Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #14: Bangkok Dangerous

2008 action thriller

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Joe's a hitman with a set of rules that have made him very successful at his job. Successful and alive. While doing a series of jobs in the titular capital city, he breaks one of those rules twice, forming personal relationships with a cute little deaf girl and mentoring a young punk who he picked up to run errands for him. Should have stuck to the rules, Joe, because now you've got a mess on your hands. I think that's a Jimi Hendrix lyric, isn't it? Hey, Joe, you were messing around with a pharmacist and a pickpocket and now you've got a big old mess on your hands. Something like that.

First off--nice hair, Nicolas Cage. Second off--really terrible movie, Nicolas Cage. This is really boring stuff, and Cage sleepwalking his way through Bangkok definitely doesn't help. A better title for this would have been Bangkok Wearisome. Cage's character once again performs narrator duties, unnecessarily since in this one, the narration adds no color, no depth, no wit, no nothing to the storyline as it does in, say, a Raising Arizona or Lord of War. Speaking of that storyline, there barely enough here to be able to give anybody writing credit. It's derivative and predictable and, in case I didn't make it clear before, extremely bland, the movie equivalent of a white guy singing the blues. This is a movie that takes itself so seriously, really sapping the life and fun out of the son of a bitch. So seriously, in fact, that it strangely becomes almost impossible for the viewer to take it seriously. It all builds up to a preposterous bullet-fueled ending that ends up as more of a pretentious whimper than the kaboom it wants to be. Cage's character has this really cool ability to vanish and rematerialize a foot and a half from the person trying to kill him which is kind of neat though. There's a really great scene where Cage and another guy with a gun run on either side of stacks of water bottles in a warehouse bathed in red light and just shoot the hell out of those water bottles. This has to break the record for the highest water bottle body count in cinema history. It's all really stupid. Maybe they should have called this movie Bangkok Ridiculous instead. Or Bangkok Predictable. Or just Bangkok Silly. Whatever name you put on it, it's a terrible movie.

Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #2: Gone in 60 Seconds

2000 car movie remake

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Master car thief Memphis Raines is pulled out of retirement after his little brother Cleveland Raines gets into a little trouble. He's got three days to get a crew together and steal fifty luxury automobiles to save his brother's life. Oh, snap!

There's only one reason to watch this movie--a scene where Nicolas Cage's character, right before the start of the big car-stealin' action, pops in "Low Rider" ("All my friends know the lowrider. The lowrider is a little higher. The low rider drives a little slower. Low rider is a real goer.") because they've got fifty cars to steal in one night, damn it, and that's the only way Nicolas Cage can get juiced up for this crap. His character goes into this little trance; wiggles and then sticks his fingers up like he's either meditating or flashing gang signs or, as only Nicolas Cage can, simultaneously meditating and flashing gang signs; jerks around a bit; and then says, "Ok, let's ride." That scene is awesome! Trust me. My description of this doesn't do it justice. Take your pants off and Youtube it.

There are multiple reasons to stay away from this movie though. The overuse of the term boosting. Boosting cars, going boosting, hey--I'm boosting in here, boosting this, boosting that, Angelina Jolie's boosting, Robert Duvall knows boosting, boosting boosting, I'm a booster he's a booster wouldn't you like to be a booster too, everybody was kung-fu boosting, check it--I'm boosting, can you keep it quiet because I'm boosting, fifty car boosting--that's absurd, boosting legends, all we are saying is give boosting a chance. It was irritating. I imagined all the actors standing around, going over their lines and arguing about who gets to say boosting. "Why does Robert Duvall get to say 'boosting' twice?" "Hey, Dominic. What do you think about my character saying 'boosting' right here?" All of these characters, including Memphis Raines, are boring. Angelina Jolie brings nothing to the table. Robert Duvall is quickly becoming a movie pet peeve of mine as he just stands around and looks dopey in every movie he's in. Here, he plays a pointless character, the unflappable old-timer veteran booster type, and does his usual stellar job of standing around and looking dopey. And the producers of this really missed an opportunity by not naming his character Booster Cogburn. Giovanni Ribisi, the guy who plays Tallahassee Raines, rubs me the wrong way, too. With an action movie or heist-type movie you need one of two things: 1) Good action or 2) Good heisting. I'd prefer the meticulous planning and creative scheming over the big dumb action scenes any day. Gone in 60 Seconds actually doesn't have either one though. You get a lot of scenes with people turning keys or sneaking around or drawing lines through car names on a list (I wonder, by the way, how these people can be so high-tech and then use chalk and a blackboard for their big fifty car list) and have to wait for the very end of the movie to get a good action scene. It's a car chase with Memphis and some cops. It's so-so but nothing to pump your fist about. The best thing about this Nicolas Cage movie is that it's out of the way. Gone in 60 Seconds? I wish this movie would have been done in 60 seconds. Wakka wakka wakka!

"Keep it real. Think slow. We'll get through this." Thanks, Nicolas Cage. Those are definitely words to live by.

Shaolin vs. Evil Dead

2004 kung-fu zombie movie

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Something about the star of Kill Bill and a pair of sidekicks fighting evil and giving the dead proper burials. It involves voodoo papers. His brother's turned evil and fights against him every step of the way. There are hopping zombies all over the place, too.

First off, I want to find the guy who played Buck (Michael Bowen) in Kill Bill Volume 1 and put him in the kung-fu sequel to The Diary of Anne Frank that I plan on writing and directing some day. That way I'll be able to put "From the star of Kill Bill 1" on the top of my dvd box and make a little extra cash despite having dialogue as bad as the dialogue in this movie:

Master: Take a piss!

Kid: What? Now?

Other Kid: You heard the master. Do it.

Kid: [Pisses]

Other Kid: Master, why did you tell him to take a piss?

Master: I need virgin's pee.

See, sometimes it's poor translating combined with poor dubbing that makes it all sound much worse than it actually is, but I'm not sure that's the case here. Maybe with the later "Where do you come from, devil? How dare you invade my little brother?" is the result of the translation/dubbing combo though. This whole thing's a lot of nonsense. Why do the zombies hop? What's with the ad nauseum chanting? Why's that kid keep slamming his groin into a wall? Does a suddenly materializing Mike Tyson tattoo really give a person special powers? Why so many references to whizzing? What the hell are voodoo papers? There are a few moments when this movie almost looks good, but for the most part, it's one of those modern kung-fu flicks injected with some horror that isn't very scary and some humor that doesn't fit at all. The special effects are the scariest part of this, a kind of CGI nightmare. The Shaolin vs. Evil Dead story isn't even completed in this movie which is really frustrating. Clips during the credits promise a sequel, and it looks like they've found a way to make the special effects even uglier. I have no interest in sitting through the sequel to figure out what the hell this one was about.

Hot Tub Time Machine

2010 time travel comedy

Rating: 8/20

Plot: A couple high school buddies take one of their nephews and another high school buddy who may or may not have attempted suicide to an old haunt to have a killer weekend. Things are depressing until they get the hot tub working. When an import energy drink is spilled on the hot tub controls, it sends the quartet back to the 1980s--the worst decade ever--and they are forced to relieve a vacation from the past in order to not screw up their futures.

Is it just me or does John Cusack look really really depressed. He's features are droopy, and he just looks like all the energy has been sapped from him. I'm worried about him. If working with Crispin Hellion Glover doesn't cheer you up, I don't see what will. Glover, by the way, is the only thing this movie has going for it. In fact, the only reason I finished the movie was because I knew Crispin Glover--America's finest actor--had more scenes. The first and sadly only laugh this movie got out of me was during a scene where Crispin Glover's character is unloading suitcases from a cart. The rest of the cast (other than the terminally-dejected Cusack) is enthusiastic enough, but they've got a script that was apparently written by teenage boys of below-average intelligence to work with. Chevy Chase takes away any bonus points Crispin Glover gets this movie. Craig Robinson from The Office is fine, and I suppose most fans of this movie will argue that Rob Corddry's idiocy is the funniest part of the movie. But the story is derivative (lots of Back to the Future parallels), the allusions are too contemporary to give this movie any legs, and it depends far too much on raunchiness. If any of it was funny at all, I could excuse all that. Unfortunately, this isn't even as funny as Somewhere in Time.

And seriously, somebody needs to help John Cusack before it's too late.

Repo! The Genetic Opera

2008 genetic opera

Rating: 8/20 (Anonymous: 12/20)

Plot: It's the year 2056, and folks organs aren't working too well anymore. Luckily, there's GeneCo, a company that helps the needy get transplants. And if the patient can't make make his or her payments? Well, the organs are repossessed violently by a masked singing repo man. A girl with a mysterious illness, her dad, a grave robber, the president of GeneCo, and his idiot children all sing about it.

Apparently, there are a ton of posters for this one. One of them even clearly says at the top "From the producers of Saw" and a little bit lower "Paris Hilton" but that didn't stop my brother from grabbing this and inviting me over to watch it with him. For the most part, Repo! The Genetic Opera looks and feels just like something made by the producers of Saw that happens to have Paris Hilton in it would. For a musical to work, the music has to be good, and the throbbing gothic industrial shit in this is not, lyrically or sonically. Musically and visually, this is pretty gross. I was surprised that this movie had the budget it did. The sets were elaborate, and the dark future the makers of this envisioned is fully realized although it suffers from some CGI-ugliness. The concept is clever enough to deserve a decent budget, I suppose, but it's so poorly executed. The acting is bad universally, and strangely, a lot of the performers don't sing very well. I suppose it would be hard to have to sing such poorly written lines while trying to keep from laughing though. Perhaps that was the situation with actor Bill Moseley, a guy who's had a lengthy career doing small bits in horror movies including Army of Darkness. Nearly every time he was given screen time, I wanted to laugh, and I'm not sure that was the intention. When the producers of Saw tried to inject a little dark humor into the proceedings--a few bad puns here and there, some gross-out stuff--it didn't work at all. Repo! The Genetic Musical ends up nothing more than an attempt to make the next Rocky Horror Picture Show. I don't like that movie at all either but wouldn't even recommend this to people who do. For those out there who happen to enjoy this sort of thing, it sets up nicely for a sequel. Anonymous and I will be there opening night, probably dressed up as Blind Mag and Luigi Largo respectively.

Paris Hilton, by the way, plays a character whose face falls off. I thought for sure I was watching a Carl's Jr.'s commercial during that scene.

The Man from Earth

2007 science fiction My Dinner with Andre

Rating: 8/20

Plot: At a professor's going-away party, he makes a startling announcement, revealing to his pretentious friends that he is 14,000 years old. They're not sure whether he's crazy or telling the truth.

Despite a fantastic, intriguing premise and the delivery of a science fiction movie without a single action scene or special effect, I hated almost every second of this movie. The biggest problem is probably that I just didn't want to hang out with a bunch of smarmy college uber-intellectual professor types for an hour and a half. There wasn't a single character I would want to spend any more time with no matter how many years they've lived on earth. Unfortunately, the actors playing them weren't very good either. It's probably unfair for me to criticize the production values of this thing, but from the opening shot, I thought I was watching a car commercial. Behind the dialogue, there's this nearly constant music, stuff that I would describe as light adult techno. The story's cool and the script is intelligent, but don't get me started on plot holes, plot holes that somehow manage to exist without there even being a plot. The dialogue is heavy with historical allusions, intellectual name-dropping, and after a while it gets tedious. By the time a bomb is dropped, the only reaction that makes sense is "Oh, puhleeeze!" I did enjoy some of this film's ideas, specifically the connections made between the teachings of Buddha and Jesus, but this should have been a lot better.

Sam the Man

2000 movie

Rating: 8/20

Plot: The titular author struggles with his second novel and his relationship, probably because he isn't really a very good writer and can't stop sleeping with ever other woman he happens to sniff.

With a vanilla jazz score; a cast of television C-listers (a guy from Becker, a guy from Ed); a lead played pretentiously by Fisher Stevens, a poor man's Adrian Brody; and an alarming lack of depth for a character study like this, this movie is just generic and sucky. I couldn't stand Sam, and I got frustrated waiting for some kind of character transformation that I wasn't going to buy anyway. At one point, he describes his writing as not being a story but "a moment" and how he's focusing on what is "important" or "meaningful." Unfortunately for anybody trudging through Sam the Man, there's nothing important or meaningful here. The interactions between unlikable characters range from awkward to irritating. I'm not completely sure what director Gary Winick or anybody else involved with this project were going for, but they apparently didn't get there.

Cannes Man

1996 comedy

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Big-shot producer Sy Lerner makes a bet with a buddy that he can take any individual his buddy picks and turn him into the talk of the Cannes Film Festival. Enter Frank, a cabbie with no film experience except for some work in a video store. Sy dubs him Sy Lerner and takes him to meet some other big shots, introducing him as screenwriter Frank Rhino, writing of Con Man.

Here's a cheap one. I'm surprised so many big names (Depp, Hopper, Del Toro, even Chris Penn!) agreed to be seen in something so crappy. As a parody, it falls flat. There's nothing especially biting here and not a single laugh. A lot of the crappiness, however, is because of sub-genre inconsistency. It's uneven as a mockumentary, seeming more like a traditional and cheaply-made narrative with a bunch of interviews and poor narration thrown in. Francesco Quinn (Frank Rhino in this and Anthony Quinn's son in the real world) provides that narration. His performance was awkwardly bad, terrible even. I looked him up because he seemed familiar, and I imagine that's because he was, in a completely different sort of performance, terrorist Syed Ali in season two of 24. He was also in Platoon. Seemingly, Cannes Man (or Con Man or apparently and goofily Canne$ Man) was filmed with a scant script. A lot of the interviews seem to be select samples from much longer improvisational ramblings, and a lot of the dialogue feels more spontaneous. But for the most part, it seems as if the director gave the talent an instruction to improvise but with a "Don't Even Think About Saying Anything The Least Bit Funny" rule. An extended cameo involving Sy and Frank visiting Jim Jarmusch and Johnny Depp is probably the funniest part of the movie, but that might be the reason why it seems to clash with the rest of the story. This movie thinks it's just so clever. It isn't.

I Love You, Man

2009 movie that Cory didn't warn me about in time

Rating: 8/20 (Jen: 6/20)

Plot: Paul Rudd's character (c'mon, you know the guy) has popped the question to his girlfriend of eight months. Zooey says yes, but soon after, she and her girlfriends start thinking that it's odd that Paul Rudd's character has no male friends. He overhears a conversation about their concerns and frantically tries to befriend another male so that he'll have a best man for his wedding. Enter Jason Segal's character (you know him, too). They hit it off wonderfully because they both like Rush. However, Paul Rudd's character has problems juggling his new friendship, his life with his future wife, and trying to sell the Incredible Hulk's house.

This is rated R, and I think I figured out what that R stands for. It's R for Recycled. This is essentially an Apatow clone, raunchy as all get out; a potential frat guy favorite; a smorgasbord of references to drinking, puking on people, sex, and man caves. I would almost swear on my wife's life that almost every line in this movie has been yanked without mercy (for the audience that is) out of a handful of other recent comedies and rearranged, like a William S. Burroughs' cut-up text, into I Love You, Man's script. About 85% of that script is Paul Rudd's character (you know, that guy) being really awkward as he attempts guy talk, slanging it up and trying to match the cool he hears in the banter of other men. He succeeds in being awkward, but he doesn't quite get to both awkward and funny. An ongoing gag about Paul Rudd's character (him) sounding like a leprechaun was actually pretty funny. Pretty funny. But most of the Klaven speak just seemed like an OK supporting actor trying way too hard to be a leading funny man. The best example is in a scene where (that one guy) Paul Rudd's character's fiance finds out that Paul Rudd's character (see: any other movie or television show with Paul Rudd) plays an instrument. He repeats "I slappa the bass" ad nauseam (in fact, Paul Rudd's character [you know who I'm talking about, right?] still might be saying it) while Zooey critiques his attempt at a Jamaican accent. I can understand the scene being in the movie, but I don't understand why it had to be twenty-five minutes long. Part of the problem with this is that it seemed the performers were given lots of room to improvise. Is some of the stuff they come up with funny? Sure. But when you have almost two hours of that same kind of funny, it gets tedious. Watching people in tuxedos and fancy dresses throwing pies at each other might be funny for a couple minutes, too. Would you want to watch a two hour pie fight though? Maybe the producers of I Love You, Man just wanted to jump on the green bandwagon, recycling and reusing what's worked the last few years to assemble this all-too-predictable comedy. Or maybe they're just really lazy.

Now that I think about it, I probably would want to watch a two hour pie fight. But only if Tarantino directed it.

Medicine Man

1992 movie

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Dr. Robert Campbell, sporting a ponytail because he's the type of doctor who doesn't play by the rules, is researching in the Amazon. He believes he's found a cure for cancer. Dr. Rae Crane, possibly the most annoying woman on earth, arrives to assist him, and Campbell tries to figure out a way to get cancer so that he can avoid being around her much longer.

This movie might be worse than cancer. Lorraine Bracco. I couldn't tell if her character was irritating or if her acting was irritating or if it was an unholy combination of both of those, but I haven't been this annoyed by a character since watching Willie in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Sean Connery is playing pretty much the same guy he plays in every movie except he's got the ponytail in this one. His gruffness or misogyny or whatever you want to call it seems manufactured or heavily scripted. And that gruffness or misogyny or whatever you want to call it makes the developing relationship between the two main characters completely improbable. This movie might have broken a record for me losing interest in what's going on. I lost track about three and a half minutes in, said, "Ah, screw it. Maybe some exciting stuff will end up happening. . .or maybe Shooby Leboof will pop up later one!" and then sat in bored confusion for almost two hours. And how am I rewarded for my efforts? Treacle in the hair! I guess I now know why I'd never heard of this movie. There are a lot of images of barely-dressed native peoples if that's your bag.

Gammera the Invincible

1966 big monster movie

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Russian planes carrying nuclear bombs are shot down. This wakes up Gammera, a prehistoric turtle who eats fire, has the ability to fly, and destroys things. He's made of rubber.

The ensemble cast here just might be the worst ever assembled. And it's not the dubbing (although that is ridiculous) because the worst offenders are the American actors. The characters in this one somehow manage to be goofier than the monster, a giant rubber turtle that can scoot through the skies like a flying saucer and spew fire. There's the Japanese photographer who can't figure out what to take pictures of without being told. There's the Christian Eskimos who warn the Japanese visitors about a giant prehistoric turtle for absolutely no reason. And just the name "Gammera" spoken by Eskimos makes dogs bark and children scatter. There's the general who butchers his lines so badly that when the other characters in the room are shown, they all have expressions like they're expecting the director to yell "Cut!" and start over again. Then, the senator in the room impossibly ends up being worse! There's a dopey child actor, a kid so obsessed with turtles (of course) that his teacher is threatening to expel him from school. But standing above them all is the scientist Dr. Contrare who is shown debating another scientist on a television program. Bad acting is bad acting, and in a movie like this, it's often difficult for a bad actor to get his performance noticed. But Alan Oppenheimer's performance stands out, a crochet needle in a haystack of awful performances. You'll see Alan Oppenheimer's name as a nominee for the Torgo at the end of the year. There are some dazzling special effects in this movie--burning planes, toy boats, flying Gammera. There's an explosion described by a character with the "only a nuclear bomb can create an explosion like that" even though it looks like a cheap firecracker. And I never knew that train cars full of gas sound just like gun shots when they explode. The monster itself isn't too bad. He apparently likes children, enough for me to suspect that he's a pedophile. He doesn't seem like a very intelligent monster although he doesn't have any other weaknesses. As one scientist so expertly opines, once Gammera is on his back, he can't get on his feet again. Really? I could have been a scientist if that's all it takes. The destruction of the miniatures is entertaining, and I really like one terrible transition from an attack of an airport to a bunch of kids dancing to a rock 'n' roll song with lyrics that go "Gammera! Gammera! Gammera!" I'm easily entertained though. It all ends rather stupidly and then finds a way to end again more stupidly by throwing the words "Sayonara Gammera" on the screen.

Watched on the big screen at school with frequent interruptions from colleagues.

Tokyo Zombie

2005 zombie comedy

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Two knuckleheads who spend their work hours practicing jujitsu instead of actually working accidentally kill their boss and bury his body on Black Fuji, a giant mountain of trash and other buried murder victims. I'm not sure why exactly, but the dead on the trash mountain start coming to life and biting people. The two knuckleheads try their best to survive the zombie epidemic.

OK, Tokyo Zombie. You got me! I told myself a few weeks ago that I was done with zombie comedy movies, but you told me, "Hey now, Shane. Give me a chance. I'm from Japan." I said, "I don't know, Tokyo Zombie. I think the world just has too many zombie comedies, and I've got better things to watch." But Tokyo Zombie said, "Japan, Shane. Japan! You like Japan. I'm quirky. My comedy's dark. I'm hilarious!" I said, "Oh, I just don't know." Tokyo Zombie persisted, and I finally gave it a chance. Fooled! Other than getting to see the Japanese Rick Moranis and a twenty minute scene involving a guy ripping the head off a Howdy Doody toy, there was nothing to see here. Stylistically, it reminded me a little of Shaolin Soccer without all the cartoony special effects. The humor was dumb, lowbrow, and, worst of all, predictable. Tokyo Zombie and I won't be speaking to each other any more.