Category: Movie Reviews

Some years ago, on his Sunday night radio show, Matt Drudge discussed the Planet of the Apes remake and inadvertently let slip a spoiler–as if you could spoil a story that had already been around for 30 years. Someone immediately called in to complain. He complained bitterly, winding up with the declaration, “You’ve spoiled my whole summer!”

Eh? Well, if your “whole summer” depends on a movie, maybe you need to get a life.

This week the movie site “Rotten Tomatoes” had to close down its comments page because hordes of loony leftists went berserk over negative reviews of Batman III: Dark Knight Rising. It’s a movie about a comic book character! It’s pitched to 12-year-olds! But never mind–somehow all these kooks got it into their heads that any criticism of this movie deserved the most violent response possible on the Internet. And so Rotten Tomatoes was swamped with profane, inarticulate, frothing-at-the-mouth comments by the usual idiots who believe The Rich are responsible for their lives being so futile and pathetic. For the first time ever, they had to close their comments page.

I haven’t seen this movie, and don’t plan to. I have outgrown comic books, and I don’t watch movies based on comic books. From what I’ve heard,Dark Knight has mutated into a political statement. Lefty losers are for it, and anyone who is against it must be an Enemy of the People. After all, you’re not a loser because you’ve attached yourself to ridiculous ideas, mal-educated, close-minded (not that there’s all that much to close), too full of rage to think straight, and never learned how to achieve anything. You’re only a loser because The Rich made you a loser while you weren’t looking!

Meanwhile, I guess we can’t even have fun with comic books anymore.

 

Looking to veg out on the weekend, I randomly selected two movies from the library, guided only by my wife’s wish for “something scary.”

The Mist (2007) was adapted from a Stephen King novella. Says I to myself, “Didn’t I read that, many years ago? And wasn’t it excruciatingly bad?” Well, yeah–but the film got good reviews, and anyhow, screenplay writers very rarely follow the original story.

Unfortunately, this time, they did! Stephen King is a sophomoric dolt, and this movie is faithful to him. So we get all the tired old Stephen King cliches that were tired and old even back in the 1980s, when he wrote this dud: the artist guy turns out to be much more of a man than the blue-collar louts who resent his college education (I think this motif dates back to Predynastic Egypt); the monsters are inevitably the fault of a super-secret military experiment conducted by straight white men; and all the Christians in the movie are bloodthirsty fanatics, ignorant, crude, stupid, and not at all sophisticated and wonderful like Stephen King.

Just to make you feel bad, everybody dies. Yup–the hero has to shoot the wise old schoolmarm with the heart of gold, the decent middle-aged guy who’s done everything he can to help, the lovely lady he might be falling in love with, and even his adorable little 5-year-old son. He has to shoot them so the monsters can’t get them (a fate worse than being shot). And then, oops, he runs out of bullets and can’t shoot himself.  Blah, blah, blah.

Knowing (2009), starring Nicolas Cage, was a lot better–but everybody still dies, on account of it being the end of the world: all except some children who get taken to safety on another planet. This film has a strong but somewhat muddled religious subtext. At least the few Christians in it are generous, loving people who really do trust God–I don’t think I’ve seen that in any other film made since 1975. I’m surprised Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins didn’t stage a protest.

But the point is: two movies, both fairly recent, selected at random (I’d never heard of either of them)… and in both of them, everybody dies. Well, practically everybody. I’m used to movies opting for somewhat happier endings than that. After all, that was what was so shocking about Night of the Living Dead–all the main characters got killed.

What does it mean, culturally, for everybody in the movie to die? Anybody got a clue?

I’m going to do something today that I’ve never done before–review a movie sight-unseen: this after having seen stills and trailers, and read a thorough summary of what is laughingly called a plot.

Disney’s John Carter is more than just this year’s biggest box-office bomb. It is a crime.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was famous for creating Tarzan, but he also wrote eleven novels set in the world of Barsoom–Mars–and featuring the immortal John Carter. This year is the 100th anniversary of A Princess of Mars, the first of the Martian series and Burroughs’ first published novel. (Tarzan of the Apes was second.)

The Martian novels were the finest stories Burroughs ever wrote, by far his most creative work. They are haunting. NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab are full of men and women whose young imaginations were set on fire by these books, and that fire still burns. Quite a few young writers were inspired by them, too–including yours truly. Fifty years after making their acquaintance, I still read them with admiration and delight.

And along comes this abomination of a movie…

What they did, it seems, was to take elements of several Martian tales, randomly selected by not-very-bright 11-year-olds, throw them into a blender along with a lot of gobbledygook that they made up themselves, and, voila! A hebephrenic mish-mosh of a story that wouldn’t hold up if it had suspenders.

Great works of art are never improved by two-legged amoebas in Hollywood trying to make them more like video games. John Carter looks like a jigsaw puzzle put together by monkeys.

By all means, read ERB’s Martian novels: you’ll never forget them. But if you have any respect at all for writers and their work, approach this movie as you would an attic full of really irritable brown recluse spiders.

I love my art; it is God’s gift to me. I love the art displayed by other writers, which inspires my own efforts. And when this art is abused by dolts in Hollywod whose only inspiration is to make a buck… well, it gets my dander up.