I Sat Through That?

In which Gerry Hayes welcomes you to his column about stuff he doesn’t like. Well, I say 'welcome'... [scroll down for the archive]

I love films. I love films that make me make me laugh, films that frighten me, films that make me cry. I love films that do these things intentionally. I also love many films that accomplish these things unintentionally - ‘so bad it’s good’ may be a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason. I love really good films and I love those few films that have reached a particular point in the badness spectrum that they’ve become enjoyable again.

But then there are the others.

The films that make me wince (and worse, the ones that make me use the word ‘wince’). The films that make my face sore from scowling and grimacing. The ones where my wife elbows me repeatedly and tells me to stop sighing, laughing inappropriately or muttering under my breath. The ones where even my arse was angry at the end.

That’s what this column is about.

Let’s get something straight right off the bat. For ‘bad films’ you should feel perfectly free to read ‘films that I don’t like’. I make no bones about it and feel, rather arrogantly you might think, that if I don’t like it, it is bad. If your favourite film turns up here and you feel affronted in some way, you should write a strongly-worded email and send it to supertoppriorityrebuttal@nevergonnareadit.com and I’ll get right on it. Or you could try watching it again with scale-free eyes and realise, ‘dear god, he’s right - it is dross - what a gift I’ve been given’. Either way’s OK with me.

Hmmm... Am I losing them? Perhaps a quote will get them back on side.

I think it was Tyne Daly who once said: “A critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.”

Darn tootin’.

I Sat Through That?

#1 - Hostel (2006)
#2 - The X Files: I Want to Believe (2008)
#3 - I, Robot (2004)
#4 - Meet The Parents (2000)
#5 - Castaway (2000)
#6 - Planet of the Apes (2001)
#7 - Unbreakable (2000)
#8 - M. Night Shyamalan
#9 - The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
#10 - The Break Up (2006)
#11 - Deep Impact (1998)
#12 - 88 Minutes (2007)
#13 - Mission: Impossible II (2000)
#14 - Quantum Of Solace (2008)
#15 - The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
#16 - Hannibal Rising (2007)
#17 - X-Men (I, II and III)
#18 - Hot Fuzz (2007)
#19 - King Kong (2005)
#20 - Six Minutes of Runaway Bride
#21 - The Transporter (2002)
#22 - Alexander (2004)
#23 - Christmas Countdown


Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #23 - Christmas Countdown

In which Gerry Hayes makes Bob Cratchett type up his latest filmy polemic while he amuses himself kicking Tiny Tim’s crutch from under him. Filthy urchin.

Something a little different this week. Given it’s the season to be jolly and all, I’ve decided I could be considerably more jolly by not doing much work for this. Instead, I’m going to sit back and get into practice for the Christmas period by drinking lots of beer and shouting at my family.

In the place of my usual, well-considered, studiously-researched and carefully crafted criticism of a film I had the misfortune of sitting through, I am instead going to share my top six Christmas films that I will never, never watch based solely on the cover of the DVD.

I know what you’re thinking - this is just a way of filling a column in the easiest possible way, thinly veiled as a seasonal top-ten, er... six. Yes, six. I know it’s arbitrary - I’m unpredictable. It’s one of my many charms.

The thing is, I can get away with this sort of thing as, let’s face it, I’m not really providing a service here, am I? I just turn up and whinge and complain about films in the hope of inspiring some sort of amused empathy or - preferably - abject rage in my readers.

So then, come and humorously empathise or get angry as we count down...

Gerry’s Great Big Christmas Top Six Films That He’ll Never Watch Based On Their DVD Covers (And Maybe The Actors In Them) Of The Year 2009 List.

Number 6: Surviving Christmas
Haaaaaaaaaaaa! Look at the cover! Haaaaaaa! It’s hysterical. Look at how funny it is. Look. It’s a big Christmas present. Haaaaaa! And it’s flattened that bloke - probably Ben Affleck (or more probably, his stunt-feet). Oh Christ, my sides, my sides! Call a surgeon to sew up my sides before my crap-filled intestines plop out onto the floor and leave me writhing in deliciously hilarious agony as I contemplate the big present flattening Maybe-Ben. Haaaaaaa!







Number 5: Jingle All The Way
How can I not have seen this? Consider yourselves thanked, you lucky, lucky stars. The cover tells you all you need to know. Arnold will blunder about with an utter dearth of comedic talent and will attempt to compensate by gurning and grunting while getting into ‘predicaments’. Also, Hayes’ Law #235 states that any film that puts the quotes “NON-STOP FUN” on its DVD cover will prove that the word ‘STOP’ is superfluous.







Number 4: Fred Claus
Remember when Vince Vaughn was in Swingers? That was good, wasn’t it? If I were you, I’d just go watch that.

Remember when Paul Giamatti was in Sideways? That was good, wasn’t it? If I were you - well, you know.









Number 3: A Christmas Story
GAH! What the...! Why film a heart-warming Christmas story in the Village Of The Damned. Sure, that kid might have an all-American haircut and the sort of glasses that get him beaten-up every time he leaves the house but look at the eyes. Look at the evil. What demonic force lurks behind those eyes? Not getting this one as it looks too damn creepy.









Number 2: Christmas With The Kranks
Well, it’s got an awful, awful, title. And, it’s got that dreadful ‘No, ho, ho’ tag line. It’s got Jamie Lee Curtis attempting to look all wholesome and decent but we all just remember when she got her boobies out in Trading Places. It’s got a bloke hanging upside-down, wrapped comically in Christmas lights on the cover. It’s got an annoying premise: couple forced to ‘celebrate’ Christmas by their neighbours (who obviously need to be shouted and sworn at). As well as all of these things, it suffers from having Tim Allen. Allen, the Christmas-Movie-Guy. Allen, the charmless, gormless and annoying Christmas moron. Oh, no you don’t, Tim Allen; get thee behind me.




Number 1: Love Actually
Top of the heap or bottom of the barrel - whatever way you want to look at it - Love Actually. Even the title makes me wince disgustedly. The only thing, known to humankind, more mawkishly saccharine and nauseatingly sentimental than a Richard Curtis rom-com is a Richard Curtis rom-com set at Christmas. Even the DVD box has a red ribbon, prettily tying up the usual, Curtis suspects. Get ready to board the slow-moving roller-coaster for a cloying ride through some sort of mushy slush made from the tears of cheese. Just thinking about Love Actually makes me want to vomit my liver up before writing “Richard Curtis is Satan” on the wall with my own bile.




Hmmm. Looks like egg-nog.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #22 - Alexander (2004)

In which Gerry Hayes looks at Alexander The Great and thinks, ‘the hair proves it.’

Alexander, 2004.

Directed by Oliver Stone.
Starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Anthony Hopkins, Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson and tons more.
Written by Oliver Stone, Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis.

Christ, another epic. Stone gives us the story of Alexander, the little, blond Irish bloke who conquered the world while wearing a funny helmet that made him look like that Martian from the Looney Tunes cartoons.

Farrell plays the eponymous hero. As is usual for our Col, he can’t really rid himself of his Irish accent and rewriting his character to explain this by his having an Irish father - or some such nonsense - wasn’t really an option in a historical biopic. Stone attempts to get around this by distracting the audience with the aforementioned stupid, blond head and ridiculous helmet.

He needn’t have bothered really, as he obviously missed the fact that everyone else in this film speaks in their own accents too. Against the general mish-mash of confusion that is Alexander, this multi-cultural aspect adds another layer of disarray.

Lets see. Alexander is heir to the kingdom of Macedonia. His dad is a cyclops (Kilmer) and his mum (Jolie) is a mentalist, sex-pot with some weird paraphilia for snakes. To her credit, at least Jolie doesn’t speak with her own accent in the film. Instead, she borrows hers from the Count in Sesame Street. “There is one Alexander. One! Ahh ha ha ha ha!”

Alexander has his own sexual hang-ups. He might be in love with his best friend, Hephaistion (Leto) who is - gasp - a man. Either Stone or the studio plays it safe though and all the audience really sees are longing, lingering glances between the two whereas, Alexander’s tryst with Rosario Dawson has boobies and everything.

Right. Have we got everything then... Alexander loves a bloke, and the eunuchs, and his mum (everybody loves their mum). Despite this, he gets married to Dawson and has wild sex. He loves his dad but his dad doesn’t love him. And he’s a bit short, with silly hair. All the ingredients for a nutter then.

And, as you might expect, he goes off conquering the world to prove to his dad that he’s all man.

Or something... Oliver Stone wrote this so there’s probably a bundle of contemporary parallels and deeper meanings related to machiavellian, political machinations and how war is an easy-sell in a culture, subservient to an avaricious ruling elite, that's been made compliant by enforced consumerism and the bias of a controlling media. I’m not sure - I was distracted by the hair.

Anyway, given that Alexander did actually conquer most of the known world, there are the inevitable battle scenes. And for the most part, these are pretty impressive. The ‘literal’ bird’s-eye view didn’t really work for me but it served its purpose. Personally, I could have done with more battles and less lingering looks or Count Chocula impressions but, I admit, I’d probably have been complaining about ‘dumbing down’ then and bemoaning the lack of anything more cerebral. There’s no pleasing me.

Well, there is, but Alexander isn’t the film to do it. If you know nothing of Alexander The Great, you won’t really come away with much more knowledge that you had at the beginning (despite Hopkin’s narration making it feel like a history lesson). This would be ok if the film accomplished something - anything - else but it doesn’t. It’s a few battle scenes and three hours of Irish accents and sub-Freudian confusion.

Good hair, though.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #21 - The Transporter (2002)

In which Gerry Hayes considers Rule One: Anything where Statham’s driving...

The Transporter, 2002.

Directed by Corey Yuen.
Starring Jason Statham, Qi Shu, Matt Schulze.
Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen.

You know, I almost don’t want to include The Transporter in this series. Oh there’s no doubt that it’s drivel but the thing is, it doesn’t really pretend to be anything else. It’s brainless entertainment with no other purpose or pretences. It’s essentially just a bunch of coloured lights and noises designed to keep people gawping for an hour and a half instead of going out, getting pissed and picking a fight with someone smaller. The Transporter isn’t trying to be high-brow or to ‘say something’. It’s not trying to ‘work on a number of levels’ (it barely has one) and, for all of these reasons, I’m a little reluctant to include it here.

That said, I saw it recently and, my god, it’s rubbish.

Jason Statham (now pretty much typecast as ‘that bloke who drives stuff’) plays Frank Martin, an ex-special forces hard man, retired to the south of France. There, he makes ends meet by driving stuff about. He’s essentially a sort of taxi cum courier service but with added hardness.

He has a BMW of which he’s geekily proud. He’s even installed a fake looking keypad to immobilise the car and make sure fares can’t shoot him and drive off. He’s no-muss-no-fuss and he’s the coolest guy ever to don a pair of driving gloves.

Everything’s going swimmingly until Frank gets hired by a bad guy called Wall Street (Schulze). You can tell immediately he’s a bad guy as he’s all cocky and mental. If you met him in real life, you’d say “well, this bloke has a job for me but he looks a bit like the sort who would double-cross me and probably try to kill me in some cruel, inventive manner - I might pass”.

Mr. Street gives Frank a ‘package’ to deliver. Frank pops off happily with the package in the boot/trunk (I’m catering to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic there - did you notice?).

Frank’s curiosity, however, gets the better of him and he breaks his own, self-imposed rule about not looking in the package and he looks in the package. Inside he finds a girl, Lai (Qi Shu). It’s about here that the stupidest thing you have ever seen happens. Not just the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen in a film but the stupidest thing you’ve seen anywhere, ever:

Lai tells Frank she needs to visit the little girl’s room. Frank, who earlier in the film, didn’t mind bank-robber brains all over his car, gets all squeamish at the thought of a bit of girl-pee in it and lets her wander off into the woods, far out of sight, to do her filthy business. A lesser man might worry that she would take the opportunity to run off. Frank, however, has the benefit of his Special Forces training which has thought him that draping the end of a long rope, loosely, about his prisoner’s shoulders will allow her to wander two hundred feet into the woods, out of sight, with little or no hope of escape.

I won’t spoil things by telling how this - seemingly flawless - plan worked out.

The film goes on in a pretty similar vein. Something ridiculous happens and then there’s a big fight. Something moronic happens and then there’s lots of shooting and rockets. Something imbecilic happens and then there’s...

...An intensely homo-erotic, oil-fight between loads of bad-guys and a bare-chested, greased-up Jason Statham. Yep, Statham - with the big guns out - gets himself all lubed-up and squelches and squirms about the floor of a bus garage with a dozen other men.

As you might expect, once he's despatched the oiled men, Statham saves the day in a manly, big-bicepsed sort of way and sits back and waits for the call about the sequel.

Personally, I’m quite looking forward to Italian Death Transporter Job IV.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #20 - Six Minutes of Runaway Bride

In which Gerry Hayes falls in love with Roberts and Gere all over again, just like it says on the poster...

Runaway Bride, 1999.

Directed by Garry Marshall.
Starring Julia Roberts, Richard Gere, Joan Cusack, probably others - I didn’t really see.
Written by Josaan McGibbon and Sara Parriott.

You read that title correctly. After whinging and bellyaching, last week, about Peter Jackson stealing (I don’t use that word lightly) hours, days, weeks of my life with his interminable pish, this week’s I Sat Through That? concerns approximately six minutes of a film. During the week, while flicking up and down the channels desperately trying to find something, anything, worth watching, I had the good fortune to land on the dénouement of Runaway Bride. I say “good fortune” because, within the time it took my finger to cease it’s unrelenting, channel-hopping presses, I knew that I had this week’s column all sorted out.

I watched about six minutes of Runaway Bride.

That was enough - much more than enough - to make it worthy of my complaining about sitting through it (and don’t get all smartarsed, saying “oh, but you could have turned it off” - nobody likes a smartarse - take it from me).

I had a quick look on the net to research it - I’m nothing if not diligent - and by an extraordinary measure of good luck, I found the end of Runaway Bride on YouTube. You can look at it here or on the player below. Honestly, I’m not making this up - this is almost exactly where I came in.

Obviously, if you haven’t seen the film and don’t want to see - or hear about - the last six minutes because you really, really hope to see it in the future, you should probably go away. Not because I’m worried about spoiling it for you - you should just go away.

I came in as Roberts and Gere were having one of those ‘serious conversations’ out on the most fake-looking balcony I’ve ever seen. Honestly, there are school productions of Romeo and Juliet with more convincing balconies and there are daytime soap-operas made with a budget less than the cost of a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich that have more realistic and natural lighting.

So Roberts (who should never wear a turtle-neck - her head and neck appear to be all part of the same long, weird protrusion), gives Gere a stinking pair of running shoes. ‘Cos she’s the runaway bride. Get it. It’s symbolic n’ stuff. At least I think it is - I missed the start you see.

Then she proposes in a sickening, candied, Hollywood manner (listen to where the violins come in on “I guarantee we’ll have tough times”). He puts on some mellow jazz on his (of course) retro sound system like a giant, grey-haired cliché and they dance.

Nauseating, right?

Right. But I could have forgiven it (just), if not for what followed. An achingly awful wedding scene on top of a frickin’ hill with autumn leaves all around. Please. Stomach-churning.

But wait. They’re not done making me sick. The music reaches a crescendo and... What’s that? Why, it’s all their friends running up the hill towards them, clapping and cheering as they come. There goes that delicious Thai curry I had for dinner.

As they ride off on horses (maybe it makes sense if you’ve seen the rest of the film), Joan Cusack, signals the end credits by screaming annoyingly into a phone and a montage of execrable, cringeworthy scenes of staggering odiousness follows...

Gape, dumbstruck, at a choir spontaneously bursting into a chorus of Hallelujahs as they hear the news. Wonder at the baker-woman throwing flour in the air and marching inanely. Rub your eyes to make sure you’ve really seen the priest and nuns running joyously across a field. Cower, repeating “no, no, they wouldn’t...” as you watch the quirky granny running/knitting because you know - you just know - they’ll have her turn and follow that hunky looking bloke. Wish, wish harder than you’ve ever wished, that you could be close enough to that bloke with the guitar to punch him in the conk.

Six minutes.

More traumatic and damaging than anything Peter Jackson has done. Peter, all is forgiven - I’ll even go and watch your two-and-a-half day director’s cut of The Hobbit when it’s out.

Six minutes of Runaway Bride...


Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That #19 - King Kong (2005)

In which Gerry Hayes keeps his distance for fear of colossal, monkey onanists...

King Kong, 2005.

Directed by Peter Jackson.
Starring Jack Black, Naomi Wattsm Adrien Brody.
Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson.

Peter Jackson takes another fourteen hours of my life. At least that’s what it felt like. Eighth wonder of the world, my arse.

Another Jackson-helmed CGI epic. Another film that’s at least twice as long as it should be. Wait, wait, I know - we can cram some more computerised monkeys in here. And dinosaurs, yeah, let’s get some dinosaur action. What else can we do? Are CGI kitchen sinks scary? No? Wait, how about big frickin’ bugs?

Jack Black [Yeah, really... I know... I like Jack Black and I can’t figure out what he’s doing here... I do like him... Yeah, fair enough, all his films are tripe but, you know he plays guitar and stuff... Yeah, he opened for Metallica... Yeah, it was a bit crap - fair enough] plays Carl Denham, a dodgy filmmaker. He persuades Ann Darrow (Watts) to accompany him to Skuuuuull Islannnnd (if you could read that in a wobbly, scary, inner-voice that’d be great, thanks) where he’s going to make a dodgy movie. Also along for the trip is handsome, rugged, screenwriter, Jack Driscoll (Brody). Driscoll and Darrow fall for each other along the way.

As if! For a start, screenwriters aren’t handsome and rugged - they’re pale and pasty creatures. Mostly photophobic, their skin has taken on an ashen pallor from years of being lighted only by a computer monitor. Their feeble arms can lift nothing heavier than a mug of coffee and beautiful ladies never fall for them on sea voyages to dangerous islands.

So they find the Skuuuulll Islannnnnd and after a bit of a brouhaha with the natives, Darrow is kidnapped to be offered to their monkey overlord, Kong.

I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but Kong is a massive great gorilla.

Sorry.

Driscoll and some of the others form a search party to, erm, search for her. Along the way, they spend roughly five hours fighting with and being chased by the aforementioned giant creatures. It just goes on for ages. Really ages.

Not, however, as long as Kong’s fight with the frickin’ T-Rexes. Jackson piles more and more ACTION in and Kong, while holding Darrow in one hand, fights off exactly seventy eight dinosaurs. This takes some time - I’d say about seven hours of screen time - and eventually Darrow falls asleep, bored with all the ACTION. Kong takes pity on her and, after the T-Rexes taste dino-defeat, he and Darrow share a tender moment.

Driscoll, not knowing that he’s now one corner of a sickening human/giant-simian love triangle, rescues her and, next thing you know, Kong’s captured and shipped off to New York where they love to stare at freaks.

Before you can say, ‘nothing could possibly go wrong’, it all goes wrong and Kong’s off rampaging through the city. Darrow follows the trail of flung giant-monkey faeces to calm Kong down and they have a romantic skate about on the ice in Central Park. This was the final straw for me and I started shouting at the screen, “It’s rubbish. This film is made out of rubbish. They’re making films out of rubbish. Next thing they’ll be making The Hobbit. You’ve gotta tell them. You’ve gotta tell them!”

So, beauty killed the beast and Peter Jackson killed another bundle of my will-to-live cells. If I were keeping score, he’d be doing pretty well at this stage.

A prize of a giant monkey-turd to anyone that spots the other film I paraphrased in a terrible manner while slagging off King Kong.

Related:

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #18 - Hot Fuzz (2007)

In which Gerry Hayes dons mirror sunglasses so people can’t see when he falls asleep...

Hot Fuzz, 2007.

Directed by Edgar Wright.
Starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Olivia Colman, Paddy Considine, dozens of other British actors who you know and love and have seen in countless other films and TV shows.
Written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg.

I don’t know what it is about Simon Pegg. I actually like him but I can’t seem to get on with a lot of his films - particularly those that he had a hand in creating. I’ve tried. Really, I have. It’s just that I can’t see what other people see when I watch this film (or Shaun, or Fat Boy). It just leaves me cold and I think that maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe I’m the problem and the giant hordes that watched and loved Hot Fuzz are right. Maybe I’m the one that’s out of touch.

Pretty soon, though, I remember that I’m definitely right and that this film just isn’t that funny.

You know the plot. Pegg is Nick Angel (the first in a series of ridiculous character names that exist only for comic effect that isn’t there). He’s super-cop. The officer with the best arrest record in London and a right pain in the arse. His colleagues ship him off to Sandford - a sleepy country village - as they’re fed up looking at his joyless mush and listening to his humourless treatises on the letter of the law. I sympathised immediately.

Despite being a tiny town with no crime, Sandford has a well-staffed police contingent. Jim Broadbent is the inspector in charge of officers played by Frost, Colman, Considine, Bill Bailey, Rafe Spall and others. Considine and Spall are mildly amusing as smartarse detectives but the others just play the bumbling bumpkin parts. We’re simple folk ‘round these ‘ere parts.

So we’re right into ‘fish-out-of-water’ territory as Angel tries to settle in to an environment not used to his sort of officiousness. I sense the opportunity for some amusing gags then. Sadly, the writers didn’t.

Then it becomes a skit of Midsomer Murders, albeit a fairly uninteresting one. More murders in various country-styles and Angel becomes increasingly frustrated at the failure of the local force to properly investigate. A cloaked figure attempts to bring some Wicker Man, cop-in-country-village-mystery into things but just seems a bit sad. Still though, intrigue raised, all that remains is to throw in a couple of high-adrenaline chases to bring us to the final revelation.

Which I won’t talk about.

Except to mention the showdown. What it’s all clearly been leading up to. By-the-book Angel has armed himself to the teeth and gets in a gunfight with a number of bad-guys. The problem is, the film can’t get over its goodie-goodie, middle-class, everything’s-ok-really core and nobody actually gets killed or badly hurt. There’s more bloodshed in an A-Team shootout. This is, I think, the biggest problem of Hot Fuzz - it’s all too nice. I’m guessing that’s what they were going for but I don’t feel it works. Granted there’s a dark underbelly but it’s hammed-up so much (by a cast with dozens of big names) that it becomes pantomime. Again, possibly that’s what Wright was after. Still... The whole thing just doesn’t really gel. It can’t seem to settle on a consistent ‘feel’ and I just can’t get on with it.

Anyway, in the end, Nick’s character arc is complete and he’s learned a little something about himself. Just in time for a last twist and a final big-bang/feeble grab for attention before they all live happily ever after.

I tried to like it. Really.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #17 - X-Men (I, II and III)

In which Gerry Hayes dons his yellow lycra con-outfit and tries to hide from the geeks...

X-Men, 2000.
X2, 2003.
X-Men: The Last Stand, 2006.

Directed by Bryan Singer (I and II), Brett Ratner (III).
Starring a bunch of weird mutants.


TV’s been having an X-Fest lately and I’ve been exposed to more X-Men than is strictly healthy for my mental health. The films, that is; I can’t speak for the comics. I’m not a fan and I’m unaware of how faithful the film representations of character, plot, world, and such are to the comic originals. Probably not very, but I dunno.

Certainly the comics are popular and perhaps that has to stand for something. Still, you have to consider that the films were popular enough to manage two sequels and one spin-off so far. Popularity isn’t really any indication of quality then.

Strictly speaking these films are relatively mediocre in terms of plot, characterisation and acting. Still, though, probably not enough to land them in my Zone Of Whinge.

So why are they here then?

Well, this is where we come back to the original source. What can turn an ordinary, lacklustre, uninspired blockbuster into a Christmas dinner? It’s the damn mutants. They’re just so... so crap. Most of them have rubbish powers. Really, really rubbish.

At least Wolverine - who is the only one with any depth (although not much) due to a slight hint of a back-story - has big claw things and a skeleton made of frickin’ metal or something. That’s at least a bit interesting. Let’s consider his buddies though.

Cyclops whose eyes are so bright, he’s gotta wear shades? Please. And he’s pretty cocky for a bloke that can’t manage his giant eye-laser.

Storm? She’s the worst mutant ever. Ooooh, she can make it go a bit foggy and can generate masses of lightning all around her which rarely actually hits anything that might be helpful. She might just be of some use farting up a breeze if you needed to get some washing dry but, other than that, she’s a complete waste of space. And why does she get a cape? Just so we can see it flapping in her arse-wind as she floats about shooting useless sparks randomly about the place.

Then there’s Iceman who can freeze ponds to take girls skating so they can fall - under the weight of incredible cliché - into his arms. Pah! That kid with the feathery, angel wings - who showed up just in the nick of time to save someone using his flying abilities - Pish. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that Kelsey Grammer plays blue, furry, giant radio-psychiatrist, Beast.

So much for the good guys. Maybe the bad guys are more interesting.

Nope. They’re led by Gandalf who wears a, frankly ridiculous, Magneto helmet that doesn’t even have the production values of one you might see on a nine-year old at a convention. His power is that he can move metal things about with his mind. Even when he moves the entire Golden Gate Bridge across the bay, I still thought that was a rubbish power.

Mystique can look like things. She can even make clothes appear on her, otherwise blue and naked, body. Vaguely interesting only.

Toad just jumps about and has a long tongue. Popular at parties, perhaps, but pointless here. Juggernaut? Jesus wept. Maybe that bloke whose astonishing power is to turn into a hedgehog is more interesting. Ha, of course he’s not.

I could go on. And on. You see the problem? Almost all the mutants are dull. How can you have an interesting battle between arch-nemeses, Bloke-Who-Can-Move-Metal-Things and Bloke-Who’s-Bald-And-In-A-Wheelchair? You can’t. It’s all just a mound of pants.

And how come no two mutants ever have the same mutant-power? How come no-one ever shows up and says, “No way! You can move metal things about a bit? Me too. What are the odds, eh?”

Well?

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #16 - Hannibal Rising (2007)

In which Gerry Hayes wishes he was drunk...

Hannibal Rising, 2007.

Directed by Peter Webber.
Starring Gaspard Ulliel, Li Gong, Rhys Ifans.
Screenplay by Thomas Harris based on a novel by Thomas Harris.

I almost don’t want to include Hannibal Rising in this column because it is one of those films that has waded so far into the excrement that it has composted and bloomed into something unintentionally hysterical. Normally, I’d recommend you see a film like this with some beers and some friends - it will make for an astonishingly funny couple of hours. However, as it seems to be further indication of the inexorable slide of the Lecter saga into arsedom and Thomas Harris’ slide into dim-witted-up-his-own-arsedom, I’m including it here.

Let’s chart the Lecter canon so far:

Manhunter (1986) - actually a pretty good film if you can get past the Miami Vice suits and the bitchin’ 80’s soundtrack. Brian Cox’s Lecter isn’t bad but pales in comparison to Hopkins’ and he shouldn’t wear those big wooly socks - that’s not Lectery.
Silence Of The Lambs (1991) - Splendid stuff and deserving of the respect it receives.
Hannibal (2001) - Hmmmm. Moore is good. Hopkins is Lecter. Daft in places, it’s, at least, watchable and one of the few examples of a film that’s better than the book (which is astounding in it’s awfulness).
Red Dragon (2002) - It’s essentially Manhunter with better suits. Good performances and a good cast but with a whiff of cash-in starting to permeate the cinema.
Hannibal Rising (2007) - The whiff has grown to a noxious foetor that seems to be coming from the pen of Thomas Harris; a solid titanium, diamond-encrusted fountain pen filled with past glories and bum-juice.

Spoilers follow.

This one’s a prequel (and we all know how great they are, right George?). It’s the tale of how a sweet little boy like young Hannibal could become the inhuman, cannibalistic monster that we all know and love. Obviously then, this is a delicate, intricate examination of abnormal and developmental psychology; a detailed study of the roles played by biological, psychosocial and sociocultural causal factors.

Nah, a bad guy eats his sister.

We meet Hannibal and his loving family living in a giant castle in Lithuania at the end of the second world war. They have to flee when the castle is taken over by soldiers. Best I can tell, they flee all of a hundred yards or so to their lodge house. There, before you can scream, “STUKA!!!”, a Stuka crashes into a tank and kills Hannibal’s parents. As if things couldn’t get any worse, Rhys Ifans arrives with a band of bad guys. Cut off as the winter closes in, the bad guys get peckish and pop Hannibal’s sister in the pot - “Oh, the trauma, it’s making me become a... a... a cannibal!”

Suddenly it’s eight years later and Hannibal (Ulliel) still hasn’t managed to make it out of the grounds of his folk’s castle. Now it’s been turned into an orphanage and he lives there. Yeah, I know - don’t expect things to get better though. He escapes the orphanage after meting out some poetic justice and tracks down his aunt (Li Gong) who seems to be a ninja. She teaches him the way of the exploding fist, or the sharp sword, or some damn thing. As a thank you, he has sex with her.

Suitably armed with sword and thoughts of revenge, he goes looking for the men that ate his sister. It all gets even more insane and Harris’ masterful gift for writing half-baked scenes and abominable dialogue comes, even more, to the fore. In one scene, Hannibal - who’s wearing a sword, Blade-style, down his back - is shot by a bad guy, in the back. The bad guy scoffs, “Ha! Shot in the spine!” Guess what his mistake is (other than actually saying “shot in the spine”).

Most of the film’s like that. Nonsensical nonsense written by Harris and bodged into something resembling a film by Weller, who should know better. Far from getting an insight into how a monster is made, we just get an insight into Harris’ deteriorating creative mind - really, one good book (Red Dragon) and he’s managed to drag it out into a giant, golden mountain of cash. Incidentally, you’ll have noticed I didn’t mention Silence Of The Lambs as being a good book - that’s because it’s essentially Red Dragon with the killer’s nickname changed. There are whole passages the same.

Possibly this particular steaming turd would have been better if Harris had just kept to recycling the good bits from earlier books/films. As it is, at best, it’s an excuse to get your mates round for some beers and belly-laughs.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #15 - The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

In which Gerry Hayes tries to insert a USB cable into the base of his skull to avoid having to type this stuff...

The Matrix Revolutions, 2003.

Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski.
Starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving.
Written by Andy and Larry Wachowski.

Matrix III. Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that the first two were wonderful - you’ve got to give some credit to the first film for giving the sci-fi movie genre a hefty kick up the arse and there were about fifteen minutes of the second film that didn’t suck - but, Matrix Revolutions just hoovers up everything around it.

One major problem - too little bullet-time jumping about in PVC pants. Where was the damn matrix? Didn’t feature enough (the film could easily just have been called Revolutions) and all that post-apocalyptic, grimy, grey, stuff with living underground and the spaceships that aren’t spaceships is just too depressing and dull.

Another issue - it tried to get too damn clever for its own good. In the first Matrix, the science-bit comprised of Morpheus saying ‘they use humans as batteries’. The rest of the film was just lots of fighting and shooting and whatnot. Ok, the geeky could argue that all Matrix films tried to be clever by their intricate and ingenious weaving of Judeo-Christian-Greco-Franco beliefs, mythology and general meanderings, but lets face it - it wasn’t really clever. More annoying. Reloaded (Matrix II), with it’s interminable conversation between Neo and Colonel Sanders sent my brain to sleep, with my arse following close behind (as it normally does). Revolutions spreads its attempts at intelligence over its two-hour running time and, while trying to be clever and to tie up the trilogy, just ends up being more daft than the others.

We find Neo (Reeves) in a coma after stopping the robo-squid in the second movie. Oddly enough, there seems to be more going on in his comatose brain than in his waking one - he’s chatting away to people in a subway station that probably represents something metaphysical that the Wachowskis think is smart. Or, maybe not, as Morpheus and Trinity (Fishburne and Moss) decide to rescue his brain from the train-world. I don’t really know - it’s boring and complicated at the same time and I started doing reruns of The Young Ones in my head (the one where Neil biffs himself in the face with a frying pan, if you’re interested).

Loads of other psuedo-clever stuff happens and it turns out that Agent Smith (Weaving) is outside the Matrix. Or maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s The Oracle. Or maybe it’s one of his clones, although technically, can they be called clones?

We visit Zion, the bastion of humanity where we meet ‘That Pipsqueak Rudy’ - I can’t remember what his real name is but he’s some astonishingly annoying kid who runs around at Neo’s heels and seems like he’d happily clean up after a Neo wet fart. We also get to witness some sort of Zion rave which degenerates from a trippy, drum n’ bass dance-off into a mass orgy. And we learn that The Machines (ooooh, The Machines) are digging holes to attack the human rats sheltering and shagging in Zion. To defend the city, the humans have those mechanical-army-leggy-robot-things like Ripley had in Aliens except these have big guns built into the arms.

Neo sets off on a mission of mediation to talk to The Machines (ooooh, The Machines). He strikes a bargain that The Machines (ooooh, oh never mind) will all live happily with the humans if he, Neo, will stop Agent Smith who’s gone all mental in the matrix and is messing up the place like that drunken bloke who pukes in your kettle at a party.

This premise leads to the big showdown, the culmination of three movies worth of antagonism - Neo versus Smith: Rumble In The Rain. While all the clone-Smiths look on, Neo and Smith duke it out.

And it’s rubbish.

Really. The big climax comes with a big ‘anti’ prefix. This is the best they can do after I sat through six-odd hours of this stuff? Rubbish. Neo loses but wins and it all goes back to normal, except Neo’s gone - or maybe he’s not - and everything’s different - or maybe it’s not.

Should have left it at one.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #14 - Quantum of Solace (2008)

In which Gerry Hayes keeps looking around to see if John Cleese is going to pop up in a white coat, offering a titanium codpiece with a built in iPod and lemon-zester.

Quantum Of Solace, 2008.

Directed by Marc Forster.
Starring Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Giancarlo Giannini.
Written by Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.

Think Casino Royale was the return of Bond? You’d be wrong - it’s Quantum Of Solace. If Casino Royale was ‘Bond for a new generation’, Quantum Of Solace is ‘lets slip a bit of old-generation Bond in and, for the next one, we can get John Cleese back’.

There may be spoilers.

I had high hopes. I liked Casino Royale. I liked Daniel Craig as Bond. I liked the new, grittier, Bourne-ier Bond. I hoped QoS would be more of the same.

All I got was a little bit of the same. Sure there are some Bourney bits - some good fights and chases and whatnot but there’s too much of the old Bond sneaking its way back in. The airplane dogfight for instance. Just because it’s ruggedly handsome Daniel Craig flying - and leaping out of - the plane doesn’t make it any less ridiculous than if it had been Pierce Brosnan. And, Bond’s seduction of the, ludicrously named, Strawberry Fields seemed to have Roger Moore leering over it, eyebrows raised, saying “you seem to be attempting re-entry, old boy.”

In Casino Royale, when asked if he preferred his drink shaken or stirred, Craig’s Bond replied, “do I look like I care.” In QoS, he sits quietly in the first class section of a plane, drinking to forget his pain, as the bartender lovingly lists the recipe for his vodkatini in exacting detail, right down to the girlish twist of lemon. Now, don’t get all prissy with me and tell me ‘that’s what Fleming wrote’. I don’t care and neither should the writers and director of this. The idea with the Bond reboot was to get away from the old, and lets face it, shite Bond films. Whether out of misguided reverence, or just plain silliness, making Craig into Roger/Timothy/Pierce/Sean (i.e. the old Bond) is a bad idea. Stop it.

In Quantum Of Solace, we first meet Bond in a high-speed chase. He’s in his Aston Martin and the bad guys are after him. After he eludes them (i.e. dispatches them with flaming-carwreck-death) he delivers Mr. White (from the first movie) to M for questioning. Turns out though that he’s infiltrated British Secret Service and a traitor shoots M and helps Mr. White escape. Bond chases the traitor and duly kills him.

So far, so good. Then he’s off to Haiti however (we know it’s Haiti as the titles on screen show it in a ‘Haitian-style’ font) and here it starts getting a bit dull and silly. He finds new bad guy, Dominic Greene (Amalric) and his, rather angry, girlfried Camille Montes (Kurylenko). Blah, blah, blah, speedboat chases, airplane chases, opera, car chases, parachute-death-drops, twist of lemon, dead bloke in a dumpster (Giannini), blah, blah.

And then we’re in Bolivia. It turns out that the evil, twisted, maniacal super-villain’s dastardly plot has been to get appointed main services provider for Bolivia. Really. The super-villain wants to be in civic amenities . He’s managed this diabolical and fiendish deed by building secret, underground dams and stopping the water to at least one small village in the Bolivian Andes (we know this because we see, at length, simple, peasant-folk all gathered around as a tiny, inadequate, trickle drips from their water pipe).

Bond won’t stand for this and tracks the fiend to a hotel that seems to be made entirely of explosives. Needless to say, the volatile nature of this building is put to good use before Bond dispenses some poetic justice and the world is safe once more.

Yes, Bond is back. But it’s the crappy Bond.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #13 - Mission: Impossible II (2000)

In which Gerry Hayes just can’t stop humming that tune...

Mission: Impossible II, 2000.

Directed by John Woo.
Starring Tom Cruise, Thandie Newton, Dougray Scott.
Screenplay by Robert Towne.

Oh, god, who has the energy? It’s another Mission Impossible. That means insanely implausible and monstrously complicated and convoluted story-lines. It means The Cruiser running about a lot and jumping on or off things. Or hanging from things - he loves hanging from things. It means far-fetched technologies that, somehow, still manage to just look like crappy props. Really, who has the energy?

This MI has been directed by John Woo which means lots of slow-motion jumping on or off things and lots of slow-motion diving while shooting two handguns at the same time. Oh, and lots of slow-motion hanging from things. I hear Cruise insisted on hanging from something.

And Woo doesn’t disappoint - or rather he does. This film is almost entirely in slow-motion. It’s crammed full of slowed down scenes. If Mission: Impossible II were played at normal speed, it would only last about fifteen minutes.

To the bewilderingly complex plot: Cruise is Ethan Hunt, of course. While hanging from a cliff (you see, he loves it), a pair of sunglasses is delivered to him in a rocket fired from a helicopter (this sounds even more nuts when it’s written down). They’re magic sunglasses that can talk and give him information about his next impossible mission before exploding in slow-motion.

So, his mission - and he chose to accept it - is to enlist the help of, professional thief, Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Newton) and report for a briefing. He manages to recruit Nyah by being charming in slow-motion while running her off the road and over a cliff. After some slow-motion sex, they learn that a bad-guy, Sean Ambrose (Scott) has stolen some buckets of bird flu named after characters from Greek mythology (thereby proving the writer is a learned and erudite man). In order to retrieve it, it’s necessary for Nyah to sleep with the bad-guy and for The Cruiser to hang from things.

Oh, and it’s also necessary for pretty much everybody to wear flawless disguises to confuse you into thinking the plot is more clever than it actually is. For instance, Ambrose disguises himself as Hunt and his disguise is so utterly perfect that you think it’s the real Hunt... right up to that edit just before he pulls off a ridiculously unconvincing rubber mask and simultaneously gets taller.

Obviously, with their advanced technology, spy-prostitutes, and Ethan’s hanging abilities, the good-guys triumph. Granted, it’s necessary to shoe-horn in a few more slow-motion scenes: Ethan diving while shooting two guns, Ethan handsomely riding a motorcycle, Nyah’s hair fluttering in the wind while doves flap about - that sort of thing - but good prevails.

As MI’s go, this is not even very good. It’s got Woo stamped all through it like a stick of seaside rock and all that style just makes for a complete lack of atmosphere. It’s the most vapid of the bunch and is really only entertaining if your brain works at a speed where the slow-motion scenes seem well paced.

Or if you like hanging from things.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #12 - 88 Minutes (2007)

In which Gerry Hayes repeatedly mouths the word “huh?”

88 Minutes, 2007.

Directed by Jon Avnet.
Starring Al Pacino (really), Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski, Amy Brennerman, Neal McDonough.
Written by Gary Scott Thompson.

88 Minutes is one of those films you watch open-mouthed wondering how such a thing could ever be - how someone could turn in a script like that, how a studio would stump up money to make it, how it could attract someone with Pacino’s cachet? These are all excellent questions that deserve answers. I have none. 88 Minutes is simply, inconceivably, massively awful.

If you’re a writer, you watch 88 Minutes and ask those questions like everyone else. Then, if you’re a glass-half-full writer, you think “wow, if that can get made and not get sent straight to the bottom shelf of a DVD store, there’s hope for me” and you start frantically typing a first draft of 90 Minutes, ‘cos that’s two better. If you’re a glass-half-empty writer, you throw things about the house in a rage because hacks like this have Hollywood sewn up and what the hell chance do you have with your carefully crafted, beautifully imagined adaptation of one of Dostoyevsky’s lesser-known novellas? Glass-half-flempty people will do both. I assume.

Such emotions are natural on viewing 88 Minutes because it really is very bad indeed.

The plot, as best I can ascertain, concerns forensic psychiatrist, Jack Gramm (Pacino). A few years ago, his expert testimony convicted a serial killer to death and the sentence is about to be executed (pun intended). However, fresh victims start to show up leading some to suspect that maybe the wrong man was convicted. So far, so by-the-numbers. But then Jack gets a phone call that tells him he’s only got 88 minutes to live. He has to solve the mystery in real time, à la 24. The race is on.

Now, in and of itself, it’s not the most awful plot I’ve ever heard. It’s not hugely original but it had potential for a couple of hours of entertaining vapidity. 88 Minutes has transcended vapidity however. The writer moved 88 Minutes from ‘meh’ to ‘what in the name of sonny-Jesus did I just see?’

Gramm is your standard cliché - intelligent, troubled guy who’s a womaniser and drinks too much. In case we don’t realise this, one of his buddies actually says, “you’re a womaniser and you drink too much.” As further proof, there are lots of flashbacks of Gramm drinking and every woman in the film throws themselves at him (except his gay PA, who explains that she won’t throw herself at him because she’s gay).

The dialogue throughout is a masterclass in how-not-to. It’s on-the-nose and obvious, it’s plain stupid, or it serves only to provide incredibly clumsy exposition. I’m guessing that many scenes took multiple takes as the actors pissed themselves laughing at the lines they’d been given.

The story twists and turns in utterly aimless fashion. Is it trying to throw us off or does it really not have clue where it’s going (it’s the latter, by the way)? There are laughable flashbacks; both to Jack’s previous night’s drinking as he thinks, thinks, thinks to remember important clues, and to an idyllic memory of a child flying a kite which hints at Jack’s inner turmoil. Well, I say ‘hints’...

Truth be told, I’m having trouble articulating how dreadful 88 Minutes is. There is little doubt that without Pacino’s name attached, this would be floundering at the bottom of bargain-bins, but even Pacino phones it in. It’s obvious that his hearts not in it and as for the rest of the cast, where do I start?

Brennerman doesn’t care. McDonough just goes for ‘cold psycho’ and fails to pull it off. I have to assume Alicia Witt is capable of better simply because she’s so wonderfully, wonderfully pretty, but she certainly didn’t act her way out of this wet paper bag. To be fair to her though, she was given some of the worst lines of the film - “what kind of sick, twisted mind could do such a thing?” (Incidentally though, if Alicia would like to get together to discuss classic movies - perhaps over a tea and some cupcakes - I’m sure I could get Mrs. Hayes out of the house for a few hours). The only one that actually seemed to be trying was Sobieski and she certainly wasn’t acting kosher.

Because of the ham, you see? The ham? Forget it.

To list everything that’s wrong with 88 Minutes would take that long and longer. Suffice it to say, it’s certain to rank among the worst films you’ve ever seen.

And for that reason, you really should see it.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #11 - Deep Impact (1998)

In which Gerry Hayes beats up Elijah Wood to steal his salvation-ticket for the comet-shelter. Wood’s only short and if Hayes can avoid his massive feet, he should be ok...

Deep Impact, 1998.

Directed by Mimi Leder.
Starring Téa Leoni, Robert Duvall, Elijah Wood, Morgan Freeman, Leelee Sobieski
Written by Bruce Joe Rubin and Michael Tolkin.

Ahh, the nostalgia. The summer of the big-bastard-rock-hitting-the-earth movies. Armageddon was all flashy and Aerosmithy and Burce Willisy while Deep Impact was the serious one, the thinking man’s disaster movie. Well, if for ‘serious’ you mean ‘exceedingly dull and dour’ and if for ‘thinking man’ you mean ‘easily entertained simpleton’ then this statement is true. Don’t get me wrong here - I’m not saying that Armageddon’s any good but at least it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Deep Impact wants to transcend action/disaster movies and be a human drama. Noble but awful.

Wood plays Leo Biederman, a geek who, while peering through his telescope at the wonders of the night sky, spots a comet. At the same time, a real astronomer, named Wolf, also spots it. Wolf seems unable to operate most forms of modern communications equipment and speeds off in his car to tell people of his discovery. He crashes and dies for no good plot reason (as his news obviously gets out and the comet is called Wolf-Biederman in honour of him and Leo).

Leoni is Jenny Lerner, a dour-faced, reporter for MSNBC. (This is the MSNBC movie, you see. I’d hazard that the logo is on the screen for at least a third of the film. And if it’s not, then it’s Internet Explorer, or Smirnoff, or Rothmans, or other ads ad nauseam. Deep Impact was, for me, one of the first films where the product placement became so prominent it kept taking me out of the movie). Lerner is investigating a politician’s affair with someone called Ellie but, wouldn’t you know it, her sources are wrong and Ellie is really ELE or Extinction Level Event - there’s a frickin’ comet heading straight at us, run people, RUN!

But nobody runs much in this film. Even when faced with certain, fiery - or watery - death, most people remain slow and polite instead of regressing to looting, stealing, murdering, bastards as, in real-life, most of them do at the drop of a hat.

Then there’s Duvall. He’s an astronaut who’s not respected by his younger and cockier crew even though he once flew a rocket or something. He and his crew, after a tearful goodbye scene lasting at least forty minutes, fly off on a spaceship to blow up the comet in a, massively-convoluted, massively-ridiculous, action scene filled with special-effects. They make an arse of it and just blow the comet into two chunks, both still bound for Earth, instead.

Back on Earth, Morgan Freeman is the president and he’s been building a huge hole in the ground where a million people will live in order that the human race survive the ELE. Other than the scientists and engineers needed to run the hole (read friends and mistresses of the administration), they hold a lottery to decide who’ll get to go. Little Leo Biederman doesn’t need to win though. He gets a ticket just because he spotted the damn comet that’s going to wipe out the world. When you think about it, it’s mostly his fault. Get him! Kill the witch geek!

Leo has a crush on Sobieski, who plays Sarah, and he uses his salvation ticket to cajole her into marrying him so she can be saved too. These sorts of comet-destroying-the-earth-weddings rarely work and two minutes later, she’s remembered that she’s too good for Little Leo and has decided that she’d rather stay with her parents and die horribly than go live in a hole with Leo. Her parents seem to concur.

You see? You see the human element?

It get’s better. Miss MSNBC herself, Jenny, gives up her salvation ticket too. She drives off to the beach to reconcile with her dad. They both hug and get hit in the face by an enormous tidal wave caused by the smaller comet chunk landing - sorry, impacting - in the ocean. Incidentally, they called the smaller chunk of comet Biederman after Little Leo. I’d be pissed off.

It’s the Wolf chunk that’s the problem though. That’s the biggie. Luckily, the astronauts, who seem to have been following the comet home but doing nothing about it for the last five months, remember that they’ve got some leftover nukes. They fly into a hole in the comet and blow it, and themselves, up at the last minute, turning the comet into teeny-tiny bits that look just like fireworks in the sky. Hurrah for our way of life, whatever that is.

I was surprised, when I checked, to see that Deep Impact is two hours long. It felt much longer. It isn’t a special effects, action blockbuster and, like in last week’s column, perhaps it should be praised for that. The problem is that what drama it has is slow moving and wearisome. It doesn’t have enough to say about life and the human condition to carry the 110 minutes when there are no spaceships or comet impacts. And that's why it's here.

It did make me what to get my news from MSNBC though.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #10 - The Break Up (2006)

In which Gerry Hayes wishes he’d stayed at home and argued with his wife for two hours as it would have been less stressful...

The Break Up, 2006.

Directed by Peyton Reed.
Starring Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Aniston.
Screenplay by Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender.

Take one gritty, depressing, kitchen-sink drama, light it a little more brightly and pawn it off as a lighthearted, frothy rom-com. Welcome to The Break-Up.

Now, I have to be fair here. I know what they were trying to do here. I know, and I really, really respect it. Reed wasn’t really trying to pass this off as carefree romance - that’s the fault of the marketers and those idiots who make trailers. I think Reed wanted to make something a little more weighty and commendable. He wanted to make something that was both funny and real. The problem is that he failed utterly at the former and, instead of real, we ended up with something that was implausible and downright depressing.

I don’t use the word ‘depressing’ lightly. I was depressed by this film. I am, genuinely, depressed when I think about it for this column. That’s not hyperbole - I really feel down when I consider this. Perhaps that says more about me than about the film. So be it.

Vaughn plays Gary Grabowski, a layabout tour-guide and Aniston is Brooke Meyers, who does something in an art gallery. For no sane reasons, they’ve ended up in a relationship and bought an apartment together.

But all is not well.

Gary’s an utter arse who can’t be bothered to pick his dirty underwear from the floor and Brooke is a nagging witch. They are Oscar and Felix with none of the charisma or humour. This is the first problem. They’re incredibly unlikable. I hated them both. Oddly, however, this didn’t make their subsequent suffering any more enjoyable to watch.

And suffer they do. In order to keep true to the title, they break-up. Oh, but there’s a rib-tickling twist. Neither wants to move out of the apartment and neither can afford to buy out the other. They decide they’ll both stay and engage in side-splitting antics in order to make the other move out.

But the antics come across as just plain mean-spirited and nasty. In what, I assume, should have been mounting levels of hilarity, I found myself growing more and more miserable and annoyed.

Perhaps the filmmakers were aware that this was a risk and so provided some thigh-slapping, light-relief in the form of Gary’s buddy, Johnny O, played by Jon Favreau. Johnny O’s advice, however, was so far removed from the ‘realism’ of the main plot as to be farcical. It might have been funny if the rest of the film had been funny but in the context of the humourless animosity of Gary and Brooke’s breakup, Johnny O’s incongruously insane pearls of wisdom serve only to make you scrunch up your face and think “what!?” To make matters worse, his blatant reversal to ‘actual good advice’ at the end is enough to make you scream at the screen.

The Break-Up is actually a brave film. It’s one that I’m surprised got made at all (although, rumour has it that it underwent some serious post-test-screening tweaking). I admire what they tried to do here but that admiration doesn’t change the fact that, as I write this, years after seeing it, I am a taut tangle of tensed muscle and have a churning pit of bile in the place where my stomach used to be. Maybe I’m not in their demographic. Perhaps it plays better to a ‘different’ cinema-goer - one who guffaws heartily as Vaughn brings home hookers or one whose regular levels of drool ratchet-up when Aniston wanders about naked - “ooooh look, I nearly saw a boob!”

Maybe.

All I know is that I’d rather have my bleak, vindictive spite served up as such and not packaged as playful, bubbly merriment. The Break-Up is not funny and it says far too little about anything of import to justify the enmity in which it indulges. And, if this week’s column is less jocular than usual, it’s because just thinking about The Break-Up has left me morose and angry.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #9 - The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

In which Gerry Hayes stares down the flaming maw of the fanboys and bellows “You shall not pass!”

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, 2001-2003.


Time to incur the wrath of the Tolkienites. I’ll have hordes of them sending death-threats in beautifully penned but barely decipherable variants of Elvish. They’ll swarm, costumed as Middle-Earth heroes and hobgoblins, around my house and set up sophisticated facsimiles of the Shire in which to camp. The hippy fans will get stoned and play guitar while the geek fans will politely ask if they can plug in an extension cable through my window so they can run their Wiis before calling me a loser, throwing an egg at me and missing. Then they’ll continue work on their Sindarin/Quenya/l33t dictionary. Whenever I leave the house, the ones dressed as Orcs will rage at me in cockney accents and I’ll be able to make out a few badly-adapted Klingon costumes in their number.

I care not though, for it must be stated: Lord Of The Rings is pants.

There. I’ve said it. Do your worst.

Now, while I may have been kidding a little on the geek thing (for I am something of a geek myself, only cooler and I’ve kissed an actual girl), I’m not kidding about Lord Of The Rings.

Before we start, it’s time for a full disclosure. I was taken in. I actually own all three films on DVD. The special editions, too. I am deeply ashamed of this and, to atone, I flagellate myself nightly while watching Lawrence of Arabia. Or porn. Mostly porn. But I digress. I went to the cinema to see all three and I watched the first two, extra-long, on DVD. By the time the third DVD arrived, the scales had been lifted and it sits, unwatched in its massive gatefold case.

They were beautifully filmed, you see. The cinematography was astonishing. The direction was good. The acting was ok in most places. Technically, and visually, the special effects were amazing.

So what’s the problem?

The story. It’s just tedious, turgid, tosh.

Hobbits and elves and dwarves and orcs and uruk-hai and humans and dragon-things and rock-things and humans and a big eye on a tower and wizards and oh, Christ, my will to live is draining, draining, inexorably draining away.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “What gives, Hayes? You’re supposed to be slagging off films, not the immense, dreary novels on which they’re based.”

Indeed.

However, the books are the source material. Even though they seem well adapted (I say ‘seem’ as I stopped reading the first book when the willow tree bored the Hobbits to sleep and Tom ‘Jar Jar’ Bombadil had to sing to the tree to save them), they still tell the same interminable story. I feel justified in bad-mouthing the films because they stuck so well to the source.

Can Peter Jackson be blamed for this? Sort of. It was his bloody idea. Ok, so he makes it all look nice but, you know, lipstick on a pig and all that. Apparently, Jackson originally planned to make two movies (one of the things I learned from the mountain of DVD extras) but, bizarrely, some guy in the studio thought that a movie per book would be the way to go. On the face of it, this is a fantastic idea; a studio actually wanting to do something right, to be faithful to the books. Brilliant. Except they decided to do it with these books and we’ve ended up with ten-odd hours of beautiful dishwater.

And I bought them. I’m as guilty as anyone.

You all know the story. Short blokes with big feet have evil ring. Have to throw it in a volcano that’s miles away. They get in scrapes along the way and meet many fantastical creatures and whatnot. Blah, blah, swords, arrows, horses, hairy-feet, Smeagol, nasty hobbitses, grumpy trees, Christopher Lee, big bird, big spider. Repeat for ten hours. The end.

I’d hazard that Peter Jackson owes me (hang on... first two twice and last one once, plus extended bits, plus extras, carry the one...) at least twenty hours of my life back. That’s nearly a day! I know a number of people like me too - disillusioned people who bought into this white-elephantine trilogy - who also want those hours back. What about it, Jackson?

Predictably, however, I also know people - more than a few - who count these among their favourite films. You could argue that it’s not a matter of right and wrong; that these things are subjective and those people who think these films are better than any others are just as right as I.

You could argue that, but you’d be just as wrong as they are.

Incidentally, does anyone want to buy all three in special, extended, DVD editions? The third one’s never been played?

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #8 - M. Night Shyamalan

In which Gerry Hayes wonders just who it is that keeps giving money to M. Night Shyamalan...

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN

Something a little different this week. Last week, as I bitched and moaned about Unbreakable, I noted that I could do a series on the films of M. Night Shyamalan. I won’t subject you to that but I thought I’d take a look at three films here in one column.

If you’re daft enough to care, there will be spoilers.

THE HAPPENING (2008)

Bad-mouthing The Happening is like shooting giant sea-turtles in a barrel. There’s just so much that’s wrong with it that it’s hard to even know where to start. Even the film’s tagline is so achingly awful that makes your teeth cry: We’ve Sensed It. We’ve Seen The Signs. Now... It’s Happening.

What there is of a story concerns our old friend, Mark Wahlberg. He plays Elliot Moore, a high-school science teacher that seems never to have taken a science class in his life - when a student answers a science question with ‘an act of nature’ (a meaningless, non-answer to anything) Elliot says ‘nice answer... science will come up with some reason to put in the books but it’ll be just a theory... we will fail to acknowledge there are forces at work beyond our understanding’. What? That’s not a science class, idiot. Elliot’s class seems one where they ‘teach the controversy’. One where science seems not to matter and moronic tosh of ‘mysterious ways beyond our ken’ is pummelled into its place.

Before he can move on to Advanced Sasquatch Anatomy, Elliot’s class is interrupted by the principal. He tells them ‘there appears to be an event happening’. Hearing this line on the trailer, before I’d even seen the film, was enough to convince me of its worth.

The event that appears to be happening, for those that don’t know, is that people all over the place get a bit dopey and then kill themselves in inventive fashion. Elliot and his missus, along with some others, flee the city.

Along the way, Elliot (the science teacher) learns, from a guy who sells shrubs, that trees can talk to bushes and that all the plants have been conspiring to kill humans by making people a bit stupid and suicidal. Armed with this knowledge, and his extensive science background, Elliot leads his band through an incongruously-placed shooting incident and further into the realm of the killer trees.

Luckily, we discover from a shoe-horned-in TV scientist that the danger will pass at (the very precise time of) nine o’clock next morning. Elliot has survived. The danger is passed. Or is it? Perhaps, in a few months, at some easily recognisable, international landmark an event will, once again, appear to happen.

Utter drivel.

SIGNS (2002)

Worst. Aliens. Ever.

Seriously. Aliens who make mysterious crop circles that announce their presence (and certainly not the presence of two half-pissed old geezers with a plank and some string) while at the same time skulking around on the roof. And what were they doing on the roof? They’ve mastered interstellar travel but need to peer in windows like space-perverts? Aliens so advanced that a redneck farmer can trap them in the pantry? Aliens that communicate on the same frequency that a baby-monitor uses? Aliens that can be killed by water? Useless, little green bastards.

But, of course, Shyamalan had to crowbar the water thing in there, didn’t he. He’s got a bit of a thing about water, has ol’ M. Fine, we get it, water. Can you stop now?

And while we’re on the subject, possibly the most absurd, half-baked idea (in a film full of them) was when Mel Gibson’s (as the less-than-reverend Hess) family heard the news that a method of defeating the aliens had been discovered but that reports were sketchy and there was little detail. IT’S WATER! Water. It’s not like the report would have required transmission of some complicated chemical formulae. Water. Why didn’t it just say ‘water kills them’? Why?

Once Mel and the gang knew though, well then they were able to make use of all those glasses of water that had, fortuitously, been placed throughout the house without so much as a lampshade on them.

Utter drivel.

THE VILLAGE (2004)

The least egregious of the three, but don’t be fooled into thinking that The Village is actually any good.

Jaoquin Phoenix plays Lucius, an arsehole who lives in a tiny village in a clearing in the woods in the 19th century. Nobody’s allowed to go into the woods as the adults say that there are monsters there. Lucius cares not a jot and after wandering in a few, cautious, yards, he seems to incur the wrath of the monsters who, under cover of night, slaughter livestock and paint red crosses on some doors. Ooooooh.

To make matters worse, Lucius is involved in a love-triangle with the local blind girl and the local idiot. Idiot stabs Lucius and, wouldn’t you know, the blind girl decides to go to get the special ‘stab medicine’ that can make him better. But, she has to go in the woods. Ooooooh.

Making her way through the woods, and mostly avoiding holes, she finds a road. And, oh heavens, a car. An actual automobile. It’s not the 19th century after all. Shyamalan, that wily trickster, has fooled us all. Really the village is just in the middle of a private woods. It was set up by a bunch of rich guys that didn’t like the violence of the modern world so they raised their kids in a forest populated by monsters that terrify them and slaughter livestock. Flawless.

The monsters aren’t real though. It’s just the grown-ups dressed up, traumatising their children to keep them safe.

We’re even told that these guys are so rich they can have air-traffic patterns diverted so that planes will not fly in the sky visible from the village, lest the children see. Personally, I’d have thought that, if they can convince the kids that a monster lives in the woods, they could probably have spun them a yarn about sky-sprites or something, but that’s probably why I’m not a rich chancer.

Ooooooh.

Oddly, The Village isn’t utter drivel. I actually quite enjoyed it for a bit. If it had continued in the ‘something in the woods’ vein, it could have been a good film. It was nicely atmospheric and had a suspenseful, eerie feel. But he had to put in the twist, didn’t he. Here, especially, it feels like a twist for twist’s sake and it ruins the film.

~~~

It’s turned out to be a little longer than usual, this week but you did get three for the price of one. Odds are pretty good that, when I can’t think of a topic next week, I’ll be kicking myself. How will I ever find another bad film to whinge about? Woe is me.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes