red_hyro Reviews

B.U.S.T.E.D (1998)

Memorably bad...which I suppose is something.

[1/10 · 9 October 2008]

What an awful, awful film.

I saw a few years back, drawn by Goldie and Bowie, whose music I enjoy, the last time I've made that mistake.

Bowie and Goldie, limited as actors but effective in the proper roles, did fine here, but rather than get a film which assigns them one note characters in order to better focus the viewer on the fact that the director is edgy, the writer is subtle, and the main actor has a great body, is a great dancer, and rivals Deniro in talent. All three are Andrew Goth, and all three sucked out loud, especially in scenes so irrelevant to the plot and narcissistic that they are painful to watch. For instance...

Did you know the main character, Ray, played by Goth is an honorable thug, but also a greater dancer? Does he pursue a dancing career in the film or is the dancing otherwise relevant to the plot? You ask.

No, but it's crucial that we have a long scene about him being a great dancer, just like we need a long scene to see that he can do a lot of pull ups, in order to understand that Nietzsche's Ubermensch walks the earth and is named Andrew Goth, I mean Ray.

Oh yes, and the movie is about a couple friends released from prison, one determined to go straight and one who is a psycho. Comic mayhem ensues.

The movie was memorably bad, which is an accomplishment I suppose, in an "Ed Wood" sort of way, since I've already forgotten so many mediocre films, but "Busted" aka "Everybody Loves Sunshine" has stuck with me, and even now recalling it, I have to shake the bad off my skin like so many wet slugs. Yuck!

Watching the Detectives (2007)

Watching the Detectives: screwball comedy for the 21st century

[8/10 · 16 August 2008]

Watching the Detectives is a loving homage to the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, adopting the basic formula of Bringing up Baby, i.e. daffy broad woos uptight dork. The dork is Cillian Murphy's Neil, an esoteric video store owner obsessed with being part of the movie reality he spends so much time the passive viewer of. Along comes Lucy Liu's Violet, a moderately insane woman who doesn't need to watch movies because she is always starring in her own, and is determined to have Neil as her costar. She involves him in a string of situations reminiscent of classic movies, noir and screwball alike, while attempting to help Neil realize she's the best thing that ever happened to him The movie is pleasant, though meandering at times, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The story could have used a little stronger of an underlying plot arc to tie together the comic episodes beyond the basic premise of Liu's pursuit of Neil. This plot arc component is what made Bringing up Baby, It Happened One Night, and other classic screwball comedies so good, the laughs occurring within a tight script. Watching the Detectives' script is funny if a bit flabby, but Lucy Liu and Cillian Murphy deliver inspired performances amidst a talented supporting cast, and are able to make you forget the film's flaws and enjoy yourself.

The central message of the film is good one for all of us who spend too much time watching and not enough time making our own movies.

Kingdom Hospital (2004)

How bad is the King's Kingdom Hospital? Let me count the ways...

[1/10 · 25 July 2008]

Stephen King's version of the Danish Miniseries "The Kingdom", about a hospital filled with oddballs and ghosts, manages to render what had been a funny, thoughtful, and eerie story into a boring piece of dog poop. Skip it and make the effort to find the original by Lars von Trier, you'll be glad you did.

In his other works, King is good at occasionally creating scary moments, some even filled with prolonged dread; yet what makes his novels readable and other television projects such as "Rose Red" watchable when wading through the banal characters, plot points and scenes, is here lacking, which is strange. It may be explained by his inability to create the subtle forms of eeriness on display in his source material, which used quiet and stillness, not as the preface to a suddenly scream, but a soft murmur. King doesn't have the patience, and instead fills up the spooky quiet with incessant yammering.

Gone as well are the often comic and/or obsessive, yet believably human characters which were the backbone of the original series by Lars Von Trier. King instead treats us to boring clichés reminiscent of one dimensional characters from his other works.

The charmingly arrogant, scheming and blustering doctor Stig Helmer, one of the original series' many treasures, is robbed of his intelligence and turned into Dr. Stegman, a craven moron whose own arrogance, bluster and scheming ways would have seemed too broad on M.A.S.H. King can't stand to create mere A-holes, they must be inhumanly evil and stupid. Yosemite Sam was more nuanced and received less cloyingly saccharine comeuppance from his adversaries, although Yosemite's comeuppance was distinguished by being funny: no such luck with Stegman, and the Kingdom Hospital is plagued by King's inability to write intentionally funny lines. (Unfortunately the hilariously awful similes which turn up in his prose works have not appeared to have made it into his scripts, but there are laughs to be found here in the dialogue.) We are also treated to elements familiar to readers of King: tedious interior monologues; annoying singing by various characters; inhuman, snarling bad guys; a wise-cracking, delightlessly sassy god-character (here, a giant anteater); and writing which leaves nothing to be spelled out by the audience. This last quality is perhaps the most annoying of King's as writer, his inability to allow for ambiguities, to let something remain less than obvious.

The Darwin Awards (2006)

Why do people let Finn Taylor keep making movies?

[1/10 · 6 March 2008]

It took roughly five minutes to tell The Darwin Awards was an awful, misbegotten, badly directed piece of tripe; I gave it another fifteen to change my mind, and when it didn't, I turned it off, not willing to give up another hour and change being tortured with gag inducing 'quirky' characters undergoing a 'quirky' storyline that would no doubt entreat the viewer to find its 'quirky' heart and undergo a 'quirky' catharsis. The disgust this movie induced in me was a familiar sort, and when I checked IMDb and saw it was by the same fellow who inflicted "Dream with the Fishes" on hundreds of unsuspecting film enthusiasts including myself, Finn Taylor, I understood what I needed to do, namely warn you, my fellow movie watchers, against this and any other film written and directed by this man. (There are only three, the two aforementioned and "Cherish"; it's a small blessing that Taylor seems to take his time either writing, editing or -more likely- getting funding for his project, which have come out at four to five year intervals.) You may, like me, have been curious about this film due to your also having chuckled at the grotesque comedy of the Darwin award winners, but I will say in all honesty, this film does not do them justice. Ironically, the filmmaker himself has not has his career killed churning out these horrifically stupid films, which would seem to imply that the Hollywood independent film scene is not governed by natural selection. That's a pity.

What is the essence of what makes this and his other films suck? It's a number of things, starting with the quirkiness. Why bother with richly imagined characters when you can stack up a couple esoteric phobias and qualities and call it macaroni? Why indeed. So our main character in The Darwin Awards is a police profiler who faints at the sight of blood: comedy gold, because you know it is just soooo ironic, and irony is best when it isn't subtle and is poorly executed in annoyingly mannered performances.

Then there is the 'intelligence' of the scripts, where you'll find, for instance, a serial killer complaining about the profiler quoting an overused line from a famous poem. How exquisite, and yet in the midst of such a badly made film, one sees the difference between knowledge and practical wisdom.

The Darwin Awards features a moronic and grating student documentary maker who is following the main character around, giving another 'clever' layer to the film, by annoying the viewer with those stupid camera frame lines that let you know when you're looking through the documentary filmmakers pov, versus all the other shots that aren't annoying hand-held drek. The maker of the actual film tries to avoid being seen as pretentious and untalented by having a filmmaker in it that is satirized as being pretentious and untalented. Because I'm an irresponsible reviewer, I'll guess that this character is an unconscious avatar of Taylor's own self-doubts about his talent, and I'm hoping someone who knows and loves this man will play intellectual midwife to him and help him realize that he should stop making films, and maybe consider a profession more suited to his talents, which I'm sure are substantial, albeit not manifested in his cinematic work thus far. They say as a young man, Kurosawa was interested in painting, but realized after a time that while he was proficient enough, his works were derivative, and so he got into film making, where he excelled. Perhaps Finn Taylor should get out of film making and become a painter.

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)

Horrific film, clumsy and superficial

[1/10 · 26 July 2007]

This is a truly terrible film about politics/ethics. I can only advise you to read the book, and not let the badness of this film to turn you off it. The film manages to take every nuanced and insightful moment in the book by Tom Wolfe (which was not without flaws) into a banally cynical statement which assumes that the viewer is dumber than a bag of hammers. What made the book interesting is that it did not have a pat ending. The film manages to have a couple.

The cinematography is in fact amazing, but who cares, since this is the only thing going for a film filled with yuck. There are bad performances by everyone, as a result of bad writing and bad direction, since Brain De Palma was either entirely blind to the overacting going on constantly in the frame or actively encouraging the actors to be as broad as possible so as to drive home the utterly juvenile and excruciatingly clumsy observations of his satiric portrait. Considering the uneven (at best) quality of his work overall, one tends to think he ruined the possibility of Wolfe's insight into New York in the 80's, America, and human affairs in general from ever being shared with a larger audience than those who enjoy reading.

Love Before Breakfast (1936)

Not a classic, but Lombard is terrific.

[7/10 · 21 July 2007]

The film's premise is straightforward: Lombard plays Kay Colby, a young socialite convinced she's in love with Bill Wadsworth (Cesar Romero), a fellow quickly identified as the douche who is all wrong for her. Her Mr. Right is Preston Foster's Scott Miller, who happens to own the oil company Wadsworth works for.

We quickly discover Miller is in love with Colby. He's also manipulative and sneaky, for as the film opens we find Miller is purposefully sending her rather self-centred beau away on assignment on a ship to Japan . And he manages to finagle it so that his own Ms. Wrong, a yappy countess with an entourage of similarly disposed dogs, is going on the same ship. Colby and Wadsworth bump into him (more accurately, they bump into his parked car and then him) at the dock.

So the stage is set for an epic 2nd act featuring the screwball comedy battle of wills, which will steadily escalate in madness and will only let up in the last minute.

The film is not as wicked as 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith', which has very similar sort of screwball formula (sneaky guy pursuing girl as opposed to sneaky girl pursuing guy ala 'Bringing up Baby'), but like that film, this one features Lombard doing what she does best: make you want to kiss and kill her at the same time. She's so good that it makes up for the inadequacies of the leading man, Preston Foster, who is not a good enough listener as an actor to create the sort of chemistry a William Powell or Cary Grant could form with an ugly lamp (see Powell's work in 'My Man Godfrey' opposite Lombard, whom he had not too long before filming divorced!). Foster's all right when we don't have to watch him react to Lombard, but his comic timing and general shtick is uneven. I suspect the director must have figured this out, as the camera is kind in allowing her to create the illusion of a relationship twixt the two a fair amount of the time.

Another interesting phenomenon is the visceral similarity in appearance of the two men (they look alike and both have dark hair with trimmed mustaches) vying for Lombard's Colby, which was aesthetically dissonant for me. I think at the very least one of the staches could have gone, just so douche-bag and good guy don't become perceptually associated in our minds.

The indulgence of quibbles aside, the film's moments of charm and Lombard's mastery of screwball comedy's delectable form of erotica make it well worth seeing if you're fond of the genre.

Big Nothing (2006)

Horrifically bad script sinks this films

[1/10 · 20 May 2007]

Big Nothing is a film in which you feel sorry for the actors. You see them struggling, leaking flop sweat trying to do their best with the one note characters they've been given:

"Hi! I'm the resident trickster character with bs stories up to yin yang ready for any and all occasions! I'll be providing the macguffin for this film in the form of a ransoming scheme and be throwing in humorous colour commentary when necessary."

"Hey! I'm the smart-talking, sass-deploying teenage beauty queen who abandoned a career as a trophy wife for a millionaire to work in a run down bar and pursue crime enterprise. FYI, I'm capable of doing just about anything to get on top! Including homicide, because as a noir character, I've rid myself of a soul for the sake of the plot";

And finally: "Hey, I'm the basically good-guy dad pulled into this obviously ill-conceived ransoming scheme out of love for my cute daughter. Ask me about my back story! You bet it's heartrending! Oh, and don't forget, my wife is a police officer! Insane to even consider committing a crime, right? Well that's just how much I love my daughter!"

The actor work hard, and yet the writer of this film clearly hates them. Why else would he confine them in this mess of story, which plods from boring event to boring event as the bodies pile up and one wonders if perhaps this movie has really been thought through, and what conversation had been going on in the writer's head as he type out this bit of detritus.

"So okay, we got the wife suddenly arrive pointing a gun at the tied-up cop and two main characters. She reveals pertinent info helping us understand what's going on. What now?"

"How's about an axe to the head by a character who shows up out of the blue, having acquired an axe, ready for homicide?"

"Golden! Who need a rich storyline when you have crappy movie magic?"

"I know, right? All right, so what's the next twist gonna be?"

"Let's have three betrayals followed by another ridiculous happenstance that insults our audience's credulity. You realize that we now have two dozen more twists than 'Chinatown' and that's a noir classic!"

"I smell Oscar!"

Smokin' Aces (2006)

Where's the beef in this story?

[4/10 · 4 May 2007]

This film is not lacking in flash or skill as regards its editing, cinematography, or even performances. But where is the plot? I kept hoping something would happen, and there would be character development, but it just didn't occur. There is way too much time spent setting up the plot: a mob boss is going to snitch, and cops and killers are dispatched to the penthouse where he is staying in order to get him. That's over thirty minutes in which nothing happens, merely indications something eventually will transpire. Then the first act occurs: they all show up and shoot each other, while the snitch mopes around upstairs and performs card tricks. The second and third acts were apparently abandoned in favour of a super-neato twist which doesn't matter because it concerns people we don't care about. Same goes for the few betrayals and relationships formed in the course of the film: since nothing led up to them or happened after they occur, they don't mean anything.

A good plot actually develops the characters, while the ostensible main character of the film, the FBI agent played by Ryan Reynolds, remains a cardboard cut-out. The director, who seems to be too busy trying to be cool (as opposed to just focusing on telling a story while being cool, ala Tarantino) with nifty cuts and one-note idiosyncratic characters to actually bother with the story, is clearly thinking that when Ryan's character is sitting in the hospital room at the end of the film, we the audience are suppose to be feeling his pain and turmoil. But why would we? He hasn't actually done anything but shown up to hotel, find out his partner has been killed and that their assignment was a moot point. Oh and he lets some injured killers go, because it's just one of those days and they seem like nice folk. Where are the choices and actions that define who this guy is and lead to consequences and problems he has to overcome? If there has actually been a plot, he could have developed relationships and undergone trials along the way, making us identify and care about him by the end. As it is, who could possibly gives a rat's ass about anybody in this film? I've had more intimate relationships with characters trying to get a nasty stain out of their favorite shirt in a thirty-second commercial.

I would have been down for an entire story, with a beginning, middle and end, which at the pace of this director would have taken at least four hours. As it is, we have a boring Macguffin in the form of coked-out magician/mobster (always a dynamite combo), a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, and an ending that reveals even the main character has given up on being in a good movie and decided to end the raison d'etre of whatever was motivating everyone to act by pulling the metaphoric and literal plug.

What makes the film so interesting is just how horribly it lacks the basic building blocks of a story, which hasn't changed much since Aristotle wrote about it in The Poetics.

Buffet Froid (1979)

A black comedy about human life in mass society

[9/10 · 24 October 2005]

The philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote: "What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost it's power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them" I believe this film is attempting to express this sense of alienation through its absurd black humor, centered around an unemployed young man who has nightmares and is followed by anonymous death in his random comings and goings. Others have given various plot details, thus I will concern myself only with pointers and descriptions which may enrich your experience of this film.

What is important to notice at first is not the absurdity of the action of the plot, which is very apparent from the first conversation of the film, but rather the concrete circumstances of the young man at the beginning of the film. He is unemployed, has no friends, and lives in an apartment building which had been until recently empty. Relationships he has and which he forms are without love, genuine care or meaning; they are merely people he bumps into on the way to eventual death (this includes most disturbingly his wife). He is not a part of anything, and makes no plans. This is a caricature of the modern, mass-society life, in which humans have no community in which their actions may be remembered after their death, no relation to others defined by the artifice which structures their world (i.e. living in apartment building, your neighbors are strangers, and you are 'closer' to people who may live halfway around the world, which is not how things have always been or will always be), and no connection in their lives to the means by which they are able to survive as an animal (i.e. your food shows up in supermarkets from somewhere and you buy it).

What is life for this man? What awaits him? To be eventually erased it seems, blotted out without trace and forgotten as flies which we swat are forgotten. The films is terrifyingly funny in this sense, as we laugh at the empty absurdity of a life which has no story for the one living it, just a horrifying series of events which have no rational rhyme or reason, a life which the person living it accepts but does not embrace, cold in the world he finds himself occupying for a while.

This may not seem like much of a recommendation, and yet for those who are interested in have their entertainment tainted with the challenge all good art poses for us as individuals, the view of life it espouses and which we find has become entangled with our own, making things stand out in our world that we had been unable to see before which prompt questions, often disturbing, we must seek to answer, 'Buffet Froid' is definitely worth checking out, whatever your final opinion as to its meaning or worth. It asks the viewer, "and what about you? You laugh at this man's life but how is your life fundamentally different from his? Is what you're occupying yourself with before death all that less absurd?"

The Secret Lives of Dentists (2002)

Really want to be a profound gem of a film, but fails utterly

[4/10 · 4 August 2005]

"The Secret Lives of Dentists, the story of a father who shares a dentist office with a wife he suspects may be cheating, is another film from Alan Rudolph which thinks it's smarter and more profound than it actually is. While it is nice to see an American director attempting to imitate Ingmar Bergman, if you watch "Wild Strawberries" together with this film, you'll recognize what is so clearly lacking in "The Secret Life of Dentists": wisdom.

Campbell Scott plays a father who serves as caretaker in a family which is sick, metaphorically and literally. His wife, played by the incandescent Hope Davis, is drifting away from him and he believes she's having an affair with someone else involved in a local opera production she has a small role in and seems to feel alive in. Their relationship has grown stale and they seem incapable of bridging the distance. We are meant to sympathize with Scott's character, and feel his pain as he attempts to let the affair he thinks his wife is having play out on its own, rather than challenge her about it and force her to make a decision.

While Scott's performance is excellent, one cannot help but ask, "why should I see this character's choice as a good one and thus sympathize with his plight?" This is a guy who is unwilling to challenge himself by actually bridging the emotional gap between himself and his wife, and trying to breath some life into an otherwise undead existence . Yet somehow, his choice of continuing on with a lifeless marriage at all costs and dooming his children to reenact the same screwed-up relationships in their own lives is supposed to be seen as a good one, the morally wise one, since he's managing to keep the family together and see it through its 'sickness'. I can't help but think that the scriptwriter and director are lacking any sort of practical moral wisdom or understanding of what makes life a beautiful thing. For this see, for example, Bergman's "Saraband", "Scenes from a Marriage" or "Wild Strawberries".

The God of Cookery (1996)

joyfully absurd silliness

[9/10 · 23 April 2005]

Another terrific film from director/star/co-writer Stephan Chow, the highlight of which are scenes involving The Eighteen Brassmen of Shaolin Monastery, whom provide for particularly inspired comic moments in a movie full of them. Like his breakthrough film in the west, Shaolin Soccer, this film incorporates martial arts into an area not associated explicitly with them.

However, The God of Cookery is not as much focused upon cooking as it is upon an ever-expanding group of oddball characters. The most wonderful thing about Chow as a director is that he doesn't simply use them as vehicles for gags but really allow them screen time to do their thing, even if it is just a throwaway role in the film (the 'ugly chef' who is in the very first scene is a good example). This includes ugly duckling/love interest Turkey, whose absurdly brutal personality and violent behaviour is so incredibly funny because Karen Mok, the actress playing Turkey, portrays her so honestly and without guile. There is none of the incredibly unfunny, strained-'trying to be funny' or ironic acting often found in recent American comedies. Chow is apparently a huge fan of Bruce Lee, but his work seems to take as much from Charlie Chaplin, a guy who knew how to be serious-ly funny.

Anyway, if you enjoyed Stephan Chow's other comedies or are up for some joyfully absurd silliness, look around for this one, it's worth the effort.