This movie needs to wash itself with that soap. Badly.
1. Fight Club
There are not words enough for how much
I loathe this movie that everyone else seems so enamored of. Oh, you
like a macabre symphony of violence? Didn't you just love that part
where Edward Norton mashes some guy's face into a grotesque soupy
mess of shattered bone shards and meat? Let's all get a hobby that
involves breaking each other's bones and beating each other bloody!
No, better yet, let's reject society so thoroughly that we regard
life as a joke, other people as members of 'the machine', and embrace
a brotherhood of sadomasochism! No... We can do better than that!
Let's make a goddamn anarchy club whose only purpose is to brainwash
members of our cult of brutality so that we may blow shit up and make
a mockery of everything, everywhere!
Man, fuck this movie. This movie is a
Nietzschean nightmare, reveling in the apparent pointlessness of
life.
Now I won't deny that this movie had a
clever premise: revealing that Brad Pitt and Edward Norton's
character were the same was an impressive twist that calls everything
prior in the movie into doubt. But the vehicle bringing us this story
is such a repulsive mess that it killed any interest I had in the
movie, genuinely angering me that people even like it at all. It's
one thing to encourage a rejection of materialism. It's something
else to encourage such a disgusting bloodsport, to lure people into
it and then turn them into worker drones for some anarchic new world
order. Yes, I know that Edward Norton's 'character' rejects it in the
end, but it still comes out pretty obvious that Brad Pitt's Tyler
Durden won in the end, and that everything that I've described as so
awful is perpetuated and has come to pass.
.
Otherwise known as: "I Need To Pee But The Movie Won't F***ing End".
2. Lord of the Rings – Return of
the King
Surprised to see this one, I bet! Now
let me clarify: I think hate might be too strong a word for
this. But I found it completely astonishing how many people claimed
to love this final movie. The first two achieved this mastery of
making Middle Earth this place where hope exists, but it is drifting
away much like the migration of the Elves to the west. We experience
the loss of the main characters as Gandalf is overcome, Boromir dies,
and the fellowship crumbles. Then we meet those of Rohan, who are
noble but in a land about to be swallowed in darkness, under the
“TENS OF THOUSANDS” of Uruk-hai bootheels. The main characters
are capable, but not all-powerful, and it is only through the barest
of victories do they get out in one piece.
Return of the King has Legolas
soloing an elephant. It has Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas basically
surfing on a waterfall of human skulls. It has the Army of the Dead
utterly curb-stomp what is supposed to be the biggest evil army we
ever see (a deus ex machina if there ever was one). Clearly, a big
problem of mine is that Return
of the King embraces the cheesy factor to an extent not
before seen in the previous movies. Also, there's just the fact that
the other movies are simply superior. For example, we really felt for
the people of Rohan. We identify with their king, we feel for Eowyn,
Eomer, and their warriors. We don't feel the same about the people of
Gondor, who spend most of their screentime being fatalists, running
for cover, and with their morale breaking in just about every scene.
We don't have anyone Gondorian to really identify with. Denethor is
basically the villain for the first half of the movie, and Faramir is
out of commission faster than we can blink (and that doesn't even get
into how he was basically a villain for the second half of the second
movie). There just isn't as much for us to get into in this movie,
the threat of Sauron being put on such a melodramatic scale that you
lose much of the human connection, both to the characters and the
people they fight for.
Last but not least, don't forget the
ending. You probably can't, even if you wanted to. That's time you'll
never get back.
.
Further proof that movies with bowling still suck.
3. The Big Lebowski
I've tried to watch this movie going on
four times and I still have yet to finish it. So I'll be brief. I'm
not the biggest fan of the Coen Brothers. Their humor is quirky and,
for me, it only occasionally hits the mark. A movie about slackers
who spend all their time bowling? Who somehow become embroiled in
some... what was it? A theft or a heist plot? I don't remember if
they actually get stoned, but pretty much everyone seems stoned out
of their minds for the entirety of what I saw. It just was boring,
amusing only barely by lieu of the stupid and random things that
happen. I think I've turned it off every time in that part (was it a
dream sequence?) where Jeff Bridges is somehow flying over the city
lights. Something about it just saps at my will to live. Every time I
try.
.
Does this even look like a movie worth watching?
4. Napoleon Dynamite
Speaking of semi-retarded slackers,
this here is their crown jewel. This movie does its damnedest to be
as agonizingly bland as possible, and yet people dig it. It's about
two thoroughly uninteresting people who live in the middle of nowhere
and do nothing important. They make lame jokes. One of them runs for
school president or something. There's that famous dance routine
which, to a novice like me, seems like a celebration of awful, awful
dancing. Seriously? What happened in this movie? Why do people like
it again? It's only redeeming quality seems to be that it succeeded
brilliantly in making me feel as brainless as the two main
characters.
.
Look at all that praise! Look at all those sycophants!
5. The Social Network
The funniest thing about this movie for
me is that it somehow won an Oscar for its soundtrack. I've seen it
twice, and I genuinely can't remember ANY soundtrack at all. This is
a minor point, but it is something that repeatedly shocks me. How
does a movie win an award for a soundtrack so understated and
forgettable that, even when I was listening for it, I couldn't
remember it?
More seriously, this movie is energetic
fluff. It tries so damn hard to be this stylistic new genre that it
completely fails to say anything interesting. Hell, apparently most
of it isn't even true. The moral of this story apparently is that
being a colossal opportunistic prick makes you a wildly successful
millionaire. Oh, let's encourage that one, why don't we? And
then there were all those damn news stories trying to 'harness the
genius potential' of Mark Zuckerberg. Why do we support this crap?
This is why this movie pisses me off. Apparently, to be successful
you must network well and then shit all over the people who brought
you up. Fan-fucking-tastic.
…
This is why I try and write reviews
about things I love. Sorry everyone! :)
Runner ups: Kill Bill, Spirited Away, Ratatouille, The Hurt Locker, Zoolander, The Expendables.
Runner ups: Kill Bill, Spirited Away, Ratatouille, The Hurt Locker, Zoolander, The Expendables.
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