It takes me a long time to see movies, so I was spared from this, this-- thing for quite some time. But holy cow!
Motorcycles that explode when toppled. Bullet dodging. Dream sequence/hallucination Angel. Rising from the dead-- 3 times!. Pulling a 4 inch piece of glass from your thigh and then attending a premier all dolled up 10 minutes later. Exploding gas behind you by shooting a bullet in front of you.
This is a disaster approaching Showgirls porportions.
Please help me. I don’t want to subject myself to such nonsense again. What relatively recent movies should I not waste my time and money renting?
Sure it was completely unreal and outrageous. But I think it’s meant to be that way and that’s what makes it fun. I used to be the cynic and watch these movies saying “no way, couldn’t happen, that’s stupid”. Now I watch to see how creative and insane they can make these movies.
Add to your list movies like XXX, Fast and the Furious II, and loads of others.
As long as they don’t take themselves too seriously and keep the action tongue-in-cheek I like watching things like:
Hondas, Toyotas, and Hyundais landing two story jumps.
Motorcycle jumps where the rider does a handstand and shoots the guy behind him.
Girls climbing into and starting a helicopter as it falls over a dam.
On the other hand I do hate movies that are asked to be taken seriously then throw in an unbelievable stunt:
(Mr. Purl is fiddling with the computer/TiFaux. I’m sitting on the couch feeding the baby. I notice that the TV is playing something really bizarre and stupid.)
Me: What IS this?
Mr. P: Charlie’s Angel’s.
Me: No wonder I was thinking “this looks extremely stupid”.
Mr. P: Have you ever seen it?
Me: I’m seeing it right now, and I’m telling you, it looks extremely stupid. (Mr. P watches it for a minute.)
Mr. P: Yeah, okay. It’s stupid.
Regarding CA/FT, I suspect that you may be experiencing a “whoosh” with the movie. It isn’t in the slightest intended to be realistic or serious, and tries to get as extremely cartoony and implausible as possible. It is basically a live-action cartoon and comedy, and if watched with the same frame of mind that one would watch a Road Runner cartoon, I think Charlies Angels is quite entertaining.
Plus, gratuitous flaunting of the cast of hotties doesn’t hurt its appeal…
Additionally, if you haven’t seen the movie, it is worth it purely for Cameron Diaz’s performance. I think she is the funniest physical-comedy actress since Lucille Ball.
On a grammatical pedant note, should the possessive of Diaz be Diaz’ or Diaz’s?
So, I had a free rental coupon, make a quick stop at the movie rental place, grab the new Charlie’s Angels movie. Take it home and it sits on the TV for 5 1/2 days before my wife and I sit down to watch it. And it turns out I grabbed the first CA movie. So, I take it back and talk the clerk into letting me rent CA 2 for free (they put the first CA on the shelf next to the new one and I grabbed the wrong by mostake). So, another 6 days go by before we sit down and watch this one. My wife lasted about 10 minutes before she got up and started reading a book, I lasted about another 10 minutes before the complete and utter stupidity got to me. Even thought it cost me nothing, I kept trying, but couldn’t make it. What actually made it worse was that the actors were obviously enjoying the heck out if it all, and it was all just **soooooo stupud. Perhaps it was a whoosh, but I think it went under me not over me, if you catch my meaning.
And I think that Cameron Diaz in one of the goofiest actors working today. Something about her just doesn’t seem right.
I suspect similar things will be said about Van Helsing, opening tomorrow. If you treat it as ridiculous mind candy, you’ll enjoy it. If you expect anything resembling a sensible story, narrative coherence, or identifiable human characters, you’ll hate it. It’s just the way the big blockbusters are being made now. (Actually, they’ve always been like this, but the tools for producing spectacle have become so powerful that the flimsy stories seem even more limp by comparison.)
XXX I’ve only watched about five minutes, but it was arguably the worst five minutes of film I’ve ever seen. The title character can shoot people in midair from hundreds of feet away even while he’s spinning around quickly and not looking where he’s shooting. Bad guys who shoot at him from ten feet away always miss. Then he gets on his motorcycle and starts riding away. Suddenly a ramp appears in the middle of the road. His motorcycle hits the ramp and he soars through air a few hundred feet, still shooting of course. Where did the ramp come from? Why was it there? I don’t know.
Gone in 60 Seconds, the remake. The cops chase Nicholas Cage through downtown San Francisco. Suddenly he sees a traffic jam up ahead. Luckily for him, the first vehicle in line is one of those car-transporting trucks, and it just happens to be empty, so Cage can use it as ramp and jump over the traffic jam. The cops are too wussy to follow. I enjoy the remarkable realism of this scene, because everyone who’s been to downtown San Francisco knows that you can hardly swing a stunted cat without hitting an empty bigrig on the narrow city streets. The character is named “Memphis Raines”. I would have liked the movie better if it was set in Memphis and the character was named “San Francisco”.
I’ve seen several posts like GargoyleWB’s about how a movie was not intended to be taken seriously, etc. “Starship Troopers” also comes to mind.
But even within that extremely limited attempt such movies fail miserably.
For a while there, WB made really awful Road Runner cartoons. There are good ones and then there are bad ones. Same with campy movies. I don’t think anybody is being “whooshed”. Bad campy is very bad.
I agree with ftg.
Kill Bill, another movie where logic isn’t really the point, did not make me wince once (O.K., it did. But it was that Achille’s heel slashing part — ewww). I knew the feats in this movie were physically impossible, but dammit, when somebody died in that movie they didn’t jump up again to fight some more and they certainly didn’t do it 3 times!
Sure it was supposed to be over the top, but a movie should make some kind of sense within it’s own frame work. CA/FT was just, well, stupid.
As others have noted, there’s fun-stupid and just plain stupid-stupid. Even a cartoonish movie can hit a point (as CA:FT, XXX, and others do) where the cartoonishness is so absurd it overwhelms even the generous leeway given to brain candy action films.
Put simply, if Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner were watching CA:FT together, even 'ol Wile E. would have turned to his companion during the helicopter-over-the-dam bit and said “oh come on…”
I can tolerate a lot of really improbable action if it’s stylish and doesn’t take itself seriously. I get a little annoyed when a dramatic movie hinges on improbability, though, like Nic Cage’s ridiculously good aim in Windtalkers, notably one scene where he fires his pistol wildly at a bunch of Japanese soldiers charging toward him and they all die.
I think ftg is right. This was a movie I never would’ve seen myself, but a friend suggested it. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. She wasn’t into action movies, and she wasn’t interested in the girls. Either way, 80 minutes later we both agreed that it was an incredibly stupid movie. It’s true that it wasn’t supposed to be Masterpiece Theatre, but it was still a problem that the movie frequently and flagrantly crossed the “much too stupid” barrier.
Well, this thread has only been dead for a couple of weeks, so i feel justified in resurrecting it.
I went and saw Van Helsing yesterday, and it does indeed rank up there with the biggest heaps of steaming crap that i’ve ever watched.
Now, i love a good big-budget blockbuster, and the CGI and all the other great special effects that are so common nowdays. I thought Spiderman was excellent, i loved Hulk, and i’m a big fan of the X-Men movies (especially the second one). I’m even goona go and see The Day After Tomorrow, because i love seeing cities get destroyed in films.
In Van Helsing, however, i was just plain bored for half of the time, and was laughing (at, not with, the movie) for the other half. The “story” was ridiculous, the acting was over the top even for a summer hit, and the whole thing plain stunk. The only redeeming features were the costumes and some of the effects.
I was particularly dismayed that three of my fellow Australians, all of them excellent actors, chose to participate in this travesty. Hugh Jackman did OK as Van Helsing, but was far better as Wolverine in X-Men. David Wenham had some truly awful lines in his role as Van Helsing’s sidekick, Carl. And Richard Roxburgh got stuck with the stinker of all roles, hamming it up egregiously as Dracula. Rounding out the Commonwealth connection, Brit Kate Beckinsale treated us to a truly horrific “Transylvanian” accent.
A movie best forgotten, and well in the running for stupidest film of the year, IMO. And that doesn’t even take into account the amateurish mish-mash of classic monster stories that they cobbled together in a single “plot.”
