Rating note: I will be rating movies on a scale from -5 to 5. Zero is a complete average rating. I feel nothing at all to it. It leaves no impact. The negative numbers create actual antipathy. The positives are good ratings. Films are really meant to be felt on a scale from love to hate, not love to bland. To get a full review a film can't really be scored by a number or grade. There are good "Bad Movies" and things like that. For instance, I love The Core and don't like About Schmidt. I will, however, admit that The Core is not a good movie, but a fantastic bad one. About Schmidt was a really good movie, I just didn't care for it. So nothing is really as simple as a single number. Despite that, I'm going to rate movies with a single number.
Ok, so this past weekend I watched two movies. Just last week I saw another. Here's the hook to my blog. At least one of them was a complete waste of my time.
The first movie I watched was Hard Candy. It's been sitting at my apartment for more than is reasonable for a Netflix disc. I had two other movies for just as long, but one is being saved for Wednesday and the other was put in queue for Allison. So I sat down with it. I had heard mostly good things about it. I had heard the main twist (who is the real aggressor in this movie, hmm?) but figured that if it's getting some positive comments then it must have enough left in it to mix things up more than that.
It started with some really crisp visuals. The dialogue was pretty flat, but this was all exposition. Lady and the tramp get back to his place and he proceeds to get her drunk. But oh, the tables are turned as she takes control of the situation. Sort of. I must put in *spoiler warning* but it's more of a saving grace to be honest.
It only gets crappier from this point. The guy, who really can remain nameless for how much the girl cares about who he is, is tortured mentally until the end of the film. You see, the young girl he's brought home is convinced he has perpetrated a crime. Actually, she isn't completely convinced. But by the end it's clear that she doesn't really care if he's guilty or not. But that's OK! Because the audience never sees any evidence either way! And that's not all! She is actually the one who invites herself over and insists on drinking. After he says she shouldn't come over and after he offers to give her a soft-drink when she gives him an odd look! So he's not a great guy for meeting her, but she's not really a victim since she's the aggressor from the start of the film.
How does it end? It doesn't really matter. I started looking at the DVD countdown after 30 minutes. By the time I realized that it wasn't getting better it was far enough in that it would have been a cop out to eject the disc. The "crisp" cinematography gets a little repetitive pretty quickly. The camera moves get distracting. The writing is a little below your average Lifetime movie of the week. The acting is passable but that's all I'm willing to give it. There was no character thesis developed, there was no attribute in either of the two people that the audience could grab hold of or at least be intrigue by. The twists don't build up in any way. In fact, they drain the audience rather than the tortured characters. The pacing is plodding once you watch them interact for a few minutes.
This movie isn't about about justice or defending the weak. It's not even about female empowerment or turning the tables on abusers. It's about two people who both get off on victimizing others. They are both equally despicable and, at the same time, pathetic.
-3
More? Ok. The movie keeps jumping from kitchy 80s humor to serious epic action flick. It's cute when, say, the transformers are hiding from Shia's parents. It's awkward when an over the top John Tuturro has to be in both funny and serious scenes throught the movie. Instead of either fearing him or laughing at him I was just left with the question: "Will his health plan cover the therapy he needs?" It needed to pick a single style and run with it. There was no idea of what the movie wanted to be, just how many ways it could ingratiate itself to viewers.
The special effects were pretty well done, but terribly filmed. Bay constantly used off kilter camera angles and extreme close ups during fights. This might have worked (but why would you not want to show the huge, sprawling fight scenes or the combatant choreography?) if the robots still had complete car parts on them, like hoods or doors with solid colours. They don't, so during the climax we zoom in on two of them, see a foot land, the foot vanishes, a tire flies and then they both run off. I had no idea who was hurt. Way to piss on the one thing this movie had going for it, Michale Bay.
In the end, I wouldn't mind watching this in the background on TV if I had a really good book I was already reading. And honestly, there are a lot of other movies that can fulfill that function. And most of them didn't bastardize an 80s TV icon or cost nearly as much. I didn't hate it but it's certainly not a success of a movie.
+.5
I'm pretty sure all of you know the plot to this one. Remy is fantastic. he has some of the most developed motivation of any animated character I've seen. He knows what he wants and he's willing to make sacrifices even before he's learned his lesson from the plot. There isn't really a flat character in this movie, except maybe Remy's father and Gusteau. Hell, I was even impressed by Janeane Garofalo and I like her to begin with!
I can't even put my finger on what makes his movies tick so well. Maybe it's because the worlds he sets up in can act as direct microcosms for political and social issues in ours without getting preachy. Maybe it's just because he can make rats and robots appeal on a human level that Michael Bay will never be able to achieve (understand?). Whatever it is, he's done it consistently for 3 films now. Disney, please give him Pixar.
Oh, and the animation and design is really stunning as well.
+4
And now you have my judgment. I hope that if you haven't seen these movies they help guide you in what to put in your brain hole. If you have then I hope they give you something to think about. That is all for now.
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