3 posts tagged “movie”
I had heard nothing but bad things about AeonFlux, and I must admit that I couldn't understand how the short-lived series of beautiful but essentially meaningless animated shorts from MTV's Liquid Television could be made into an entertaining, let alone coherent, 90-minute film.
It can't.
Everything you've heard about AeonFlux is true. It AeonSux. It's AeonFucked. It's not only dull, it's also confusing, stupid, porrly designed, badly acted and has the type of dialogue that even the lamest Hanna Barbera rip-off would cringe at.
Starting from teh top, we have Charlize "I'm an Oscar Winner When I'm Ugly" Theron not wearing Aeon's super Laura Petrie flip hair style, even though she actually does catch a housefly with her eye lashes, much to the amusement of anyone watching. She does not, disappointingly, then turn her eyeball to look at the fly. However, the meaninglessness of the action as well as her rather subdued reaction to the feat clues one in immediately to the immense fiasco one is about to witness.
Let me put it this way, most of the dialog consists of obvious statements like "It's you," or "She's my sister." So this is what's being said between characters while they systematically anihilate each other with their bare hands... er, feet. Yes, feet, but not feet, but hands, because one character has had hands grafted onto her ankles, so now she has to run on her hands, but they're her feet. And also, there's a beautiful park that becomes an obstacle course of missile-hurling pinecones and deadly blade grass (no doubt you saw that in the trailer) and clouds that pee.
Well, I made up the cloud part, but it could have been true.
What's the plot? Who gives a flying bloody fuck? But I'll summarize so any curiosity you may still have can be sated here rather than by you actually renting this monstrosity. Aeon lives way in the future after a virus has wiped out 99% of humanity. She lives in Los Angeles, but it's the Los Angeles of TV so it's all clean and gangless except for these whispering secret people constantly pruning the shrubs. Okay, so she also has that woman from Fargo living inside her head, only she thinks she's really in an Anime so she talks nonsense and looks like she's constantly on the verge of crying. Aeon doesn't know who she is, but she has a sister who knows who she is, only she's killed almost immediately for being too cheerful.
Following so far? So then, Aeon gets an assignment from wig-woman in her head to accompany the hand-feet girl across the beautiful meadow of pain so she can assassinate some guy who's brother used to go out with Angelina Jolie when they were both Hackers. The brother actually hates him because he whispers so much and no one really knows what he's on about. Meanwhile overhead, a giant jellyfish or something like a jellyfish constantly circles the city trailing long streamers as a reminder than everyone else is dead, so it's cheerful and depressing at the same time. On board is a man dressed in a body condom who disappears at will and keeps the DNA records of all the people in the city inside a harp made of light.
Aeon discovers that the one brother has a hidden lab inside or beside or underneath his hidden library that you can only enter by becoming incredibly self-involved. While she's there, she's attacked by a bad-ass black woman and she excapes by doing something with a vault door or passing through water or maybe she pretends she's asleep, I honestly couldn't tell at that point.
In the end, the shrub pruners climb towers and shoot everyone, Aeon finds out that her sister has been cloned and is now a baby, the one brother gets so pissed off about the whispering that he shoots the other brother, the giant sky jellyfish crashes into the wall separating new Los Angeles from the jungles outside and everyone gathers at the gaping hole and wants their money back.
It's only 100 minutes long, but you'll feel like you spent 300 years there. 0 stars out of 5 for wasting my time and not being bad enough to be funny.
Sometimes, you just want to settle back into your loge seat at the multiplex, munch some yellow-oil-flavored popped corn, suck on a diet soda pop drink and let something numbing wash over you so you can forget, if only for a 90-minute period, that the world currently sucks because the people in charge hate you.
So it was that I found myself sitting next to my manfriend in the IMAX theatre at the Metreon weird-ass collective mall complex readying my eyes and ears for an assault by the master of stuck-inside-a-boat filmmaking, Wolfgang Petersen and his latest loud excuse for entertainment, "Poseiden." After all, if Hollywood thought that the idea of remaking one of the silliest disaster movies evar was worth $125million, why shouldn't I pay $12 for the right to sit in front of a family of 12 who all smell like whatever they make nacho cheese sauce out of? This is what movie-going is all about!
The plot concerns the ill-fated passengers of a huge ocean liner - and we get to see just how huge it is during the 20-minute opening credit fake helicopter shot all around the fake ship on its fake ocean thanks to the power of CGI and the acting skills of some guy who knows how to jog, which is foreshadowing of things to come. Then we get 10 minutes of set-up so we can either recognize famous faces so we know they'll survive (Mr. Goldie Hawn! That guy from Jaws that Belushi played better than that guy from Jaws! Uhhh, someone I think I've seen before in some movie with Reese Witherspoon but he wasn't a chihuahua and - oh yeah! Jogger guy!) or we're introduced to some people who have more than one line of dialogue prior to the rogue wave so we shall assume these are our femme fetales.
The wave hits the poor ship broadside and this is what I'm paying $12 for. This is the money shot. This is the cream splashing all over the lens. And was it worth it? Friends, it really was. Destruction on a grand scale, but not so big that you can't take it all in. Not like a comet hitting the Earth and you have to figure out which major city is being demolished because they all look like Toronto, anyway. No, this is served in bite-sized pieces.
Before I go on, I have to mention Fergie. You know who Fergie is? And not that spokeswomen for Weightwatchers, no I'm talking the girl from that multicultural royalty free photograph of a band who sang about her lovely lady lumps. That Fergie. She's totally in the movie! And she doesn't sing "The Morning After," which has taken on all new connotations since I have grown up than it did when I watched some movie of th eweek chick lip-synch the lyrics in the original. She does sing some awful ballad and I think we get to hear her finish up one of her hit singles before the boat turns over and she totally pees herself. It's like a documentary available on YouTube, only 8 stories high.
Anyway, the boat turns over and mostly everyone is in the big ballroom because the wave hits just at the strike of midnight on New Year's Eve. Unluckily for the staff, they're all stuck in the kitchen making more shrimp cocktail than would ever actually be needed in the course of an average Roman conquest and get burned up in flash fires, which we are told, like, three times are fires that burn really, really fast and then stop, and are not, as I imagined, animated Web cartoons using a plug-in that Firefox never seems to have the right version for.
The next hour concerns a lot of crawling and getting wet and pushing bloated bodies aside and betting with your movie neighbor who's going to bite it and who'll survive. I got most of them wrong, and I credit Wolfgang for fooling me into believing the whiny, claustrophobic Latina would survive wihile the whiny, suicidal, ancient fag wouldn't. Because, irony of irony, the guy who want to die actually lives, and the girl who wants to live to see her dying brother live, dies. And I'm giving nothing away becase by the end of this film - oh, hell, by the ten minute mark - you don't really care who survives as long as stuff blows up.
It's not a horrible movie at all. I was actually quite entertained because it delivered what I expected of it and the only thing missing was more fat people like Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters. Where are all the great fat actors? Think about it, no one's fat anymore. Even the great fat directors of yore (Orson Welles comes to mind, and Hitchcock of course) have been replaced by incredible shrinking directors like that Lord of the Rings dude and Karl Lagerfeld, who's not a director but he is a prima donna.
If it's still around, I recommend losing a summer afternoon to the pleasures of watching B-list actors and lovely brunette actresses you can't tell apart die on screen in elaborate set pieces built for hundreds of millions of dollars just so they can be destroyed for our entertainment. And isn't that a lot better than another man in tights flying around lamenting how sad he is, even with all those super powers?
Maybe not as hot, but certainly more understandable.
4 out of 5 stars, for delivering what was promised and killing Kurt Russell.
I have not read the book, and I am thinking now that I am glad I did not. Not, of course, because it is in any way sacreligious (which rhymes with 'delicious,' kind of) but because if it is anything like the movie I would have thrown it fairly hard about 20 minutes in, perhaps injuring my cat.
The plot notwithstanding - and it doesn't - the characters are also confused and confusing and hard to understand. There's some old guy played by that dude who can control metal from the Xmen and he can't, now, even control his own legs. He's obsessed with Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" because the artist portrayed some dude like a chick and that's funny? I guess? And then Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks, only instead of being pissed off at having AIDS or trying to get some weird mutant child on a train to evil Santa's village, now he's scared of elevators and doesn't know that he can get his hair cut at the mall for $12.95. Then the girl from that French film about being amused by men who work in porn stores also has long hair and does something with a dime in a bathroom at the Louvre that fools some grizzled French dude so badly that he behaves extremely rudely even for a grizzled French dude.
Seven hours later, my butt hurts, Hanks is pretending to kneel like a knight at a glass pyramid, the chick can't stand in water or something, the albino gets shot to death because no one can see him in the light and he gets mistaken for a 'got milk?' billboard, and the old man is screaming something at Tom Hanks about his hair.
1 out of 5 stars, for scribbling on the Mona Lisa, which is the most overrated piece of art in the world.
