Bookmarx

Posted by Tommy Marx November 16th, 2009

I haven’t seen Couples Retreat yet and based on the trailers, I doubt I’ll even bother to rent it. It just doesn’t look funny to me.

Not that I’m a movie snob or anything. I finally saw Paul Blart, Mall Cop a week ago and thought it was cute but ultimately forgettable. On the other hand, Forgetting Sarah Marshall was one of my favorite comedies ever, and I’m not ashamed to say I loved The Proposal. In other words, each to their own. Couples Retreat looks really bad to me, but I bet a lot of people thought it was hilarious.

That said, I find it a little bizarre that the distributor, Universal Pictures, decided to delete the token black couple from the movie poster on foreign releases. Evidently the company feels that British audiences prefer movies that don’t feature those pesky coloreds.

According to a spokesperson for the company, Universal isn’t ridiculously racist. They just wanted “to simplify the poster to actors who are most recognizable in international markets”.

That seems reasonable. After all, Malin Akerman, Kristen Davis, Jon Favreau, and Kristen Bell are international superstars, right?

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Posted by Tommy Marx November 12th, 2009

When Susan asked me if I wanted to go with her and Teresa to see Paranormal Activity yesterday, I didn’t hesitate. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a good horror movie.

Unfortunately, I didn’t care for Paranormal Activity at all.

The gimmick of using a video camera to record all the action is extremely difficult to pull off, and Paranormal fails miserably.

First, the jerky movements of the camera are highly exaggerated. Instead of having the feel of an amateur video, the nonstop bobbing and weaving ends up making you feel nauseous. My friend actually closed her eyes through most of the movie, only opening them during the bedroom scenes (when the camera is stationary), because she was literally getting sick. Yes, we understand that this is supposed to be home video, but I can’t believe anyone – especially a young, reasonably athletic man – would have so much trouble keeping the camera still every now and then.

Second – and this is a major problem with every “camcorder” movie I’ve ever seen – there comes a point when it’s no longer possible to believe someone would keep filming. Cloverfield was the very worst example of this (I don’t care how much you want to document what’s happening, when your life is seriously in danger, you’re gonna chuck the heavy video equipment and get to safety), but Paranormal Activity is pretty bad too.

Even when the worst things start happening, Micah grabs his camera before doing anything. It’s almost believable at the beginning, when he’s determined to document the supernatural. But by the end, when there’s more than enough evidence to suggest they’re in some serious shit, it’s impossible to believe he would face the wrath of a demon with a video camera severely limiting his sight.

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Posted by Tommy Marx October 16th, 2009

According to Rotten Tomatoes, Drag Me to Hell had a 92% approval rating. Evidently, a large majority of the critics were happy to see a horror comedy that was never horrific nor comedic. I wasn’t.

From the beginning, the movie sucked. Sam Raimi is never interested in being subtle (at least in this film) if he can be over-the-top broad instead. The villainess gypsyhas yellowed, decaying teeth – which are actually false teeth. Seriously, dentures that decay? The fight scene between our heroine and the old woman is taken straight from Spider-man (evidently everyone in every Raimi movie now possesses super-strength). A fly lands on the woman’s face while she’s sleeping, then crawls in one nostril and out the other before forcing its way between her lips, and instead of being even remotely disturbing, it just made me wonder why a fly that was that determined to get inside her didn’t, I don’t know, crawl down her sinus passage instead of popping back out of her nose initially. And at every possible opportunity, copious amounts of fluid spurt – the heroine starts bleeding at work and instead of an ominous drip or two, she literally sprays blood from somewhere all over her boss. And when she goes to the gypsy’s wake, not only does she get physically assaulted by the woman’s corpse, she’s drowned in Nickelodeon slime because evidently that’s what’s used to embalm gypsies.

I watched the movie for a full hour, but I’ll be damned if I finish it. I never kicked an old gypsy out of her home, so why should I be punished so harshly.

It’s even more annoying that – although pretty much everyone is playing a cardboard character with the depth of, well, cardboard – the acting isn’t bad and the production values are genuinely decent. What I wouldn’t give, though, for a horror movie that was creepy and freaked me out while resisting the urge to go overboard. The Saw series, with a mythology more laborious and incestuous than the X-Men comic books, long since gave up trying to be scary. Eli Roth had one of his characters escape the Hostel with one of her eyeballs dangling down, which was more annoying than digusting. I want to be creeped out by what I don’t see, not irritated by mediocre special effects meant to be gory and offputting but instead being laughably overdone.

I actually enjoyed the recent remake of The Last House on the Left until the ending. Yes, a couple of times it flirted with ridiculous, but I liked the set-up and the whole movie until the end, when the writer and/or director decided to have the main bad guy’s head blow up in a specially-rigged microwave. What the fuck?

I like being scared. Not nearly as interested in being pounded over the head with gore with the expectation that I would be anything but annoyed.