I Bet Nobody Scrolls Up This Cinema

The review that will leave you asking… “Why?”

The first scene of Just Friends treats us to the sight of Ryan Reynolds in a fat suit and retainer, mugging for the camera as he croons a ballad into a mirror. His chin disappears into a bulbous mass of fake flesh, from which two beady eyes gleam like wet raisins. If that alone doesn’t put you off, I don’t know what will.

Ostensibly some sort of romantic comedy, Just Friends has two big problems: it’s not romantic and it’s not funny. Reinforcing the sad stereotype of the “nice guy,” whose acts of kindness morally oblige the girl to fuck him, the movie takes us on an emotional journey through unrequited lust, humiliation, slapstick, requited lust, emotional abuse, and objectification. If it sounds like I’m about to wax pedantic about gender roles and Hollywood sterotyping, don’t be afraid: this movie is, first and foremost, merely a piece of shit, and any disturbing sociological undertones come a distant second.

Stand by for boilerplate. The year is 1995. You know because Gin Blossoms or some fucking thing is playing in the background and Chris Brander (Reynolds) offhandedly mentions Party of Five. I guess that’s what you’ve got for a nostalgia cue in the Nineties. Bill Clinton! Blowjobs! Uh… Furbies! Haha! Anyway, Brander is mooning over his smokingly hot best friend Jamie Palamino (Amy Smart), whom of course he secretly wants to bang, but she loves him like a brother. Rejected and humiliated through a deeply hilarious yearbook switcheroo right out of the John Hughes playbook, Brander departs his hometown in tears.

Fast forward a decade, apparently, where Brander is no longer fat, but instead a smug, athletic bastard who can have any woman he wants. Bewilderingly, the “other woman” in this scenario is Samantha James (Anna Faris), a braying, intolerable psychopath who unfortunately steals every scene she’s in. If you’ve ever seen Anna Faris do her shtick, it’s basically on full-blast here; Samantha is the equivalent of the racist homebots from Transformers 2, waving her arms shrieking like a dentist’s drill whether she’s directly involved in the action or not.

Anyway, Brander ends up back in his hometown after an amazingly coincidental mishap on a plane, and meets up with Jamie at the local dive. Here we’re treated to all the usual Post-High School Trauma cliches: the star quarterback is still hanging around in his letter jacket, fat and bald, drinking himself blind, while the hot girl hasn’t aged a day, still working at the bar but with Big Dreams of Making It Someday. Brander, after stammering a bit, asks her out on a date.

From here, the movie descends into thematic incoherence. At first, Brander clearly just wants to revenge-fuck his former best friend, but then apparently develops feelings for her. He deals with these feelings by treating her like garbage, then having an attack of conscience, then treating her worse than ever. The audience is subjected to lengthy, tiresome angst as Brander tries to figure out why he wants to bang Jamie — we know that he does either way, but apparently his motivations are supposed to be key.

Along the way, the entire universe conspires to physically abuse Brander, which is where the comedy supposedly comes in. Kids whale him in the balls with hockey sticks. As he lays immobilized on a hospital gurney, the paramedics drop him down a hill face-down onto a frozen lake, following up with mumbled apologies. The waitress at the local diner refuses to take his order, instead bringing him a giant stack of fudge-covered pancakes because he used to eat that when he was fat. In short, people just behave in a surreal, outlandish fashion strictly for the purposes of humiliating Brander. In volume, the effect is more depressing than funny. Also, there’s Anna Faris eating toothpaste and staggering around, semi-comatose on Vicodin. And her character doesn’t behave all that well either. (Rimshot!)

And what does Jamie think of all this? We never find out. Her character is a complete cypher, existing only as the object of Brander’s lust, and his emotions apparently being the only ones that matter. Brander valiantly attempts to save her from remorseless lothario Dusty Dinkleman, who’s just out to revenge-bang her (Chris Klein), and the movie only comments briefly on the towering irony of this before moving on to more grueling slapstick.

Finally, the film lumbers to a conclusion, where Brander turns over a new leaf and confesses his true feelings for Jamie, although not without first being tasered in the balls. Jamie, despite Brander heaping a constant barrage of emotional abuse on her, smiles and kisses him. Hooray! I’m so happy! Oh wait, I feel nothing. I don’t think I’ll feel anything ever again.

So to sum up: too much Anna Faris, a squalid storyline, and the kind of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation-era comedy violence which probably should be amusing, but isn’t. If you want to see a better romantic comedy, see The Proposal with Reynolds and Sandra Bullock. Note I didn’t say good… I said better.

Penned by Juno scribe Diablo Cody, Jennifer’s Body is a black horror-comedy that dares to tell the amazing and unlikely story of Megan Fox transforming into a man-eating bitch.

Our story opens with Needy (played by the pop-eyed and comically adorable Amanda Seyfried, somehow crammed into the Plain Jane role) kicking some poor orderly’s ass in a mental institution. Ten seconds in and our hero is incarcerated already? But how? Needy sets up the lengthy flashback with disaffected nonchalance, and  we travel back in time to scant weeks earlier, where nerdy wallflower Needy and her BFF Jennifer (Megan Fox) share both a deep friendship and an inexplicably convenient psychic link that’s one part atmosphere, one part plot crutch.

Needy and Jennifer attend a local dive bar, where an unbearable pre-fab indie band (Low Shoulder, a group mercifully nonexistent beyond the bounds of the movie) belt out a cloying sugar-pop ballad. Did you enjoy it? No? Well, you’ll be hearing it throughout the film, so just you buckle up. As Low Shoulder hits the chorus, an electrical fire starts, helpfully fulfilling the movie’s gore quotient early. The agonized screams of extras peal in the background as Needy and Jennifer escape and swap pop culture references. In a truly clumsy transition into the movie’s plot, the members of Low Shoulder hypnotize the more-than-willing Jennifer into their creepy van, and she disappears — until later that night, that is.

If you’re going into Jennifer’s Body (note the cunning double entendre) expecting Fox to artfully portray an unsettling transformation from snobby cheerleader to flesh-eating abomination, brace for the first of many disappointments. Human Jennifer and demonic Jennifer are basically indistinguishable, save for the fact that demonic Jennifer spews bilious black fluid everywhere, just in case it’s unclear that something’s amiss.

From there, the movie descends into a formula that, while dressed in ironic new clothes, relies just as heavily on slasher conventions as a thousand other films. Jennifer begins methodically devouring the unfortunate souls of Devil’s Kettle High School, and the requisite parade of clueless authority figures and sarcastic voice-overs ensues. Jennifer must consume the blood of the living in order to maintain her volcanic sexuality, which is doubtless some kind of subversive statement on puberty, or menstruation, or Revlon or something. Needy, despite supposedly being the intelligent one in the cast, wilfully goes along with the classic Idiot Plot; the story only moves forward as long as she (and the audience) pretend certain things aren’t happening.

Body’s script groans under the weight of Cody’s shrill attempts to seem relevant. Much like Juno, both the characters and the dialogue swell with quirky quirkaciousness like pustulent sores: Every available surface is plastered with posters of the hippest bands you’ve never heard of. The high school teacher is a scarred, fretting ninny with a hook for a hand (played by an utterly wasted J.K. Simmons), and the characters utter clunky, honest-to-blog phrases like “cheese and fries” and ironically add “dot com” and “dot org” to the ends of their sentences, thus demonstrating to the audience that they are surely hip teenagers living in the information age and not just more twenty-somethings pretending to be high schoolers in a horror movie.

Brisk pomo witticisms aside, Jennifer’s Body has plenty to offer in the guilty-pleasure arena. Bare midriffs and plunging necklines abound, and even the ostensibly frumpy Needy dutifully sheds her clothes somewhere in the second act. The gory bits, brief as they are, are well-done, and the Seyfried / Fox makeout scene will surely satisfy those enterprising souls willing to endure the entire film rather than just search for the scene on Youtube.

The movie lumbers through the inevitable plot elements (would you believe that the cosmically evil Fox eventually tries to seduce Needy’s Zack-Efron-lite boyfriend Chip? Would you?), and we eventually learn that Jennifer was sacrificed to the Devil by the members of Low Shoulder in order that they might enjoy sweet pop-band success. In true Diablo Cody style, the film shoves our nose into the urine-stained carpet of irony as the band cuts loose with a light-hearted stanza of “867-5309 (Jenny)” before brutally stabbing her to death. Ha ha! Get it? Because her name is… look, forget it.

To its credit, Jennifer’s Body does contain a final twist that’s genuinely entertaining, even if it is set up with all the sly subtlety of an air horn at a Jets game. It seems de rigeur that one can’t so much as mention Megan Fox without taking a swipe at her acting chops. In truth, Fox is not terrible, but she’s out-acted at every step by Seyfried, whose transition from nerdy girl to swaggering, cynical badass is the most interesting thing about the movie. Needy’s epilogue satisfies the revenge instinct, even if it does give off the impression that the movie ends just when it’s getting interesting.

In short, Jennifer’s Body ends up being precisely kind of movie Cody was desperately trying to subvert — long cleavage and deus ex machina, short on story. Jennifer’s Body is the kind of movie best enjoyed with some sarcastic friends and a generous supply of alcohol. Chances are your own wry pop-culture jokes will endure in your memory far longer than Cody’s.

Say there, movie lover, do you love mutants? How about swords? How about mutants with swords… for hands? And other people killing sword-hand mutants with swords? Well, if so, Mutant Chronicles is the movie for you.

As the title deftly implies, Mutant Chronicles is the chronicle of some mutants, and how they killed some guys with swords and were later killed by other guys with swords. I know it might seem like I’m being reductionist here, but I’m really not. Aside from some turgid exposition on the front end, Mutant Chronicles is one long, queasy, disjointed series of fight scenes, bursting with cheap-looking computerized gore and devoid of even the most rudimentary characterization.

Our story opens in the one billionth century A.D., where (according to the narration) a mysterious machine came down from space and started turning everyone into mutants for reasons that never become even remotely clear. But then the machine was buried, so that the machine would stop turning people into mutants. Tragically, the machine is unburied in the first five minutes of the film, and thus starts turning people into mutants. A crack team of soldiers is dispatched to blow up the machine, so as to stop the flood of mutants… well, I hope I didn’t lose you anywhere.

The cast is surprisingly decent. Ron Perlman stars as Brother Samuel, a two-fisted fightin’ priest who must lead the gritty Dirty Dozen into the tunnels to blow up the mutant machine. Of all the actors, Perlman gives the most to the film; he chews the scenery with the kind of remorseless intensity one has come to expect from him. John Malkovich plays the same role as Sean Connery in Highlander II, or Christopher Walken in any of the Prophecy sequels; that is to say, he’s in the movie for five minutes in order that the movie might contain five enjoyable minutes. Thomas Jane, Devon Aoki, and some other guys round out the team of hard-bitten mercenaries, but ultimately they’re all pretty interchangeable. One of them shows off a picture of his kids and talks about the restaurant he’s going to open, and is then impaled on a piece of rebar. Okay, not really. But had that happened, you would not have been surprised.

Stylistically, Mutant Chronicles is like Sky Captain’s grubby cousin who comes over to your house and puts his muddy feet all over the furniture. It’s a gritty future that looks like 1914, complete with pot helmets, potato-masher grenades, and rainy trenches. The World War I iconography is so ruthlessly cribbed that if it weren’t for the spotty, blurry CGI work, you might think you’re watching the end of Gallipoli.

Clearly shot on the cheap, Mutant Chronicles looks decent enough for its budget, but suffers from the same problems as Sky Captain, and then some. Everything’s out of focus, and the computerized elements lack any sort of weight. Surrounded by green screens on every side, the characters look, shoot, and talk past the camera frame, leading the viewer into a foggy world without any sense of place. Despite the vast scale afforded by the CGI backdrops, even the wide-open spaces seem curiously claustrophobic. The movie’s color palette consists almost exclusively of reds and grays, with the occasional orange explosion for variety.

Things change for the worse when the crew goes underground, trudging their way through dimly lit air shafts and featureless antechambers. The protagonists are plagued at every step by an unyielding horde of identical baddies, transforming the movie into something remniscent of a game of Doom. Even the guilty pleasure of watching the choreographed swordplay gives way to boredom after a solid half-hour of non-stop killing. After enough of this, the fingers start yearing for a game controller to steer one of the heroes toward the power-up.

As mindless action-adventure goes, there are worse offerings out there than Mutant Chronicles… the Sci-Fi epic Mansquito, for instance, might fare a little worse. The story is rudimentary and the characters so one-dimensional they could do a guest spot in Flatland, but if you like your action served up in heaping portions like sides of charred beef, Mutant Chronicles will give you your fill.

I imagine we’re nowhere near the nadir of bullshit Avatar stories in the media, but here’s a good candidate: Taiwanese man dies while watching Avatar!

A 42-year-old Taiwanese man with a history of high blood pressure apparently died from a stroke while watching the film, Agence France Presse reported.

In a truly awesome stroke of relevance and class, the article goes on to mention the film’s box office to date. You know, so readers can make an informed decision about stroke victims in the news.

What the shit, CBS? Aren’t we inundated with hype enough already without this ersatz, hyperbolic William Castle horseshit?

Note: Avatar isn’t a bad movie, at least not according to me. Two posts in and this blog’s theme is looking shaky already!

Daybreakers: I didn’t have the heart to post on Icine and say this looks like a complete piece of shit. There was a time when I regarded the presence of Sam Neill as some sort of mark of quality; even an uneven mess like In the Mouth of Madness was rendered enjoyable by Neill’s well-meaning hammery. Now he’s like a poor man’s Anthony “Anything for a Buck” Hopkins. I’m tired of nonsensical dystopian futures where everything is apparently lit by one-source blue lighting. This was old when Supernova detailed the thrilling voyage to the planet Ridley-Scott in 199, but honestly, enough already. Let’s get some bleak movies with some solar hues for fuck’s sake. Despite the good reviews, I simply cannot dredge up enough care from Giveafuck Bay.

Legion: Killer grandma! Killer ice cream man! Paul Bettany deserves better than a retread of Prophecy written by Corky from Life Goes On. I can only hope that the possessed wall-crawling grandma is meant to be comical somehow, because judging from the trailers, it’s about as soul-blastingly frightening as Beverly Hills Ninja. Also, when was the last time you saw a good humor truck? I haven’t spotted once since about 1991. Surely today’s youth will connect with the cheap and dark irony of the killer ice cream man! Also, everyone knows that you can defeat angels by shooting them with machine guns. If Abraham had brought his Webley to the mountaintop like he’d planned, he wouldn’t have had to pretend to sacrifice Isaac. He could have just shot God in the face and yelled “now what, motherfucker!” (Thus commenting wryly on the vague and incestuous nature of the Holy Trinity in an ironic fashion. Abraham can later hint that Gabriel is his own grandpa.)

Twilight: Any of ‘em. From Bram Stoker’s original Prince of Fellatio-Phobia to vampires playing baseball and moping over girls one-hundredth their age. You’ve got to admire Stephenie Meyer for making a billion dollars from a consequence-free parable that reduces the flesh-eating undead to a hunky love interest straight off the pages of Tiger Beat. Lestat would be proud. I look forward to Meyer’s inevitable descent into braying, Anne Rice-style insanity, wherein she declares herself above all editing (not much of a leap there, I’d wager) and writes the scintillating follow-up, Spinebreakers, about deadly mother-eating babies and the teenage girls who love them.