Jim Carrey can act. The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind prove that. But his 5-second motionless cameo as a corpse in Clint Eastwood’s ‘The Dead Pool’ had more zing about it than this paycheck performance. Here, he can’t be bothered to strive for involved angst or tortured immersion or any of that. Here, he’s pantomime-poor. What’s behind you? The best part of your career, Jim. The film itself is a travesty even on Joel Schumacher’s bottom-heavy shitometer, and silently screams at you to switch off every few seconds. Yet more guff about the WEIRD manifestation of numbers as prescient and relevant and signifying something catrastrophic and fateful about our protagonist. It seems you can waft a few pages of premonitory dribble in front of a studio exec nowadays and get any old tat greenlit.
Martha Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence
Insipid, glib, pointless ménage a quatre, featuring three punchable male leads tiresomely orbiting a drably pretty and unconvincingly magnetic Monica Potter. Something about an art gallery, crossed-wires, near-misses (is this even what it's about? Does the writer or director even know?) and yet more scandalously inept money-frittering from a sporadically none-more-awful British film industry. The kind of cheesy, pseudo-sophisticated rubbish you’d expect last-minute from a swindled creative writing student.
Feels like being locked in a terrible nightclub, surrounded by the endlessly dumb chatter parping out of the gaping mouths of pampered, listless, dull southern arseholes. Mistakes energy and enthusiasm for vitality and relevance. The front cover says it all: John Simm looks both hammered (on cider) and exceedingly irritating and delighted with himself for being so hammered. The film seems to be very chuffed with itself for, like, hitting the nail on the head about how the olds just don’t geddit and how hedonism is preferable to becoming your mum and dad and other really sharp insights that no-one has ever made before. Certainly never as tediously. And as you can see, it's got arch bellend Danny Geezer in it, so it's even more of an absolute doozy.
Like a series of cockney drama workshop sessions strung haphazardly together, during the enactment of which the performers were asked to improvise gangster film clichés, lazy appropriations of seething menace (limp gurning) and edgy poise (hungover cantankerousness), only to come across as bored, lethargic versions of themselves whilst doing it. So spectacularly bad as to be mesmerising. Damon Albarn can’t even stand still convincingly; as for the involvement of the likes of Robert Carlyle and Ray Winstone, it’s strangely comforting to know that even top-performers like these are capable of being this atrocious.
Sliding Doors
This took years for ex-Bread knob Peter Hewitt to come-up with, and you can see why: it takes time and diligent care to plumb such labyrinthine turgidity and manage to make Gwyneth Paltrow seem completely unappealing and difficult to remotely endure. Ah, the dilemmas that affluent 30-something women have to wrestle with – ditch knobhead boyfriend and end up with a really dull, paper-thin guy with a nice line in unconvincing seduction patter? Double-realities unfold and serious questions are posed, such as: who put up the money for yet another irredeemable affront as this swanky, empty disaster?
AI
Haley Joel Osment (who hasn’t aged well – Google him!) is a small boy, but he’s not happy. He’s not really a proper boy, he’s a little artificial child that feels human. He finds out as much and ends up lobbing himself into the murky depths, only to be cut out of the frozen waters millions of years into the future by aliens observing a desolate Earth, who create a mother figure for him in order to make him feel whole again. What would surely have been ace under the aegis of Stanley Kubrick is a tosswad of mawkishness and ham. It’s the Chlamydia cum-stain on Spielberg’s pristine cinematic Y-Fronts (though there is a coffee-coloured starburst near the arse-crack that spells ‘Amistad’). Jude Law also skitters about as a kind of Fred Astaire gigolo figure. An expensive, airless, mard extravaganza of wrong.
TV spin-off travesty that will puncture your soul and make it feel like runny, salmonella blighted yolk. Kenan and Kel of strangely amusing kids knockabout show take the money and somehow trot out their lines like shameless goons. The most memorable scene involves Kel (or is it Kenan?) being told to 'Watch yo ass!', followed by Kel/Kenan spinning on the spot whilst 'watching' his 'ass'. Ingenious, but never hits such heights often.
Death Proof
Tarantino was once good, though you can hardly believe it watching this contemptuous rubbish. A load of nonsense about (a wastedly ace) Kurt Russell being a psychotic stuntman with yet another foot fetish. Featuring the most godawfully inept dialogue of ANY of the films on this list of turds. And this from the guy still on a crusade to convince us that he's 'beyond Godard' etc. He described this as his 'Eugene O'Neill movie'. Hoho. M Night Shyamalan, anyone?
The Day After Tomorrow
Hideous CGI spunkfest of submerged skyscrapers and laughably trite family values waffle, thrown at you loud enough and disagreeably enough that you'd hopefully not notice how crap it is and just go with the (not bad) effects. The world goes to shit and we're too annoyed by the feeble nature of what's served up to care.
United 93
I've got to be careful here, haven't I? We're on hallowed ground. You can't really have a go at such an enterprise as this: the reconstruction of a still-raw moment of hellish contemporary history in choreographed, verbatim detail. Here's my problem: there was no need. Not for reasons of sensitivity, but for reasons of superficial ambulance-chasing pointlessness. Here we have an incident already thoroughly mapped, recounted, and filed away for regretful, thoughtful reconsideration. Greengrass would say (and has) that it was a 'valuable' endeavour, bringing such a dire disaster into forensic focus for those who might not understand what happened. This is what I think: that it's tawdry, airbrushed opportunism masquerading as political art, and that the people that couldn't be bothered to wrestle with the permutations of such seismic worldwide horror in print such not be hand-held through a rousing celluloid version. Bankrupt, misguided tosh.
Poolhall Junkies. A hopeless shitstain of a film from a guy who could no more direct a Hollywood film than aim his plonker at the toilet bowl. Give a wet brain Palminteri and Walken and a few mill, and watch him better this without breaking boozy sweat.
ReplyDeleteFYI, the berk in question in Mars Callaghan.