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dir: Wachowskis
I'm not crying from watching this; I'm just vomiting with my eyes
I guess we can’t call them the Wachowski Brothers anymore, since technically they’re not both brothers anymore. Allow me to illuminate your confusion with an explanation, one of the few times where one of my more obscure references can actually be explained in a sane way that might make sense to another human being.

When they made Bound and the Matrix trilogy, two chaps sharing the name Wachowski were responsible as the directors. Now, as in as of a year or two ago, one of them is still a Brother Wachowski, and the other, thanks to the type of surgery that in Australia is still colloquially referred to as the “cruellest cut of all”, one of them has undergone gender reassignment surgery to become a Sister Wachowski.

Strange, I know, but don’t for a moment feel that I’m impugning the lifestyle choices of people who I believe have every right to do whatever the hell they want as long as they’re not hurting other people. He / She can do whatever the heck they want with their pink bits, surgery-wise or otherwise as long as it doesn’t involve my pink bits.

dir: Richard Kelly
Don't you dare touch my box
This is not a good movie. It’s not even mediocre. It’s just incompetent.

It’s not as utterly godawful at his last awful foray into moviemaking, which was the truly dire Southland Tales, but whilst it’s not as asinine, it’s not much better. It’s staggeringly not much better.

Richard Kelly came to prominence with Donnie Darko, and since then has been squandering whatever goodwill the flick engendered with a much too forgiving audience. Honestly, these other films he’s been making are so eye-rottingly rotten that it makes me think Donnie Darko was a fluke, a goddamn fluke.

Maybe the elements that he was able to put together coherently the first time have never been able to coalesce since then. I know this is a review of his latest shitfest The Box, but bear with me for a second: I think you can see the seeds of his failure even back in Donnie Darko, by comparing the theatrical cut with his director’s cut.

That’s what it comes down to: Kelly doesn’t know how to edit his own flicks. Of course, the companies hire editors to actually edit the films, but the directors (and often producers) can end up sitting in at every stage to ensure their singular ‘vision’ gets carried through.

dir: Tom Tykwer
I could have been the next Bond, you know, I could have been somebody.
What the fuck happened to the guy who made Run Lola Run?

Here’s your answer: He’s making shitty, ludicrous flicks that sap the will to live of any audience anywhere.

The International is fucking unbelievable. It is a Bourne Identity – Supremacy flick without Jason Bourne or Matt Damon, but, perversely, with Clive Owen, who was in the first Bourne flick anyway. Recursive much?

So imagine: someone wants to make a Bourne flick but can’t afford Matt Damon. Who’s next on the list, oh, we can’t afford them, how about, no, further down, okay, Clive Owen and Naomi Watts? Brilliant.

And of course you need some German people in it, so why not hire German hot stud superstar Armin Mueller-Stahl, who’s 80 if he’s a day over 16?

Sole direction given to Clive Owen in this: “Um, act the way you did in Children of Men, but don’t run around as much.”

Clive Owen roles can be divided successfully into two groups: the ones where he has stubble, and overacts wildly, and the once where he’s clean shaven, and doesn’t overact as much. This role is clearly one of the former rather than the latter.

Naomi Watts doesn’t really have any differentiation between roles, and strides around with “concern” face the entire time here. Is she credible as a district attorney trying to bring down one of the biggest banks in the world? Maybe, if her plan is to wear them down by asking them continuously to make monthly donations to Amnesty International whilst on the street corner outside their headquarters.

dir: Seijun Suzuki
Branded to not make any sense at all
1967

I’ve watched this flick twice and I still haven’t got a fucking clue what happened. Forgive me for the language, since this is a family show. And as a father I really should be more circumspect in my choice of language. But honestly, for fuck’s sake, this flick is insane.

dir: Antoine Fuqua
Now with more machismo!
Could have been. This flick could have been a contender. It is well acted (mostly), well directed, and with one monumental example to the contrary, mostly well scripted. It is deeply unfortunate that the monumental fuck-up that occurs in the script at about the 1 hour mark renders the rest of the film an exercise in pointlessness, but then again, if life has taught me anything, it’s that you can’t have everything, and even if you did, some bastard would probably break in and steal all your shit when you were at work.

It’s the way of the world. None of this justifies the awful and insulting way that the film degenerates into a true Hollywood morass by its end, but hell, as I’ve mentioned a million times before, most films stuff up the ending because they never put as much work into the conclusion as they do with the pitch:
(pitch meeting between producers and studio execs)
“Um, Denzel as the bad guy?”
- “Sold!”

The premise alone is supposed to be enough to justify our interest: Denzel overacting all through the film playing a badass cop. That they weave some strands regarding ethics and the morality of police work into it would seem to be an additional, intellectually enjoyable level upon which the film could have worked. That they piss it all away by insulting our intelligence with a plot conceit so shameless that it would make M. Night Shyamalan blush means the only reason the film will ever be remembered will be because of the sympathy Oscar Denzel Washington received for his overrated performance, and not for any particular virtue of the film.

dir: Stuart Baird
Which shine-head is which? Seeing double means seeing four Jean-Lucs!
There is a law in economics referred to as the law of diminishing returns, or alternately known as the law of variable proportions. Essentially it states that if one factor of production is increased while the others remain constant, the overall returns will relatively decrease passed a certain point.

Accept for a moment that the number of Trek fans and other obese obsessives is relatively constant, if not decreasing over time. Establish that the amount of merchandising and truly quality television shows pumped out continues over time, with more and more money being poured into this formerly profitable venture. The law of diminishing returns states that past a certain point you cannot get back what you put in.

With 5 television series, ten films of variable quality and millions of dollars worth of merchandise, the Trek franchise has long been the big brother to the prodigy that is the Star Wars empire. Being an elder sibling, it claimed some intellectual superiority and acting credibility which some may have been grateful for in times passed, but now seems to be a dull vintage of sour grapes. The franchise, under the current benevolent leadership of Rick Berman has been run into the ground, well and truly, to the point where Trek is less of a pop culture phenomenon and more of a relentlessly embarrassing joke.

With the bland recycling and laughable pandering of the current television flagship Enterprise, which consistently ranks in the hundreds (as in each week it is about the hundredth most watched show in the States), and the viciously painful last outing at the cinemas, being Insurrection (which still makes me want to perform random acts of senseless violence on innocent bystanders every time I think about it), you'd think that it's time to retire this old veteran. Not so, the geniuses at Franchise Central believe. People do want to keep watching the same shit again and again. We don't need to come up with anything significantly interesting or even compelling. All we need to do is do everything we've ever done before, and have the same people in the room when we're doing it. Surely no-one can be unhappy with that.

dir: David S. Goyer
Even dumber than it looks
You have to wonder what the attraction is with this franchise. Wesley Snipes hasn't exactly done any memorable acting work in donkey's years. The Blade character is so two-dimensional that when Blade walks side-on from the camera I always expect the guy to be paper-thin. It hasn't really set the box office alight (none of the three films were big earners in that respect). Marvel, I'm sure, has plenty of other comic book franchises dying to be made (and I'm sure plenty of them are already in development).

As a vampire scenario it's not a particularly intelligent, original, amusing or otherwise worthwhile one. The main character's motivation is solely to kill vampires and try to gruffly protect humanity (which seems secondary). There's not a lot of room for character arcs, thematic development, social significance or transcendent insights into human or vampire nature amidst the averagely choreographed fight scenes and the most ordinary action set pieces.

I am taking the piss, but a film doesn't have to be dumb just to be an action film. Then again there doesn't need to be any of those elements in a full on action film, but a little would be nice. After setting up the franchise credibly in the first Blade film, they squandered it in the second by turning it into a sloppy Aliens clone complete with WWE wrestling moves and completely lowered the bar for fight scene choreography, wasting the talents of numerous decent people (not least of which being Donnie Yen).

Rumours of director / 'star' conflict arose which did nothing to dispel the feeling of crappiness that pervaded everything. A third film didn't really need to be made, but got made anyway. Think of this as a quickie for a few extra bucks. At the very least they admit right from the start that the premise is empty, and they need two other legs to prop up this shaky three-legged coffee table upon.
Killing off Blade's mentor character and sidekick Whistler (Kris Kristofferson, who looks older than Gandalf) they introduce Whistler's daughter Abigail (Jessica Biel) and Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds) to pick up the slack.

dir: Garth Jennings
How does something so funny getting transformed into something so unfunny? Oh, yeah, Hollywood.
So I liked the “So long and thanks for all the fish” song used in the intro, in fact I found it thrilling, transporting and charming. Unfortunately it’s about the only thing I liked about the film.

It’s funny, or maybe not that funny that they (“they” being the people responsible for regurgitating this film forth, which includes Douglas Adams) could take a book beloved by so many legions of nerds for its humour and yet succeed in draining most of the humour out of it.

I’ll admit that I’m not really that much of a fan of the book in the first place. I would still like to think that they could have done a better job had a better director or producers had a bash at it. Imagine Charlie Kaufman having a go at the screenplay, and Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry directing it. If you don’t think that Americans or a French guy could do justice to it, then how about if they’d used an innovative bunch of people like Danny Boyle and his production crew, or Edgar White and Simon Pegg, the guys behind Shaun of the Dead.

Hell, maybe they should have gotten your mum to direct it. Or even my mum. Though she is busy sitting in a store window in Amsterdam’s red light district. That reminds me, need to send her those antibiotics for Mother’s Day.

Anyone it seems could have done a better job than Garth Jennings. The film, for the majority of its length, is just shy of mediocre. There are flashes of brilliance, but they last for mere seconds at a time. It’s not all bad, of course. We should be glad that there are still studios out there with more money than sense that aren’t so risk-averse as to knock a project like this on its head. It had been in development hell for decades, but based on this shemozzle maybe it should have stayed there.