{"id":3450,"date":"2009-05-26T17:00:39","date_gmt":"2009-05-26T21:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3450"},"modified":"2009-05-26T16:02:41","modified_gmt":"2009-05-26T20:02:41","slug":"weve-got-movie-sign-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3450","title":{"rendered":"We’ve got movie sign!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the long Memorial Day weekend, I watched a few movies — three, actually. (I won’t include the The Skydivers<\/a>, the MST3K<\/em> episode I re-watched on Monday morning. But I like coffee!) These were, in order, Baby Mama<\/a>, Terminator Salvation<\/a>, and Audition<\/a>. I don’t think you could have picked three more different movies. All of them had their moments, but all of them were, in their own unique ways, rather disappointing.<\/font><\/p>\n

Baby Mama<\/em> has a stellar and talented cast, beginning with its stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, yet it never manages to be all that remarkable. Pleasant and likable, and often quite funny, but more forgettable than anything else. Stephanie Zacharek at Salon<\/a> calls it “sometimes conventional to the point of being formulaic.” While talented comedians can sometimes rise above a mediocre script, I don’t think the cast here quite<\/em> pulls it off. (Although I will agree with Zacharek that Undercover Brother<\/em>, writer Michael McCullers’ earlier comedy, is “marvelous and unjustly overlooked.”)<\/font><\/p>\n

Terminator Salvation<\/em> is at least as good as its predecessor, Terminator 3<\/em> — which is, of course, to say not so good really, or at least significantly worse than the first two films in the series. It isn’t completely terrible, often a halfway decent summer action movie, but it’s awfully generic, incredibly cheerless, and never seems to have any real reason<\/em> for existing. Director McG almost fetishizes the machines in this film, as if that’s<\/em> what made James Cameron’s original Terminator<\/em> movies work, but he skimps on the human characters. Few of them here make any real solid impression. Christian Bale, for instance, is basically just playing a parody of himself, and those raspy bellows — which I actually defended in The Dark Knight<\/em> — did start to get on my nerves after a while. It’s tough to argue that Bale is even the star of this movie, however. Just like in The Dark Knight<\/em>, he’s more a supporting player. Sam Worthington seems to get considerably more screen time, and his is the only character with anything like a real arc. I don’t know what it says about the movie that its ostensible hero could maybe be cut from the film altogether, but it isn’t good.<\/font><\/p>\n

And then there’s Audition<\/em>, which was not at all what I was expecting — but I guess I should have come to expect that from a Japanese horror movie. Easily the best of the three films I watched over the weekend, it still left me somewhat disappointed, maybe because my expectations were so high — maybe because I had expectations at all. As Scott Tobias writes<\/a>:
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

Japanese director Takashi Miike’s astonishing, one-of-a-kind Audition<\/em> presents a sticky catch-22 situation: The best way to see it would be to stumble absentmindedly into the theater knowing nothing about it. On the other hand, only the most adventurous moviegoers would be grateful for not having been warned.<\/font><\/font><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is truly shocking — Elvis Mitchell<\/a> calls it “a test of nerves,” requiring “a strong constitution” — but maybe less so because you know the shocks are coming. Ultimately, while I’m very glad I knew it was a horror movie going in, I wish I hadn’t known the direction that horror was coming from. I wish, basically, that I just hadn’t read the plot description.<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the long Memorial Day weekend, I watched a few movies — three, actually. (I won’t include the The Skydivers, the MST3K episode I re-watched on Monday morning. But I like coffee!) These were, in order, Baby Mama, Terminator Salvation, and Audition. I don’t think you could have picked three more different movies. All of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}