The Academy drinks the grape Kool-Aid

A heartbreaking tale of teen obesity

So the Academy Awards have been announced, and somehow Juno managed to get nominated for best picture, screenplay, director and actress. Perhaps the one condolence we can get out of this is that Michael Cera wasn't nominated for playing George Michael Bluth AGAIN. I'm hoping that come awards night, Diablo Cody will get a head injury and - in a twist right out of the Lindsey Lohan classic I Know Who Killed Me - revert to her stripper past and end up shaking her ass onstage while Jack Nicholson shoves dollar bills into her G-String. That would at least provide some small degree of entertainment, as opposed to the braindead script she wrote.

Still, the fact that anybody could be dumb enough to nominate this disgusting hipster wankstain of a movie for anything other than a Razzie is disappointing enough. At least this has motivated me to finally put together a comprehensive list of my thoughts on why Juno is unquestionably the worst movie of 2007. Yes, worse than Norbit. At least Norbit openly acknowledged that it was made for prepubescents and retards. Be on the lookout for it in the next few days.

Charlie Wilson's War- Why?

Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts demonstrate how stomach-turning AARP sex can be

Kongye had a chance to attend an early screening of this hot mess on Wednesday night. Perhaps a full review will come later. For now, some thoughts:

This movie was apparently written by Aaron Sorkin. This was a fact I knew; but was not specifically aware at the screening. Within 10 minutes, that information shoved its way straight to the front of my mind and all I could think was "this is SO Sorkin." If you are a steadfastly loyal Sorkin fan salivating at every line written to be delivered at the speed of a Swedish bullet train and saturated in too-clever-for-their-own-good quips, you will probably get a kick out of this movie. If you haven't had a lobotomy, the writing will drive you absolutely insane.

I don't understand the thought process behind casting Julia Roberts as a sultry seductress and Southern socialite (sorry for the unintentional alliteration, I feel positively Sorkinesque now). Obviously she is bloody awful. The only way to describe her character, as Roberts portrays her, is that she is playing Melanie Griffith's older, more grotesque sister from Viva Laughlin. She is just that bad.

As expected, Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in an absolutely brilliant performance- too bad he seems to be in a completely different movie; one I'd actually want to see. He steals every scene and is the only funny or captivating component of this generic Oscar-bait star vehicle.

30 Days of Shite

"SKREEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!"

Yes, we watched 30 Days of Night. I can't even begin to go into how stupid this movie was right now, so instead I'm going to start out by responding to some of the points made in Newsarama's fellatioreview of the movie:

Well, 30 Days of Night—is not—a direct, panel by panel remake of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s original graphic novel—it’s actually…better.
Replace "graphic novel" with "failed movie pitch" and "better" with "even more simplistic" and this is a correct statement.

30 Days of Night is enhanced by a newfound sense of character development and non-one liner dialog.
HAHAHA BULLSHIT. There is no character development in this movie. NONE. In 2 hours there is absolutely zero character development for anyone, and the entire supporting cast is completely interchangeable. As for the "no one liners," bitch please. Yeah, there aren't any one liners because Steve Niles isn't clever enough to write a goddamn one liner. There are plenty of lines that attempt to be one liners but fall flat on their face, though.

Let me repeat that—there really aren’t any cute Hollywood one-liners in this film. Even the trailer, sporting the now-infamous clip of Marlow saying, “No God,” bears a certain gravitas that doesn’t dismiss the moment as iconic.
Gravitas? I assume gravitas refers to the 10 second pause as Danny Huston stares around the abandoned town after asking "God?" for no reason other than to prove how retarded he can look before busting out his comeback ("NO GOD!"). I was falling out of my chair laughing. Total gravitas, guys. (I should add that although they refer to Huston as "Marlow" here, there is nothing in the movie to indicate that any of the vampires have names at all.) Also, the lack of intentional one liners seriously hurt this movie. I mean seriously, when your movie is a goddamn joke anyway you can at least attempt to make it intentionally funny for at least one scene.

Basically, 30 Days of Night transcends one medium to a new medium the way 300 or Sin City has—
Fixated with shitty action and possessing all the thematic depth of a kiddy pool? Yeah, that's a pretty accurate description of all three of these overrated shitfests. (Although neither 30 Days of Night or Sin City come close to matching 300's artistic vision of "gayest Xbox game ever.")

Typical to movies—audiences have to have a connection to the imperiled in this type of film. Granted, none of these human characters, beyond Stella and Eben Oleson, are iconic or memorable, but that was intentional. They are food.
This line cracks me up as the reviewer struggles to rationalize how awful this script is while still hanging onto the money he was paid to ensure a glowing review. "Well, normally you're supposed to identify with the characters, but it's okay that you don't in this one because they're deliberately supposed to be shitty to make the movie work." Sure thing, guys. Also, if the standard has fallen so low that we're describing Eben and Stella as "iconic" or "memorable," then I feel that I should mention the iconic and memorable dinner I had at Popeye's fried chicken yesterday.

From the standpoint of the talent—Josh Hartnett is Eben Oleson—any fan of the original material can feel it.
I have to agree here, Hartnett was utterly perfect for the part. In the comic, Eben had absolutely no identifiable personality whatsoever, and since Hartnett is completely incapable of portraying human emotion I can hardly think of a better actor to play Eben

All told, 30 Days of Night’s not a “jump out and scare you” kind of horror movie-
Yeah, because that would imply that Niles would have to come up with with a scenario where a vampire attack would be an unexpected surprise. Or that this movie was scary in the first place.

It’s an eerie movie which is tonally accurate to the original source, and even though there are a number of changes from the original story, they were made more out of the necessity of storytelling logic and for the intent of unifying certain thematic elements.
Yeah guys, I know when I think "eerie," I think "vampire attacks in super choppy fast motion with high pitched screaming playing the entire time." This shit is as "eerie" as Dane Cook is "subtle." And let's focus on some of the "storytelling logic " on display here in the revised plot, solely focusing on one of the additional locations:

• The people of the town have the ultimate goal of reaching "The Utilador" a structure that apparently exists solely to house a gigantic trash compactor. This structure is so far out of town that they remark that they need a car to get to it and spend 7 days hiding in an attic, 11 in an abandoned convenience store, and 9 in a police station before they head to it.
• Remember when they said they needed a car? On day 27 they walk to the Utilador.
• THE UTILADOR IS SO CLOSE TO TOWN THAT YOU CAN SEE THE MAIN STREET OF TOWN OUT THE WINDOW. SERIOUSLY, IT'S LIKE 30 FEET AWAY.
• The trash compactor at the utilador is in the movie solely so that they can throw a vampire into it and kill him quickly. However, when Josh Harnett's deputy is infected, Hartnett opts to slowly and laboriously hack his head off with an axe and leave the corpse lying on the floor to stink up the place instead of disposing it. Why? Because in 2 days, he's going to need to shoot up vampire blood in order to fistfight a vampire.

This isn't storytelling logic, it's a collection of logistical plotholes you could drive a fucking truck through. At least in the comic there was a reason for an infected corpse to be lying around so Eben could infect himself instead of spending 2 days with a rotting dead body lying directly in front of a device that was written into the movie solely for the purposes of corpse disposal.

LEARN TO WRITE, STEVE

Okay, now for my own thoughts. It's no secret that this movie exists as a comic solely because it failed as a movie pitch the first time around. The main reason that it failed is because when it comes to writing, Steve Niles is, quite honestly, an utter hack. He can come up with some moderately inspired horror concepts, but when it comes time for dialogue, characterization, and actual plotting, he completely falls apart. It's quite telling that he made first break into comics with adaptations of Richard Matheson's I am Legend and Clive Barker's Rawhead Rex rather than any of his own ideas. His success in the comics field seems to be mainly because he manages to be a nice guy (unless he's bringing you onboard a fake project in order to steal your girlfriend, but that's another story,) and attract some of the most talented artists in comics. Seriously, looking over Niles' resume is like a who's who of some of the best regarded artists in their field. Bill Sienkiewicz, Ben Templesmith, Richard Corben, Ashley Wood, Tim Bradstreet, not to mention his co-writing gigs with Rob Zombie and Thomas Jane. So when it comes to comics, he can attract some incredibly talented collaborators that cover up his own glaring deficiencies as a writer. Movies, however, are another issue.

Without the stylized art to distract you, you will quickly realize that this story is stupid. Like, stupid stupid. Iredeemably stupid, really. The supposed "reenvisioning" of vampires he presents is profoundly dumb. They run around with their faces smeared with dried blood, communicating mainly through nonstop high-pitched screaming and occasionally delivering subtitled dialogue in a stupid vampire language that sounds like Klingon. Quite frankly, they're hilarious. Half of them look and act like they have Down's syndrome, they scream all the fucking time, and their leader, as portrayed by Danny Huston, is ridiculous.

(I do have to give credit for one thing, though. The scene where Danny Huston kneels down in front of a puddle of blood, checks his reflection, then decides it's time to slick back his buzzcut with a handfull of blood is one of the most sublimely stupid bits of extraneous villainy you will see in theaters this year. I'm inclined to believe that this was probably Huston's idea, because the rest of the script demonstrates that the writers probably aren't capable of anything remotely clever or intentionally campy.)

The progression of time in this movie is completely fucked, by the way. With no way of actually demonstrating that time is passing aside from clumsy "DAY (insert number here)" captions popping up at random intervals whenever the cast arbitrarily moves to another location, the only visual cue we have to signify the progress of time is Hartnett's scraggly pube-beard. Fittingly, it stops growing after day 7 and remains the same length for roughly the next 22 days. I had the same complaint about the comic, but really from a storytelling point of view, this story does not portray "30 days of night." At the most, it conveys about 30 hours of night.

Oh, and the characters are nonexistant. None of them have discernable personalities, and the only one with any actual backstory gives it through hamfisted exposition immediately before Hartnett cuts his head off with an axe. Thanks for your life story dude, but really nobody cares about your dead kid when you're gonna get killed offscreen in 30 seconds anyway. Also, when you introduce a character, relegate him to the background and forget about him for an hour, there's really no way to give his death any emotional weight, so don't even bother trying. Aside from that, there's a bunch of interchangeable males so undifferentiated that I forgot who was who and what their respective roles were about 45 minutes into the movie.

Oh, and in case you still want to see this movie after reading this, Josh Hartnett turns into a vampire and kills Danny Huston, who somehow manages to jump mouthfirst onto Hartnett's fist and impale his own head on it in the lamest climax to a fight scene ever. Then Hartnett and his estranged wife watch the sun rise, with predictable results. I just saved you $11.

Drink? Don't mind if I do. Maybe this will dull the pain of watching this movie

The only upside of this experience was that Jekyll & Hyde liquor sponsored the afterparty, and as a result, we were getting shitloads of free merchandise, not to mention shot after shot of liquor being handed out to us for free. I think during the 45 minutes spent at the afterparty I consumed at 5 shots of liquor, a can and a half of Monster energy drink, and a pint of beer as women in nurse's outfits asked me to pose for pictures while handing me free alcohol. Kongye had at least 2 shots, a pint of beer, and half a can of Monster. In addition, we each walked out with several T-shirts, a deck of playing cards, and a set of stainless steel flasks. (We aren't supposed to mention those according to the merchandise girls, but whatever.)

Anyway, the liquor itself is a decent alternative to Jagermeister with an interesting presentation. The setup is this: The berry flavored "Jekyll" liquor goes at the bottom of the shot, topped by the herbal flavored "Hyde" liquor, resulting in a shot that starts out like Jager and ends with a comparatively mellow raspberry flavor. It's a decent enough shooter if you don't mind the excessively sweet flavor and somewhat gimmicky nature of the drink. Hopefully Kongye will comment more on it, as she apparently woke up craving more of it the next day, only to be thwarted by its scarcity in Manhattan liquor stores.

30 Days of...?

So Kongye and Phallic will be seeing a preview screening of 30 Days of Night tonight, and I'll probably be doing a review of it afterwords. In the meantime, read and ponder the following line from Newsarama's review of the movie:

"Basically, 30 Days of Night transcends one medium to a new medium the way 300 or Sin City has-"

Jesus Christ, this is going to FUCKING SUCK.

Sunday Reviews

Kongye didn't watch much TV on Sunday night. We'll be back later with a special review of the new episode of America's Most Smartest Model, the only show on the TiVo for the whole night. In the meantime, we will review what we did see last night- the trailers before Elizabeth: The Golden Age. We may or may not end up reviewing the film itself. In case we don't, here's an executive summary:
The Golden Age features great acting and some breathtaking visuals; but it doesn't live up to its potential.

As for the trailers, they made us realize that this is going to a be a very weak year for movies. With Elizabeth already a disappointment and the crop of Oscar bait we saw trailers for last night isn't giving us much hope.

Love in the Time of Cholera- So we're watching the trailer for this movie. Everything is looking mediocre. I'm thinking it's probably not necessary to have every popular and good book turned into a movie, especially if you're going to half-ass it and hire actors who are either from South America or look like they could be and force them to do their lines with accents but speak English. That's always been one of my pet peeves. Just pick a direction. Either have your actors speak Spanish or have them perform in their normal voices. The audience doesn't need Benjamin Bratt to put on an accent so that we'll know that they'd actually be speaking Spanish in real life. So we get through the trailer and then comes the funniest part of the night. At the end of it, after they've put up all the other information, with the classical score in the background we get that romantic script font movie studios so adore, and it says.... "with original songs by Shakira." The entire theater just breaks out into laughter. The laughter actually builds as patrons realize everyone else in the room is thinking the same thing and it just gets louder and louder. The laughter lingers long into the next trailer. I'm not sure that's what the studio had in mind.

Atonement- There's a ton of hype surrounding this movie. I'm not convinced by the trailer or the talent working on this. I'm sorry, but the Pride & Prejudice pedigree is not going to win any points with me. At least this Joe Wright adaptation on a romantic novel with Keira Knightley in the lead isn't based on a novel that's been adapted countless times for film and television. Then again, Jane Austen is a lot less annoying than Ian McEwan, so it's really a toss-up which one of these two films is more unnecessary.

Sweeney Todd- Uh, I was excited about this when I heard they were making it. I guess I forgot Tim Burton hasn't made a decent movie in years. Sweeney Todd is supposed to be a musical. The trailer features almost no music. Either this isn't a musical anymore or, as I suspect from the one instance of Johnny Depp singing in the trailer, the cast and Burton screwed up the musical numbers royally and the studio is trying to avoid letting us see how bad this will be.

Charlie Wilson's War- Wow. That's all I can say about this movie. I'm not sure where to start. Perhaps the ad campaign for this is terribly misguided and it will be a fantastic film. If I am to go by the trailer, it will be a giant mess. I don't know where to begin. The premise of the movie is that Tom Hanks plays a Lothario congressman who is manipulated by Julia Roberts (horribly miscast as a wealthy seductress) into single-handedly launching a covert campaign to arm Afghan resistance fighters against a Soviet invasion. In addition to being woefully historically inaccurate, I'm not sure what message this film is trying to send. The trailer would have you believe that the movie will glorify Roberts' cold warrior. At the same time, the trailer has scenes that make us think this will be a Wag The Dog type of satire. While it would be irresponsible and overly simplistic to say that Hanks' actions lead to the rise of the Taliban, it is fair to say that U.S. policy in Afghanistan at that time is not exactly worthy of the Hollywood treatment- unless you're making a movie highlighting foreign policy errors in the tail end of the Cold War. This looks like a total mess. However, even though I despise the overrated Roberts I do enjoy Mike Nichols' work so I'm giving this movie a chance. Expect a long entry on the historical inaccuracies once I actually see it, though.