The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)

"Stop, or my mom will shoot!"The next industry Uncle Tom who calls Alan Moore out for his righteous hatred of Hollywood need only look at this train wreck. Do that, and understand that the pain you feel is nothing compared to what it might be if, say, you’d actually created this “property.” That’s the term they use. Not “story,” not “idea,” but “property.” As if the book were a piece of over-mortgaged real estate.

I have a lot of love for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and I’ll admit I would never heard of the book if not for this idiotic little film. That alone ameliorates my otherwise-all-encompassing hatred of it, and the system that birthed it. Movies like this make me wish the aliens from Independence Day really would hurry up and destroy Los Angeles with their incredibly slow fireballs.

This film is a throwback to the Golden Age of superhero movies. That was not a happy time, despite my choice of verbiage. Sure, Richard Donner’s Superman led the pack, but so did those crappy, made-for-TV Captain America movies. Remember Dolph Lundgren as He-Man? Or The Punisher? Have you forgotten that the era of Tim Burton’s Batman also cursed us with Joel Schumacher’s? I haven’t! {More}

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monster All Out Attack (2001)

Kaboom!Like most middle-aged men, Godzilla suffers from a deplorable excess of emotional baggage. After fifty years of high highs and low lows his identity has become erratic. Toho, Godzilla’s production company, is currently scrambling to field the movie that will return Godzilla to his rightful place as champion of the giant monster action extravaganza.

The Lizard King fall from grace began during his “hiatus” from ’95-’98. This gave the Gamera trilogy time to come along and redefine the boundaries of good Giant Monster Cinema (believe it, or not). The trilogy did this in many ways…which I rattled on about ad nausem in my review of Gamera 3. But most importantly (and I’m sure Toho’s executives would agree) the trilogy raked in an absolute shitload of money.

Never one to miss a wave, Toho revived the King of the Monsters for Godzilla: 2000. And the fans…kinda shrugged, really. I mean, sure, it was Godzilla, but…you can read the review yourself. {More}

Gamera 2: Advent of Legion (1996)

You're pushing it...shovin' me...A large meteor

Falls to Earth near Sapporo

Then the fun begins

As far as director Shusuke Kaneko is concerned, “Gamera 2 focuses on the war aspect of giant monsters.” A “kaiju big battle” is, for once, the main focus of a giant monster film. How revolutionary. There’s nary a moment spared for the idiotic, soul-searching  “character moments” that usually clutter these types of movies. This is a textbook case of good monster moviemaking, some of the best you’ll find on either side of the pond. And you can quote me on that. Not that you will, but whatever. The point is, against all odds, Kaneko and co. have taken the silliest big-budget monster in Japan’s vast Popular Culture and transported him into a serious film.

As I mentioned in the haiku, a swarm of meteors fall on Japan’s northern-most island, Hokkaido. One lands almost directly on top of Science Center Teacher/Technician/All-Around Girl Honami Midori (Miki Mizuno) and her brace of kids. Military personnel arrive the next day only to find the meteor gone, without so much as a note on the pillow. The military, commanded by Colonel Watarase (Toshiyuki Nagashima), scratch their collective heads in dismay. You think they might want to call a Scientist in on this? {More}

Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989)

''Was that you, George?''Short and sweet version:

The defining, stand out scene of this whole movie (the one we all get our pictures from) turns out to be a dream sequence.

Long and painful version:

Remember when I called The Incredible Hulk Returns “a fine capstone” to the series? Well, that was the truth. It’s unfortunate no one at NBC realized this in time. Not very surprising, though. Happens everywhere. A decent little picture miraculously becomes popular (popular enough to snatch the fifth highest rating of any program aired in the same week) only to be sullied by a lackluster, assembly-line sequel.

Hot off the success of Returns, NBC rushed to make a deal with Marvel for future Incredible Hulk outings. And, wouldn’t you know it, less than a year later Trial of the Incredible Hulk roared and flexed its way to prime time. And as the talking head said on the news, right before the aliens blew up all those cities, “Indeed, God help us all.” {More}

Van Wilder (2002)

Our Hero, in his natural habitat.I hate modern comedies. Their grotesque obsessions are polluting the very fabric of our culture. We are getting dumber for no reason. It has nothing to do with resources. Thanks to the Farrelly brothers, Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, and the curious cloud of anti-rationality radiation hanging over Los Angeles,  Hollywood just throws money at the people who produce gross out comedies. Future film historians will look back and wonder how, each year, as the twenty-first century opened, more production companies wasted so much talent into this cinematic cul-de-sac? I’m not sure what scares me more: the fact that this kind of movie exists, or the fact that it is so popular.

All of which brings me to Van Wilder, which I recently borrowed from a co-worker who hyped it as the funniest National Lampoon picture in twenty years. She wasn’t that exact…but really, the point is this: Chris, I love you, chica, but we radically different taste. Not that she knows this site exists. I’ll have to tell her in person. I’ve spent the past three days figuring out just what to say. What do you say to your friend when s/he hands you a piece of crap and tells you it’s the laugh-out-loud hit of the young decade? {More}

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)

A man alone.In the summer of The Year 2000, my parents and I embarked upon a European Vacation. After two nights in Paris, circumstances found us in the quiet little town of Bois (pronounced just like it’s spelled…as long as you’re speaking through a mouthful of yogurt). With a few hours to kill before the restaurants opened, I flipped on the TV and found Manufacturing Consent, the almost-three hour documentary profile of MIT Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky. Filmmakers Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick followed the man around for  four years, taping talk after talk in a variety of countries. They also managed to dig up hours of archival interviews from as far back as the 1960s. All of which is cut-n’-pasted into a one hundred sixty-seven minute primer for anyone too lazy to pick up one of the man’s many (many, many) books.

For those who don’t know (I was once one myself), Professor Chomsky is one of the most respected linguists in the world. When my mother went back to get her Masters in English, or her certificate to teach English-as-a-Second Language, her coursework amounted to a whole hell of a lot of pouring over various Chomsky’s work. The Professor teaches at MIT, writes shelf-fulls of books, and has appeared on numerous TV shows, mostly in other countries. Thanks to his old-school, anarcho-syndicalist views on the Ideal Society, and his scalding, unrepentant criticisms of America’s most-imperial foreign policy ambitions, he remains largely unknown to the general public, even unto today. {More}

Roger and Me (1989)

Michael Moore uncovers the sad truth about whom I dated in high school.It’s easy to forget that, once upon a time, all the talking heads dismissed Michael Moore as a “comedian.” God only knows why. There are very few ha-ha moments in Roger & Me…unless the slow, painful death of a community strikes you funny.

On September 16, 1908, philanthropist William Durant opened the first General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. With seventy-two years experience in ol’ fashioned, American car making, the company realized record- breaking profits in the the 1980s. It did this, in part, by closing eleven plants in Flint, leaving thirty thousand factory workers suddenly unemployed. The company considered this savings on labor-cost a profit, but it became death blow to the city of Flint, which entered a financial nosedive which it has not climbed out of to date. All attempts to revive the area have failed miserably. Today, Flint is as much an urban wasteland as anything this side of Detroit, South Africa, or Afghanistan. If you’d like a sneak peak at America’s future, hop a flight to Michigan…and bring some spare change for the guy standing on the highway with a cardboard sign. WILL WORK FOR FOOD. {More}

Alien (1979)

"Hi-ya! Howyadoin?"
“Hi-ya! Howyadoin?”

There are three films, more so than any other, that typify modern genre cinema. Ken Begg calls them “template” films, and while that’s a darn good phrase it falls short of describing the true end result of Hollywood’s slavish corpse eating. I hear “template” and I think of this massive assembly line, stamping its slow way to entropy. But the creative process isn’t quite like that. If it were, there’d be a lot more good movies out there.

Instead, for twenty years we’ve drowned in a seemingly endless barrage of rip-offs, plagiarisms, and bastardizations. It’s almost like a virus latched on to hundreds (if not thousands) of creative minds, churning out volumes of absolute shite that then go on to spread and mutate, each time loosing just a little bit more of what made the template what it was to begin with.

Alien is one of those movies you hate to review, but can’t bare to leave unmentioned, in favor of its dismal progeny. You fall into a cycle of Jesus, what could I possibly say about this that hasn’t been said? But that didn’t stop Dubbya, and look where he is now. I hope this will be interesting. Or at least functional. {More}

X2: X-Men United (2003)

"Well...are you coming?"
"Well...you coming? You do have a movie to star in, you know?"

I went into this farce with no expectations.  In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a natural pessimist. So much of a pessimist I was prepared to write X2 off completely, like all the idiots I criticize for the blatant hypocrisy inherent in their dismissal “comic book movies.” Then the maintenance man comes by at nine in the morning, screwing my sleep schedule all to hell. And he tells me I should see this movie. It apparently “kicked serious ass.”

So off I go to Target. Twenty minutes, two cigs and one neutered anti-theft device later, I returned the proud (if ambivalent) owner of X2, second in what will no doubt be the epic superhero movie trilogy to end all epic superhero movie trilogies. For, like, ever.

As if. I say “ambivalent” whenever I’m faced with something like this…like almost any movie from the summer of ’03…with one notable exception…something that makes me feel anything but united. I love glitz and glamor as much as the next Red Blooded American Male, but I’m getting mighty tired of leaving a movie feeling hollow and gypped. After all, didn’t they used to make movies with something more than a few hundred million dollars of special effects? Something that engaged its audience? That challenged us? Was that just a dream? I swear they were still doing it a few years ago… {More}

Night of the Creeps (1986)

I had a plan…really, I did. I was going to blow the roof of this whole Month of the Living Dead thing. I was. Because I had a plan. Sitting on my ass, watching Friday the 13th Part VII (again), it hit me. Zombies, you say? Hell, son, who’s a more famous zombie than Jason mothafuckin’ Voorhees? And didn’t they just make another one of these damn films? Hell, I thought, Why not just review the rest of ‘um all at once. Back to back to back to back…

Things didn’t turn out that way. For one thing, I sobered up. For another, I saw Night of the Creeps staring out at me from out of the Horror racks.

Night begins with…alien midgets. Good God, we’re in for it now. Alien Midget #1 runs down a dimly lit corridor and through an airlock, gripping a canister in his (her? its?) hands. Alien Midget #2 orders #3 to blow the hatch, warning him (her? it?) that “The experiment must not leave this ship.”

Too late, Pinky. Alien Midget #1 promptly tosses the canister out the airlock and we’re off to… {More}

For a moment, there was hope