It Was That Bad

In nearly 10 years, I've walked out of exactly two movies.

Two.

I sat all the way through Pathfinder. I stayed until the credits of Battlefield Earth.

This weekend, I walked out of a movie. With 10, maybe 15 minutes left. The barrage of suck combined with the smoldering fury of my wife pretty much propelled me from my seat. Enough was enough.

But I'll get to that in a minute.

One of my hobbies is gaming. I've an Xbox 360 and a PS3 sitting in my entertainment center and on any given night (at least before the arrival of the daughter), you'd find me online. Yes, I'd wait until after Steph went to bed. I'd also alternate gaming with reading. I'm not one of those gamers.

There's a website for gamers older than 25 called 2old2play.com. It's an online gathering place for other people with my sort of afflictions. We have forums, blogs, the whole nine yards.

From time to time, I'll post my UTW review over there (with a link back to the UTW website, of course) as a means of cross promotion. And just to get some feedback. It's good to have feedback now and again.

Course, I received the same sort of feedback I usually get around here: hate mail.

In all the time I've been doing this, I've probably received fewer than five encouraging letters, and more letters of anger, outrage and hate than I care to remember. I relish those, honestly.

I get that people disagree with me. I hope so. I don't get, however, why some feel the need to personally attack me for not sharing their view.

I think it's funny. Sometimes, it gets to me, sure. I'm human. But most the time, it's funny. I have never taken the bait and responded. That wouldn't be professional, would it?

When I posted last week's column on 2old2play, someone took a shot at me. Since it's not here, I shot back. Holy cow, did that feel good. One of the best times I've ever had writing anything. Catharsis doesn't quite cover it.

Here's what he said (punctuation is his, not mine): "Just as movies continue to perpetuate the ole' adages, so do those who review them. I personally take great offense to such reviews as my brother and I are aspiring writers and have long been plagued by such cynicism.

"Why is it that every reviewer has to stand atop upon his lofty peak of know it alls and rain down their conceited rants?

"You berate these movies for their obvious mistakes and miscalculations. So superior is your writing expertise that you have written how many movies? How many blockbusters have you cashed in upon?

"What you fail to mention in your long winded tirade is how much talent and luck it requires to get a script or concept green lighted. Also you completely gloss over the fact that the movies you deride are purely for the entertainment of the audience."

I almost just corrected his grammar and tightened up the writing for giggles. There was no way for this person to know I've been writing fiction since I was about 11 years old and have yet to get anything published, though I was happy to point that out to him in not so pleasant terms. That's not the relevant part to today's discussion, however.

I wonder, reading his rant, if that's how most people think about critics. That we sit upon our soapboxes and cast our prejudices and scorn upon others' art simply to make ourselves feel better.

I can't answer for my colleagues, mostly because I don't consider myself a "critic," per se. I'm just a writer who used to like movies, was in the right place at the right time, and got the gig. At the time, I'd written probably three movie reviews as a journalist, all of them for The Daily O'Collegian at OSU.

I had no idea what I was doing. I remember wondering if I should apply literary theory to film, as that was my background. I had a creative writing minor and had taken a scriptwriting class.

But is that what people wanted to read? I had to figure it out as I went. My conclusion was that I'd best be serving my audience if I a.) tried to entertain them slightly, and b.) tried to steer them toward or away from a good experience thereby possibly saving them hard-earned cash.

I've learned a few things about my craft since then, and a lot about film. But with experience comes expectations.

I expect movies to try not to suck. I don't give them a free pass for stupid just because they are--let me get this right--"purely for the entertainment of the audience."

Sorry, man. We shouldn't lower our standards just because you don't know any better. I've quoted Rage before, so here goes again: "If you settle for nothing now, you'll settle for nothing later."

Once again people. Stay away from the bad movies. Send Hollywood the message that you're not going to put up with their cavalcade of crap any longer.

Boycott the bad. Take action. Walk out, just like I did.

The End Is Nigh

So what did I walk out of? Doomsday.

I had hopes for it to be at the very least an entertaining B-movie in the vein of The Road Warrior. That's what the trailers were selling, after all. In fact, it looked for all the world like a blatant rip-off of Mad Max and The Road Warrior.

I own Mad Max, but never got around to buying The Road Warrior, even though I enjoy it much more than the other. If you haven't seen those films (you must be living under a rock), they're post-apocalyptic epics starring Mel Gibson as a cop turned vagabond and antihero. His car, the last of the V-8 interceptors...

I loved The Road Warrior as a little kid. Cars, crazies and mayhem. Awesome. Is it a good movie? I have no idea. I haven't watched it as an adult. Mad Max holds up fairly well. That said, don't talk to me about Beyond the Thunderdome. That's like mentioning Highlander 2. Or 3.

Doomsday director Neil Marshall is three years older than I am, so he pretty much grew up on the same cinematic diet I did. No doubt, he also has fond memories of Mad Max and The Road Warrior.

That would be fine if he'd occasionally warmed his hands on that nostalgia instead of building an homage of poop to it.

Doomsday is worse than 10,000 B.C., and if you dropped by last week, you know what I thought of that. At least 10,000 B.C. made sense according to its internal logic. Sure, it was dumb as hell, but it was consistent.

Doomsday... I'm not even sure I can begin to describe the traffic accident it is. It sort of starts off as 28 Days Later then morphs into Clockwork Orange/Road Warrior. And that would've been fine, if that's as far as the mashup went.

But then the characters emerge from a tunnel on the "other side of the mountain" and we're trapped in the middle ages again, complete with armored knights on warhorses.

I said it last week, I'll say it again this week: who in the hell greenlit this thing?

The story, such as it is begins in England next month. A virus breaks out in Scotland, so the Brits wall the island in half and leave the Scots to die (I'm sure there's some adroit social commentary going on there, which may be the most intelligent thing in the movie), along with the virus.

Many, many years later, the virus has resurfaced in London and British Intelligence owns up to the fact that there are survivors living to the north. They think that means a scientist found a cure, so they enlist Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), a Scottish refugee turned military spec-ops badass to lead a team to Scotland to find a cure.

They go over the wall, drive for awhile, then things go bad, because that's what things do in movies. They run into all these mohawked mutants right out of The Road Warrior. They're led by cliched punker Saul, the leader of his merry band of cannibals.

Eden and a couple of her crew escape Saul and Co. via steam engine and head upland. Once they get to wherever, they take a trek across the highlands, go through an old military tunnel, and emerge in the land time forgot.

This section of Scottish society has reverted to the middle ages, complete with, as I mentioned before, armored knights with swords. Eden and her gang let themselves be captured and taken before Dr. Kane (Malcolm McDowell), the liege lord of this particular fiefdom.

Once there, he has them jailed and has Eden do battle with is executioner. The knight has full armor and weapons. She has her spandex and fake boobs. Of course, she prevails and they escape back to the military tunnel. Once there, they find a Bentley in a box (still fueled and with good battery after 20+ years!), which they drive to back to the land of the road warriors.

And that's about where we walked out.

The sad part is that the acting didn't kill the movie. In fact, the acting was pretty decent, considering the kind of flick this was.

This time, the blame must land at the feet of writer/director Marshall. Doomsday is f#@!ing terrible. I really shouldn't have to elaborate on that, to be honest. You've just read the synopsis and I think my recounting actually makes the film sound better than it actually is.

It's kitchen-sink writing. Every bad idea he ever had went into the movie. In fact, it stinks of something he wrote while in grade-school, and I wish he'd lost that particular notebook.

I don't often comment on the music, but the score by Tyler Bates is so over-the-top and annoying

Doomsday is the action/horror equivalent of a Will Ferrell movie. I think Marshall knows it's a giant piece of crap and he just wanted to see if he could a) get it made, and b) convince someone to see it. It's that or he wanted it to be a part of Grindhouse. He is soooo not Tarantino.

I liked Marshall's other films. Dog Soldiers ("There is no spoon.") was a decent modern werewolf movie. Last year's The Descent had some charm as low-budget horror fare. It had some meat to it.

Doomsday is a boatload of stupid.

Rough Weekend for the Reviewer

I know we're running long here, but things must be said. It sort of makes me sad that I always have more to say about bad movies than good ones, but that's the way it is.

I watched 4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 days. Talk about a downer. I had a tough time with it, actually, because it's about a young woman trying to help her friend get an abortion. I sat on my couch, my eight-week-old daughter in my arms, and watched a character bag up an aborted fetus.

Hard. To. Watch.

As with my favorite literature, the story kicks off without any sort of exposition. You meet Otilia and Gabita in their dorm room at a Romanian college as they're getting ready to go somewhere for a couple of days. You can tell what they're going to go do isn't exactly legal, but that could be a lot of different things in 1980s Romania.

Gabita is nervous about the whole ordeal, so she feigns some sickness and sends Otilia out on her own to make the arrangements for whatever it is they're doing. You know it involves money, a hotel room and some random guy with a briefcase.

It becomes clear when Otilia, Gabita and the guy, Bebe, get to the hotel room and he gets upset about how much Gabita lied to him. She's not just two months along in her pregnancy. It's closer to four. Abortion is illegal, but the sentence for conducting an abortion after four months is much steeper than prior to four months. It's considered murder and 10 years is on the board.

The money they have isn't enough. Gabita, being the selfish friend she is, assumes Otilia will do whatever it takes to make sure she has the abortion. What Otilia does will make you queasy. Suffice it to say she's a better friend than you or I will ever have.

This is a hard-as-nails drama. It is unflinching and uncompromising. Sure, it's shot low-budget, but I've seen precious few films made with any amount of money that have the visceral impact of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

It wouldn't, couldn't be made in America. And that's a damn shame. It's a film that makes the argument for cinema as art, not entertainment.

For as bad as Doomsday is, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is that good. Just don't expect to enjoy it. It isn't meant to be fun. It's meant to tell a story, and not all stories have happy endings.

Also, the last shot is pitch-perfect.

It opens at the Circle Cinema, 10 S. Lewis, this weekend. If you've the stomach for it, check it out.

See you next week.