Scare Me or Spare Me

Will it ever end?

This is the longest streak of shit movies I've ever had to endure.

Usually, there'll be a bad movie and a decent movie in one weekend. Decent means, for the purposes of discussion, something you'd feel alright paying matinee prices to see. Not a bad time, but nothing to text your friends about.

But March 2008 will go down in infamy.

Doomsday, 10,000 B.C. and now Drillbit Taylor...all noteworthy by the level of craptitude. I also watched Shutter last weekend, but it wasn't bad, just boring and unoriginal.

You get tired of me complaining about bad movies. I get tired of watching them. What do you want? I have to suffer, you have to suffer.

It's almost as though the studios are looking at the release calendars, seeing empty weekends, and then just approving whatever script is at arm's reach. Weekends are opportunities to make money.

Used to be there was one major release a weekend, sometimes two. What'd Frey say? "It's the lure of easy money...has a very strong appeal?" Something like that.

The top 10 at the box office last weekend collectively brought in $94.65 million. That's on a slow weekend in March. March is traditionally the doldrums of the cinematic year.

Call it an even hundred and then suppose that every weekend all year, the studios collectively make $100 million. Multiply that out across the year. Now we're not talking about millions anymore. We've just broken the B barrier.

When you're talking that much money, you're going to have a tough time convincing me movies are anything more than a business. Just like the auto industry or the tech industry. In that environment, "good" becomes equivalent with box office investments.

I Am Legend could've been a pretty good movie if perhaps they hadn't gone all CGI stupid with the vampires at the end. As it turns out, the movie was just mediocre. But it made in excess of $256 million (good enough to put it 40th of all-time), so now it's "good."

We're supposed to get excited about mediocre? That's the best we can hope for?

Dammit All

I'm beginning to wonder if movies are even worth paying attention to.

What is their purpose? Not to the studios. We've covered that. What is the purpose of a movie in society? Is it to distract? To provide, as my esteemed colleague said last week, "entertainment?"

Do we really attend for distraction or escape, or is it some sort of habit? Do we spend our week being inundated with entertainment "news" to the point of being compelled to partake in the sweet Kool-Aid they dish out?

Are we sheep? That's basically what I'm asking.

The answer is yes.

You go to the movies because there's something you genuinely you want to watch probably one of out every five times. The other four times it's a social activity.

Well, maybe not you. I tend to think people who actually read reviews or columns like this one are into films in the first place. Movies mean something to you. The deluge of junk at the local cineplexes pisses you off as much as it does me.

Movies are becoming culturally insignificant, and this emphasis on the business of entertainment is merely going to speed the form into the grave.

Allow me to enter into record examples A and B: Drillbit Taylor and Shutter.

Drillbit Taylor is the latest offering from Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, the "comedic geniuses" behind The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad. Apatow is producing here, Rogen writing, along with "Edmond Dantes," a.k.a. John Hughes. Gee, John, I wouldn't want my real name on this turd either.

There are some similarities between Superbad and Drillbit Taylor. For one, we have the same number of high school losers, with nearly the same height/weight characteristics. We have two best friends, one fat, one tall and skinny, and then the random third wheel. In Superbad, the third wheel was McLovin.

As with Superbad, we're back in high school and our protagonists are again the pariahs seeking nothing more than acceptance. Also like Superbad, the fat friend is the one with the smart mouth. It's as though Rogen and his buddies sat in a room and thought about how they could again mine their childhood memories.

Only with Superbad, you had the coming-of-age thing going on. It was more of a "night-in-the-life-of" kind of thing. It felt more real.

Drillbit Taylor feels like a dumb 80s comedy, which when you take into account the presence of John Hughes, it's not surprising. Then again, Hughes was the brains behind some of the best 80s comedies, such as Ferris Bueller's Day Off and...yeah, looking at the list, there's nothing anything there I think has held up well. He did write all three of the Home Alone movies. So, ah...yeah. Moving on.

Here's the set-up:

Two best friends, Wade (Nate Hartley) and Ryan (Troy Gentile), are about to start high school. Wade is the skinny one, Ryan the fat. They're stereotypical nerds.

Now, sure, they make the first-day-of-school epic mistake of wearing exactly the same shirt, but they're hoping to just fly under the radar. Wade screws that up by trying to dissuade the local bully from stuffing a kid into a locker. Once the bully's attention lands on Wade and Ryan and their matching shirts, their life is pretty much finished.

They make it worse on themselves from there.

Out of desperation and lack of options, they hire a bodyguard. Drillbit Taylor (Owen Wilson). He claims to have been an Army Ranger and to have guarded a couple presidents and celebrities. In reality, he's a bum. Literally.

He figures he can scam the kids out of a few bucks then go about his merry way. Of course, he ends up caring about them and discovers he really doesn't want to be a bum after all.

Okay, I made the part about him not wanting to be a bum up. It doesn't really happen like that. Mostly.

This is supposed to be a comedy, but what good is a comedy that doesn't make you laugh? Wilson is usually bankable for chuckles.

So what you have here is a get-richer scheme by everyone involved in the production of the film, and little actual inspiration. This is one of those things that probably shouldn't have been made. The only think that kept me from bailing out on it was the charisma of Wilson and the two kids. That's all the film has going for it.

Do yourself a favor and skip it. This is one of those movies that no one's going to remember six months from now.

Still Lacking Inspiration

I'm so tired of those "Asian" horror movies. That trend should've started and ended with The Ring. Everything since then has just sorta sucked

I'm not sure what the impetus is. Why are they remaking Japanese films for American audiences? Why can't the studios just buy the originals, throw some decent subtitles on there and drop them into theaters?

These are always "ghost" stories, and all the ghosts look the same. They're always black and white, always Asian. And they always attack the "blonde woman." The only exception I can remember is Jennifer Connelly in Dark Water.

Can we not come up with our own scary ghost stories? Paranormal State is on every week on one of my HD channels. Can't someone come up with something a little more down home?

For instance, I saw the trailer for The Strangers a couple weekends back. There's one shot with Liv Tyler standing in the living room of this house, looking away from the front door. Behind her, there's a guy standing there in the foyer, bag over his head, watching her. That one image scared the holy hell out of me. I don't even want to see the movie the trailer unnerved me so much.

Anyway, I'm tired of these uninspired Asian horror remakes. Same song, different verse. Move along.

This one...Ben Shaw (Joshua Jackson) and his new wife Jane (Rachael Taylor) move to Japan where Ben has a new photography job lined up. He's been there before.

They take their honeymoon and explore the country. One night, they're driving and Jane "hits" a woman in the road. Only they can't find the woman. Jane can't let it go. Ben can't forget about it either.

Then they start seeing "spirits" in their pictures. Faces in white light obscuring the rest of the photograph, that kind of thing. Jane tries to get to the bottom of it. Ben more or less ignores it until weird stuff starts happening to him, too.

Madness ensues.

I was bored silly watching the movie. There's no character development. There's really not much of a story. Two-thirds of the film is Jane trying to unravel the mystery of the missing girl from the highway. Then you get Ben's friends dying in mysterious ways. And then you get to the real story behind the story.

Scare me or spare me. It's bad enough that you've seen everything here in all the other Asian horror remakes the last five or six years. To see it done again and worse than before...I can think of so many better things to do with my time.

All the women in these movies become amateur detectives. They always unravel the mystery behind the ghost. Ugh. At least in The Ring, Naomi Watts' character is a journalist. You can make a case for her being able to dig into something fishy.

Here, we have the dutiful wife who's followed her photographer husband across the western pond to his new job. She has no job of her own, though I seem to remember her mentioning that she'd just gotten certified to teach sixth grade English.

Right. I dunno about you, but the biggest mystery I've ever had to solve was who keyed my car in high school (never did find out).

Again, I'm just annoyed at the banality of it all.

Go ahead and give Shutter a pass.

I'll check in with you next week. Hopefully, we'll have better luck.