Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post

oliver9184 · 04-04-2010, 11:49 AM

Better off Dead 7/10 is a high school comedy from 1987 starring John Cusack. If I had to pick my favourite genre of films it would be high school comedies. The 1980s was the decade of the high school comedy; the bar was set impossibly high early on by Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). The rest of the decade's films in the genre are usually fairly poor but always easy to watch for the first time and there's likely to be a high count of good-looking fitties in them. Aside from this they have a charm and naivity absent from contemporary adolescent films. John Cusack currently stars in Hot Tub Time Machine, in which he's whisked back in time to the 1980s to relive his youth at a ski resort; in this film he's doing it for the first time, for real. The comedy is really, really broad and goofy to the extent of surreality (stop-motion dancing burgers) and there's as many misses than hits, as well as jokes about suicide which are in questionable taste and feel quite at odds with the film's light overall tone. Cusack is likeable and affable as ever; all of the other characters are not much more than ridiculous, cartoonish stereotypes.

Gran Torino 6/10 - the fact that a hundred and something IMDB voters have collectively rated this as an 8.4 scoring top 250 film astonishes me. Is the IMDB's readership (ergo the film-watching population of the world) really that obtuse? Or have I missed the point? It could just be that I'm wrong. It feels churlish to accuse a Clint Eastwood film of being unsubtle but this film is obvious and cynical to the extent of being patronising. And cynical too - in my opinion as blatantly cynical and manipulative as that old offender Forrest Gump. I know that Eastwood is Eastwood and I do generally like him and what he does. Here he's playing almost a parody of himself, glowering and grunting like the proverbial bear with a bee in its honey. Or mouth or whatever. All of the other elements of the story feel completely artificial. Never have I seen criminality rendered so unconvincingly (or acted so poorly) as here. Every single supporting actor is doing soap-opera standard acting. Watch the kid Eastwood befriends in the last scene that he's in (banging the cellar door). Garbage. It seems that Eastwood himself is pretty much untouchable these days (as an actor at least) but watching him in Gran Torino makes one realise how similar he was to this in A Fistful of Dollars almost fifty years ago, and how little his acting has evolved (it hasn't needed to I suppose). I like him a lot as a comic actor but living-legend status aside, I think he's just as limited as John Wayne was.

S.F.W. 5/10 is a heavy-handed, unpleasant, anarchic and ill-dated media satire from 1994 starring Stephen Dorff and Reese Witherspoon. The premise is: convenience-store shoppers are held hostage by mysterious criminals who film their captives and force a TV station to broadcast it live. Stephen Dorff is charismatic and could be likeable if his character wasn't an empty-headed oaf. Witherspoon (my reason for watching this) is more real, and more likeable, and cuter, but isn't in it enough.

Bringing Out the Dead 6/10 is a drama from everybody's favourite film director, Martin Scorsese, from 1999 and starring Nicolas Cage. There's no way this should be boring considering the talent of those two names but somehow it is. Cage plays a semi-alcoholic paramedic scooping up broken human detritus from the mean streets (!) of New York City and dumping it into hospitals. But you can't watch Nic Cage get so spectacularly drunk as in Leaving Las Vegas then have him be a tiny bit drunk here. We know how drunk he can be and what a splendid thing that is now, so him drinking little bits of gin here and there like a pussy just doesn't convince.

Clash of the Titans 6/10 is a mess of a film, but is watchable because it's avoided the two things that would have crippled it: being too long and taking itself too seriously. You go to this sort of film to see massive monsters rather than good performances: that's a good thing because this film features possibly the most massive monster ever filmed, and performances that are completely blank, unmemorable, inconsequential and zero effort ones. Of the rest only Mads Mikkelsen is worth a mention. His looks and voice remind me somewhat of Peter Stormare and Stellan Skarsgård; excellently he'll next be in the megaviolent Viking movie Valhalla Rising. Watching Sam Worthington in the lead is like watching someone trying (not very hard) to be Russell Crowe - but someone who's only been told about Russell Crowe and hasn't ever actually seen him in action. He's like whatever the opposite of an actor is (?) - a hole in the screen perhaps, or an animated figure that nobody has animated. Worse than Orlando Bloom even. Colin Farrell or Eric Bana or even Gerard Butler should have played the part. And yes, those three only came to mind because of Alexander, Troy and 300. I saw this in 2D because I had heard that the 3D version is absolutely awful.

Kick-Ass -/10 isn't zero out of ten but I don't know what score to give it. I didn't like it but I think that's my fault rather than the film's. When I first heard about this film I knew it wasn't for me but I still went to watch it at 0020am, drunk, alone and pissed off about something unrelated. I stayed until about 2/3 through. Something about this whole concept and how popular it is really irritates me and I haven't yet been able to properly articulate it. I know I'll be in a minority. What it comes down to is this: I don't like comics and it bugs me how popular they are, and how the medium as a whole has been accepted as having the potential for almost as valid literary merit as regular prose does. (The term "graphic novel" lends credence to this idea.) I have to reconcile this admittedly reactionary viewpoint with the fact that I like some comic-derived films a lot: if there were no comics there would be no Spider-Man 2. Back to Kick-Ass: I absolutely cannot identify even slightly with a character who aspires to superheroism. A hero should be reluctant. Idea behind this film MIGHT work if its action took place in something like the real world - something closer to the Dark Knight or Watchmen - but Kick-Ass creates for itself a jokey and heavily stylised film world more like Batman Returns, in which violent slaughter is funny, there are no lawcourts and you'd expect to have superheroes show up when crime happens. Maybe (probably) this is the point and it's postmodern, and it's very clever, and I don't get it because I only read proper books and think comics are for children and slow-witted adults.

04-04-2010, 11:49 AM	#3788 (permalink)
oliver9184 Psycho	Better off Dead 7/10 is a high school comedy from 1987 starring John Cusack. If I had to pick my favourite genre of films it would be high school comedies. The 1980s was the decade of the high school comedy; the bar was set impossibly high early on by Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). The rest of the decade's films in the genre are usually fairly poor but always easy to watch for the first time and there's likely to be a high count of good-looking fitties in them. Aside from this they have a charm and naivity absent from contemporary adolescent films. John Cusack currently stars in Hot Tub Time Machine, in which he's whisked back in time to the 1980s to relive his youth at a ski resort; in this film he's doing it for the first time, for real. The comedy is really, really broad and goofy to the extent of surreality (stop-motion dancing burgers) and there's as many misses than hits, as well as jokes about suicide which are in questionable taste and feel quite at odds with the film's light overall tone. Cusack is likeable and affable as ever; all of the other characters are not much more than ridiculous, cartoonish stereotypes. Gran Torino 6/10 - the fact that a hundred and something IMDB voters have collectively rated this as an 8.4 scoring top 250 film astonishes me. Is the IMDB's readership (ergo the film-watching population of the world) really that obtuse? Or have I missed the point? It could just be that I'm wrong. It feels churlish to accuse a Clint Eastwood film of being unsubtle but this film is obvious and cynical to the extent of being patronising. And cynical too - in my opinion as blatantly cynical and manipulative as that old offender Forrest Gump. I know that Eastwood is Eastwood and I do generally like him and what he does. Here he's playing almost a parody of himself, glowering and grunting like the proverbial bear with a bee in its honey. Or mouth or whatever. All of the other elements of the story feel completely artificial. Never have I seen criminality rendered so unconvincingly (or acted so poorly) as here. Every single supporting actor is doing soap-opera standard acting. Watch the kid Eastwood befriends in the last scene that he's in (banging the cellar door). Garbage. It seems that Eastwood himself is pretty much untouchable these days (as an actor at least) but watching him in Gran Torino makes one realise how similar he was to this in A Fistful of Dollars almost fifty years ago, and how little his acting has evolved (it hasn't needed to I suppose). I like him a lot as a comic actor but living-legend status aside, I think he's just as limited as John Wayne was. S.F.W. 5/10 is a heavy-handed, unpleasant, anarchic and ill-dated media satire from 1994 starring Stephen Dorff and Reese Witherspoon. The premise is: convenience-store shoppers are held hostage by mysterious criminals who film their captives and force a TV station to broadcast it live. Stephen Dorff is charismatic and could be likeable if his character wasn't an empty-headed oaf. Witherspoon (my reason for watching this) is more real, and more likeable, and cuter, but isn't in it enough. Bringing Out the Dead 6/10 is a drama from everybody's favourite film director, Martin Scorsese, from 1999 and starring Nicolas Cage. There's no way this should be boring considering the talent of those two names but somehow it is. Cage plays a semi-alcoholic paramedic scooping up broken human detritus from the mean streets (!) of New York City and dumping it into hospitals. But you can't watch Nic Cage get so spectacularly drunk as in Leaving Las Vegas then have him be a tiny bit drunk here. We know how drunk he can be and what a splendid thing that is now, so him drinking little bits of gin here and there like a pussy just doesn't convince. Clash of the Titans 6/10 is a mess of a film, but is watchable because it's avoided the two things that would have crippled it: being too long and taking itself too seriously. You go to this sort of film to see massive monsters rather than good performances: that's a good thing because this film features possibly the most massive monster ever filmed, and performances that are completely blank, unmemorable, inconsequential and zero effort ones. Of the rest only Mads Mikkelsen is worth a mention. His looks and voice remind me somewhat of Peter Stormare and Stellan Skarsgård; excellently he'll next be in the megaviolent Viking movie Valhalla Rising. Watching Sam Worthington in the lead is like watching someone trying (not very hard) to be Russell Crowe - but someone who's only been told about Russell Crowe and hasn't ever actually seen him in action. He's like whatever the opposite of an actor is (?) - a hole in the screen perhaps, or an animated figure that nobody has animated. Worse than Orlando Bloom even. Colin Farrell or Eric Bana or even Gerard Butler should have played the part. And yes, those three only came to mind because of Alexander, Troy and 300. I saw this in 2D because I had heard that the 3D version is absolutely awful. Kick-Ass -/10 isn't zero out of ten but I don't know what score to give it. I didn't like it but I think that's my fault rather than the film's. When I first heard about this film I knew it wasn't for me but I still went to watch it at 0020am, drunk, alone and pissed off about something unrelated. I stayed until about 2/3 through. Something about this whole concept and how popular it is really irritates me and I haven't yet been able to properly articulate it. I know I'll be in a minority. What it comes down to is this: I don't like comics and it bugs me how popular they are, and how the medium as a whole has been accepted as having the potential for almost as valid literary merit as regular prose does. (The term "graphic novel" lends credence to this idea.) I have to reconcile this admittedly reactionary viewpoint with the fact that I like some comic-derived films a lot: if there were no comics there would be no Spider-Man 2. Back to Kick-Ass: I absolutely cannot identify even slightly with a character who aspires to superheroism. A hero should be reluctant. Idea behind this film MIGHT work if its action took place in something like the real world - something closer to the Dark Knight or Watchmen - but Kick-Ass creates for itself a jokey and heavily stylised film world more like Batman Returns, in which violent slaughter is funny, there are no lawcourts and you'd expect to have superheroes show up when crime happens. Maybe (probably) this is the point and it's postmodern, and it's very clever, and I don't get it because I only read proper books and think comics are for children and slow-witted adults.