Getaway

I like to think of myself as some kind of a grand sage of the film world, quietly sitting down on my laptop in New Jersey pouring nothing but brilliance onto these blog pages as a masterfully analyze and understand every element of film culture.  And yet, with "Getaway", I am completely but a child, utterly confused by everything and amazed by every aspect of this particular production.  I'll start with the fact that this is one of the best films of 2013, but it appears I am entirely alone with that assumption.  Rotten Tomatoes gave this film a perfect 0%*, which is a score reserved only for the most awful of disasters or most disastrous of awfulness - you take your pick.  But I loved this movie, it felt fresh and unique and haunting right to the human soul.

But this was a conclusion I had to reach very slowly.  "Getaway" was nothing like I expected.  The trailers showed off a big stupid action car chase movie, starring not Ethan Hawke but a Shelby Cobra Mustang.  Actually, there's only one scene featuring a car, and its not even a chase.  Ethan Hawke is actually driving a Toyota Rav-4 minivan, about as practical and boring as a modern car can get, not fighting bad guys, but rather having a nice personal conversation with his wife while his daughters sleep in the background.  Its actually a brilliantly written scene featuring very natural dialog, something you wouldn't expect from a car movie that seems want to be more stupid than "Furious 6".  This is a masterpiece of false advertising:  not a single scene from that trailer actually shows up in "Getaway".

The title itself really tells the whole story.  It appears to be a monumentally clunky reference to the speed of the late Carroll Shelby's glorious engineering legacy.  But this is really cypher, the "getaway" in that title actually refers to an entirely mundane family trip to the Peloponnese, and more so Ethan Hawke and his wife, Julie Delpy's excursion to a garish hotel where years of resentment and romantic complication boil up into a feverish fight that threatens to destroy their unique bond.  Its all very high-minded stuff, the kind of thing you don't usually see get a wide release, which is probably why the studio buried it in deathly Labor Day release date.  The director, Courtney Solomon is best known for making fabulously terrible "Dungeons and Dragons" - one of those rare masterpieces of ill-conceived cinema that fails on every level.   "Getaway" is the exact opposite of that, and maybe that's the joke here.  Courtney Solomon took his awful tainted name and used it to bill a forgettable car flop and instead made a quiet, stirringly beautiful commentary on relationships, age, and the meaning of love.

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

Children, rejoice, the Twilight Age has ended.  "The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones" was not its killer, nobody could have killed a phenomenon such as Twilight - trust me, I tried.  Merely the legions of preteen girls and their sexually unsatisfied middle-age mothers moved on, finding some other fad to obsess over.  2013 has swung three times to rebuild the Twilight Golden Goose with three new franchises:  "Beautiful Creatures" - despite being a legitimately decent movie - drowned, "The Host" was a crime against all sentient life, and finally, "The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones" is best ignored entirely.  Teen supernatural romance has ended, as they say, not with a bang, but with an empty theater.

Where between the curiously well-made camp of "Beautiful Creatures" and the unabashed atrocity of "The Host" does "The Mortal Instruments" lie?  Right in the least interesting place:  mediocrity.  Its not surprisingly decent, nor is it so unbelievably awful as to be fascinating.  Its just a pretty lame supernatural adventure, and unfortunately, it carries itself with a kind of self-conscious embarrassed weight.  Almost as if its aware that its hunting after a market that no longer exists, and unable to understand what in the Hell made Stephenie Meyer's vampire nightmare so damn popular, its simply going through the motions, without much of a care if anything its showing or saying will really make an impression.  So naturally no impression is made by anything it shows or says.

As story, "The Mortal Instruments" is essentially every teen girl fiction story ever written:  adolescent discovers she has supernatural powers, making her essential to saving the world, also she meets brooding blond hottie who totally wants her froggy-style.  So its like Harry Potter plus Twilight, sounds like it would be relatively simple, right?  Not at all.  "The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones" is one of the most confusing movies I've seen all year, not because it has a needlessly complicated plot with excess pointless characters and all manner of magic rules that are never well-explained.  But because it introduces all manner of usual plotlines, and just cliffhangers them all, perhaps hoping for a sequel.  So let's drive another two hundred miles on empty, hoping there will be a gas station offering less than three dollars per gallon, I'm sure that will work out just fine, "Mortal Instruments", don't worry.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

In the past month and a half, I have completed the entire four-part Metal Gear Solid saga, including a spin-off.  And let's just say, I probably overreached myself.  I've hit the burn-out point.  I can't take any more crazy espionage, retarded plottwists, or nano-machines anymore.  I need something new in my life, something to clean the pallet.  Something to get the bad taste of "Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots" off of my tongue.

Okay, "Metal Gear Solid 4" is not a baaaad game per se.  As in, its playable, the parts for the most part all add up to a decent-enough experience, and maybe if you're never played a Metal Gear game before, it will feel fresh and interesting.  But then again, if you're never played a Metal Gear game before, you won't have the foggiest idea of who anybody is, what is going on, why its going on, how any of this matters, and who this old dude is instead of Solid Snake.  The game doesn't even attempt to let new players in, it is completely obsessed with its own mythology, filling itself to the brim with references, cameos, reappearances, and plottwists, all to create some finale to mythos.  A mythos that was basically made up as Hideo Kojima went along, requiring various sloppy retcons and fudged math to create a Grand Unifying Theory of Metal Gear.  And it just doesn't add up.

At this point, the ridiculousness of the plotline is so bad its surreal.  There are points in this game's narrative that come off as perhaps an experimental satire so far removed from reality that its hard to tell what level of irony we're working on here.  If any.  Curiously, at the same time, the game jumps head first into an array of curious design decisions, all with the apparent intention of wiping out the stealth part of Metal Gear.  The gamepaly simply feels wrong:  my early attempts to follow the letter in the law of Tactical Espionage resulted in numerous deaths, until frustration wore in and I bought a shogun and destroyed every enemy in my least subtle impression of a Solid Snake Terminator that I could manage.  Only a serious hardcore fan could find much of anything in the plotline defensible, and the core gameplay is all bells and whistles, with very little substance.  "Metal Gear Solid 4" feels like a franchise trying its very hardest to self-destruct, and for better or worse, failing even at that, because "Metal Gear Solid 5" is coming out soon enough.

You're Next

"You're Next" offers something of a nice challenge for the would-be amateur loser blogger film critic.  The first half of the film is painfully standard home invasion slasher affair, starring unlikable people, and never approaching true horror.  The second half is more of the same, only with many more people dead, and now a cast of the dumbest and least threatening villains to appear in a slasher movie since Matthew Lilliard was one of the psychokillers in "Scream".  However, at that point, the directing is so inept, the scares so lacking that we might as well be riding unicycles in a happy circus, that the film becomes hilarious.  To the point that the final confrontation isn't so much a desperate struggle of the Final Girl to beat the invincible great white shark in a mask that is the killer, as much as a very awkward and comically brilliant conversation.

Obviously, "You're Next" is not good horror movie, as it is never scary and its attempts at horror basically boil down to a few jump scares and funny masks.  One gets the sense that "You're Next" might even be approaching ripping-off a 2008 home invasion film starring Liv Tyler, also featuring impossibly ninja villains in funny animal masks, called "The Strangers".  Which I recall was a movie with a decent pace of suspense, only lacking a certain kind of reality.  Such as... three jackasses in masks, no matter how ninja-tastic, are not going to be able to beat off anybody, no matter how dumb with a shotgun, but we're getting off task.  "You're Next" is much more of a slasher, pulling together an entire family into a single big house in order to kill them off one by one.  Only, even by the gore-fest standards of a slasher movie, which is essentially sitting waiting to see in what slapstick way Jason Vorhees will kill these two teenagers screwing in a tent (maybe use that harpoon he got earlier in the movie?), "You're Next" is lame as well.  The villains aren't scary - they're actually borderline "Home Alone" slapstick victims, the kills lack any creativity aside from one notable one featuring a blender towards the end, and the heroine is too strong.  Then maybe its a survival movie featuring an Australian chick?  Then why are so many people getting cut to pieces.

See?  Here's my quandary.  "You're Next" isn't scary enough, it isn't gory enough, it only gets really funny towards the end, and most of it is approaching unwatchable.  It even has vague pretensions of real drama, casting a bitterly unhappy family as its victims instead of the usual fair of horny dipshit Jason-bait.  The humor is built up so subtlety that I wasn't even sure it was intentional until the conclusion.  So can I recommend a movie just on the strength of a beautifully hilarious final scene?  I dunno, maybe I can.  Its no "Conjuring", but it doesn't really fit into any of my pre-established biased categories, and I'm enough of a hipster to be impressed by that.

Star Wars Episode VII Concept: Shadows of the Republic

I don't think anybody has quite managed to appreciate the tragedy that is J.J. Abrams being the successor of George Lucas.  Of all people to inherit the greatest SciFi franchise of all time, why in the Hell would we want a man who markets, but doesn't create?  He builds up mysteries, but not content.  He sells, but he doesn't actually produce.  Some people accused Lucas of being a soulless toy industrialist who made the Prequels for no reason other than to accrue several billion more fortunes of Spanish bullion.  But at least Lucas, on some level, seems to be a man who wants to create good stories and relive his vigorous creative period, and actually appears to have been deeply hurt by the massive rejection the world gave to his second Trilogy.  Jeffrey Jacob Abrams?  He made "Star Trek Into Darkness", and even though nobody likes or even remembers that movie just three months later, I don't think he cares.  If there's any man alive who liked the Prequels, it was J.J.

Its all too easy to be cynical, but its hard to look at the Blockbuster steam of Hollywood and get very much hope for what this industry will do to Star Wars.  Especially Disney, which last year made a fascinating and classic old-timey adventure movie in "John Carter of Mars", but this year made... "The Lone Ranger".  You can argue all you want about soulless corporate filmmaking, but when that mindless party line winds up creating "The Lone Ranger", a movie about a subject matter so old that its guaranteed to fail no matter what - and even then was by all reports a hideous disaster* - I have my doubts.  But while fascinating disasters of groupthink overriding common sense sure give a nice feeling of schadenfreude when you get to read about the millions that Mickey Mouse lost, there are other films that are simply meaningless.  What can you take out of "Oblivion" or "Elysium" or "The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones"?  There's no auteur behind the wheel anymore, now we have a committee.  Every aspect of "Star Wars VII" will be scrutinized and sanitized and re-edited for the Chinese.  Exactly where in all that doublethink do you think fun movies get made?

So then I got to thinking:  I've done like four of these Star Wars speculation articles already.  I predicted that there would be a Sequel Trilogy two years before Lucas turned to the Dark Side and sold out to Big Hollywood.  Let me once misdirect my creative energies towards a project I can never finish, can never even start, and will never possibly ever come about.  (And even if it could come out, I'm already doing a fine job pissing off the creators of this project.)  Its time for more... Fanwank Corner.  This time, let's imagine the script for "Star Wars VII" - and almost certainly do a better job than J.J.