Feb 16
(Semi-)Annual
Dubious Achievement Awards Part 2:
Silliest
Happy Ending:
WINNER:
Argo
RUNNER
UP: Les Miserables
Let’s start
with Les Miserables. In heaven, everyone killed off in the June Rebellion is
going to the barricade again? What’s the message here? That their spirit of
liberte lived on in the still-more-soul crushing, continent-wide rebellion of
1848? That sounds kind of hell-ish. Or perhaps they went on to hold a revolution in
heaven? Is Les Mis secretly a Paradise Lost prequel? If you’re going to have a
musical/movie called “The Miserable Ones” then end it where it belongs: THE
JACKBOOT OF DESPOTISM ON THEIR THROATS!
No such excuses for Argo. Argo is a
perfectly fine movie, until it ends with Jimmy Carter declaring a retro-active
“Mission Accomplished” RE: the Iranian hostage crisis. Desert What-Now?
KING
OF QUEENS AWARD FOR LEAST BELIEVABLE MOVIE ROMANCE:
WINNER:
Selma Hayek & the original king – Here Comes the Boom
RUNNER
UP: Halle Berry and Tom Hanks – Cloud Atlas
Return of
the KING! In all seriousness, how and why Tom Hanks and Halle Berry end up
baby-making in Cloud Atlas is utter nonsense and richly deserving of this
award. But the whole movie is silly enough to ignore, so if future creole speaking
tribesman and space cadet hottie want to start a family, perhaps we can just suppose that memes about beauty in that era had changed.
Here Comes
the Boom, however, distills the concept in its purest form. Ridiculously gorgeous Selma Hayek, whose character is literally named “Beautiful
Flowers,” is also a talented and caring teacher at your local school. Scrappy,
tubby King of Queens teaches biology, gets his act together, makes a bunch of
immigrants US citizens, and fights in the MMA, saving his school from
bankruptcy. Selma Hayek, of course, plays no narrative function other than to
be extremely attractive (Jimmy?…Jimmy…pass that mission accomplished sign
over).
Let’s just
say what we’re all thinking: Biology? The King of Queens teaches biology? This
school has bigger problems. Everyone knows, the gym teacher is the one who
thinks he can do MMA. The King of Queens can teach gym. The biology teacher is
the one who smells slightly of formaldehyde and took his job to justify wearing
a lab smock in public. The biology teacher is the one who holds bake sales and
car washes to save the school.
Helen
Mirren Award for Least Believable Female Ass-Kicker:
TIE:
Lily
Collins – Snow White A
Kristen
Stewart – Snow White B
I’ve long
since been beaten to the punch with the obvious observation that the evil queen
in both movies is hotter than Snow White, raising the issue of whether the
mirror is broken or just the casting department. Lily Collins has a unibrow and the best I can say is that her attractiveness rivals her acting credentials. If the message was
that there is something other than physical beauty that the mirror is
measuring, it’s too subtle for this mind. Kristen Stewart is more
understandably cast to try to draw presumed Twilight fans in, but is similarly
not obscenely attractive, innocent, or talented. In general, she looks like
that red-eyed slouch in the corner of a freshman college party who has either
smoked too much weed or spent the last half hour crying because she lost her
virginity to someone who wouldn’t even stay the night. Or both. Her “inspiring”
battle speech in this movie would send the troops at Anzio sprinting back out into
the breakers.
This raises
the more curious issue of why both try to turn Snow White into an action hero,
one Robin Hood and the other Joan of Arc. The effort to modernize fairy tales
to make the women stronger is a perfectly worthwhile endeavor. But Snow White
seems particularly difficult to pull this off in without deliberately aping the
genre. Snow White is supposed to be the picture of innocence and purity. It is
these traits, her vulnerability, and ultimately her beauty, which bend the male
world to her deliverance. So when she’s
running her sword through some foe’s entrails, clad in chain mail and grit,
something of the spirit of Snow White is lost.
If you
insist on going this route, and not making a parody, then Snow White has to
redefine purity, some transcendent nymph or goddess huntress figure akin to Athena
or Diana. Just something interesting. Not a callow, 100-pound waif who can
barely lift her fake sword. Not only is neither Snow White particularly
attractive, neither looks like she can fight either. What’s the point of
changing the story to make Snow White stronger if she still looks like the old
Snow White…if a little homelier?
The
Star Wars Episodes 1-3 Award for Colossal Disappointment
WINNER:
Killing Them Softly
RUNNER
UP: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The Hobbit
is what it is – stretched into three movies to make money. The Hobbit as a book
is a motley of World War 1 era politics and the wandering plotline of
the Beowulf epic. The thing that stood out to me in this rendering was the
question: is it just the movie that’s about Zionism or was the book too? I
mean, 12 dwarves returning to their lost homeland? Ring any bells? Then again,
the dwarves lost their kingdom because of their love of gold? So is this an
anti-semitic story about Zionism? Is it that weird, English form of anti-semitism
where they just sort of disdain Jewish people rather than hate them?
For my
money, the biggest disappointment of the year was Killing Them Softly. James
Gandolfini is still wondering what his garishly pointless character was doing
in the movie. Because it has artsy touches and half a movie of Brad Pitt,
reviewers were at pains to say nice things, usually floatsam like “stylish” and
jetsam like “trading in pleasures of a rarified sort.” The message from
reviewers is, “You won’t enjoy this movie, but I did. I am superior to you.” I
did not enjoy this movie. I thought it was indulgent nonsense.
Worst
Remake:
The
Amazing Spider Man
Total
Recall
WINNER:
Total Recall
I love the
original Total Recall, but it’s not Shakespeare. They barely changed anything.
I’m not hanging on the edge of my seat waiting for whoever is playing Sharon
Stone’s character to scream, “YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I HATE THIS FUCKING PLANET.”
Isn’t a Total Recall remake the perfect opportunity to undo the first movie by
changing what’s the reality and what’s the dream?
As for
Spider Man, there’s nothing wrong with the movie other than that WE JUST HAD A
SPIDER MAN series. Marvel couldn’t keep one of their top characters on the
sideline no matter how bad Spider Man 3 was. Who are we to argue? Marvel has
taken the industry over and remade it on the comic book model; perhaps they can
just as successfully constantly regenerate the character with little down time
as they do in the paper copy industry.
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