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Hisss-terically bad!

The H-Bomb:  According to ancient Indian legend, Nagin is a deadly snake goddess who holds within her body the key to immortality.  If her mate is threatened or harmed, she will hunt down and take vengeance on whoever is responsible, and will in all likelihood claim the lives of at least a few innocent bystanders along the way.  Not only is an evil American by the name of…  wait for it…  George States, fully aware of this, he is actually counting on it, as he is dying of a brain tumor and has kidnapped Nagin’s mate in hopes of drawing her out so he can get at this immortal what-have-you that’s inside of her.

Well, his plan works, as Nagin takes the form of a hot naked woman (Mallika Sherawat) and goes in search of her captive mate.  Along the way, she encounters a few uncouth individuals who would love nothing more than to rape her.  So, she is forced to teach these hooligans a lesson in manners by eating them up and puking them out.  This, predictably, attracts the attention of local police inspector Gupta (Irrfan Khan), who is understandably baffled by these crimes.  However, Gupta’s batty old mother in law, as well as some other superstitious locals, begin to suspect that it’s the work of the serpent goddess.

Will the snake woman rescue her mate from the evil George States, or will she fall into his trap?  Will Gupta the cop catch her before she can, or won’t he?  Who’s to say?  The real question is…  will the audience still be awake at the end to find out, and if so, will they care?  The answer to both: not bloody likely.

“Hisss”, shot on location in India, is the third directorial effort from my favorite nepotistic filmmaker, Jennifer Chambers Lynch.  Ms. Lynch and I have crossed paths in the past when I reviewed her hilariously horrible debut “Boxing Helena”, as well as her decent sophomore effort, “Surveillance”, which was far, far from perfect, but overall a step in the right direction.  With her latest film, she ditched Hollywood for Bollywood, and has slithered all the way back down to “Helena”‘s level of utter awfulness.

Basically, “Hisss” is a B-grade creature feature.  You would expect a filmmaker from the Lynch family gene pool to take this myth and spin it into something creepy and cool…  or at least weird, in a good way.  But no, she made a plain old monster movie, the kind that airs on the Syfy Channel during one of their snake themed weekend movie marathons.  It’s the kind of movie that’s meant to be stupid fun, except here Lynch made it extra stupid, and skipped the fun all together in favor of sheer boredom.

One thing she did manage to nail is the look of a Syfy Original movie, in that it looks spectacularly cheap.  Not cheap in a cool, indie film kind of way, but cheap in that bad, direct-to-DVD way, complete with a laughably shoddy CGI snake monster that looks like it was ripped from a mid-90′s video game.  The snakes in that Samuel L. Jackson movie were more convincing.  As for the cinematography, you may think it impossible to make such a colorful place as India look drab and dreary, but Lynch somehow manages to make it look about as vibrant as London on a gray winter day.

Setting aside that the film is about as visually appealing as a dried dog turd, and that the special effects are only special in the short bus sense of the word, there’s also the putrid script to take into account, which features maybe ten minutes worth of clunky, uninspired action, and spends the rest of its eighty-something minutes wasting our time with bad drama and unfunny attempts at quirky humor until it finally gets to its awkwardly staged, and not-even-remotely thrilling climax.

Is there anything at all that sets “Hisss” apart from other hokey creature features?  There is, actually, in that it is, to my knowledge, the first and only movie to feature a snake-on-human sex scene.  A little Hisss, Hisss, Bang, Bang, if you will.  Leave it to the daughter of David Lynch to come up with that one…  and also leave it to her to make even that boring.

As for the acting, Sherawatt isn’t half bad, considering she doesn’t have a single line of dialogue in the film.  But, given the quality of the dialogue, that probably worked in her favor.  She’s required to look sexy and dangerous, and she pulls off both.  Khan, who plays the police inspector, you may remember from “Slumdog Millionaire”, in which he played…  a police inspector.  Way to cast against type there, Jennifer!  Anyway, he does okay, but he was better in “Slumdog”.

As the evil American George States (wow, really Jenn, really?), Jeff Doucette is over-the-top and cringingly terrible, but I blame that more on the writing than him.  In a well written script, he would have been a good man forced to do bad things out of desperation.  But, that would have required a little more thought than Lynch was willing to put into it, so instead he’s just a one note mustache twirler who is all dastardly and villainous…  just because he is

Is there anything positive that can be said about “Hisss”?  Well, the snake-woman makeup effects by Robert Kurtzman are pretty impressive, I’ll give it that.  Unfortunately, that very faint praise is all the praise I have, because bottom line, “Hisss” is pisss poor.  It truly sucksss asss, and while it was apparently taken away from Ms. Lynch and re-cut by others, it still bears her name, and I can’t see how a good film could ever be made from the footage I saw, so she is still to blame for it being the piece of ssshit that it is.

However, if you do feel inexplicably compelled to see “Hisss”, it is currently available on Netflix Instant Play.  But seriously, why would you, when there are so many more productive things for you to do with your time…  like pulling the wings off a fly, or checking your lawn for severed ears, or about a million other things.

Not much passion to be found here.

The H-Bomb: Nate (Mickey Rourke), a down and out, sad sack musician, narrowly escapes a mob hit and wanders through the desert until he comes upon a circus populated by the typical assortment of freaks and weirdos. It’s there that he meets Lily (Megan Fox), a beautiful girl with wings… yes, actual wings that she was born with. Nate thinks she’s an angel, but Lily insists that she’s merely a “bird woman.” Nevertheless, Nate wants to take her away from her life as a freak show exhibit. And after a run-in with Sam (Rhys Ifans), the carnival barker who also happens to be Lily’s adoptive father, the two of them hit the road together.

In an effort to make amends with Happy (Bill Murray, doing his best impersonation of a somnambulist), the gangster who wants him dead, Nate offers to give him the bird girl in exchange for Happy sparing his life. After taking one look at her, Happy is enchanted and accepts. However, Nate has fallen in love with Lily, and she has developed feelings for him, and shit gets complicated… sort of. If you want to find out more, you’ll have to watch the movie. But, if you follow my advice, you will not only NOT watch this movie, you will stay as far away from this art house abortion as humanly fucking  possible.

Now I’m gonna do my best to just get straight to the point and not take that much time with this one, because I’m already very angry at myself for wasting as much time as I did just watching it. Someone once said, when a mainstream film is bad, it’s usually just bad. But when an offbeat, indie film is bad, it can turn out to be an atrocious, unwatchable piece of shit, and that is very much the case with “Passion Play”. Notorious for flopping hard at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, this movie stinks worse than a cow pie rotting in the afternoon sun on a hot summer day. Not even the fuckin’ flies want to go near this thing!

This flick is “indie” in the absolute worst sense of the word. It’s weird for the sake of being weird. The characters are quirky yet shallow, unappealing, and completely uninteresting. I truly did not give a flying frog’s dick about anyone in here. It acts like it has something to say, yet says nothing at all. And, for the most part, it’s horribly paced and goes nowhere… slowly.

If I were to describe this flick to our esteemed editor Rick Swift, I would say it’s kind of like “Crazy Heart”, except the lead character is an even bigger loser, it’s far more absurdly pretentious, and it’s about a thousand times crappier than he remembers that movie being [Read Swift's take on Crazy Heart, here].  It’s basically a love story between two lost outcasts who find each other. This most certainly is not a new concept, but it could have been done well, had writer/director Mitch Glazer (some big shot screenwriter, I‘m told) bothered to make either lead, or their story, even remotely interesting.

But he didn’t. I couldn’t have cared less if Nate lived or died. I gave not a shit if Lily ended up a permanent slave of Happy the gangster, and I really was entirely indifferent as to whether or not the two of them got together in the end. Even in instances that were meant to be magical or whimsical, like when the wind blows through Lily’s wings and she can fly for a moment, I was neither touched nor moved. I was just thinking, “Yeah, whatever, is this shit almost over? No? Goddamn it!”

Rourke’s been on a hot streak these last few years, but this time he left me cold. Looking as slovenly and ugly as ever, he tries his best to make us feel for Nate, but the character is just too damn dull to be either pathetic or sympathetic, no matter how often he gets on his knees and cries. Fox, on the other hand, provides some of the few bright spots in this otherwise dreary affair. It’s not just that she appears nude (albeit breasts covered), it’s that she actually gives the best performance in the film. I’m convinced she can be a competent actress, after all, and she gives Lily an innocent, child-like quality that almost made me care about her. As for Bill Murray… he showed up… he said his lines… and I’m convinced he was doped up on Valium the entire time. It’s not even worth mentioning that he makes for an even less intimidating gangster than Michael Keaton in “Johnny Dangerously”.

Okay, I’ve really devoted more words to this mound of diarrhea dung than I ever meant to, so I’ll wrap up. “Passion Play” is a love story with zero passion and a parable without a point. It’s a dismal cinematic train wreck that, unlike “The Room” or “Birdemic”, doesn’t even rise to the level of funny-bad, it’s just bad-bad (though there are some green screen shots that are so horrible they give “Birdemic” a run for its money). It is very bad-bad, and, as stated, pretentious as hell to boot. Do not even rent it out of morbid curiosity. Do not even take it if somebody tries to give it to you as a gift. For your own sake, give “Passion Play” a pass.

From time to time, rarely at iRATEfilms, we get such divergent opinions of the same film that it perplexes me as an editor.  Two critics that don’t always see eye to eye might not always agree on a film’s delivery, but Little Fockers stands out as Sergio simply loved it and Limacher loathed it!  Click the image below to be taken to each review, then tell me, the hapless master-of-puppets, who got it right and who got it wrong.  -Swift

(more…)

You can keep it, Wes!

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The H-Bomb: One night in the quiet town of Riverton, a serial killer known as the Riverton Ripper is mortally wounded by police. While en route to the hospital, the Ripper comes to and attacks the paramedics, causing the ambulance to crash and burn. The Ripper’s bloody stretcher is found next to  the river… but he isn’t. Whether or not the Ripper is dead remains a mystery, but what is known is that on that same night, seven children were born in Riverton.

It’s learned that the Ripper was a schizophrenic with multiple personality disorder… seven different personalities to be exact, one of which was the killer. That turns out to be very convenient since there were seven children born that night, thus starting the local legend that each child inherited a soul of one of the different personalities.

Sixteen years later, the seven kids born on that most unholy of nights, gather by the river where the Ripper disappeared in order to “kill him.” That is, to destroy some puppet likeness of him out of the superstitious belief that it will keep him from coming back. These seven kids represent the whole spectrum of movie teenage stereotypes: we have jock/bully kid, bitchy popular girl kid, Bible thumping religious girl kid, geeky white kid, geeky Asian kid, geeky black kid, and the quiet one, Bug (Max Thieriot).

Now Bug, as we come to find out, is the special one of the group. He suffers from migraines, has strange visions and premonitions, seems to be at times psychically linked to the others, and will even take on their mannerisms. This year, it’s Bug’s turn to “kill” the Ripper, only before he can destroy the puppet, the cops break up the party.

The next day at school, Bug seems to be acting especially squirrely, as other members of the Riverton seven start to drop like flies. Could the Ripper still be alive? Or has his soul inhabited one of the kids? Or, a better question still… who gives a shit?

That needlessly convoluted set up is only the beginning of writer/director Wes Craven’s first feature film since 2005’s “Red Eye”. Craven, like other filmmakers who work mainly within the horror genre, has been hit-or-miss throughout his career. When he hits, he blows the bull’s eye right out of the fucking target (“A Nightmare on Elm Street”, “New Nightmare”, “Scream”). When he misses, he tends to range from mediocre (“Cursed”), to unbearably dreadful (“The Hills Have Eyes, Part 2”).

Sadly, “My Soul to Keep”, which was touted as the comeback for this “Master of Horror,” is a miss. A big one. An epic fail. A crushing disappointment. A complete misfire. A movie so unfathomably bad that within the first fifteen minutes the viewer will realize exactly why the studio hid this sucktacular suckfest from the critics for as long as they could. [Editor's note - that would explain why we didn't get an invite]  This film is like an hour and forty minutes of nails dragging on a chalkboard, it is that fucking miserable.

It’s so horrendous I was tempted to do something I’ve never done in my entire movie going life… walk out on it. That’s right, that’s how bad this thing blows. But, the reviewer in me prevailed, and I stuck it out, just to see if it got any better… it didn’t.

Thing of it is, this movie is sunk entirely by one element, Craven’s script. It is just mind bogglingly terrible on every conceivable level. As I mentioned earlier, the characters are so clichéd they’re cartoonish. That wouldn’t be so bad, except for the fact that Craven wants us to take this shit seriously. The dialogue is so wretched it’s absolutely embarrassing to listen to. (“Wake up and smell the Starbucks.”- yeah, someone actually says that) It’s as if Craven is trying to write like his old “Scream” scribe, Kevin Williamson. His attempts at writing witty teen banter are just pathetic beyond all comprehension.

The plot is choppy, has absolutely no flow, and the suspense and thrills are pretty much non-existent. Not to mention Craven stuffs his story with copious amounts of pointless filler. Like an over-the-top (and utterly ridiculous) scene set in a science class where Bug gives a presentation about the California Condor. The Condor is supposed to be some kind of metaphor for the collecting and protection of souls, but it’s all just pointless, philosophical gibberish.

Craven then bores us with a subplot about High School student hierarchy politics where Bug and a friend spy on a group of bitchy popular girls (the leader of which is some obnoxious Rose McGowan clone). There is, admittedly, some information learned during this scene, but it’s clunky and strange and goes on way too long. In fact, most of the exposition in this film is delivered in forced, awkward ways, like the scene where Bug’s sister, who’s smaller than him, beats the living shit out of him(???), before telling him a secret about his past.

The scenes in which the killer stalks and takes out his victims are quick and curiously ineffective, and when we finally do get to the bloody climax, it’s filled with more exposition than thrills. The characters spend minutes just talking to each other instead of fighting and slashing each other to ribbons.

Also, the whole idea of Bug being psychic is ultimately rendered pointless because Craven never develops it in any kind of meaningful way. Like other plot strands, it just kind of hangs there.

The film is being shown in 3-D, though it was not shot that way, and it shows because it’s not noticeable and does nothing to add to the excitement of this weirdly un-exciting experience. That, ultimately, is the movie’s main problem, it is just plain fucking boring! Damn it to Hell, I expected better from you, Wes!

Craven had an interesting idea, but he botched completely with his sub-par, at times incoherent, screenplay. This is a real let down for me. “Life as We Know It” should not have been the better film to come out this weekend. Here’s hoping Craven has better luck with “Scream 4”.

Disappointing!

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Freddy Krueger has sliced and diced his way across Elm Street and the Dreamscape enough times to ingrain himself in pop culture, possibly forever. Despite this, it seems like many teens today are not actually familiar with his work. This was most likely the reason “A Nightmare on Elm Street” was remade. Unfortunately, director Samuel Bayer, known for his music videos, has created a tame version of the original fright flick that is easily the weakest film in the Elm Street franchise. Sorry “Final Nightmare,” there’s a new ‘champ’ in town.

If you don’t already know what the film is about, it involves a group of teenagers (Rooney Mara, Kyle Gallner, Katie Cassidy) who are stalked in their dreams by a horribly burned gerbil of a man wielding finger-knives and a Christmas sweater. Originally played by Robert Englund, Krueger was a sharp-tongued maniac with a playful sense of violence. Under the helm of Jackie Earle Haley, however, the remade killer lacks everything that made Krueger a fun and interesting villain. What’s worse is that he’s not scary in the slightest. Without all the one-liners Krueger was famous for, this film’s monster loses much of its insanity and reverts instead to a mopey caricature, lashing out at kids who can’t put up a real fight.

Most people probably won’t consider slashers or the slasher genre in general to be fun and playful, but they should. After all, they’re about teens running around, partying, having sex, making bad decisions, and then dying because of it all. These films are funny, sometimes stupid, and always gory. “A Nightmare on Elm Street” is none of these things. From beginning to end, it’s all one big sob story you really don’t care to listen to. There is no emotion to connect with and none of the subversive elements that made the original series get under your skin. This is bare-bones Elm Street if there ever was one, stripped of everything, even scares.

Speaking of the film’s fright factor, there really isn’t one. Recycled moments from the original film are thrown out there, though they never last as long as they should. One scene does do its predecessor justice, and could have possibly set the scene for a great and gruesome movie, but in the end it stands alone.

Though the film isn’t scary, it might make you jump from sheer volume. All the pop-up scares are accompanied by excessively loud noises that force you to cringe. It is effective, at first, but quickly gets annoying. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, though, considering the fact that Michael Bay is one of the producers. And no, I don’t think that was below the belt.

This new version does prove effective in one sense, it reminds us how the classic stands on its own and needs no modern re-hashing.  Even Hollywood tricks and big budgets aren’t able to spin the story in a fresh, new way. This is unfortunate, and one can only hope that the remake won’t ruin the series for anyone unlucky enough to have it as an introduction to Freddy’s fucked up world.

After.Life is a movie about death, life, and the transition from life to death. We are introduced to Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci) and Paul Coleman (Justin Long).  It is obvious Anna really is not happy with her life. She’s a school teacher who has a special student named Jack (Chandler Canterbury) who is a little disturbed.  Anna is heading to a funeral when we first meet the somewhat creepy undertaker, Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson). After the funeral, Anna goes to meet Paul at a local restaurant, where we learn that Paul is planning on proposing to Anna. Paul lures her to the restaurant by telling her he received a promotion which means he will have to move. Anna comes to the conclusion that  Paul is leaving her. Anna, upset and distraught, drives away in a bad thunderstorm with the rain coming down hard and is not really concentrating on what is happening around her – she tries to dial her cell phone,  not realizing that there’s a van in the other lane, and encounters a brilliant flash of light.

We cut to Anna waking up and wondering where she is,  the undertaker informs her that she is now dead. But, she’s wide awake and talking to him, wondering how she can be dead and still be talking to him. Deacon alerts her that he has a “gift” that allows him to help the recently deceased in their transition to the after life. Oh, to be so bold, director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo introduced the “I can talk to dead people” bit.

Paul  is searching for Anna, and has no idea what has happened to her.  Distraught, he goes to her school only to find out that she didn’t even show up for work. Paul turns to the one place he’d rather not go, Anna’s mothers house, and finds out from Anna’s mother- Beatrice (Celia Weston) that Anna was in a car accident and it was, of course, Paul’s fault for letting her drive in the bad storm.  Yep, more cheesy stereotyping – they went there!

Back at the funeral home, Eliot is injecting Anna with something to help her muscles relax while her mother comes in to see her daughter one last time. Beatrice, in a moment of humor that possibly wasn’t supposed to be, asks Anna if she thought about her mother before she “went and died”. Shortly after she leaves, Paul shows up and asks to see Anna one last time but is refused at the door by Eliot. Eliot lets him know that since he’s not family he can not view the body. Anna is once again awake and listening to what is transpiring upstairs. Elliot tries to deceive Anna, claiming it wasn’t Paul at the door, but Anna knows better.

Suspense was supposed to happen, fear, levity, all these things were supposed to happen, but After.Life fails to reach any kind of stability.  Sure, it has some moments that may leave a bit of a mark, but where the potential and execution meet is nowhere to be found.  It was sloppy film-making and mediocre entertainment.

The movie just kept getting more and more convoluted with twists and turns and cut-scenes, dream sequences, homages to past movies that made no sense and sprayed the screen with a confusing mess of a story.  It just keeps going and going, with no end in sight, and when you think it’s over, it’s not done yet! It just keeps attempting to add more and more to an already ridonkulous plot. It attempts to make sense by having different aspects of movies from the past all tied in; the movie’s most serious parts turned out to be humorous – taking the audience right out of the movie. I guess if you REALLY need to see Christina Ricci topless for a decent portion of the movie, it might be worth checking out, otherwise I would stay away.

After.Life proves what I have said throughout my existence; Death is the easy part, Life is what kills you.  I will admit, there was a guy a couple rows behind me who thought it was AWESOME, and his girlfriend asked him if they saw the same movie?!!?  I guess I wasn’t the only person who thought it was utter crap!

Repo Men is a futuristic sci-scare film that follows the life of a blue-collar company man working for a large corporation known as “The Union”.   His task is simple, if you have an organ resting in your body that was provided by his firm and you can’t make the payments on said organ, he “harvests” it back to the “The Union”.

Like all large corporations, or governments, you don’t just pop over and ask for an organ, first you meet with an “official” who sets up the paperwork – then you get the transplant, then, inevitably, you pay!  What’s that, can’t afford your payments, you say the check is in the mail, your dog ate your checkbook, Remy (Jude Law) doesn’t give a flying fig – that isn’t his department.  He is with retrieval, not billing – woe be the man who makes his professional acquaintance.  Once he shows up, you are gonna bleed.

Remy is partnered with Jake (Forrest Whitaker) who is a little more gritty than Remy, but enjoys what he does nonetheless. Both Remy and Jake work for a smarmy, no excuses boss, Frank (Liev Schreiber), who will talk you into wanting the organ, by talking you into purchasing it, but then waste little to no time to send out his Repo Men to recover it when you fall behind on your payments.  The irony of the heartless doling out hearts is cute, but not effective here.

Remy’s wife, Carol (Carice van Houten), wants Remy to move into sales for his safety and the well being of his family. But, Remy enjoys his job too much, still he wants to do what’s best for his family – so reluctantly Remy lets Jake know of his dilemma.   While on a successful hunt running down deadbeats, Remy lets Frank know of his intentions. So, Jake sets up one last repossession for Remy before he moves into sales, and Remy goes to the house of one of his heroes, T-Bone ( a cameo by the RZA).  When Remy attempts to take back T-Bone’s heart, something goes terribly wrong, and Remy’s equipment malfunctions and he gets the shock of the defibrillator himself.  Waking up in the hospital with The Union’s latest, top of the line heart, Remy knows this can’t be good.  It isn’t what he  wants, but quickly he discovers it is the only way that he can survive.

Remy’s life falls completely to shit after he gets a new heart, his wife has kicked him out of his house, won’t let him speak to his son, and hands him his first Late Notice of payment on his new heart. Remy attempts to make the money for payments by returning to work for The Union as a salesman.  Sales isn’t his strong spot, so he takes back to the streets as a repo man. From there, the story takes a predictable turn as Remy becomes the hunted.  While on the run, Remy encounters a woman that he’s seen only once before, Beth (Alice Braga), and decides to help her out of a bad situation. This is where the movie begins to intensify, and more of the action begins to happen. We follow Remy and Beth on the run from various Repo Men The Union sends after them.

The film never explains time or location, maybe by design to add the authenticity, but it fails to pull that off.  The action scenes are few and far between, and the character development is almost non-existent. The plot was choppy and hard to follow – simply because there was NO definition of time lapsed throughout the movie. The violence was graphic, BUT if you don’t believe there would be scenes of graphic violence in this movie I have NO idea what the hell you thought you were going to be watching. The movie was long, I almost fell asleep and I drank a friggin’ Red Bull before I went in the theater.

Repo Men really didn’t have much to offer anyone, and I wish I could have gone and repo’d my money back! I won’t spoil anything for those who want to go see it, and if you do WOW, but the ending of the movie made a bad movie worse! I feel there were a couple humorous lines and one scene of decent action that gave the movie at least something to enjoy; but in a movie that runs almost 2 hours, 5 minutes that doesn’t make up the slack.

I was expecting SLC Punk meets London, but what I got was as disappointing as British cuisine.

It was like some kind of homo-erotic Oliver Twist story with limited violence.  I was expecting London to be dripping with blood, and for the most part – all we got was American Crayfish and junkies strewn about with some Russian mobsters and the occasional awkward moments of, I guess it was supposed to be tension?  Who knows, and the killah of RocknRolla, there is going to be a sequel!  The Real RocknRolla – at the end this is revealed, and I was thinking, no thanks, I just wasted time and money THINKING I was going to be learning about this amazing idiot.  Jeremy Piven and Gerard Butler can’t pull this script out of the Thames, I only hope Sherlock Holmes is much better, Guy Ritchie.

Yes, ok, I will give you it had some interesting concept cinematography, but the overall package was thrown together with no symphonic balance.  Even the soundtrack sucked the big one, with the exception of the title song – and then, just barely.  The whole movie I was BEGGING for someone to kill the “RocknRolla” – who by the way was essentially an after-thought waif with so little class he might as well have been telling pimps how to run underage hoes for ACORN.

There was one cool scene, reminiscent of a Spenser, Robert B. Parker novel, where a foot chase actually winded the pursuers and pursued and you could feel it, unlike a typical Hollywood script where no one runs out of bullets, misses a high-octane shift or runs out of energy.  So, I liked that bit, but it was a two-hour movie that should have been 90 minutes at best.  I was initially bummed I missed this in theaters – this might be your thing if you like British gangster flicks lacking oomph.

“Nothing but a complete Hershey’s squirt…”

Ye ‘ol Storyline

This ‘comedy’ tells us the story of Marc Pease (Jason Schwartzman); grown man living life vicariously through recollections of youthful glory. Eight years out of high school, he’s still living in yester year—high school delusions. He even dates a 17 year-old –like, yuck! Over the course of a day, events come to a head. While watching from the sidelines as his former teacher/mentor, Mr. Gribble (Ben Stiller) oversees the opening night of a high school musical, Pease has an epiphany. Through a cathartic, hilarious process, he finally exorcises his demons and realizes there’s more to life than the roar of greasepaint and the smell of a Broadway crowd or is there…zzzzzz, I long for the sweet, sweet release of death.

The storyline is what killed the video star here. So good, this flick should have gone straight to braille!

The Cast and Crew

Ben Stiller, Anna Kendrick and Jason Schwartzman put their best foot forward, but there lies the problem. Once you become a ‘star’ the audience starts expect what kind of role you’ll be playing in the film they’re about to watcg –I know, I know, not always true, but it’s tough to breakout of this unless you’re a champion actor and you really, really know your craft. I would say Schwartzman is the only one that comes close. Stiller is good for comedy, but that’s about it – never go fully retarded. I’m going to say all the talent brought their “a-game,” but the script was just too light. No major conflict. No major love affair. Nothing really gained nor lost. Borefest ’09, right here people.

For set design, Bryony Foster needs a big Ck “hats off.” All the shots were setup nice with the colors and scenery chosen. I’m curious what they paid the poor soul because this looked like a cheap overall production.

The Good, Bad and Indifferent

The good thing here is another independent was made. On that note, the bad thing is…another independent was made. This type of movie tends to lock in the notion independent movies just aren’t worth the risk to watch, so why bother? If you were told Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction could be made for $8M and gross $250M world wide – would you risk investing in it? Now, after reading the script, if you were a suit running a studio, you probably would give the green light. Probably laugh at someone telling you $250M would be made, but give the go ahead to shoot the darn thing – just to shut up that assistant bucking for the scraps at your teat.  Now, I would be willing to bet my ’82 civic, Star Wars collection of yellowed bed sheets and my pig named Little Rat that the script for this movie sucked right outta the gate. You can make a bad movie from a good script, but you can’t make a good movie from a bad script.

The overall production was fine. Again, big talent needs a big script to execute great acting or the film will go down in flames. Imagine a major ball player at your local batting cages. How weird would that be, huh? I’m not saying you need a $40M budget either. I’m the biggest fan of $5M and under projects; it shows ya “what ya really got.” Strong scripts + strong performers = strong box office returns and/or overall returns i.e. Sideways and Little Miss. Sunshine once everyone takes a chance to see what the Oscars are talking about.

The Bottom Line

Don’t waste your time. It just stunk.