Category: Movies

One thing I forgot to mention: Flushed Away is a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it to anybody who likes Wallace & Gromit.

It’s pretty dire for the first ten minutes or so; the whole thing has the taint of DreamWorks about it, and you’re likely to believe that the whole thing’s been Shrek-ified. But about the first time you see a slug, the Aardman effect kicks in, and it’s all great from there on. All the voices are great (especially Bill Nighy as the albino rat and Jean Reno as Le Frog), the story’s even more solid than a “kids movie” needs to be, the character animation is perfect, and they even put plasticine textures on the model to distract you from the fact you’re watching CGI.

The Wallace & Gromit movies are more about being clever and inventive; this is all about being funny. And it’s surprising how well it works; jokes as corny as these (again, see “Jean Reno as Le Frog”) really shouldn’t work as well as they do. But it’s all in the timing and their willingness to go at it full-barrel. If you’re going to do a getting-racked-in-the-nuts joke, go all the way with it. And then do it again.

I can’t think of a thing I didn’t like about this movie, and I hope it’s a hit.

This week I had an inadvertent Mary Harron film festival, because I rented The Notorious Bettie Page and American Psycho without realizing they were both by the same director.

You can understand my confusion — one’s a biography about a 50s pin-up star, and the other’s a horror/black comedy adaptation of a satirical novel about yuppies. But when you look at them back-to-back, especially when you combine them with the only other Mary Harron movie I’ve seen, I Shot Andy Warhol, you can see an oeuvre developing. They’ve got a lot in common: they’re all period pieces, they’re all driven completely by the stand-out performance of a lead actor (Gretchen Mol, Christian Bale, and Lili Taylor), they all show a pretty antagonistic relationship between men and women, and they’re all ultimately unsatisfying for reasons that are kind of hard to define, exactly.

My first reaction after seeing Bettie Page and American Psycho was that Harron has what I call the “Drew Carey Syndrome.” That’s when you’re hip enough to be able to recognize what’s cool — Carey was a fan of The Sims back when it was still fairly esoteric, and he recognized the potential of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and its stars and brought them to popularity in the US — but everything you put out yourself is just kind of… there.

But that seems like too harsh a criticism. I have a hard time finding fault with either Bettie Page or American Psycho — they’re technically well-made, the scripts are fairly solid and well-paced and competent, the period touches are dead-on accurate without being overbearing, there are plenty of clever visual touches that keep the movie interesting, the casting is perfect and the leads are given the opportunity to totally take over the part, and as you go through you get the feeling that Harron made all the right choices.

Still, at the end of each I was left thinking, “how has my life been improved by watching this movie?” And I couldn’t come up with anything. The Notorious Bettie Page ends up feeling just like a standard biopic, with (welcomed) nudity and some interesting visual touches thrown in. It felt like a performance — a great performance, but still without the feeling that I got closer to understanding or relating to a real person.

And American Psycho is more broadly a satire/black comedy, so you’re not really supposed to relate to the main character. But it still feels “off.” Maybe it’s in the subject matter; you get the real sense that Harron worked hard to keep the 80s references from being too obvious or heavy-handed, but she was too constrained by the book and was forced to keep that material in there. Mocking yuppies, and Huey Lewis and Whitney Houston, might’ve seemed fresh in 1991, but by 2000 it just seems so dated as to be irrelevant.

American Psycho works the best of the three I’ve seen, because it ends with some ambiguity and forces you to think a little about what you’ve just seen. Of course, I did have to watch the ending again with the commentary on, to make sure that the ambiguity was intentional, but then that’s what the commentary is for.

The thing is that I really want to like Harron’s movies a lot better than I do, because of all the stuff she gets right. As I said, all the technical stuff she gets dead-on right. And the performances from Gretchen Mol and Christian Bale are about as perfect as you can get. And the choice of subject matter is interesting, and the take on it is uncompromising. All of the movies portray women as people, with their own motivations and their own independent life stories, instead of just defining them by how they relate to men. Considering she was able to convey that viewpoint even in the on-the-surface-misogynistic American Psycho, that’s pretty impressive.

So it’s remarkable that any of those movies were ever made, and that they managed to come out as strong as they did. I just wish I liked them better.

For years I’ve had a list of movies I need to see to become “movie literate.” Mostly they’re ones I don’t particularly want to see, I just feel like I owe it to myself to get more cultured but without all that tedious reading. And I’ve been quoting them for so long, I feel like I owe it to the moviemakers to actually know what I’m talking about.

I may rethink that homework assignment, though, if all the movies suck as much as On the Waterfront. How did this thing ever get to be a classic?

It’s speechy, and ham-handed, and actually pretty gross in its message and characterizations. It acts like there’s this difficult moral ambiguity going on, when there is none. It’s clear from scene one what’s the right thing to do, and you spend almost two hours just waiting for this loathesome, affected idiot to just do it already. It’s insulting to women, because Eva Marie Saint’s character is nothing more than a stupid girl who digs Bad Boys and will abandon any moral compass she supposedly has just to hang out with one.

And it’s got the worst kind of faux-Populist attitude, where a bunch of filmmakers act like they’re down with the Common Man and they understand the honor and code that comes with life on the docks. But the movie shows the people as nothing more than spineless idiots and bums. They’re not regular joes who are put in a difficult position; in this movie, they’re cowards who will stand by while people get murdered right in front of them.

Of course, the whole business with Elia Kazan and the HUAC is pretty gross, too. Especially when he expects us to feel sympathy for this conscienceless moron who says he’s just trying to do the right thing and doesn’t understand why all the guys gotta be so mean to him and kill his pigeons. But the movie’s bad enough even without Kazan’s attempts to make himself out as a martyr.

I really don’t understand the appeal of this one, at all. I even tried to think that it’s all about context, and maybe it was brilliant in its day. But Rear Window came out the same year, proving that Hollywood could tolerate subtle performances, complex plots, and intelligent women. I thought the US was done with ham-handed, insulting “message movies” as soon as Frank Capra stopped making them.

I always thought that Best Picture winners were at least supposed to be watchable, even if they weren’t really enjoyable or even all that good. Now I’m afraid to see A Beautiful Mind.

As our lives get increasingly hectic and confusing, it becomes dangerously more and more likely that one of us is bound to look up from what he’s been doing and suddenly realize, “Oh, shit. I just made Event Horizon.”

Paul W.S. Anderson has lived through this experience, and he’ll tell you the only way that he can manage to get through it is that he can also say, “Holy shit. I just had sex with Milla Jovovich.”

But don’t get too paranoid and frozen into inaction. It’s easy not to make Event Horizon. Thousands of filmmakers do it every day. You just have to remember a few simple rules:

1. Don’t make Event Horizon.
Seems obvious, I know, but sometimes the most obvious things can be ignored. Travel back to 1997. DOOM the videogame has already been out for four years, Solaris has been out for twenty-five, and Alien for eighteen. Someone comes to you with a movie pitch about a sci-fi/horror hybrid about a derelict spaceship bringing back something horrible from a Hell dimension and the rag-tag band of space military sent to investigate. While it’s obvious to us that there’s absolutely nothing novel about the concept and making such an inessential film would be a colossal waste of time, we still somehow ended up with Event Horizon.

2. Know your art direction.
If you can, ask your concept artist if you can meet him and take a look around his office. Note your surroundings. Are there more than two H.R. Geiger books on his bookshelf? If so, first ask whether he or she received them as a gift. Then ask whether you want to be showing your audience something that they’d already seen eighteen years ago.

3. Take a look at the concept art before you give the approval to begin building it.
Once you’ve received the concept art, take a few minutes to examine it. It sounds obsessive-compulsive, sure, but believe me: a few minutes spent here will save you hours later trying to explain yourself to the critics. Ask yourself a few key questions:

1. Wasn’t this better when it was called Alien? Or Aliens? Or Outland? Or Contact? Or 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or Hellraiser?
2. Why would a spaceship’s engine core have intricate goth metal shapes all along the walls, when the rest of the ship is late-70s what-a-deep-space-spaceship-would-look-like?
3. Or giant goth metal spikes coming out of the walls?
4. Can we not work a surfeit of chains and a giant razor-sharp pendulum into the picture?
5. Considering this is a horror movie, and the script doesn’t call for anyone to be impaled on said goth metal spikes, even though one character falls from a great height into the engine core and somehow manages to completely avoid the dozens of spikes on the walls, could they be hurting the design more than helping it?

4. Don’t be afraid to re-write your script.
I know, I know. More work! But it’s an initial investment that will be paid back ten-fold when you see the delight on your audience’s faces when they realize they don’t have to sit through another movie with a wisecracking black guy who survives against all odds. Take a shot at differentiating the two completely indistinguishable gruff, hard-as-nails white guy crew members. Since your plot involves the forces of hell working on your characters’ worst fears, why not give each one more back-story? Or, some?

5. Have an ending in mind when you begin filming.
Movies take a long time to film, so it can seem like you’ve got all the time in the world to come up with a way to wrap everything up. But more often than not, you’re going to be wicked busy during filming, and won’t have time to tie up all the loose ends. After a few days of shooting for 20 hours straight, you might even answer the question, “Didn’t the main villain just get very visibly and dramatically sucked out the front window of the spaceship?” with something as crazy as “The ship teleports him back.”

6. Hire an editor.
After all that shooting, you’re going to end up with a lot of film. What’s needed now is someone who’ll put those pieces of film together in an intelligible manner. It’s what separates the tight, suspenseful pacing of classic horror from a bunch of completely random scenes thrown on-screen with no discernible sequence or connection.

Now, Anderson claimed that the studio mandated all kinds of cuts to the movie to make it less gory and more palatable to the action-movie crowd, and he threatens promises to release a director’s cut someday. So I’ll concede that one, to a point. The trailer included on the DVD shows a bunch of clips that didn’t appear in the movie, with more background on Sam Neill’s character, more suspenseful build-up to finding records of the Event Horizon in the first place, better explanations of what’s going on in the ship instead of lines of dialogue inserted randomly, etc. Those would’ve helped a lot.

However, no amount of added footage or context could make sense out of that ending. Unless the studio mandate wasn’t just to cut stuff, but to replace the cut scenes with pure suck, there’s no denying that Anderson actually filmed Laurence Fishburne and the already-dead Sam Neill duking it out in the goth metal engine room.

7. Ask yourself if life is imitating art.
One of the recurring motifs of the movie is that people keep telling Sam Neill’s character he was wrong to make the Event Horizon. Coincidence?

8. If all else fails, take it home.
If you’ve for whatever reason ignored all these rules and still somehow made Event Horizon, just run with it. Don’t just do the Carrie thing with Pinhead Sam Neill showing up and “it was just a horrifying dream!” Take the guy who survived getting thrown naked out of an airlock even though his eyes were bleeding, and have him break out of his holding tank and start ripping out intestines. Have a demon send the ship back towards Earth and then laugh as the camera zooms into his mouth, then have the screen say “The End?!?” Show KISS jumping through the hellgate, or even the Harlem Globetrotters. Just do something, anything to make this movie have one original moment.

9. Trust no one.
After you’ve made Event Horizon, you may be tempted to watch it. You may ask friends what they thought of it. This is a bad idea, because people lie. They will describe it as “a flawed gem.” They will, with a straight face, describe it as “one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen,” even though there’s absolutely nothing in the movie that’s remotely frightening (and this is coming from someone who wets himself at grocery store Halloween displays).

The remake of Solaris is not a horror movie, but a sedate, pensive philosophical drama that asks what it means to exist as an individual, how we know ourselves, and how we know others. And it’s a hundred billion times scarier and more unsettling than Event Horizon.

They will even say that it’s a good campy horror movie until its horrible ending, which is the worst kind of lie, because it’s half-true. Your Event Horizon truly does have a horrible, stupid ending. And you’ll remember Resident Evil fondly as being good, campy fun horror with some memorable moments. So you’ll be tempted to watch. And the only thing you’ll take away from the movie is one line of dialogue: “Hell is just a word. The reality is much worse.”

Several years ago, someone recommended I watch Sherman’s March: a Meditation to the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. I’m glad I waited so long to finally see it.

The premise of the movie is that filmmaker Ross McElwee received a grant to film a documentary about Gen. Sherman’s march through the south, but just before he was to leave to begin filming, his girlfriend left him for her ex. No longer interested in a Civil War documentary, McElwee meandered through Georgia and South Carolina, roughly following Sherman’s route of destruction, spending the entire time trying to hook up with various eccentric southern women.

The movie’s more engaging than it has a right to be, considering it’s three hours of a neurotic guy lamenting his desperation and ogling women’s chests and thighs. Taken at face value, it’s an extremely personal and self-effacing document of people’s attempts to find meaning in their lives and someone to share their lives with — that story, it tells well.

But after over 20 years of enforced cynicism and the unwelcome onset of video blogs, it’s difficult not to see the layer of artifice there. McElwee says in voice-over that he’s lost himself along the way, to the point that he’s filming his life just to have a life to film. But there’s still the nagging sense that he’s created a caricature to star in the movie, cribbing character traits from Woody Allen and Albert Brooks’ fictional selves and passing them off as himself.

He dresses as a Civil War soldier for a costume party, then delivers a drunken late-night monologue to the camera about how Sherman was a tragic figure and how he can relate. He starts to deliver a documentary-style speech about Sherman at a war memorial site before stumbling out of frame by a river bank. It just comes across as fake and threatens to ruin the believability of the rest of the movie.

It’s a pretty minor complaint over all, since the movie does what it’s presented to do, it has some genuine insight, and it actually manages to convey as much real information about Gen. Sherman as you’d retain from a “real” documentary. But it teeters uncomfortably on the edge of open, honest, personal filmmaking as it is, and I have to wonder if a few more years will make it seem insufferably self-indulgent.

Speaking of being insufferably self-indulgent: what I liked best about it was seeing the south of my middle-school years, the real south as I remember it before the strip malls and subdivisions and Republicanism sucked the soul out of it.

He goes to Stone Mountain and rides the skylift and the train around the park. We see shots of Atlanta’s old skyline, when you could still see the blue hamburger. He shows bits of Savannah and the coastal islands. He shows how even the cities in Georgia had an empty, hot, rural feel to them. He shows conspiracy freaks, vacuous discussions about religion, and morbidly obese mechanics wearing white T-shirts stretched to their limit. It’d come across as more stereotyping if I hadn’t been there and seen plenty of people exactly like that.

There’s a scene where first meets one of his targets as she’s singing with a band outside a Sears in South Carolina — that kind of image perfectly sums up southern suburbs in the early 80s to me: hot, strangely desolate, and just weird.

After being hit with that kind of nostalgia, then seeing these people all desperate for something to give their lives meaning — a job, a bomb shelter, or a girlfriend — it was hard not to feel as morose and insomniac as McElwee. Has it really been that long since I was there? What have I been doing since then that’s of any importance? I’m now as old as he was when he made the movie; why do they keep referring to each other as “middle-aged?” How come I can’t stand to be back there for too long now, but still feel strangely out of place out here?

The movie’s got enough deadpan humor and clever editing that it never feels too depressing or self-indulgent. But this feeling of desperation and tragedy and yearning for some bit of satisfaction you can’t find at home, that lingers after the movie ends. So I guess that makes it art.

BBC News: Superman ‘not gay’ says director

Defamer.com’s painful beating-the-joke-into-the-ground

10. Wears blue tights, red cape, boots, and codpiece.

9. Flies around Earth at super-speed, turns back time long enough to deliver snappier comeback to Lex Luthor than earlier “Oh no you didn’t, bitch!”

8. Starts a weblog.

7. Outfits Fortress of Solitude with hot tub, private gym, and ironic 50s and 60s ephemera.

6. Dresses dog in matching costume.

5. Giggles uncontrollably at sexual innuendo.

4. Won’t stop quoting Bring it On.

3. Clark Kent requests transfer from news desk to gossip column.

2. Admits true weakness is not Kryptonite, but the Bravo channel.

1. Reveals that time away from Earth was spent writing a poignant, wry, and bittersweet memoir of his experiences coming to terms with a world that doesn’t understand him.

This week’s summer blockbuster movie was X-Men 3: The Last Stand. I’ll give it this much: it could have been worse. Much worse.

Actually, as far as summer action movies based on comic books go, it wasn’t all that bad. If I were the grading type, I’d give it a solid B. The problem, of course, is that it’s following two other X-Men movies, one which was surprisingly good and another which was awesome. No surprises there; people have been comparing it unfavorably to the first two ever since it was announced that Bryan Singer wasn’t directing it. I’d been trying to keep an open mind about it, mostly because I just hate to see anybody getting dogpiled as much as Brett Ratner was.

After seeing the movie, I still don’t think he deserves as much hate as internet geekdom has been laying on him. But it’s plenty clear that this is Commercial Entertainment Product, meant to close out a franchise and make the producers and actors their money; if you’re looking for art in a comic book movie, I guess you’ll have to wait for Superman Returns.

There’s a lot of characters in this one, so we gotta start with the standard comic book roll call:

• Storm: controls the weather, uses shrill complaining and Academy Award to magnify screen time
• Wolverine: healing factor, invulnerable adamantium skeleton, claws, mutant patience power while biding time until own movie franchise
• Iceman: can freeze moisture, has a girlfriend
• Kitty Pryde: steals boyfriends and spotlight, can phase through solid objects while still maintaining physical form
• Rogue: absorbs other mutants’ powers, can phase into pointless subplot while still maintaining top billing
• Beast: super-intelligence and dexterity, blue fur, can bend laws of space and time to negate cameo appearance in previous movie
• Jean Grey: level five psychic abilities, can levitate rocks and leaves and cause people to disintegrate, can spend entire movie sitting, lying down, or standing still
• Cyclops: misses Jean, cries
• Colossus: super-strength, forms invulnerable metal shell, transforms from bit character to main team member without developing any detectable character or personality
• Professor Charles Xavier: telepathy, telekinesis, remarkable de-aging make-up ability so you’d never believe he wasn’t 20 years younger in the opening, turns out to be kind of a dick
• Angel: fey, has wings, really cool introduction scene, powers over ham-handed allegory
• Magneto: destroys bridges, devours scenery
• Mystique: can kill people with her legs because that never gets old, takes the form of any person except for one of the most beautiful women on the face of the planet
• Callisto: super-speed, can detect mutants, has sass and attitude
• Juggernaut: he’s the Juggernaut, bitch!

I was distracted through the whole thing, because I was trying to place what the movie reminded me of. Kind of like when you taste something “off” and keep eating it until you figure out exactly what it is that’s wrong.

Part of it was that it seemed like nobody involved really wanted to be there (except for Ian McKellen, who seems to be willing to do anything for any project anywhere). It seems like Halle Berry pitched a fit until she was the star, and then didn’t know what to do with it when she got it. Some of the “leads” get less screen time than the kids from Jurassic Park got in Jurassic Park 2. And the movie does go on a killing spree with some pretty significant characters; if it were handled correctly, it would’ve at least worked for shock value, but here it just seems like actors wanting to get out of their obligations as quickly as possible.

Part of it was that it seemed like a Marvel movie, when the other big Marvel movies (Daredevil and Elektra excepted) somehow managed to escape that. In the comics, I was always a fan of DC and never liked anything Marvel put out. DC had built a modern mythology, with a stable of iconic characters fighting supervillains in an alternate universe with cities like Metropolis and Gotham and Central City. Marvel had neurotic anti-heroes living around New York, pandering to teenagers with cheesy stories that pretended to relate to the real world. In reality, the two companies put out equal parts crap and good stuff, and neither’s really any more noble than the other. But as far as corporate vision and public perception go, DC was the fun and imaginative one, while Marvel was the lowbrow cousin too preoccupied with “keeping it real.”

In the movies, that somehow got reversed. Every movie based on a DC property, since Superman II has been mediocre to awful. But with X-Men and Spider-man, all of a sudden Marvel was putting out really cool movies based on characters I cared nothing about. Even the Marvel flickering comic book pages logo was cool; finally, in movies, they “got it.” (While Batman Returns tried to be darker and more realistic; go figure.) But X-Men 3 reminded me of reading a Marvel comic book — not completely awful, but completely forgettable, with completely slapdash plotting, forsaking character development for the next action scene, and a heavy-handed, clumsy attempt to relate everything to a Real World Issue.

The Real World Issue in this one, by the way, is the serum that will “cure” mutants, with Halle Berry giving clumsy speeches about how mutants don’t need to be cured. Somehow this version of X-Men has even more of teh ghey than the ones Bryan Singer made. But as blatant and clumsy as it is, none of it really sticks because it just seems crammed in there in a desperate attempt to make everything “relevant.” The comparisons between Magneto/Malcolm X and Professor Xavier/MLK Jr. are just as blatant.

The other thing that bugged me was that the whole thing felt like a fan movie. Everything looked cheap and poorly done, from the sets to the props to the costumes. Especially everybody’s hair, and I’m not usually the type who notices stuff like that. The CGI was competent but completely uninspired; it was like some CG firm down in LA had been itching to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge ever since they saw the trailers for Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow, so they put it in the script even though it made no sense. I’d had somewhat high hopes, because the opening scene is set in the 70s and looks perfect for a 70s suburban house — the clothes, the hair, the furniture, everything. But judging from the bland cheapness of everything else, they apparently blew their entire artistic and creative wad trying to recreate a set from “That 70’s Show.”

And like a fan movie, it was all slap-dash plotting based more on stream-of-consciousness fan fiction than telling a real story. It doesn’t hold together, it turns up the extremes too much, it relies too much on gimmicks and cheap thrills. The great thing about the first X-Men movie was that it was based on the premise, “what would it really be like to suddenly find yourself with mutant powers?” X-Men 3 seems to be based on the premise, “wouldn’t it be like totally bad-ass if Phoenix could make people disintegrate and then Iceman and Pyro got in a battle to the death and Wolverine fought a Sentinel and Magneto destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge?”

The funny thing is that it would be pretty bad-ass to see a lot of this stuff, which is what keeps the movie from being a total disappointment. Without any pacing, flow, character development, suspense, or meaning to it, though, it just all jumbles together and then disappears. The first two movies had at least one total “oh hell yeah!” moment each — for me, it was when Wolverine accidentally stabs Rogue in the first, and when Nightcrawler saves Rogue after getting sucked out of the plane in the second. For all its noise and explosions and attempts at big blockbuster moments, X-Men 3 has nothing approaching the impact of those scenes.

Except, of course, for Juggernaut’s catch-phrase, which is stupid enough to be classic. And Angel’s introductory scene was pretty damn cool, as creepy as Rogue’s from the first movie. But unlike Rogue in the first movie, Angel never had any kind of character development, so he was relegated to silent pointlessness and the aforementioned ham-handed allegory — he might as well have been a unicorn.

It still seems a little unfair to criticize the movie for not being as good as the first two, especially since X-Men had its own share of clunky moments. But the first two did a remarkable job of reminding us what is possible with a “comic book movie,” after a long drought since Superman and Superman II. Maybe it’s exaggeration or naivete, but I had the feeling after the X-Men and Spider-man movies, that we were crossing some kind of nerd/normal barrier. We’d finally see movies with stories as imaginative as comic book stories, where creators weren’t afraid of looking uncool or too low-brow for doing stories about super-heroes. And we’d get a real pop mythology going, made by people who knew what they were doing. X-Men 3 isn’t a god-awful movie, but it’s just another forgettable summer action movie, and that’s all.

Even though I was warned against it on this very weblog, I still went to see The DaVinci Code Wednesday night. Whoo! Somebody light a match! I didn’t expect it to be good, but I didn’t expect it to be the cinematic equivalent of lying under the chair of a guy who’s delivering a two-and-a-half-hour-long, post-three-bean-and-cheese-burrito fart.

They should’ve… no, wait. That would be going too far. But then again, it was bad enough that I think it’s warranted: they should’ve called it The DaStinky Code. Yeah, I said it.

Roger Ebert’s review says “The movie works; it’s involving, intriguing and constantly seems on the edge of startling revelations.” Which is more confounding than anything presented in the movie — how can he say the movie “works” when it’s always on the edge of being interesting, but never crossing over?

I’ll concede that there are elements that, if given more work, could be used to make either a predictable but passable thriller, or a pretty interesting History Channel documentary. Knights Templar are always good, and everybody loves a good multi-national secret organization. I’ll even admit that a deranged, fanatical albino monk, if he weren’t portrayed as a completely impotent moron, might make a good secondary villain.

But it’s like this movie didn’t even try to make a good story. I’m giving Ron Howard the benefit of the doubt, assuming that he was trying too hard to be faithful to a dumb book. Because the problems with the movie are so obvious I can’t imagine why nobody did anything to fix them. The movie is:

Pandering. You’re never given one second to figure anything out on your own; some character always rushes in to explain exactly what you just saw. When a character isn’t available, helpful CGI effects point the way — it’s a triangle, that looks like a womb… GET IT?

Muddled. It’s never clear who planted what clues and when. As Mac asked when we were leaving, “So wait… I.M. Pei was a Templar?” For all the exposition we subjected to, we’re still never given even a rudimentary timeline — who was supposed to be writing these riddles? Why would a French guy, leaving clues for his French granddaughter, use English riddles and “APPLE” instead of “POMME?”

Stone dull. About nine hours into Ian McKellan’s Flash presentation on The Last Supper (the one he keeps ready down in the basement in case any wanted criminals show up with questions), crazy albino monk jumps out of nowhere and attacks him. Ostensibly, this was to stop our heroes from uncovering the secret, but I say he was just thinking, “For the love of Christ will you stop with the exposition already!”

Stupid. As pandering and dull and exposition-heavy as the movie is, there are still plenty of places where they figured the audiences would still be too dense to be able to follow along, so they had to dumb it down for us. Again, as Mac pointed out: Tom Hanks’ character is introduced as a Professor of “symbology,” because apparently Harvard University isn’t familiar with the term “semiotics.”

Implausible. Which would be okay if it were exciting. National Treasure, the Bruckheimer “let’s be secular so as not to piss anyone off” attempt to capitalize on the craze around The DaVinci Code book, was a really stupid movie. But it at least was a decent action/thriller, so you suspend disbelief and let things slide so they can tell their story. And still its clues and plot points were better and made more dramatic sense than The DaVinci Code‘s.

For starters, we’re supposed to believe that an old man who’s just been shot in the gut is able to go around leaving a series of complicated clues for his estranged granddaughter? No. And even if I were feeling charitable and were willing to give the movie that one so it can get things going, it’s still a movie. Show him, gut shot bleeding profusely, staggering around the Louvre, thinking up anagrams, writing them on priceless paintings, hiding keys, then stripping naked, writing more needlessly cryptic anagrams and numeric sequences on the floor in his own blood, then lying down and drawing a pentagram on himself. Preferably, to the tune of “Yakety Sax.” Show, don’t tell. Or, in the case of this movie, show, don’t smell. Yeah, I said it again.

Insulting. One of those anagrams, if I’m remembering it right, was for “LEONARDO DAVINCI THE MONA LISA.” Which is good, because people standing in the Louvre aren’t going to pick up on your clue if you just said “Mona Lisa.” (All the promotional stuff around the book has pictures of the Mona Lisa, which always implied to me some ancient mystery revealed in the painting — nope, turns out it’s a message written, in English, on the painting). But maybe grandpa knew he had to be explicit, on account of Sophie’s learning disability. For a story whose central conceit is the idea of evil men in the Catholic Church concealing a secret for millennia in order to preserve their oppressive patriarchy, you’d think the one woman in the story wouldn’t be such a simpleton. She spends the entire movie having things explained to her. Supposedly trained from the age of four to solve riddles and puzzles, she can’t figure out any of the basics, even at gunpoint.

I’d said earlier that I was doomed to see the movie no matter what, just to see what all the fuss was about. So I guess at least I can say that’s over. I just read an excerpt from the book online, and it looks like the movie was pretty much a line-for-line reverse-novelization. So at least I only wasted two and a half hours on it, instead of however long it would’ve taken me to read the book.

It has shaken my faith, though. The book has sold over 60 million copies and has plenty of people who still defend it. How could a loving God let this happen?

Tonight I went with Mac to see Poseidon. Yes, on purpose.

The reviews will tell you this movie is bad, and the reviews will be correct. It’s really tough to recommend; we had fun watching it, but we had to put a lot of effort into it. I think even if I were Joel Siegel and I were desperate to come up with quotable blurbs to put on the poster, the best I’d be able to come up with would be “Guaranteed to make you have to pee!”

It was pretty clear it was going to be bad as soon as the opening shot started. It was a long fly-over of the boat that didn’t look like an ad for a cruise ship line as much as an ad for a piece of open-source CGI rendering software. Set against a sunset straight out of one of those inspirational “Footsteps in the Sand” posters.

I think the whole point of the scene was to introduce us to our hero, who is not Matthew McConaughey. Dude likes to run, and he had some type of previous career involving the Navy. That’s about all the character background we get for him, but that’s all right because that’s pretty much all the character background we get for anybody. The movie’s got an assload of dead bodies throughout, meant I guess to imply how horrible a disaster the Rogue Wave caused but without having to go into a lot of exposition as to who these people are. But you don’t really care much more about the main characters than you care about Random Immolation Victim #38.

There’s the ex-Mayor of New York who loves his daughter, the daughter who needs to prove to Daddy that she’s a grown woman, the boyfriend who’s there, sleazy greasy gambler Lucky Larry, a waiter, a captain who’s clearly slumming after “Homicide” got cancelled, and a woman who has a kid.

Fergie from the Black-Eyed Peas is in the movie. Ironically, she’s the only actor in the main credits who remains dry throughout the entire film. When I’d heard she was in it, I was hoping there’d be a dramatic scene where everybody’s standing hip-deep in water and they say, “Wait… did it just suddenly get warmer?” And then the camera pans over to Fergie and she shrugs and there’s the sound of tinkling bells and a slide trombone.

Richard Dreyfuss goes against type and plays a mopey, fussy, annoying old gay architect. I couldn’t tell if he was acting so prissy because they wanted to play up that he was old, or because they wanted to play up that he was gay, or because he’s Richard Dreyfuss. Mac pointed out that he exclaims “oy vey!” at one point, and also calls the waiter guy “gorgeous,” so I’m guessing his role in the movie was to combine Shelley Winters’ and Red Buttons’ characters from the original into one show-stopping performance.

Nadia from “Alias” is also in the movie, playing the Catholic claustrophobic Elena who’s Catholic. Also, she’s Catholic. This is crucial, because her crucifix is the only thing the movie has that resembles a plot point. In case you were in danger of forgetting that she’s Catholic, they make sure to show her making the Sign of the Cross every 30 seconds. This was clever re-enforcement of the idea (to wit: she’s Catholic), otherwise audiences would be completely bewildered at the sight of a Hispanic woman wearing a crucifix. On “Alias,” she only appeared for like 20 episodes, and by my calculations, she was impaled by glass shards about 18 times and turned into a zombie. In Poseidon, she isn’t much less clumsy.

I never liked disaster movies, because they always seemed completely pointless. This movie is so pointless and inessential it makes the original seem profound. I kept hoping for some sign of cleverness or suspense, or even irony, but the people making the movie just wouldn’t meet me halfway. They just really wanted to be faithful to the canon of the original, I guess, and exhaustively document the story of a ship that sinks and almost everybody except a few people dies.

Which reminds me: the death count is disappointingly low. I kept hoping for random shark attacks or electrocutions or getting sucked into jet engines or even ravaged by an unexpected shipment of snakes that break loose from the cargo hold. There’s only two main character deaths that are cool at all, and they’re both telegraphed way in advance and happen too soon and too close to each other. The annoying child character comes tantalizingly close to death about a dozen times, but for whatever reason he shows a Terminator-like knack for surviving.

There’s exactly one sequence in the movie that’s genuinely kind of cool. It’s after crash when Kurt Russell suddenly climbs out of a pile of open-eyed dead bodies, horrifying the mom and her kid. It lasts about 8 seconds. That’s not too good for a movie that’s about 100 minutes long.

But the summer movie season ain’t over yet. Next week: The DaVinci Code. I really want to go to the theater a day early and wait in line, wearing my albino monk costume. Incidentally, every time a big blockbuster movie comes out, there’s always a porn movie with a parody title released soon afterwards. When are they going to come out with The DaVinci Choad?

A few weeks ago I was outside the multiplex of the soulless Glendale Galleria, looking at the posters of coming attractions and dreading the summer. Larry the Cable Guy was still playing, and the movies we had to look forward to were The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift and Garfield 2.

I was thinking that there is a reason people aren’t going to see movies much anymore, and the MPAA needs to learn that it’s not because of pirates or bootleggers or DVRs.

But I just got back from seeing Mission: Impossible 3, and not only was it good, but every single trailer they showed beforehand looked like something I’d want to see.

Tonight’s movie first: it’s not going to make anybody’s best movie ever list, but it’s a good, solid summer action movie with plenty of explosions and enough intelligence behind it to never kick you out of the experience. I’d heard people say it’s like “Alias” with Tom Cruise, but not really — it’s a good bit less goofy than “Alias.” And I’ve heard people were averse to see it because of Mr. Cruise, but for all his faults you’ve got to give him credit: once the movie starts, he usually disappears and does a good job. There’s only one bit where he was acting, where he’s telling his fiancee to trust him. The rest is all running from stuff getting blown up, and, which struck me as unusual for an action movie, acting like he’s winded afterwards.

So that’s one down. My take on the rest of the movies I’m interested in seeing, in order, just based on the trailers:

1. Pirates of the Caribbean 2: I dunno, maybe that makes me a company yes-man or something. The trailer kicks ass. (The trailer I saw tonight isn’t online yet as far as I can tell). Great villain, good one-liners, neat effects, looks like a hell of a lot of fun.
2. X-Men 3: The buzz around this one is looking worse and worse, but I’m sticking by it.
3. Superman Returns: I haven’t been able to put my finger on it, but this one just hasn’t really grabbed me. I still think the actor, the suit, Lois Lane, everything except Kevin Spacey as Luthor, just seems “off.” The new trailer is great, though, so that bumped it up the list.
4. The DaVinci Code: Remember this list is relative. I’m not expecting the movie to be good, but I’m going to see it anyway — I sure as hell am not going to read the book, and the story sounds just interesting enough to make me wonder what all the fuss is about. Plus, Audrey Tautou.
5. Over the Hedge: I know! I’m surprised too, but it looks like it might actuall be kind of funny. What sells it is William Shatner as a possum.
6. The Omen: Why do I want to see this one? For you, Damien! It’s all for you! But really, it’s for Mia Farrow as creepy nanny. And because the original is just about the stupidest “thriller” movie ever made, and I’m curious whether it’s possible to make a scary movie out of it. Seriously, the whole movie is like two hours of Gregory Peck going from person to person and having them say, “your son is the devil,” and then dying horribly, and still he never clues in.
7. Poseidon: And this getting down to the very bottom of the barrel, but it’s summer, and it’s a giant ship that rolls over and sinks. Which is a metaphor for something or other.

Not an outstanding line-up, but still. It should be enough of a diversion until Fall and Snakes on a Plane.