2008 in Review: It Wasn't All Good...

Thanks to HBO's almost non-stop re-airing, I know have seen what must amount to half of Meet the Spartans. Since the movie is seventy-something minutes long, that's a lot of shitty movie. I know I must've seen a healthy chunk of the beginning, swaths of the middle, and more of the ending than I care to admit to.

Listen, I talk some serious shit about bad movies here, but since Meet the Spartans is representative of the kind of "movies" the "shithead twins" make (I won't dignify their names here), I can say with total certainty I'll never watch Disaster Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie, the rest of Meet the Spartans, or any other turd sandwich they crank out into theatres.

Meet the Spartans is not a movie. A movie has a plot. Even Airplane, which this so badly wants to ape, has a plot. Jesus, Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult has a fucking plot. Meet the Spartans is a collection of bad scenes strung together with even worse narration. I thought reviewers were kidding when they said that these "movies" literally explained a joke, but they weren't.

To give you an example, there's a scene with Carmen Electra where she gets angry or something and is clearly wearing the black Spider-Man suit, right down to the mask and the Spider-Man logo. It's abundantly clear who she is, but some ass-clown still feels the need to say:

"She became angry like Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 3."

That's EXACTLY what he says. Because the target audience for Meet the Spartans is apparently mentally retarded. Every single reference in this movie is spelled out ad nauseum. They seem to think this is an acceptable substitute for jokes, and the sheer lousiness of this "movie" tends to suck you in. Then you realize what it is you're watching, look away disgustedly, and change the channel.

All of this brings me to the first phase of the long delayed 2008 Year End Recap (in February). We're going to start with

FIVE MOVIES I HOPE TO NEVER SEE AGAIN

Since I covered some of these before, I'm going to be brief. No sense wasting even more of my life on this tripe, but you need fair warning so that the same mistake isn't made in your living room. I saw a LOT of shitty movies last year, but these are the five movies I hope to never suffer through in 2009 and beyond.

1. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale - The first Uwe Boll film I ever saw will also be the last. Look, I'm a staunch defender of Jason Statham and his terrible taste in roles, but even he couldn't save this stale fart of a Lord of the Rings ripoff. When Burt Reynolds, Ray Liotta, and Matthew Lilliard hamming it up can't salvage this crap, there's no hope for Dr. Boll. Consider yourselves lucky I went a whole year without uttering this film's name.

2. Diary of the Dead - George Romero, what the fuck were you thinking? Look, maybe your social commentary wasn't exactly ("they're us!") subtle in the past, but between the lack of zombies, hamfisted narration, and general unlikability of the cast, Diary of the Dead has nothing going for it. You abandon interesting characters (the Amish man, the guys in the warehouse) to continue following these d-bag film school students, and on top of that you give the worst character in the movie carte blanche to spell out the themes! It's bad enough the reason to "keep filming" is flimsier than Cloverfield's, but do you need to hammer us over the head with this horrible script? Make me a zombie already and get this over with. How the mighty have fallen.

3. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor - It sucks. Even when the other Mummy movies were retarded, they were entertainingly retarded. This is not, for a lot of reasons. Don't think a football joke involving yeti saves it, either. It doesn't.

4. Righteous Kill - Speaking of how the mighty have fallen. Jesus. When Street Kings is a better movie about crooked cops, you know this has to be bad. And it is. Forget about the gratuitous death of 50 Cent. Don't even bother glancing at the cover. That's how much of a waste Righteous Kill is.

5. Lost Boys 2: The Tribe - Save the worst for last. Hey, this could've theoretically not sucked - pun intended- but the people behind The Tribe tried extra hard to ripoff the story from the first movie and somehow make Corey Feldman look bad in a role that was a no brainer for him. He doesn't have to dress like Edgar Frog for us to remember who he is: we fucking watched The Lost Boys, idiots! That's how we know this sequel is THE SAME MOVIE! The tease at the end, involving Corey Haim promises more mediocrity in Lost Boys 3: Because It's Friday, We Ain't Got No Jobs, and We Ain't Got Shit to Do. Oh boy. Please hold me back.

Everyone do yourselves a favor and avoid these embarassments of cinemas like the plague. Don't let morbid curiousity or fallacious word of mouth trick you into renting them. You're just wasting ten hours of your life (at least).

special (dis)honors also go to: The Ruins, Mother of Tears, National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, Death at a Funeral, Drillbit Taylor, The Wizard of Gore, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Trapped Ashes, and The X-Files: I Want to Believe, all of which sucked in various ways and are generally not welcome in this apartment again.

Blogorium Review: Righteous Kill

Or, 110 Minutes I'll Never Get Back.

So, like I said: so you wouldn't have to. And for your sake, I hope none of you ever fool yourselves into sitting through Righteous Kill.

Don't get me wrong: I wasn't watching anything better before I started this insultingly stupid waste of time disguised as a mystery. Righteous Kill just happens to be the last thing I saw tonight that was pathetic and totally predictable from minute one. I'm not going to bother saving this for next week because I'm already in a bad mood and thinking about this garbage will only sully an otherwise worthwhile year-end post later on. Let's get this over with.

People might be tempted to say "waste of talent" when they hear about Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in this piece of shit called a movie, but let's face it: they haven't been "Al Pacino" or "Robert De Niro" in years. Maybe not since Heat, which was the last time they were on-screen together and the last time I'll mention that film in the same breath as Righteous Kill.

This downward spiral should be of no surprise to people paying attention. On the one hand, you have Al Pacino the star of 88 Minutes which may be worse than Righteous Kill but I'm not willing to find out*. On the other hand, Robert De Niro who alternates between crap like Meet the Fockers and crap like Hide and Seek. The "legend" part of their resume is long since passed them by, so to hear that they're "finally teaming up" doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

But I watched it, so let's give you a cursory summary, huh?

Pacino and De Niro are two cops who everyone calls Rooster and Turk (for reasons I'll get to in a minute) that did one shady thing a long time ago blah blah blah. All of a sudden criminals connected to them start dying with poetry left at the scene and Internal Affairs gets interested and so do John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg who are also cops but... it doesn't even matter. Throw in Carla Gugino as a love interest for Turk, 50 Cent as a drug lord, Brian Dennehy as their Lieutenant, and start the mystery.

Except that Righteous Kill thinks it's smarter than you are. Or than it is. Because it opens with De Niro's taped "confession" about how he's the killer and he murdered all of these people. Couple that with the fact that the killer is still obscured during the course of the movie and it's pretty easy to figure out where it's going. In fact, the reason that it's necessary to call them Rooster and Turk is because otherwise you'd know that De Niro says his own name early in the "confession" and it's clear his "statement" was written by someone else.

But Righteous Kill insists on maintaining this stupid facade well after it's obvious what's actually going on. Since Pacino is playing "bug eyed bat-shit" Pacino, it's even clearer which one of them is actually doing this, but it doesn't stop director Jon Avnet from putting together a Saw-like montage near the end for anyone stupid enough to still be drooling on themselves in the theatre. Get it? That's how all of this crap happened? Don't you feel embarassed to not say "well duh!"?

So yes, the movie is terrible. It was a colossal waste of time with a cast of "they should have known be- well, that's not true...", but it keeps on prodding forward until the wholly predictable conclusion where everything works out okay because the bad guy who wanted to die dies and the good guy is cleared and anyone with any moral ambiguity simply vanishes from the plot.

Was anything redeeming? I guess if you've ever wanted to see someone blow 50 Cent's brains out, fast forward to near the end of the movie. Then you can watch a patently fake 50 Cent dummy fall through a glass window. Maybe that's worth your rental, but I doubt it.

Honestly, if you need to get you "cop film" jollies out in a tale or sordid cops who break the rules to get things done, you might as well just watch Street Kings. It's bad, but at least it never tries to be smart. How could it with Keanu Reeves?

And that's all you need to know. You won't watch it; I won't talk about it again, end of story. Consider it my present to all of you.




* same director. oh, that's promising...