Stupid Quotes #17: Michael Bay #2

On the topic of pirated motion pictures:

It’s going to be the death. I look in the eyes of these interviewers. There was one of them, maybe in Norway, and this guy looks me in the eye and says, “Don’t you think piracy is about sharing?” I say, no, it’s about stealing. They really believe they are sharing, and it is like really lightning fire. Somehow, the studios are going to have to get dirty and fight back.
[...]
If you wanted to get dirty, you can get dirty. You can implant things in their systems. You can get nasty.

--Above The Line: An interview with Michael Bay

Film review: The Family Man

The Family Man
Directed by Brett Ratner
Starring Nicolas Cage, Téa Leoni, Jeremy Piven, Saul Rubinek, Josef Sommer, Don Cheadle

Here, ultrahack Ratner and the profoundly untalented screenwriting duo of David Diamond and David Weissman perform an inexplicable and boring magic trick by stretching a well-worn scenario that could barely suffice as a half-hour television show into the longest two hours and six minutes in the history of motion pictures. I often check the time counter of my DVD player once, maybe twice when viewing a movie; while watching this slogging, entirely uninspired dreck, I checked it over a dozen times, always bewildered by how little time had actually elapsed.

Cage plays a successful Wall Street broker with no social life and, like every other character of this rancid story, nary a whit of personality, either. With the aid of sassy, magical, pistol-wielding Don Cheadle, he's transported to an alternate dimension in which he sells tires and is blessed with a loving family...the life he could have had if he hadn't gotten on THAT PLANE thirteen years ago! Christ, what a pristine concept! It's the life he could have had, but he doesn't realize how much better it is to have a family than an nine-figure bank account and investment assets out the wazoo until he experiences a succession of charmless, totally predictable incidents in the life of a godforsaken Jersey NORP.

This story's conflict of choice is utterly beyond me; why does Cage want to move back to NYC and start his career over with his surprise brood when he lives in a gigantic house beyond the means of all but the most prosperous middle-class families (it's cute when production designers who live in ivory towers try to depict the working-class household) and could simply quit his job and use what he knows to engage in insider trading without ever being caught? The performances are bland at best (Cage, Leoni) and infuriating at worst: as always, Jeremy Piven is enragingly obnoxious, so annoying in his overacting that I'd thrill to see him thrown into rush hour traffic on the Long Island Expressway. Saddled with yet more ugly, blue-tinted photography, Ratner's direction would be rote if it weren't so calculatedly, pointlessly drawn - there's no depth here to convey; he's just dragging every scene out as long as he possibly can to satisfy studio expectations of a two-hour feature.

If you want to see almost everything that's wrong with American cinema, Ratner's filmography and this flavorless entry in particular are endemic of it. This is gutless, brainless, wholly derivative film making. It's bound to insult the intelligence of any viewer with a triple-digit IQ who makes the mistake of watching it. Consider yourself warned.

Stupid Quotes #16: Patrick A

I really wanted to limit these recent entries to the inanity vomited by the Fauxteur and his inane brood, but just look at this:

When I'm on stage screaming, hitting my face with a microphone and pouring beer on my head, at least I'm singing about the Torah.

--'New Jews' stake claim to faith, culture

Film review: The Tingler

The Tingler
Directed by William Castle
Starring Vincent Price, Philip Coolidge, Judith Evelyn, Patricia Cutts, Pamela Lincoln, Darryl Hickman

In one of the very best of William Castle's popular B-horror offerings, the matchless Price stars as an obsessive pathologist who discovers the existence of a creature that lives in the human body, grows when its host experiences extreme terror and can only be diminished by the noise of a scream!

Despite its notoriously poor special effects (strings are quite visible!) and Castle's conventional direction, this kitsch classic is enlivened by compelling performances, a fantastic premise and another of Robb White's cunning, unpredictable plots, which he churned out for most of Castle's best pictures. Price is at the top of his form as the misguided scientist, and although his performance of an acid trip (the very first in film history) isn't even remotely realistic, his expressed panic certainly is.

Always keen to promote his movies with gimmickry as a supplement to his own craftsmanship, Castle had vibrating electric buzzers installed in the seats of random audience members, which were activated whenever a scream in the movie occurred. Paid shills were also planted in the audience to scream during key moments. Even the cinematography was touched by Castle's ambition: splashes of bloody red color in a crucial scene hideously complement the B&W photography.

While it's hardly as effective a horror movie as it was a half-century ago, The Tingler is still great fun, for both its hilarious flaws and legendary leading man make this required viewing for anyone who still cares about light, enjoyable genre pictures and magnetic screen acting. There might be some potential for a remake of this, but while the effects could certainly be improved on, who could possibly replace the Merchant of Menace?

Film review: The Dark

The Dark
Directed by John Cardos
Starring William Devane, Cathy Lee Crosby, Richard Jaeckel, Jacquelyn Hyde, Keenan Wynn, Biff Elliot, Warren J. Kemmerling, Casey Kasem

Christ, what an awful movie. In this Z-grade drivel, an alien comes to Earth, decapitates people with its bare hands or explodes them with lasers emitted from its eyes and is pursued by a thoroughly inept police force until primate William Devane sets it on fire, which makes it explode. The end.

It's almost pointless to critique any particular aspect of this film because everything about it is awful. Reading from a ludicrous script, the irritating cast goes out of its way to make asses of themselves; as an incompetent slob of a detective and an obnoxious, TV-addicted psychic, Biff Elliot and Jacquelyn Hyde are especially annoying. Armed with his gigantic clamping teeth, Devane plays some sort of former wife-murdering convict turned successful trash novelist. Whatever else he is, he seems to be stoned out of his skull through most of the movie. Only Casey Kasem is (unintentionally) entertaining as a pathologist, tossing off one ridiculous line after another in his unmistakable voice.

Film Ventures International really was the worst of all the B-schlock production companies that flourished in the '70s and '80s because most of its features were as unengaging as they were incoherent. This one is no exception. Although the murderous monster was originally intended to be a zombie, its status as a space alien was endowed following poor test screenings. It doesn't look at all undead or extraterrestrial, instead resembling some sort of ape-man, like Devane. To emphasize the creature's off-world origins, the movie was bookended with inane narration and the ocular laser beams were added in post-production. The cheap and hurried execution of this last-minute tweaking is painfully obvious.

Tobe Hooper was supposed to helm this mess, but he dropped out of the production after shooting a few scenes. I wish that I'd followed suit fifteen minutes into it. Avoid this at all costs.

Film review: The City of the Dead

The City of the Dead
Directed by John Moxey
Starring Dennis Lotis, Patricia Jessel, Christopher Lee, Venetia Stevenson, Betta St. John, Tom Naylor, Valentine Dyall, Ann Beach, Norman Macowan

In this very first Amicus Production (when the company was still named Vulcan Productions), a young college student (Stevenson) fascinated by witchcraft is spurred by academic curiosity - and the advice of her history professor (Lee) - to visit a foggy, shadowy, mysterious little New England town in order to research her favorite subject. Her sojourn is interrupted by a local holiday that exposes her to the worst sort of firsthand research...!

Grim, gloomy and genuinely creepy, this fun little chiller is far superior to The Devil's Rain, a film that it strongly influenced, among others. With the exception of the oafish Tom Naylor, the cast is in fine form, especially Stevenson as the sprightly student, the icily ominous Jessel and Lee at his menacing best. Furnished with fine sets, clever editing and attractive photography, the quality of this B-movie's production is a cut above average. However, the film is also weirdly scored by orchestral horns and percussion, as well as quite a lot of lightweight jazz; none of this ruins the picture's baleful tension, but more often than not, it's oddly incongruous.

Film review: Seppuku

Seppuku
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi
Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Rentaro Mikuni, Akira Ishihama, Shima Iwashita, Tetsuro Tanba, Yoshio Aoki, Ichiro Nakaya

Following the Battle of Sekigahara and the Tokugawa clan's final assumption of national rule as the last and most powerful shogunate, Japan experienced a large and enduring influx of ronin as a result of this shogunate's calculated, underhanded elimination of numerous influential daimyo and provincial clans. As a result of this collective fall from grace (the likes of which would not be witnessed again until the onset of the Meiji Restoration), a trend occurred in which impoverished ronin visited the houses of thriving clans and requested permission to commit ritual suicide on their grounds as a means to end their suffering and preserve their honor. Many of these requests were legitimate; many more were ploys to obtain a position or monetary handout in response to the pitiable state of these former warriors.

Adapted by famed screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto from a story by novelist Yasuhiko Takiguchi and directed by Masaki Kobayashi with the intense and maudlin milieu common to his films, Seppuku is a tragedy of two such samurai - one a disgraced and desperate fraud, the other a weathered and earnest veteran of the late Sengoku war. At different times in the same year, both men arrive at the Edo compound of a flourishing and rigorous clan, the leadership of which has no intention of affording charity or anything other than seppuku to those samurai who come calling for it. However, neither man is quite what he seems to be, and the terrible consequences of the clan's brusque adherence to lawful bushido slowly unfold, revealing institutional hypocrisy and personal devastation of an unspeakable magnitude.

Even by Kobayashi's usual standards, the technical quality of this picture is beyond critique. His flawless, dynamic anamorphic composition is enhanced by some of the most beautiful, nuanced photography ever committed to black and white stock. Of the set and costume design, the period detail is exquisite. The only film of greater beauty and aesthetic merit in Kobayashi's oeuvre is the ornate (and incomparably expensive) Kaidan. Alternately frantic, mournful and haunting, Toru Takemitsu's muscular, noisy, biwa-driven score is complemented by a chamber string orchestra - arrangements typical of his 1960s output.

Befitting a production of such excellence, its famous performers are entirely credible in their demanding roles. Nakadai potently expresses grief, desperation and moral outrage as the honest and truly honorable protagonist in opposition to Mikuni's arrogant counselor and the cruel retainers at his command. As in the The Human Condition trilogy and Samurai Rebellion, Kobayashi ably depicts the suffering of the individual as a result of authoritarian abuses of power. Although the particular target of this film's scathing indictment is the society of the Edo period - in which the image of honor was often deemed more important than honorable acts - its condemnation of tyrannical abuse possesses a universal appeal. Kobayashi had no interest in pushing an agenda or promoting ideology; where he perceived infamy in Japanese society (and especially that of its military), he sought to expose it.

Carefully paced, emotionally exhausting and consistently unpredictable, Seppuku is among the most heart-wrenching and thrilling of all filmic jidaigeki. Challenging and often difficult for its audience, its crushing misery and impressive swordplay are only matched by the outrageous injustice of its denouement.

Stupid Quotes #15: Mike Wever

Whatever [Michael] Bay wants is what we try to give him. Sex is sex, dialogue is dialogue, but what people want is special effects. Bayhem, that's what it's called. That's what I like to call it. Whenever we do a Michael show, it's a new level of Bayhem.

--'Transformers' blasts back: Another Michael Bay direct hit

Note: because they generate hilarious idiocy as proficiently as they create extraordinarily bad motion pictures, the next twenty Stupid Quotes will be culled from interviews with Michael Bay and his cohorts in over-budgeted trash moviemaking.

Put To Good Use #1: Karaoke Night

From Put To Good Use

This is the first of six Put To Good Use strips, created sometime in the summer of 2005. I'll be uploading one of these on a monthly basis until late March, when I expect to have some new strips available. Enjoy!

Book review: Ana's Girls

Ana's Girls
Written and edited by Eda R. Uca

This self-proclaimed "Essential Guide to the Underground Eating Disorder Community Online" dispels the outdated stereotype of anorexics as white, middle-class teenage girls and young women. More importantly, it also proves, beyond the faintest shadow of a lingering doubt, that the majority of anorexics - or at least those who discuss their disease online - are not intelligent overachievers.

Every aspect of the online anorexia subculture is detailed: its asinine screed, derivative slang and vernacular, common methodology and absurd religious pretensions. Most of the book consists of survey results and message board posts, nearly all of which indicate that the average online anorexic is a spoiled teenage girl or young woman with an IQ in the mid-80s. This is where the average reader is likely to cull most of his or her entertainment. The spelling and grammar of these lunatics is analogous to that of a particularly stupid grade-schooler. Their self-awareness is predictably non-existent, and their selfishness is mind-boggling. The few among them who seem to possess some degree of literacy are verbose and therefore have a better means with which to exhibit their insanity.

Approximately a fifth of this book's length is comprised of original writing, which describes the aforementioned elements and conventions of pro-ana communities, websites, message boards, etc. It's congruous with the semi-coherent cut-and-pasted material only because it's very poorly written and formatted. Spelling and grammatical errors are legion, many passages (both entire sentences and fragments thereof) are repeated in the same paragraph and citations are nonexistent. Text is frequently rendered beside delimiters. Survey fields that should appear with bold emphasis often don't. The book's text is formatted in 12 point Courier monospaced typeface and every single line is double-spaced. This is not only ugly, but also obviously designed to pad the book's short length; had it been properly formatted, this trade paperback wouldn't be half as long as its already underwhelming 218 pages.

Anyone who wants to learn more about the pro-ana community can very easily do so by joining a message board and observing these dense psychopaths firsthand. Not only are they eager to pour their emaciated, abused hearts out to other women and girls, but they tend to throw themselves pathetically at males for attention, if only because so many of them are dropped by ex-boyfriends who aren't interested in dating something that resembles a skeleton. Because this activity requires no financial commitment whatsoever, this book is entirely useless except as something to giggle at for those who don't want to wear out their eyes by looking at a screen when laughing at the illiteracy of bone-thin crazies. It's also another of too many ineptly self-published volumes that does nothing to help those few talented authors who want to freely publish and promote their own work.

On the other hand, the following invaluable advice is tendered on page 164 just prior to an incomprehensible and totally incongruous summary of cannibalism: "Only one thing matters for the rest of your life. Does what you are about to put in your mouth contain carbohydrates?"

Yow.