16 result(s) tagged “Making a Mockery”

(Through June 25, we are under the sway of Bizarro. Blame Piper at Lazy Energetic Eye Theatre.)

My distate for the stone-faced British comedian Rowan Atkinson is well-documented, as is my loathing for his signature creation, Mr. Bean. I like subtle, sophisticated verbal comedy as much as the next guy, but Atkinson takes it too far; I’ve been with people who stare at his almost subliminal act without a hint of a smile, unaware that the turkey-on-the-head routine is a joke.

But in spite of the insufferable Atkinson, I had reason to be hopeful about Mr. Bean’s Holiday.

It’s too long. We’re miffed by the nominations, and sometimes the process itself. The production numbers are cheesy and interminable. We’re displeased with the final results more often than not. Years later, we’re typically embarrassed by the outcome.

So let’s scrap the Oscars.

Even this year, when a reasonable and strong case can be made that the Best Picture winner was indeed the year’s best picture, all I heard were complaints. The ceremony was dull, and No Country for Old Men and Day-Lewis and Bardem were nearly inevitable.

So let’s replace this evil with another: We’ll choose the best movie of the year through something similar to the presidential-selection process.

As a member of the choir, I ran screaming from the church because of Michael Moore’s preaching in Sicko.

I’m in the minority here — the movie got good reviews and an Oscar nomination in the documentary category — but this was among the least effective films I saw all year.

Plus: the equally inept Infamous.

Man Offered 11-Year-Old Tickets for Sex.

If the tickets were 11 years old, who would want them?

We’ve been producing Culture Snob for more than four years now, and I’ve come to a sad realization: I’m tired of movies.

Not all movies — Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope still reveals new facets of mythic complexity every Sunday — but the whole movie culture: a half-dozen new releases almost every week, the incessant obsession with box office and awards, the flood of contradictory reviews and fiery debate ... . It’s no wonder Owen Wilson wanted to escape.

Rather than bitch and moan — or act out in self-destructive ways — I’ll offer my suggestions on how to fix the movie industry in a few easy steps.

(An experiment in theft [or fair use] and editing as part of Lazy Eye Theatre’s Bizarro Blog-a-thon.

In the spirit of the character and the blog-a-thon: Bons Erutluc am so proud that me wrote every word!)

Sunshine and Groundhog Day have a lot in common. In each, we see things we’ve seen before, over and over again. But in Sunshine, this doesn’t describe the plot of the film, but the movie itself.*

The article begins innocuously enough:

“Hollywood’s depiction of the U.S. military is often laughably inaccurate to many Americans who wear their country’s uniform.”

True enough. But then, in reference to Michael Bay’s Transformers:

“The Army has never fought giant robots, but if we did, this is probably how we’d do it.”

(This is the first and, I promise, last reference to Transformers on Culture Snob.)

It is, of course, bad form to kick a man when he’s down, but here goes.

First it was merely M. Night Shyamalan’s boastfulness that grated, such as when he told Time:

“Except for Pixar [qualifier], I have made the four [qualifier] most successful original [qualifier] movies in a row [qualifier] of all time.”

Some have have tried to dispute this claim, but I believe Shyamalan has crafted enough conditions that his statement is factually correct. (We must ignore George Lucas, but I’m guessing that M. Night would disqualify the final three Star Wars movies because they’re sequels — hence, not “original” in his sense of the word.)

This is the Michael Bay Defense: My movies might suck, but they make a lot of money!

In Dark Water, the 2002 Japanese horror movie that was re-made in the United States in 2005, an anxious, annoying, newly single mother named Yoshimi rents a very wet apartment and encounters a greenish ghost. I thought: Certainly this would have been a much more entertaining film if Yoshimi battled the pink robots instead.

Open Water would barely be worth the effort of dismissing except for some shockingly enthusiastic reviews. So to prevent you from wasting 80 minutes of your valuable time with this piece of shit, I’m wasting considerably less of your valuable time with the piece of shit that you’re presently reading.

The premise of Idle Hands: an easy way to cash in on an audience that has never heard of some of the movies listed below. The story: Pot-smoking slacker teen loses control of his right hand, which goes on a murderous rampage and is undeterred by being cut off and microwaved.

Oscar nominee Alec Baldwin isn’t bad in The Cooler, but he’s not any good, either, and the film as a whole is terrible. The best thing I can say about Baldwin is that he’s the only performer who doesn’t look completely adrift in this disaster. If the Academy Awards measure a performer’s work relative to everybody else in a picture, then give Baldwin the statuette. Otherwise, his nomination is a joke.

Just as Pulp Fiction spawned a number of crude imitations, it appears that Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves has inspired young filmmakers to mimic his bleak depictions of degradation. The British film Under the Skin brings with it the affectations of von Trier’s film — the hand-held cameras, the grim natural light, the misogyny, the attempted shocks — in the service of a painfully immature story without a shred of psychological understanding or depth in its main character.

Most hot young actors wouldn’t dare trying to play vacuous, affected, manipulative, selfish, back-stabbing rich kids. It would look too much like reality. Ryan Phillippe, though, is one of our great screen artists. He has the guts to play a vacuous, affected, manipulative, selfish, back-stabbing rich kid, and to avoid the criticism that he is simply being himself, he decides to play the role badly.

The two movies at which I’ve had the most fun in the past 15 or so years both came courtesy of Albert Brooks. In each, Brooks played weenie-boy whiners in search of something important: courage (Defending Your Life) or the reason all his relationships with women fail (Mother). In The Muse, the Brooks character isn’t looking for anything nearly so deep; he just wants a good script — something Brooks could have used as well.

If two young women characters in a movie decide to take a vacation to an exotic locale before going to their respective colleges, the viewer can be certain one of two things will happen: They’ll have passionate sexual awakenings at the hands of a handsome stranger, or they’ll be unjustly imprisoned in a fucked-up judicial system with seemingly no hope of ever getting out. In the case of Brokedown Palace, we get both.