Category: General

Sequel to classic hacker movie War Games (1983) – Matthew Broderick’s first big movie.  (If you haven’t seen The Road to Wellville (1994) you should, it’s probably his best movie.  I don’t know why IMDB hates it so much – but then I haven’t seen it for 10 years or more.)

This time up, instead of JOSHUA (an AI) controlling 1983 America’s nuclear arsenal, we have RIPLEY (an AI) in control of 2008 America’s computer & utility networks (and some well armed unmanned aerial vehicles, for good measure).  RIPLEY is tasked with hunting down and killing terrorists, without the shackles of human interference.

What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, the way RIPLEY finds terrorists is by hosting an internet gaming site, it turns out that if you’re good at some crappy computer game, you’re probably a terrorist.  Do too well and the AI sends in the dogs.

What could possibly… Wait. What?

It turns out that ‘who is good at computer games’ is surprise, surprise, ‘some clean cut white American teenager (Matt Lanter, doing a pretty good job, all things considered), who loves his mum, and runs errands for his elderly neighbour, and has a hot girlfriend (the completely adorable Amanda Walsh), who also happens to be a hacker geek who makes cantennas and cellphone interceptors for a hobby’, that’s who.

I’m more annoyed when movies have potential, and completely fail to live up to it, and this movie does.  There are opportunities to give the Fear Industry a good kick in the ribs, and the movie does seem to hint at taking advantage of them, before devolving back into a completely ludicrous stinkfest where you DDOS the most powerful AI in the world by getting all of your friends to log into it and challenge it to computer games…

What could possibly… Ahhh, fuck it.  Fuck this fucking movie.

The actors are all just fine, the problems with this movie are everything else.

Whoever is responsible (Art Director?) for deciding that RIPLEY should look like a handful of exposed motherboards in a glass walled room, with dangly bits of ribbon cable, strobe lights and cold cathode tubes, should be shot in the reproductive organs.  With a gun.  A big one.

If you want to see how menacing an AI-gone-bad in a movie with a colon in the title should look, see 2001 : A Space Odyssey (1968).  Did HAL have dangly bits of ribbon and nightclub style strobe lights?  No, he had an unblinking one-eyed gaze, his face a simple rectangle adorned with little more than enigmatic inscrutability.  (I bring HAL up for a variety of reasons, one is that they referenced/ripped-off the lip reading scene in this movie.)

Don’t see The Dead Code, it suuuuuuuuuucks. (The movie, you see, is what went wrong.)

I guess I first read Prince Caspian when I was about 9 or 10, and far too young to read the subtext.  But of course later on I realised, and the movie is swimming in the same brand of thick & syrupy propaganda.

You already know the story, a whiny little shit (the heir to the throne) is targeted for death by his evil prick uncle (next in line, and newly become a father), and makes his escape, quickly stumbling onto the fact that myths & legends are true, and the land they’re in is full of magical beasties.  The kids from TLTWATW are called back to Narnia, and things go from there.

The CG is really good – the trees are far more realistic than the Ent’s in Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy, and the small animals all move incredibly well…  The smaller cats and dogs in particular are wonderfully executed.  Whoever did them should be brought onto the team for the Hulk sequels, because they’re waaaaay better at nailing realism than whatever cackhanded arsehole is currently doing it.

The boys are all fucking morons (actually, all of the humans are morons, either vicious nasty scum, or vacuous simpletons), the animals are all awesome.

It’s just too bad about the religious propaganda being forced into the story with all the subtlety of a Jarvis HBD-1 Bung Dropper, because it would do a great deal better without it – or with it, but included more sympathetically to the rest of the story.

Remember, way back in like 1995 or 1996 when the totality of mainstream media coverage of “The Internet” was pretty much that it was for bomb making recipes and pedos?  Well that really seems like forever ago now, particularly given that they’ve all embraced what we already knew was a great thing, so things are pretty much as they should be.

(The next battle is “them” trying, increasingly desperately, to take it over from us.  But they’ll fail in the end – because they’re stupid and greedy and closed minded, and we’re smart and greedy and free.  Their greed is for money, ours is for information – and information wants to be free on The Great Big Planetary Copying Machine that we all take such delight in plugging our brains into every day.)

So to have a movie like Untraceable come out, in two thousand and fucking eight, all about the dangers of the Evil Immoral Internet…  It just seems like some sort of bizarre, anachronistic joke.

Evil Genius sets up an untraceable video stream, plumps a victim down in front of the camera, and sets the pace of their death to the number of viewers of the stream – more people watching means faster murder.  So of course the stream goes crazy.  It’s grim as hell.  And utterly ridiculous.  But I tolerate these things for the sake of movies.

But what I don’t necessarily tolerate is dialog in my movies that is serving the interests of the corporate owners of the movie producer.  For instance there’s an interaction at one point, completely out of left field, about network neutrality, and how the killer is in favour of it – because obviously only insane killers want the free, open, level playing field that made the internet the incredible outlet of artistic & technical innovation (and kitten photos) that it is.

This is just dropped into a scene, for no obvious reason.

Not long before that, there’s a brief discussion of a file sharing site  – but if you download the free music, you’ll be infected with a backdoor that steals your bank records and passwords.  Oh, obviously.  That must be why no one downloads TV, movies, or music online – because they’re all instantly pwned by The Evil Blackhats.  Or, millions of people do in fact download exactly such things every single day with only the very occasional piss-weak little virus to be seen, and this is all just complete scaremongering bullshit.

Occams razor comes to our rescue once again.

All of which leads me to believe that the whole damn movie is a nasty stinking piece of vile PR oozed from the backroom of a smokey private club, produced as part of the marketing campaign for a cabal of Big Media Companies, probably written by people who usually provide spin and damage control for the RIAA and MPAA, when they sue solo mothers, crippled children, and laser printers.  (I’m not kidding about that last one, these fucking tools served notice on a laser printer for downloading music.)

Some of the performances are ok, but I just cannot tolerate this kind of bald-faced, anti-individual freedom, pro-Corporate… rhetoric.

(The pro-corporate stuff is only present “between the lines”, the other side of it isn’t nearly as subtle though – it’s a simple rhetorical device, find something that everyone can agree is bad, i.e. torturing a kitten to death, and then pretend that you need to take away everyone’s freedom to vote or fly in an aeroplane, or more kittens will be killed.)

Please, just let this movie, and any others that follow it, die.

Don’t be fooled, this isn’t a sequel to 2003’s Hulk movie, just a weird new movie in its own right.

I mean, the movie isn’t weird, it’s a Hulk movie, but it’s weird to have a reboot within 5 years of the movie being rebooted – I guess the other one didn’t line up right with Iron Man and whoever else is going to be included in an upcoming crossover movie.

And what’s the deal?  Well, pretty much what you expect I reckon.  Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) is irradiated, turns into a super strong, very big, green… Hulk… And The Powers That Be decide they can’t be having him roaming around free and hunt him down, so he goes into hiding.

Conveniently for us, he goes into hiding in the Brazilian favelas – which are friggin’ awesome high density slums, incredibly photogenic in their filthiness, and provide for some life and vibrancy on screen for a while.  While in the favelas he trains himself in meditation, and gets some coaching from someone who looked suspiciously like a Gracie – in self control and BJJ – all in the hopes of getting sufficient control over himself that he can avoid doing the whole “don’t make me hungry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m hungry” thing.  (You’ll get it when you watch the movie.)

The powers that be track him down when he has an accident (not of the HULK SMASH kind though), and send in the thugs.  Trouble is, you see, he’s the motherfucking Hulk.  So it doesn’t matter how bad arse you are, your puny bullets will bounce off his unconvincingly shiny skin, and P.S. stop being dressed up as an American soldier when you’re a British soldier, you giant tool.

The British guy (Tim Roth) gets some upgrades, and turns evil, and then there’s a great big fuck-off battle. The end, and they all live bittersweetly ever after.

It’s all good except the CG – and given that CG plays a pretty big part in modern superhero movies, this is probably a problem they should have spent a bit more time on.  Maybe you’ll be less sensitive to it than I was, but to me most of the Hulkmode stuff – while highly entertaining and action packed – also looked rather more like game cutscenes than I can tolerate in a movie, particularly given the year (it’s less convincing than “that dinosaur movie”, and that came out a loooong time ago).  I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m sure that the Hulk can be presented in his superhuman form, while still looking like something “real”.

Oh, and how hard is it to render a helicopter?  Seriously.

It’s good fun, very entertaining, and I reckon you should check it out – bonus is a Tony Stark cameo, thick with the syrup of foreshadowing for the upcoming crossover.  And if even that isn’t enough, how about a very sexually frustrated girlfriend for the Jolly Green Giant?  Poor girl.  (teehee.)

(Oh, and it’s really time to stop having Stan Lee cameos in every damn Marvel movie, please. Please!)

M. Night Shyamalan’s 5th outing since 6th Sense, and still not meeting up to the mark set by that stellar example of the craft.  (My hair stood on end when you-know-what was revealed.)

This film, perhaps because people like to compare Shyamalan’s films, has suffered from an incredible assault from critics – amateur or professional alike.  If you’ve heard anything about it, what you’ve probably heard is that it’s awful.

The movie as a whole isn’t awful, but some moments definitely are – and shouldn’t have made it into the final cut. For instance there’s a scene where a man ends up in a zoo enclosure with a pride of lions, they attack him and rip his arms off – but the physics just don’t work at all, it’s a completely ludicrous scene, and not one that fits consistently with the internal logic of the movie – they pull his arms off, one then the other, while he remains standing.  It doesn’t make any sense, and is more what I’d expect to see in something like Gore Gore Girls.

The violence is visceral, with numerous gruesomely realistic (excepting the lion scene) deaths portrayed graphically on screen.

The extended sequence with the pistol was quite something.

Mark Wahlberg in probably his worst performance in years, not sure if it’s due to writing, directing, or decisions he made for himself, but he uses an odd tone of voice that doesn’t let up.

Oh and his wife/the love interest (Zoeey Deschanel) has a weird goddamn face, probably all due to her eyes – it’s like she’s on some sort of tranquilisers the whole time, or she’s just woken up from a coma, or who knows what.

If you like movies, go and see it for yourself, don’t just drink second-hand haterade – it’s better than a lot of people are giving it credit for.  (If you don’t like movies, why the hell are you reading this?)

A cheapskate little gutter philosopher is having a hard time getting $20 out of an ATM, so he stumbles into a bank where he gets caught up in a heist.

Apart from the horrible writing, bad acting, and dreadful direction, this is an awful movie that should be avoided at all costs.

Oh I said “apart from”?  No, that’s really all there is to this one.