The Wolverine: The Best X-Men Movie So Far

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The X-Men series is one that has never really distinguished itself in a major way, in spite of the fact that it's one of the first film series to be based on a Marvel property. They're not bad movies at all (well, The Last Stand is kind of lame), but with so many characters being juggled around over the course of the run time, the average viewer might find it difficult to feel heavily invested in what's going on or who's doing what, with one notable exception. As far back as the first installment, it was obvious which character the filmmakers preferred, and that character was Wolverine. He seems to be every X-Men fan's favorite, garnering several of his own spin-off series and ironically standing as the most recognizable, lone symbol of an ongoing story about a group of gifted individuals working as a team.

Hugh Jackman was a brilliant casting choice; his seamless combination of physical ruggedness and subtle personal vulnerability gives the character an onscreen depth that would have been absent if the producers had gone with a more straightforward tough-guy performer. Next to Ian McCellan's Magneto, he was the best thing in the original trilogy. Too bad it wasn't until 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine that he got a chance to be showcased on his own. For my money, that's where they should have started. The rest of the X-Men come off as shallow and bland next to Wolverine's hard-bitten, unpredictable ferocity, and it's not like the general, non-comic obsessed public doesn't have at least a passing familiarity with him after years of his image showing up on t-shirts and lunchboxes. Hell, before Tim Burton's Batman came out in '89, a lot of people had completely forgotten about the Caped Crusader, and now you can't go a day without seeing some Batman-related article of clothing or knick-knack.

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The Wolverine, interestingly, is not a sequel to X-Men Origins; instead, it seems to be a sequel to X-Men: The Last Stand, a connection you'd think the producers would want to avoid. Wolverine has recurring hallucinations involving the powerfully psionic Jean Grey, the love-interest he kills at the end of Last Stand. She's played by Famke Janssen, the same actress who played her in the trilogy, further cementing an association with an inferior movie. This doesn't hurt The Wolverine too much, but I'm surprised they didn't decide to go with a quasi-reboot and leave the other movies out of it. The main reason might be that X-Men: Days of Future Past is slated to be released in the next couple of years, preventing The Wolverine from being a true stand-alone project.

This time out, we spend a lot more time with the character, even more than in Origins, and as a result, he comes off as far more complex, layered, and sympathetic than in previous movies. From the opening shot of B-52 bombers swooping in on the city of Nagasaki in 1945 as an imprisoned Wolverine watches, you realize you're dealing with something a little more thematically rich than what has come before (I say that fully knowing that X-Men opened with a young Magneto in a Nazi concentration camp—it just works better here).

He saves a Japanese soldier from the heat of the atomic blast, an act that will have important consequences later. In the present day, Wolverine is alone and plagued by nightmares, living in the woods and rocking a serious mountain man beard. A young Asian woman with pink hair lures him to Japan, where he meets again with the soldier he saved decades earlier, now an old man on the verge of death. He has become a wealthy industrialist, and promises Wolverine he has the means to erase his mutant healing ability and grant him a mortal life. Wolverine is intrigued, though he never actually says yes to the proposition. While he sleeps, an evil scientist with the mutant ability to produce deadly toxins from her body secretly implants a spider robot thing in his chest cavity, suppressing his instant healing and making him vulnerable to bullets, knives, and aluminum baseball bats.

Taking away Wolverine's ability to heal is a good way to go. By weakening him, there's the sense that he could be in some real danger, and the audience is left to wonder just how badly he's going to be injured before he's able to heal again. Suspense is limited, because anyone who's seen an action movie before knows he's not really going to die, or even be denied his mutant powers for very long. But it works for the amount of time they elect to use it.

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The Wolverine has a strong first half, and there's an extended action sequence starting at a funeral and ending on top of a speeding bullet train that's as good as superhero fights get. The problem I had was with the overall execution of the story. There are a lot of great elements here, from Yakuza to ninjas to an adamantium Silver Samurai, but with the exception of the gangsters, these elements feel underused. There's a part toward the end that promises to be a knock-down, drag-out fight between the hero and a clan of ninjas, and it's all over before it has a chance to begin (though it does end with a cool reference to Kurosawa's Throne of Blood). You go to see a movie like The Wolverine specifically because you want to see him get in a wicked fight with ninjas; the result is kind of a letdown. The rest plays out exactly as you would expect, which is less a criticism than it is a comment on the trap nearly all action movies fall into. The hero confronts the bad guy, they fight to the death, the hero wins, and there you go. After decades of climaxes that all go exactly the same way, it's hard to muster up very much enthusiasm, especially when the final fight amounts to real actors running around in a CG cartoon, as in every other giant blockbuster from the last ten years.

I recommend The Wolverine, with reservations. It drags a bit in the middle, and doesn't realize its full potential. Still, it has some choice moments and solid performances, and by the time it's all done, we're left with a Wolverine who seems much more human and personable than in any other X-Men movie, in the best of the X-Men movies so far. 

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V/H/S, Atrocious, and Found Footage

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I talk about a couple of movies and there are some spoilers. So, you know, look out.

Anyone who hasn't been in a coma for the last five years or so has noticed the massive influx of “found footage” horror films both in theaters and straight-to-video. The feeling I get, just from cruising around the web, is that a lot of people bemoan the growing prevalence of this subgenre, saying that it's driven chiefly by the desire of producers to make and market films with next to no budget and with even less creativity. They can get away with shooting on video, using locations instead of sets, and hiring unknown actors. The Paranormal Activity series is probably the worst offender, recycling the same story from movie to movie and seldom even bothering to change up the formula: for the first half, doors creak slowly on their hinges, curtains are rustled, and objects are knocked on the floor when no one's around. Later, pots and pans get dropped from the ceiling and loud noises freak everyone out. Finally, someone—usually a woman—is grabbed by an invisible force and dragged along the floor. I've only seen the first three (aren't they up to five now?) and they all follow that same basic pattern. In between scares, we see lots of footage of bedrooms and kitchens where nothing is going on. The whole series feels a little bit like a joke on the audience, and a mean one at that.

Still, there's nothing about the genre in and of itself that makes it awful, save for the lackluster efforts of some of its practitioners. I have to admit I'm kind of a sucker for this sort of movie. I loved The Blair Witch Project when it came out, probably because I've been out in the woods at night enough times (minus the witch) to relate to the situation the characters find themselves in. The scares build steadily and effectively, and the ending is flat-out unforgettable. While many people apparently thought Apollo 18 sucked, I was actually impressed by the premise, and thought the film did a decent job of capitalizing on the idea of two astronauts trapped on the moon with a mysterious, malevolent presence and no way out. The fact that they were under attack by rock monsters was lame, but up 'til then they had me hooked. Cloverfield is terrific, one of the better monster movies I've seen. And I enjoyed the first Paranormal Activity, a movie best watched alone and at night. Once you've seen one, though, you've seen 'em all.

I find the animosity toward these movies kind of perplexing, mainly because they're not much different in kind from the crop of slasher movies that came out all through the '80's. Genre movies are all about trends, and this happens to be one that dominates the area of horror at the present moment. Just as older horror fans look back on Freddy, Jason, and Micheal Myers with nostalgic fondness, fans in their teens and twenties will remember The Last Exorcism and The Devil Inside the same way. They won't be wrong to do so; everyone has a soft spot in their heart for the popular culture of their youth, and there's some good in there that sets itself apart from the dreck.

I watched a couple of movies recently that, for me, represent both ends of the spectrum of found footage horror. While tooling around on Hulu looking for something to watch, I happened across a Spanish language film called Atrocious. The title gives ample fuel to anyone looking to make an easy joke about the movie's quality, which, after sitting through the whole thing, I feel might be perfectly justified. Not that it's a terrible movie, but it stands as a good example of why some people hate the found footage genre. The story involves a trio of siblings who stay with their parents in an old ancestral home somewhere in rural Spain, located next to a shrubbery labyrinth similar to the one in The Shining. The eldest is a young man who wants to shoot a documentary about a local urban legend. Against their parents wishes, the boy and his sister tromp around in the labyrinth looking for cool stuff to film. They see a mysterious woman, with her back to them, through a gap in the shrubbery, and later the family dog turns up dead at the bottom of a well inside the labyrinth. Not knowing the dog is dead, the youngest of the three disappears into the maze to look for it, freaking out their mom and sending the whole family on a search to find him. Naturally, all of the action is seen through the night vision of the two video cameras the brother and sister keep with them at all times. 

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Up to this point, the movie has a lot of build-up without very much happening. Once the characters are in the maze, they spend what feels like twenty minutes running around and yelling. It's pretty boring until the young man is grabbed from behind by an unseen assailant and dragged for several feet. Recovering from the attack, he picks up his camera to go find his sister, who he finds tied up at the gazebo at the maze's center. They make it back to the house, where copious amounts of blood have been spilled. They barricade themselves in the upstairs room, listening for the unknown person moving about in the house. The movie goes to news reports of a family in rural Spain that has been murdered, clearly talking about the people we've just been watching, then backs up and shows us the rest of what happened. The young man goes downstairs, then down into the basement, where a videotape is playing showing a woman with his mother's name in a psychiatric hospital. The narrator on the tape describes her as a deeply disturbed patient who has already murdered two of her children. At this moment, the young man's mother creeps up behind him, wielding an axe, and kills him.

Points go the the film's writers for not doing the obvious and ripping off Blair Witch Project. The urban legend mentioned earlier refers to a local ghost said to guide lost travelers out of the woods. Rather than telling a ghost story, which we have every reason to expect, the filmmakers go for a variation on the “someone you least suspect is really a psycho killer” formula. Overall, it's not very effective, because that kind of twist is, by now, pretty used up. Now that I think of it, it's a stripped-down version of the end to Scream. And like I said before, not a lot happens up until the end. A long way to go without much of a payoff. I wouldn't blame anyone who sees this and thinks, “Man, this found footage stuff is bullshit.” In it's defense, it doesn't feel as cynical and lazy as the Paranormal Activity series.

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Before Atrocious, I watched V/H/S, a movie from a couple of years ago. Unlike every other found footage horror film I've seen, this one takes the audacious step of being an anthology. There are, in total, five different stories in this one, hung on the the framing story of a bunch of young lowlifes breaking into an abandoned house with the intention of stealing a VHS tape. What they find are a pile of videotapes and a dead body. The presence of a corpse in no way deters them from looking for the tape they want, and one member of the gang is given the task of sifting through the stack to find the right one. As he does so, he watches a group of guys pick up girls at a bar, one of whom turns out to be a vampire demon; a man get murdered by his girlfriend's lover while they're on vacation at the Grand Canyon; a group of hikers slain by a killer who can't be filmed with a video camera for some unexplained reason; and the female half of a Skyping couple being an unwitting participant in an extraterrestrial breeding program. Once that story wraps up, the corpse comes to life and kills all the creeps. Weirdly, there's one more tale after that, though there's no one left alive to see it.

Not a perfect movie, but the anthology structure prevents it from getting dull, and all the stories move along at a good pace. It has genuinely scary moments, and there's some smart use of the found footage format. Whereas in just about everything from Blair Witch onward, characters are required to run around with a camera glued to their face in a way that seems totally unnatural, seeing as they're being chased by ghosts and monsters and whatnot, the makers of V/H/S opted for the most part to be logical: the guy in the first story films the action through a pair of glasses with a built-in mini camera, so it makes sense he doesn't stop shooting as he's running for his life. The couple at the Grand Canyon don't use their camera any more than you'd expect, and the Skying couple likewise don't use their laptops and tablets in any way out of the ordinary. V/H/S comes off much smarter than most entries in the genre, and it'll probably wind up with a cult following in later years, if it hasn't already. It gives me hope that this kind of movie can be done well when in the right hands. The concept provides the sort of immediacy the horror genre thrives on, and fans ought to rejoice that new territory has been staked out that can be explored in innovative, unsettling ways by talented filmmakers.

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World War Z: Zombies Old and New

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I went through a phase where I was absolutely sick to death of zombies and zombie movies, until I came to understand that they are now, and perhaps always will be, a dominant fixture in the pop culture landscape. They figure in about half of all movies made in the last ten years, they're in almost every video game (fine by me because I stopped gaming years ago), they're the premise of a hit TV series, I can count on most of the Halloween costumes I see being zombies, and people still tell zombie jokes on the internet. It's just the way things are, and I'll have to get used to it. On some level I wish everyone would drop the subject and find something else to amuse themselves; zombies are way past being hip or edgy, but they've become so rooted in the popular imagination that they're now as much a part of the consumer landscape as Burger King and Windows. I've more or less made my peace with it, but only because I have to if I want to enjoy contemporary entertainment.

In that spirit, I'll say that World War Z is a fine example of the genre as it stands today, even if it doesn't have anything new to say in respect to undead people shambling around taking bites out of the living. The only goal here was to make a fast, rollicking horror/adventure movie with tons of zombies and a lot of gunfire and explosions, and they accomplished that perfectly well. Where they depart from standard-issue zombie fare is in the epic scope they bring to the story; events start in Philedelphia, then move to South Korea, Israel, and finally the UK. Everything that happens is big and intense, with zombie hordes attacking in writhing, spastic waves, providing the film with some of its most memorable visuals. The undead here are of the 28 Days Later/Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead variety, running and jumping and swarming like Olympic athletes jacked up on crystal meth. The action has a feverish, skin-of-your-teeth quality that rarely lets up, and when it does start to wind down a little toward the end, it comes as something of a refreshing change of pace.

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Where World War Z fails is in its almost total lack of inspiration. I haven't read the novel it's based on, but the impression I get is that it has an episodic structure revolving around stories told by the survivors of a worldwide zombie epidemic. That's original, but none of it shows up on screen. Instead, we get the heavily-armed living struggling against the relentless living dead, a scenario so old it collects Social Security checks. World leaders and the military are at a loss, and there's a race against time to find a cure for zombie-itis. Nothing new there. I know less discerning fans don't look for subtlety, but if producers want to push back against the law of diminishing returns, they need a fresh approach. Humans vs. Zombies isn't going to cut it in the long run, even if it looks epically humongous. What saves the movie from feeling like little more than a big budget remake of 28 Days Later are good performances, particularly from Mr. Pitt, a fast pace, well-written characters, and unique imagery. I won't get the picture of zombies piling and scuttling up a wall like ants out of my head any time soon.

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I have to admit to a few biases when it comes to zombie flicks. I saw the original Night of the Living Dead (the movie that created the modern zombie if you ignore Vincent Price's The Last Man on Earth) on Halloween night when I was nine years old, and it had an indelible impact on my still-growing brain. Nothing since has ever recreated the grim, apocalyptic, unearthly feel of that movie for me, an effect achieved mainly through black-and-white cinematography, stilted acting, and a low budget. Not even Romero's follow-up Dawn of the Dead has the same power, though it did up the ante by employing Peckinpah-esque bullet hits and full-color guts. The later forays of Lucio Fulci into zombie cinema are fun, surreal, and a serious trip to watch, but generally feel more silly than scary. Living Dead is the first movie I know of to show the dead as literal ghouls who feed on the living, and while other movies have been more graphic in their depiction of the same material, none have done it more memorably (it's that freaky-ass music that does the trick).

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An interesting trend I've noticed in the zombie genre over the last several years is a tendency to tone down the gore, a weird development when you take into account that extreme gore was a primary selling point of zombie movies when the idea was new. Each new entry tried to out-splatter the last, culminating eventually in the ultra-gory finale of Romero's otherwise boring Day of the Dead, and some years later with Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, a film that was so overwhelming in its broad comedy and explosive, manic gross-out pyrotechnics that I naively assumed, right up to the point when Danny Boyle and Zack Snyder resuscitated the genre, it would be the final word in zombies. Clearly that hasn't been the case, and the next generation of dramatists have evidently decided that explicit blood and guts isn't the way to go. I was actually surprised at how tame Snyder's Dawn of the Dead was in comparison to the original, and the same goes for most of the recent crop of zombie flicks. One exception is Shaun of the Dead, which holds back on the gore until one character has his intestines pulled out by an undead mob, even giving us a good look at his empty body cavity as he dies screaming. That one bit is as shocking as anything Romero or Fulci ever did.

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You don't have to think on it very long to understand that the main motive behind cleaning up the buckets of blood is to increase ticket and DVD sales. For all its entertainment value, World War Z has a PG-13 rating and barely a drop of blood. Producers want the maximum number of moviegoers to see this stuff, and most people don't want to be alienated by exploding heads and flopping entrails. Diehard gorehounds can seek out more obscure, unrated titles, but zombies are now officially for the masses. In the same way that the iconography of punk rock and death metal has long been co-opted by unthreatening bands on the Billboard charts, the zombie movie is now a relatively safe mainstream product, suitable for Disney and children's costumes. Much like zombies themselves, the commodification of formerly obscure subcultures is not going away any time soon. One more thing old-school fans will have to learn to make their peace with.

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Pacific Rim: Watch Rodan Instead

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I went into this movie with high hopes, fully knowing I was expecting a lot from a story about giant robots fighting giant monsters. With a name like Guillermo del Toro's attached to it, the man who created Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone, there was a chance the material would be handled with an originality and depth largely considered atypical of the giant monster movie genre. I've been a fan of Godzilla since I was old enough to turn on a TV, so you can imagine my anticipation for a fresh take on a familiar idea.

Pacific Rim, in my opinion, is the worst movie del Toro has ever made. It's also the dumbest movie I've seen so far this summer. There was not a single moment, not a grain of the story or an element of any of the characters that doesn't appear somewhere else in recent pop culture. It's common to say that there are no new ideas, which may well be true, but I didn't think a titanically expensive major studio release with such a pedigree would be so thoroughly derivative. The giant robots are nothing more than a retread of Transformers; the monsters carry parasites on their bodies just like the monster from Cloverfield; there's a gag involving Ron Perlman's character taken from Deep Blue Sea; the creature designs are straight out of Avatar; and to add insult to injury, there's a line ostentatiously lifted from Star Wars.

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It gets better from there. All of the dialogue is either uninspired or wincingly bad. The stock characters live solely in two dimensions, plugged into the story to fulfill the minimum of narrative requirements. You have geeky, awkward scientists, a hero with a dark past to live down, a cocky young upstart with something to prove, an insecure young upstart with something to prove (and a dark past to live down), a grizzled veteran without much time left, and monster-fodder. They're unengaging, hollow, bland, and never once break the bonds of cliché. Their unrelenting shallowness makes them impossible to care about, a serious problem when it comes to generating any suspense or interest during the big monster battles.

Those battles are the primary set pieces, the main reason the movie exists, and rather than looking forward to them, I found myself dreading their arrival. I had the same problem here that I had with the Transformers movies; computer animation doesn't render depth of field very well, and with the added inconvenience of all but one fight taking place at night, in the rain, the action looks like nothing more than big, glowy CG blobs grappling with abstract geometric shapes. I had to strain my eyes to make out what was happening. Combine that with the thundering audio mix, and the effect is unpleasant at best, torturous at worst, and you get a headache both ways.

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So much in the film comes off as ridiculous that I have to wonder, did del Toro mean for it to be this silly? Is it supposed to be a goofy homage to monster movies of the past? If so, he goes about it the wrong way. What little campiness there is feels subdued and half-hearted, not nearly gonzo enough to support such a thin story. Over-the-top humor and satire would have been an interesting way to go—think Paul Verhoeven directing an uber-budget Big Man Japan—and would have been more appropriate for this kind of outrageous subject matter. But I think—I think—it's all meant to be taken unironically, making the end result that much more disappointing.

Giant monster movies don't have to be just for kids. The 2008 South Korean movie The Host is funny, suspenseful, unconventional and adult, worth seeing more than once. Apart from the ending, it might be one of the best monster movies ever made. 2010's Monsters, while it has its issues, is a unique and grown-up take on the genre. It's possible to do this kind of thing and do it smart. Guillermo del Toro, of all people, should have been able to give us something just as good. Instead, what we have is only slightly less bad than the recent output of Micheal Bay.

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Darth Vader In Middle Management, and Imperial Inefficiency

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One of the most interesting scenes from Star Wars, for me, is the part that takes place in that conference room on the Death Star, where a group of upper-level space navy officers and one nobleman (it's Lord Vader, not Captain Vader) have a sit down about the status of their new ultra-weapon. It stands out from every other scene in the movie because it's so solidly bureaucratic, giving the audience a window into the kind of functional, boring details that make up life on a fictional space station. The movie opens with a shoot-out, we see a weird bar full of creepy aliens, stellar dogfights and a lightsaber duel, but for about five minutes, thirty-odd minutes into the run time, we watch a board meeting.

Lucas demonstrated an even deeper commitment to sci-fi C-SPAN in The Phantom Menace, where the action—such as it is—grinds to a halt halfway through so the characters can discuss how things are going to go down in space Congress. Serious stuff is supposed to be happening, there's a rouge Sith Lord on the loose, and the violent occupation of a peaceful planet is in progress. But the important thing is to dramatize how senators lobby for votes, entirely through expository dialogue. The scene feels like it goes on forever, and was the point where I stopped the DVD the last time I watched Episode I and told myself, Never again. I probably won't keep that promise, but it'll be years before I make myself sit through that. It's maybe the worst scene in a pretty sloppy trio of prequels, and that's really saying something.

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The scene in the original Star Wars differs for a few key reasons. One, it's terse. It feels a lot tighter, a result of the fact that it's better written, leading me to believe that Lucas either didn't write it, or he was a much better writer as a young man than he was in his sixties. Maybe it's the editing; the documentary Empire of Dreams all but accuses Lucas of making a mediocre movie that had to be saved in the editing room. Whatever the cause, it comes off much better, no less so because it ends in harrowing violence.

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Many people have commented on the cause of that violence; who did that one admiral or commander or whatever think he was mouthing off to Vader that way? Was he nuts? You'd think he knew who he was talking to. Even if Vader doesn't technically outrank that guy (leading me to wonder exactly what Vader's role on the Death Star was—consultant? Snitch?), Vader's reputation alone should have shut his yap. Are we to believe word of his lethal powers hasn't gotten around the Empire? It must have to some extent, because he mockingly refers to Vader's “sorcerer's ways”. Had Vader never force-throttled an Imperial officer before? Or one of the enlisted men? I find that hard to believe. Sith Lords don't bother much with impulse control. Maybe that officer is just a cocky sonofabitch, and likes to push people and see how much he can get away with. If so, it was the wrong day to try that trick with Vader.

A few scenes earlier, aboard the blockade runner after Princess Leia is taken into custody, an Imperial officer essentially chastises Vader for potentially getting everybody in trouble with the Senate (how much authority can the Imperial Senate possibly have? It's a police state, for chrissakes). Vader placates him with hurried assurances that he'll handle the situation, and so we see the first instance of the Sith Lord having to deal with a disrespectful co-worker. That makes the incident in the conference room the second time in one day he's had to take shit from somebody who doesn't consider him a serious threat. Clearly that was one time too many, but I'm still a little perplexed.

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If everyone knows who Vader is, and has some idea of his role toward the end of the Clone Wars, you wouldn't think they'd want to get on his bad side. Also, they have to know what his relationship to the Emperor is. Unless that's all kept a secret, but what would be the point of that? Wouldn't it be a better use of Vader's talents to make sure everyone knows he's an efficient and enthusiastic killer, just to keep them all in line? I don't understand why else he's there. Maybe the Emperor couldn't think of anything else to do with him, and told him to go hang out on the Death Star for a while. Vader obviously has real authority—he appears to be in charge of the blockade runner's capture—but his duties don't look any different from those of the average mid-level officer. It seems a poor use of someone with so much inherent power.

That's how it goes sometimes, though. You have a resource at your disposal and don't know exactly what to do with it. Some of the expanded universe stuff implies that Vader was helping the Emperor hunt down and kill the last remaining Jedi; I read a pretty cool comic story once where he was doing that, having an awesome lightsaber and force fight with a refugee Jedi. Obi-wan Kenobi tells Luke that was how things went down, but years later Lucas undermines the backstory by having the clone troopers kill off most of the main Jedi. The final shot of Episode III shows the Emperor and Vader standing on the deck of a Star Destroyer supervising the construction of the Death Star; Vader goes from badass warrior to a contractor in just a few days, or however much time elapses between that silly scene in the operating room and a shot of two of the most iconic heavies in cinema history staring out a window.

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In Empire, things look much better for Vader. With Grand Moff Tarkin dead, Darth gets a promotion, and a brand new, super-humongous Star Destroyer to cruise the galaxy in. Now he can choke Imperial officers to death with impunity. The only person who can tell him any different is the Emperor, and that guy shocks people to death with his fingers. At first glance, it looks a bit like failing up, when you consider that Vader didn't manage to stop the Rebels from blowing up the Death Star. But remember, Grand Moff Tarkin was in charge of mounting an effective defense against the attack, which he stoutly refused to do apart from a few fighters and the laser cannons that were already lining the trench anyway. Vader was just doing his job. Besides, who else was the Emperor going to promote to second-in-command? Does anyone else in the original trilogy look qualified?

Still, it all seems kind of a mess, what with high-ranking officers being killed in front of the crew. That's a shitty work environment, and you'd think people living in a super high-tech sci-fi universe would have some idea of how ineffective it is to use death as a motivator. You just don't get the best work out of people that way. They have to love their job, love where they work, if you want really top-drawer workplace performance. It's one thing for a totalitarian dictatorship here on Earth to do that “Fail me and I'll kill you” stuff, but those space people ought to know better.

Going back to that scene in the conference room, you can see the problem is an endemic one. There's Vader, magically strangling a guy, and it takes Tarkin a minute to finally say, “Hey now, come on, knock it off you guys.” You call that discipline? The Empire's unlikely defeat at the hands of talking koala bears with sticks now makes a lot more sense. This is what happens when an organization is headed by a cranky old wizard who doesn't get out much, and finds it worth an afternoon's amusement to pit a son against a father in a battle to the death. Lucas' message here seems to be: Arrogance and complacency lead to a downfall. Too bad that, when he started the process of producing the prequels, he didn't take a few hours to review his own best work and remind himself of that lesson.

Sharknado: Yer Silly and Ya Know It

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I didn't actually watch very much of this, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, before I found something better to do. Truth be told, it didn't look all that bad for a movie that was meant to be bad, about as much fun as most low-budget, crappy-on-purpose, generally uninspired exploitation movies of the kind that have become popular in the last ten years or so, especially on the Syfy Channel. The joke just wore off for me, and once that happens, why commit to another hour of viewing?

Just ahead of it in the lineup was another cheap shark attack movie with cartoony CG effects, this one featuring a giant shark that could wiggle around on land like a seal. It traps a woman in a cave, so she throws a bundle of dynamite down its throat and blows it up, sort of like the finale of Jaws if Jaws cost $200. She exits the cave covered in seaweed and shark guts, then walks off into the sunset with a guy dressed like Jimmy Buffett.

It's funny because it's supposed to be, as is Sharknado, and it makes me think about the nature of this kind of movie at the present moment. It's great that cheaply produced exploitation movies are still a big part of the cinematic landscape (In the interest of not coming off like a pretentious douche, I'm trying to avoid using words like “film” and “cinema” instead of “movies”, but for the sake of variety I'm probably going to show occasional lapses), showing up on cable and video instead of drive-ins and movie houses like the bygone days of yesteryear. But there's a marked difference in style. The majority of monster movies up until the '80's were meant to be taken more or less at face value, regardless of quality. If there was humor, it was oriented around the characters; people told jokes or did funny things, but the movies were not themselves jokes.

A lot of that has changed. At least as far as Syfy Original Movies go, standard practice seems to be to produce work that is mostly meant to be a gag. No one would think Sharktopus or Giant Boa Vs. Monster Gator or whatever is a straight-faced monster movie. Self-referential irony is a hallmark of this genre, and since we're living in the post-post-post-post irony era, where people wear clothes and facial hair intended to make them look stupid because it's cool to like stupid things for being stupid, smart low-budget producers put out stuff designed to make bad movie fans say, “That looks totally ridiculous, I have to see it.”

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More power to them. Sometimes you want to watch something unapologetically trashy so you can point and laugh and roll your eyes. It's a good way to kill an hour and a half. I'm curious to see where the trend goes in the next ten years.

Evil Bong, and Stoner Movies In General

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I didn't set out to watch Evil Bong because I thought it would be good, but I was hoping it would be the kind of bad I could get into. You know, Bride of the Monster, Battlefield Earth, bad like that. I remember seeing a copy of it on a shelf at a Blockbuster and thinking, Jesus that looks awful. There's Tommy Chong mugging over an image of a weird bong with a face, psychedelic colors and pot-leaf lettering to let you know this is a stoner movie, just in case the title Evil Bong left any doubt. How can something like that be anywhere close to good? Or even watchable? I suppose it could have been a lot of things: a sly and knowing satire of stoner comedy, a parody of franchise horror, or possibly a movie so incredibly inept that the embarrassing dialogue, painful line readings and laughable staging would make it a fun ninety minutes.

No, turns out it's just stupid. It's “bad-bad”, not “good-bad”. Just incompetent enough to be dull, insulting, and lazy, but not to the extent that you shake your head in disbelief. What happens in Evil Bong is all too believable, because it's no stretch to imagine a production company throwing together a cynical, boring piece of shit with the intention of cashing in on that lucrative too-baked-to-give-a-shit-about-what-I'm-watching market.

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Here's a sketch of the story: Nerdy college student rents a room with three stoner room mates. One of the room mates buys a bong online from somebody in New Orleans. The bong arrives, the stoners smoke out, and one by one they disappear into an alternate dimension that looks like a cheap strip club, populated by dwarves, strippers, and random characters from other Charles Band movies (the Gingerdead Man shows up for a second, and I think the lead from the Trancers series makes an appearance) A couple of the stoners are bitten by vampire strippers, but it's never mentioned again afterwards and has no bearing on the story. Meanwhile, the evil bong grows stronger from having fed on their souls or something, and develops both a face and a phoney Creole accent. The nerdy student and his girlfriend are the last to be sent to the interdimensional strip club once they figure out what's going on, and that's when Tommy Chong walks in as the bong's previous owner. He fails to kill it with a hammer and a chainsaw, so he takes a hit off it and goes to the strip club and blah blah they leave an opening for a sequel (two of them, actually).

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I only have a passing familiarity with the work of Charles Band, but I see that Evil Bong is one of his. He's kind of a next-generation Roger Corman, responsible for a lot of the cheap, schlocky stuff that used to litter the horror and sci-fi sections of my local video store. While Corman achieved a touch of respectability with his loose Poe adaptations back in the sixties, Band has produced almost nothing but dreck, except for two loose adaptations of Lovecraft, Re-Animater and From Beyond, which he executive produced. I don't have to have seen most of it to know it's bad; I saw Mausoleum (which is actually good-bad now that I think of it—there's a part where a woman's boobs turn into demons and chew through a guy's chest, a scene that gets a nod here) and Robot Jox, so after Evil Bong, what more proof do I need? I'm not knocking the guy, he's in the movie business to make money, but, like Corman, he churns out some serious garbage as a result (Irrelevant side note: The best thing I've ever seen of Corman's is Death Race 2000, and the worst is Creature From The Haunted Sea).

The sad thing is seeing Tommy Chong in this. Not surprising, just sad, in the way it's always sad to see a performer decades past his initial fame trying to capitalize on tired schtick. I was never a big fan of the Cheech and Chong phenomena, even when I used to get ripped on a daily basis. Anyone over the age of ten who finds them unironically hilarious needs anticoagulants to prevent another stroke. They were sporadically funny, at best, but they occupy a space in the hearts of at least three generations of stoners, a demographic with famously low standards in everything but plant strains. From what I can see, stoner humor consists mostly of “Dude, those guys are baked!” and “Check it out, they've got the munchies! 'Cause they're baked!” Sometimes it hits the mark; Robert DeNiro spacing off and fumbling with a phone in Jackie Brown is funny because it's fucking true, that's pretty much what it's like to be stoned, and the portrayal is not a flattering one because it mocks how completely unfocused and bungled a person is while under the influence. That's one of the reasons I liked The Pineapple Express so much. It's shockingly honest about what it's like to live the life of a chronic pot user, from Seth Rogan's character admitting that he only hangs out with his dealer because he's his dealer, not because he actually likes him, to taking stock of his situation and admitting to himself that all of the bad decisions he makes, he makes while high. Can you picture Cheech and Chong being that insightful in their heyday?

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