Movie Mails

I, Robot

I, Robot. Or: I, Product Placement. Let's have a look at the year 2035: Everybody in Chicago drives Audi. Well, special Audis, some of them with huge logos on the front grill with neon lights; the autopilot making sure this logo is always clearly visible in the shot whenever a camera is around. Will Smith's ride looks like an Audi TT covered in sugar coating.

Cool people own JVC stereos. Nice and glowing ones. And because Will Smith is so old-school, he's got a vintage stereo from the year 2004, so whoa, guess what, you could buy it right now if you wanted to. Just like his All-Star Cons that are often shown in close-ups and mentioned in dialogs.

But hey, why complain about that. They have commercial breaks on TV too, and in I Robot, they're at least in the style of the movie and not that long.

But now to the movie itself. The credits state "Suggested by Isaac Asimov's Novel". I assume they took a Thesaurus and looked for the word that hints at the most vague connection between the original material and the movie.

But hey, the movie wasn't so bad after all. Okay, it's just blockbuster junk food, there's no denying of that, and some things are plain dumb. I particularly hated the idea of trying to squeeze some tears out of the audience after a robot is killed. What the heck? Especially when considering that this movie was made by Alex Proyas who used to be the expert for the dark and gloomy and got now promoted (or demoted?) to the PG-13-boom-special-fx-with-big-budget department.

Some camera work is cool though, especially towards the end when there's some real tight-booty crap. The savior of this entire movie without doubt though is Will Smith (if you like him). He doesn't suck.

The CGI does, however. As you might expect, this movie is full of CGI. Sometimes it's kind of artificial, but then, sometimes it's ridiculous. There's one scene with lots of crates somewhere. That totally reminded me of a computer game where they often have crates littered around (either for jump'n'run purposes or as cover in a FPS).

So... very generic. Watchable, but nothing special.

The Bourne Supremacy

Da-amn. I'm losing my touch here. This movie has been out for weeks and only now did I see it. But then again, I was never that eager to see it - everybody said it's as good as the first part. Great. The first part didn't exactly blow me away.

It's a solid action movie (but PG-13, bah), but that's about all. Still, I finally decided to watch part 2. Just for the heck of it.

And - basically it is like the first part. Matt Damon is still Bourne who's better and cooler and smarter than all the others, and even after 30 car crashes, 80 punches and getting shot three times, he runs around happily and even maintains his nifty hair-style. I was pretty jealous - I have to smear this goo in my hair whenever I hop into the ocean to go surfing for a few minutes.

But the one thing that really annoyed me was the camera. They decided to go for this post-modern shaky camera thing, and really bad too. I'm starting to have this theory that the producers simply decided to employ amateur camera operators. There's no other explanation for this piece of crap camera work. The shots themselves are well-composed, but the camera twitches around like an epileptic when exposed to strobe light.

And I'm not even talking about the action scenes here. I timed one shot: It was 14 seconds long and the camera was "static"! I mean it was pretty much showing the same thing, just shaking around like a tiny cutter at Beaufort 10 and totally random zooming in and out.

Things really got out of hand during the action scenes: The camera totally spaced out there. Close-up after close-up with easily four shots per second. That's not fun anymore. Near the end, there's a long car chase in which Matt Damon is broadsided ten times at 80 miles per hour, and each time, his car spins around a couple of times before he happily keeps on driving. Well, at least that's what it looks like, it's impossible to follow with this bullcrap camera.

Personally, I liked the fact that half of the movie was set in Germany, and just like in the first part, the actors actually spoke decent German (since they actually shot there). That gave me mixed feelings of "check out how different that place looks" and "hey, I've been there... I know all this."

Funnier even that some details were only plausible if you actually understood German. In one scene, he calls three hotels and asks for a certain person, all this in (horrible) German without subtitles. I don't think people could understand what the hell that was about if they didn't speak German. And other details here and there, like one shot where we see him driving somewhere. A street sign says "Tegel", but that's all. Well, it's hard for people who don't live in Germany to understand that Berlin-Tegel is where a big airport is.

Other than that? Nice. Like the first part. That sums it up.

Collateral

Yo Bagel,

it just came to me again - the movie industry here in the US is a lot more sophisticated. Release dates for movies are placed strategically; like the summer blockbusters. Those are movies like Spider-Man or X-Men, they're PG-13 and designed for mass consumption.

You can tell the season by looking at a theater billboard: It's pretty much PG-13 only in summer.

But then, there are little R-rated treats scarcely sprinkled inbetween, like Confessions of a Dangerous Mind as a re-release last year, or Collateral now. In Germany, movies are threwn together randomly depending on when a distributor is able to get a hold of it.

The trailer looked nice, and there has been a lot of advertisement for this movie. So I had some solid expectations when I walked into the theater - something I usually try to avoid.

But in this case, it worked out - I liked the movie starting from the first scene on. You gotta get used to the look though - it's shot on HDTV and is pretty much entirely set at night. Therefore, it looks a bit grainy, but not like a TV movie or anything.

Michael Mann tried to keep the movie "authentic" - hence the digital format and the complete lack of credits in the beginning.

The exposition is rather short, too: After we meet Jamie Foxx, driving arguing couples and hectic businesspeople all across Los Angeles that he knows inside out, Tom Cruise gets into the cab.

And there we go. Tom Cruise has him drive to a residential area but mentions that he has to make a total of five stops and asks Jamie to wait. And guess what, since you've already seen the trailer, you know that a soon-to-be-corpse plummets onto the cab, and Jamie and Tom have that famous piece of dialog: "You killed him!" - "Nah, I shot him. Bullets and the fall killed him."

So now Jamie ends up as the driver for Tom Cruise, who moves from place to place and leaves a trail of destruction.

There have been many movies of this kind. Colatteral is still a lot of fun to watch: For one thing, there are the two main characters who involuntarily get to know each other better that have been fleshed out remarkably well: There's the cynical Tom Cruise who came to realize how insignificant a human life in the grand scheme of things is, and, with this knowledge, carries out his job with an unmatched calm and indifference. Jamie, on the other hand, tries to make himself believe that this 12-year cab driver career is just a "temporary part time job".

Then, the movie amazes with its clean execution - there are no silly or drawn-out scenes in it, and occassionally genuinely funny situations. There are a few "oh-lookee-here-what-coincidence" plot elements, and a few cliches, but to a small extent only.

After seeing the movie, you'll remember a lot of scenes, and you'll come to appreciate how good many of them were. There's that scene in the Jazz joint that I dug a lot. And the scene in the club that had a pulsating soundtrack, was very dynamic, and edited clearly, even though a lot was going on. It's just a downer that Jada Pinkett, normally strikingly beautiful, didn't look that amazing here.

In that bulk of summer blockbusters, this is one of the movies I need to overcome this hard time of PG-13 blandness. Definitely on my "must have" DVD list.

Gothika

Jeesh, stop asking these dumb questions. "Why did you see it in the first place?" Cause there wasn't anything better running at that time. Okay?

Gothika. First of all, the name. The name sucks. Regardless of the movie itself. You simply don't call a movie Gothika except if it's about a bunch of 16-year-old chicks who listen to The Cure and Joy Division and paint their rooms black. In that case, the name would be an appropriate warning.

But it doesn't even have anything to do with the movie. Gothika. Gothika WHAT? Gothikannotbelieve what kind of bullcrap movie this is?

Whatever. Well: Halle Berry rules. But not in this movie. Just like Cameron Diaz has been forced into the murky depths of ugliness with a bizarre haircut in Being John Malkovich, Halle Berry breaks all barriers with this indescribable undergrowth sprouting on her head.

The movie starts off nice enough. A psychologist has a blackout and ends up in the nuthall, on the other side of the high-security steel doors, with no idea what the heck happened. Sounds promising - for sure, there's a good explanation for everything, and through some cool psychological twists and turns we find out what all that was about.

But - no. Unfortunately, the seemingly supernatural phenomenons turn out to be actual supernatural phenomenons, and I hate bullcrap like that. Ghost stories suck. Well, that alone doesn't ruin the movie. The rest does, though.

My internal score counter started at 7 when I reached the 5-minute marker. This is usually the point at which I perform the first score check since you have a first impression of the tone, integrity, and direction of the movie. At first, it oscillated a bit, but then it was a straight ride down. Every time I tried to help the movie ("if this-and-that happens now, I might add a point"), it would disappoint me again.

And I can't even say that it was totally predictable - naw, there's no way you can predict some of this ridiculous humongous pile of unflavored bullcrap that happened at some parts of the movie. Not even my worst nightmares had place for that.

The score of "2" in the end was a pure act of mercy. The movie was good at least from a technical point of view, and Halle Berry looked good in two or three shots (but her hair... noooo!), and Charles S. Dutton is in the movie, even though just for a short time. Sad, really. Coulda have been so much better.

House of 1000 corpses

Oh wow, yet another one of those dumbass movies hyped by controversy. Rob Zombie's attempt at a movie. Originally dissed by the studios since they were convinced it'd get the commercially not viable NC-17 rating. Now, three years after it was finished, it was finally released - R-rated.

It's supposed to be a horror movie - Rob Zombie is, after all, a fan of that genre, and the very beginning is a hommage to the 70s horror shows. The movie is set at Halloween in the 70s.

First of all, I gotta point out that the movie is surprisingly calm. Or boring? Oh yeah, that was the word I was looking for: Boring. Well, there's not much going on plot-wise, but all those long sections between those points where the plot slowly crawls along drag along like chewing gum stuck to your shoes. Nothing happens! Not even any random acts of senseless violence that would make the movie more enjoyable.

Also, every few seconds, some ultra-grainy random video material is spliced into the movie. That really gets on your nerves after a short while.

The entire movie is totally bizarre, which by itself is good. But there's nothing that makes the movie good in any way. When I watch a movie, I constantly have a score value for it in my head. The first scene got 8 out of 10... and went downhill from then on... until I could squeeze out a 2.

2, what for?! Well, the (two!!) directors of photography didn't suck. The movie is very colorful, the very first shot alone is beautiful - solid blue with a bit of red, and as the camera pulls back, a lot of green moves into the frame. In one scene, a screaming actress, lit a blue light, ends up in an entirely yellow room. The set design too is kinda cute.

But the violence? Hey, I thought that was supposed to be an ultra-violent movie that borders the NC-17 barrier. But naaah, not by a long shot. Whenever violence accidentally happens somewhere inbetween those endless phases of boredom, it's usually distorted with above-mentioned video effects to such an extent that you cannot even begin to understand what's going on. Senor Zombie can't even do a simple shooting without totally messing the scene up beyond recognition.

If the movie was any better, I'd say that you can see the old school: There's virtually no slow-motion in the movie. Just video effects. Better Luck Tomorrow, in comparison, has lots of the fast-slow-fast-slow-gadgetry.

And all this experimenting... there's one scene where a baddie holds a cop at gun-point. Oh wait... let me back-track to the previous scene. Instead of the typical Rob Zombie industrial noise, all of a sudden there's some yodeling music while the baddies slaughter to civilians. Then that baddie holds the cop at gun-point. Both people don't move - the cop has his hands up, the baddie holds the gun at his forehead. The music stops, the camera pulls back. It's totally silent, not even a buzz track, for more than 15 seconds. Then, finally, the baddie pulls the trigger and smoke (no blood) appears. Great. How random.

Seriously. What the heck. What are people thinking.

Feardotcom

Okayokay... I checked out the reviews before watching the movie, and they all tore it a new one in unison. I still wanted to see. Rogert Ebert said "the film sucks booty but at least looks good."

So I checked it out with low expectations - I didn't even came to see a movie, just an experiment in cinematography.

Even that however wasn't very spectacular (maybe I was hoping for something more like Panic Room. Aah, good old David Fincher). Yeah, some scenes were lit and shot interestingly, but generally it was rather conventional (including a few boom mikes in the frame).

It was amazing: The movie showed just how much direction matters. Actors that normally aren't that bad end up being unable to deliver simple lines even remotely believable (like "crap! I got a ticket!").

Okay, the story was totally random and the plot a huge piece of crap. But I kept asking this question: What the heck are people thinking who make movies like this? How could you possibly come up with crap like that? What thing on earth might move you to put something like this up?

I'm speechless. Well, the movie is very German - there are many Kraut names in the credits, a few German characters who speak perfect German (cause they ARE Germs, duh), a few special effects were made by Das Werk. Well, there's my scapegoat right there. But the director isn't German and it's his fault. His, and the screenwriter's, oh, cursed be their souls.

Since Barbershop was sold out, I had to choose between Feardotcom and Swimfan - both had horrible reviews - but I chose the R-rated movie. Uah. Whoa. Da-hamn. What bad choice that was. That movie really brings out your worst fears.

At least everything is consistent: All the way to the last scene, the one question keeps popping up... what the heck was THAT about now?

Last scene (not really a spoiler, it's pointless anyway)... after all bad guys have been killed and most of the good ones too, the heroine is back home in bed, asleep. The phone rings. She picks up. All you hear is krskrskrs. She grimaces and hangs up. That's it. Yeah. What the heck was THAT about now?

There are so many details about this movie I could bring up now.... oh man, what a movie. I could keep on ladying about it for days... man...