Live Free or Die Hard
Rotten Tomatoes: 81%
luke-smith.info: 0%
Bruce Willis stars in another Hollywood milking of the udders of a well-received prequel put out some twenty years earlier. Live Free is a desperate attempt to combine the traditional action movie palate with hilarious gestures to tech-culture. Live Free, unlike may bad movies actually has a plot with not fully irrational characters, but every minute detail of the film is so obscenely out-of-this-world in terms of common sense that it forfeits any kudos it would have earned otherwise.
The first thing every viewer will realize about the script is that the writers have no idea how technology functions. At the beginning, we see a number of "computer hackers" that accidentally download a virus that.... ...blows up their computers. I didn't major in CS, but I think you might at least need to download some new drivers before you can interface your software with a self-destruct capability; I'm sure they make it a lot easier on Macs though.
We also find that if one of these illustrious hackers fails to download and detonate this virus, a team of inexplicably French-speaking assassins is lying in wait to fill his entire apartment complex with lead. Now when Bruce Willis comes to Justin Long's apartment himself, Long shows no reservations in at least cracking his door to speak with him. So really it's a wonder why the Francophone mercenaries didn't just skip the virus and the home invasion steps and just knock on the door and blast him when he peeked his head out. Probably would have been more subtle, but then again it's an action movie and the only part of our brains we're supposed to be using is our pituitary gland.
Long is unconvincing as a lead role, but part of that may be because his character is written to be a mosaic approximation of what the elderly think about "kids these days". His character whines when Willis listens to "old people music" (Credence) in the car and is written to have the resilience of a castrato. He makes for a passable whimp, but not a passable tech-whiz, but part of that may be because everyone in the world already knows he doesn't know anything about computers in real life considering his appearance in those Mac commercials.
The best most unintentionally funny part of the film was when in one scene Long's character derides news radio, saying that Willis shouldn't listen to corporate media because they just try and make you "buy what you don't need," but then a scene later, Long complains about how hungry he is and says "we just passed another Arby'sTM!" Great, marketing is so blatant nowadays that we can be advertised to by the same phony characters that supply us with trite and useless pre-packaged discontentment.
Mulholland Drive
Rotten Tomatoes: 82%
luke-smith.info: 0%
Mulholland Drive is by far the worst film ever schemed.
I saw Eraserhead; I didn't mind it too much. I knew it wasn't supposed to make explicit sense, and maybe there were some common themes of angst and preoccupations about fatherhood that underlied it, so I let it pass as a cute and subtle production.
Mulholland Drive is a whole different story. You don't actually find out that it's an incoherent mess until about half way in; the first half has a few non-sensical scenes, but you let them go because you expect them to come up and be explained later on. Then suddenly, the characters change names and switch places, the old plot dissolves into inconsistent and purposefully disjointed scenes, and all of our logical faculties that make humans superior in reasoning to all other life forms on earth are pissed upon by a maniacal David Lynch.
This movie is like horse dung spread on a canvas: there may be some pestersome Buddhist sociology graduates who think it qualifies as art or some mystic profundity, but for all people with reasoning and sentimental souls yearning for beauty in the world, this film makes an abject mockery of everything good. I cannot remember any two and a half hours of my life more painful than when I watched this blasphemously empty, perplexing and reasonless film.
Dostana
Rotten Tomatoes: 100% (Doesn't count anyways as foreign films always score 100% at RT)
luke-smith.info: 0%
I was going to begin this review saying that, "this film encapsulates everything unappealing about Indian cinema," but I then realized that I could basically say that about every Indian film I've seen in my life. How does one describe Bollywood? Campy? Quirky? Corny? A combination of over-vivid colors, musical numbers and a mockable masculinity make just about every endogenously made Indian film incompatible with Western viewers, including myself.
Dostana is the story of two young men who pretend to be homosexuals in order to room with a girl they're both attracted to in a desirable apartment. After a deal of subtle wooing of the female lead, a third party swoops in and wins her easily (by virtue of being an identifiable former Bollywood star). The movie quickly changes its disposition from one empathetic of the male leads as they pursue their love interest into one derisive of them, constantly trying to pin them with more unfortunate humor and shame.
This movie, like many others of its kind seems brazenly insincere in portraying male emotion (but who isn't). In the end the film covers up its awkward core of cuckolding with a plethora of predictable gay jokes, which is enough to send much of the Indian and foreign audiences home happy, not me. The cute factor may be a smile-maker on occasions, but it's hard to take seriously even as a comedy movie.
Sebastiane
Rotten Tomatoes: 100%
luke-smith.info: 0%
I've been informed (by all sources on the matter) that this film is supposed to be on the life of Saint Sebastian who if the movie has any grains of truth in it spent his time reclining homoerotically with other Roman soldiers whose uniforms in the 3rd century were apparently wearing nothing at all. It being one of the only films ever performed entirely in Latin, I wanted to see it so I could complain about how poor the Latin spoken was, and I was not disappointed at all; it bore cacophonous poorly-pronounced script from scene one straight to the finish line.
Sebastiane is a case-and-point example of how easy it is to throw in cute quirks and abuse interest groups to achieve cult status, especially in the 70s. The entire movie is documentary about a pack of womenless soldiers on the frontier who trade leud jokes all day and revel in gay sex. The only part that actually touches on the mythology Saint Sebastian is his execution (obviously for different reasons). But still, to the empty people who are impressed by the shallow risqué sense of this movie, it constitutes a deep commentary on the relationship between religion and the LGBT lifestyles. In reality it's a few scenes of desperate men naked in the sand, volleying contrived and simple Latin all of this without any real pretence of being related to the story it claims to retell. One might as well say Baywatch is a show about the Virgin Mary.
The Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Rotten Tomatoes: 83%
luke-smith.info: 0%
So when La Planète des singes was originally written and the first Planet of the Apes film came out, the backstory that was revealed in both was that human society had begun to rely on the manual labor of apes to such an extent that humans languished in laziness and indolence while apes evolved to preeminence. It was a statement on the technological development of humankind and how improving society could cause the downfall of man. The Rise of the Planet of the Apes does away with that background and comes up with a far less biting and superficially moral reason for the fall of man: big mean scientists experiment on animals and cause the spread of a epidemic while apes get ahold of a kind of drug that just makes them just magically smarter in some way.
The science of the film is ridiculous. We're supposed to believe that there can be some kind of chemical that animals can ingest to acquire human-like intelligence in a couple usages. In fact, the ape lead gains the ability to vocalize. Now I'm neither an anthropologist nor a primatologist, but a chimpanzees frankly don't have the vocal tract necessary to imitate the sounds of human language; even if you could dose a chimp with some wonder drug that gave it the ability to perfectly understand human language, it would still and always be physically incapable of speech. Regardless, contrary to what the clerk at your local natural vitamin shop says, drugs don't make you evolve, evolution does. Granted, natural selection works on a scale that might be a little too long for many audiences.
But beside the bad or infeasible science (which I have certainly not covered exhaustively) this movie has all the tired clichés of bad film-making. There are reprisals of famous lines from the original, "Get your hands of me you damn dirty ape!" etc. just to build an association and to titillate the viewers. The girl from Slumdog Millionaire appears as the absolutely redundant love-interest; the main character goes through all the trouble of falling in love with her to get the plot nowhere. Frankly however I felt like all of the humans in the entire film were wastes. The story could have been told far more economically without them. Of course I was on a 14 hour flight when I saw this so I might be being to hard on it.
The Big Lebowski
Rotten Tomatoes: 80%
luke-smith.info: 0%
So Roger Ebert opened his laudatory review of this movie saying that "The Big Lebowski is about an attitude, not a story." Far be it from me to question the very basis of Mr. Ebert's livelihood as a critic of fine cinema, but "the Dude's" attitude doesn't make this movie an venerable piece of film history. Ebert is correct in indirectly saying that essentially the entire "plot" is redundant; it is hardly more than a framework to exemplify the extravagant behavior of the Dude and the other eccentric characters. That's all fine and well, and the film has succeeded in penetrating a small niche of popular culture, but not because it's good at what it does, but because the memorable characters are cute incarnations of one-liners with their silly antics and totally wacky(!) encounters.
The Big Lebowski should have been a pernicious MTV daytime show instead of a movie, because it's obvious that all the thinking went into character development instead of making a meaningful plot. Actually I should extend a caveat to the word character "development" because the characters are all stagnant stereotypes or wacky neighbor types the entire film without rest or evolution. Point is that unless the Super Coen Bros actually had somewhere they were going for with this plot-wise, there's no reason not to try and aim for a TV audience somewhere between Beavis and Butthead and Jersey Shore.