”

It’s scary what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney might make of that statement.

END

Trying to out-act a cardboard cutout.

Mock Star.

In ROCK STAR, Chris Cole (played sufficiently blandly by Mark Wahlberg) is a big loser with bigger hair and an even bigger voice. Through a freak turn of events he is hired by an international metal band (Steel Dragon, led by a big-haired Dominic West) and attains his dream of rock superstardom. Finding he is too vagina-whipped – and what a vagina! Jennifer Aniston’s! – for that level of adulation and its attendant financial, sexual and psychological abandon, he abjures that well-salaried and well-knob-polished position only to purvey his feeble artistry at the lowest possible echelon of the music business – the toilet pub level. For no pay.

Er – Wha?

From stadiums to Starbucks. Every musician in the world knows what is wrong with this Hindenburg Disaster of a plot arc. But when it comes to music, rock bands in particular, observers and listeners and drunken rednecks in pubs who ululate “Freebird!” at regular intervals selectively forget that we live in a world that revolves not because of orbital angular momentum – but because of capitalism. Though it is true that one can easily find a wannabe rock-n-roller in any given pub in any major city in the world who is plying his art for free, his goal is invariably to earn wodges of cash in the foreseeably-planned or far-fantasized future.

Iggy Poff

ROCK STAR’s denouement decimated everything it had painstakingly purveyed as Chris’s goal – fame and fortune. We are told to “work hard enough, want it bad enough and to follow our dreams” – yet when Chris attains his sought-after dream, he gives it up! It is implied that The Dream is a lie; that it holds no substance. He renounces everything for the sake of two things: his chick (any man who would place his chick before music is not a musician in the first place – nor is he a man), and because his band disallowed him creative input on their songs – oh, cry me a river, Tchaikovsky! Not only would this songwriting condition have been spelled out in his contract, even if he was too monkey to apprehend the copyrighting and royalty situation, his enviable position in the band – as prominent lead vocalist – would have lent itself to riding on the legacy of Steel Dragon to forge a solo career parallel to theirs. But no logic could save this movie once we saw the predictable character arc aiming towards the intersection of Hollywood and Whine.

After coercing us into rooting for the struggling Chris, the movie does an about-face and has Chris gutlessly back away from his own ambition – purely for the sake of “dramatic” impact. But who would this spineless ending appeal to?

Dumb chicks.

ROCK STAR’s demographic of wannabe rockstars and starving musicians would have welcomed a story where the struggling kid becomes an international rocker – and stays an international rocker. I was heartily enjoying this portrayal of my past life of debauchery and devil-may-care enterprise (the inclusion of real-life rockers, Zakk Wylde and Jason Bonham as Steel Dragon members, and source music culled directly from my archived record collection only enhancing the nostalgia) – until the denouement insulted every musician who ever bashed his brains against the unyielding wall of the deaf music industry, and made the hero a puerile girly-man whose supposedly giant “dreams” were ultimately low-brow, middle-class, blue-collar mediocrity. And any real musician will tell you that a dork who gives up an international music career for a chick deserves every non-paying toilet gig he gets.

The last scene finds Chris puling his alternative angst to coffee house yuppies and the untalented, introspective “singer-songwriter” coterie. Next stop: Nursing Homes and Poetry Slams. If this is indeed Chris’s dream coalescing, it is more correctly a NIGHTMARE. I know. I’ve lived it. It is implied this dead-end gig is part of an epiphany or righteous road, whereby he now “creates art” on his own terms, when it is merely to whine his way back into his girlfriend’s panties.

One of the feature songs is Steel Dragon’s Stand Up And Shout, which the movie metaphorically achieves in spades during its first act. Soon enough, it devolves to Bowie’s livid shout of outrage: ”This ain’t rock and roll, this is – genocide!”

The writer of ROCK STAR, John Stockwell, was an actor in EDDIE & THE CRUISERS, which was an abject lesson on how NOT to write a rock and roll movie – and Stockwell seems to have learned that lesson well, showing us how good he is at NOT writing one.

Director Stephen Herek (who crafted a reasonable music-based movie with MR. HOLLAND’S OPUS, 1995), seems to capture the essence of 80’s Bighair Metal in all its garish androgyny. The song stylings are there, as are the leather pants, low-slung guitars, bovine attitudes and Big-Haired-and-Breasted bims. The parking lot argument over which tribute band is better of the two is a slice of history more hilarious, asinine and ridiculously true than any fiction could conceive. There is also a searing scene involving Aniston wearing a tantalizingly see-through dress, squirming the dance floor, while Nugent’s Stranglehold sensuously sweeps the soundtrack. All these things about ROCK STAR are commendable.

We soon realize – well, at least musicians soon realize – that the movie is merely the media portrayal of the 80s Metal Scene. Sure, this Scene existed, but underneath the glam-hamming and strumpet-humping, there was a struggling, starving reality, which ROCK STAR tried desperately to pin down. And failed.

Much was touted about this story mirroring that of real-life vocalist Tim “Ripper” Owens and his rise to prominence with metal gods Judas Priest, but though the story quantizes the basic events surrounding Ripper’s situation (singer of a Tribute Band ends up playing in the Real Thing), it captures none of the streetwise intelligence or truthful motivation of someone in Ripper’s position.

Instead, it gives us Marky Mark.

the high life of the lowlifes

“Is it hot in here – or is it just these pants?”

Achieving a goal of living a shallow, yet sinfully entertaining existence doesn’t necessarily mean that your life is meaningless or unfulfilled. Your goal may very well have been to achieve a shallow, yet sinfully entertaining existence, with all your finances, food and fun taken care of by people whom you pay to manage those aspects. Who ever said that Life has to be stoic and boring and routine to be Meaningful?

Who even made the rule that “art” has to be created on your own terms to be fulfilling? We seem to forget that all the art of the Renaissance was commissioned by the church or state or royalty; if those shiftless artistes were allowed to create art on their own terms, we would never have had the Sistine Chapel, The Last Supper, The Ninth Symphony or St. Paul’s Cathedral.

People really do believe artists do not exist on the same capitalistic plane as the rest of the world. And here we hit the teeth-grinding fallacy of the public’s ignorance pertaining to rock and roll bands.

Must have been so easy to sell ROCK STAR as a feasible story, not only because the chick demographic would fall for the idiotic ending (where his girl returns to him for being so loyal to give up his dream for her puss), but also because – it’s not a “real” job, right? You just get up there and wangle your dangle and get paid and laid, right?

And when you fly to the Moon, you just sit there and they press a button and you fly upwards, right?

Over twenty years of performing has made me realize that non-musicians have no idea how musicians come to be onstage before their eyes, or how we fit into the fiscal scheme of things; they think we put this together just last night and arrived here two minutes before downbeat. (Like they believe radio personalities arrive at the studio one minute before airtime; or all it takes to be an actor is to memorize your lines.) What you see onstage is the culmination of years of studious learning, finger-bleeding practice, ear-numbing rehearsal, frustrating hustling, prodigal promoting, inspired recording, sleepless nights, jet-lagged days, thankless personnel coordination, futile sacrifice, abject poverty, deranged ambition, iron will, starving, stealing, creating controlled chaos and burning bridges; getting had, getting took, I tell you folks, it’s harder than it looks…

What we do, we do for arena love and blood money – we earned our bones long before you ever heard Freebird for the first time. This is a Real Job that no one gives us any credit for, because of pasty-faced karaoke dweebs who think they can sing, art-choking MTV who thinks it promotes music, AMERICAN IDOL douchebags who think they have talent, countless films portraying bands as mental deficients or portraying a ludicrous hyper-reality (like this film), and every joker who thinks he can play rock guitar after stumbling erroneously through Smoke On The Water using barre chords –

And you have the audacity to be outraged because I won’t play your insipid redneck request?

I got your Freebird right here, mongo!

the business of rock and roll

Jennifer Aniston in a see-through mesh dress? Okay, I’m done.

We know Chris is a Loser from the outset because his girlfriend is his manager. (Only musicians will understand that gag.) We are given many other indications that Chris is not real rock star material, first from his brother, who points out, “You don’t have any fantasies of your own – you fantasize about being someone else” (that being, Bobby Beers, vocalist of Steel Dragon, played by Jason Flemyng). Chris’s bandmate (Timothy Olyphant) also alerts Chris to the fact that, “You don’t know where Chris Cole ends and Bobby Beers begins.” The screenwriter seemed to be including these elements to illustrate how “dedicated” Chris is, but it only kept pounding home the fact that he was clueless. He is content to live off someone else’s laurels and had no interest in promoting original music. Later, when the songwriting bug bites him, he does another stupid thing and walks out on the biggest band on Earth…

When Chris initially walks out on his garage band, girlfriend Emily (Jennifer Aniston), states, “All the talent in the room walked out that door – the first rule in this business is to go where the talent is.” Uh, no. It’s a lot more complicated than that, honey…

It’s not about talent. Or looks. Or networking. Or even songwriting. All those aspects are part of a bigger picture that requires your willingness to morph to whatever the people who are advancing your salary tell you to morph into, to appeal to a pointed market and recoup your advance, staying economically viable by making a profit. For them.

After your initial success, if any, no matter how much “talent” you display with your bedroom songs and kitchen voice, you will be left with only your force of will to continue in the music business, or to succumb to its decadences or obstacles, and die a funky death.

Your employer will abandon you at the first sign of flagging sales or a better Business Model (read as someone even more willing than you to Do What He Say), and each successive deal, each contract you sign, each company you work, each funder and producer and agent will take slices of your integrity and humanity and leave you a husk of a prostitute. But by then, you won’t care. In LAST ACTION HERO, Arnold tells us he “won’t die till the grosses go down.” And when they do… your Q plummets, the scripts stop arriving, and everyone stops calling you “Mel baby.” Either you forge ahead with your force of will or you find a comfortable corner to die. Most people in the entertainment business are not so much afraid of dying alone, as dying unknown.

And we can’t even count the number of unnecessary blowjobs given in the name of the “who you know” fallacy. It’s not who you know, but HOW you know them. You can “know” scores of high-echelon stars, but if they are merely passing acquaintances, employers, fellow musicians, that gets you exactly nowhere. But know one high-level “executive” responsible for signing or development of acts at a major label; know him as a drinking buddy; know his sexual war stories, as he knows yours; know him so well that you can reach over his arm and scam a slice of his pizza with the familiarity of a room-mate – and your ticket to stardom is sealed. It’s about personal trust. No talent required.

The first rule in music is really: No One Cares About Your Music – Except YOU.

So keep your demos away from me. And stay away from my pizza.

dying young, living old.

“If you work hard enough, and want it bad enough, dreams do come true, so follow your dreams man, cos we all die young…” I don’t think even the cliché-churning screenwriter comprehends exactly how portentous those words are.

“I’ve lost my eyeliner, someone cut my hair like a lesbian, and my sweater smells like a dog fart… uh, this next song is dedicated to Eddie Vedder…”

If you do not “make it” – become a financial success as a “rock star” – at an early age, your chances of becoming a success dwindle at an exponential rate as your age increases. That is, your marketability as a star – a product, a brand, an icon – is tied to your formative years. In the entertainment world, we all “die young”; spent by the time we are 30. But, you argue, the Eagles are still around, as are KISS and the Stones and McCartney – yet all those denizens of the upper reaches of the superstar stratosphere “made it” WHEN THEY WERE YOUNG. Only by doing so could they have guaranteed their current longevity. Pink Floyd and Madonna and Aerosmith all found themselves entrenched in the industry while still under 30.

The movie gives Chris many aspects of his stellar fame to be dissatisfied with – all of which are superficial. When you are solidifying your financial future and that of your potential family’s for generations hence, what piddling nuisance is it for a girlfriend to whine that you’ve “lost your way”? What triviality that your band does not allow you to write songs for the band? You are on a salary per night that the working class makes per quarter – what juvenile gripe that you feel unfulfilled? Is a 4 a.m. garbage route any more fulfilling? Try it. You might like it.

At one point, manager Timothy Spall tells Marky about a dead-end marriage he was in, and how he just walked away from it when he felt trapped. Marky uses this analogy to simply walk away from the band onstage one night in the middle of a gig, and let a kid from the audience take over (coincidentally enough – it’s Myles Kennedy (Alter Bridge, Slash), an awesome actual hard rock vocalist!). Contracts, lawyers, rehearsals, insurance, waivers, logistics of stage show and explosives and moving platforms be damned!

Emily decides she wants to own a place where hippie assholes converge to talk Sartre and pretend sophistication and industry clout – in other words, a coffee shop. The movie implies – insidiously, via Emily’s disparagement of Chris’s tour schedule – that stabilizing your base of operations is the path to successful business. But the rock band’s base of operations – the Record Company – is stabilized; the band is only that cog of the Stable Machine that must necessarily move to progress business. Emily whines that she “wants a life.” And being on tour is not A Life? The tragedy is that Emily – through the ignorant, traitorous screenwriter – speaks for everyone who arrogantly and condescendingly believes that being on the road in a band is “not a real job.”

All we ever hear in life is that we should aspire to never being tied behind a desk – when Chris achieves this, Emily decides to Stand Up And Pout and leaves him. Her last straw is when Chris cannot remember what city he is in and forgets their date due to sleep-deprivation coupled with insensate philandering. (So what? On the road, band members rarely know which city they’re in, even when they are completely cognizant – performing the gig and promoting the product is the paramount reason for their existence at that juncture. Since they are cattled at the road manager’s behest onto a stage which is constructed to look exactly the same every night, all they have to do is go through their well-rehearsed motions to earn their pay.) Emily sees this as an ongoing problem which will only escalate – but if she won’t stand by him during the good times – and make no mistake, these are the good times (with chicks and guns and firetrucks and hookers and drugs and booze – all the things that make life worth livin’ for) – why would Chris ever consider her a candidate for standing by him during the bad?

The obvious paradox is: by movie’s end, when Chris has re-started below the bottom of the barrel, just what is he aiming to achieve?

Maybe in five years, his feeble, freebie “project” might graduate to pub band level, playing Sweet Home Alabama and Brown-Eyed Girl to a gaggle of drunk ingrates and Skynyrd junkies, pulling down a whole $35 per man for five hours onstage, shelling out expenses for flyers and petrol and food and rehearsals and equipment, and eventually getting fired for not bringing enough heads in the door; making sycophantic calls to venue managers who assuage their small-knobbed insecurities by playing power games of hiring and firing; entering every futile Battle Of The Bands comp, never realizing it’s still about bringing heads in the door and not about their “soul-searching” music; trying to secure an “audition” gig in a Pasadena restaurant and fantasizing that one day they’ll be –

Rock Stars – ? – !

END