Mann At Arms
Collateral
No Collateral Damage Here Folks!
Michael Mann is really the man. He’s even gots an extra ‘n’ to prove it. The dude knows action and how to make pastels look good on men (see any episode of Miami Vice). While the flamingo pinks and chalk blue duds take a vacation in Collateral, the action and thrills mos certainly don’t. This flick is all that Heat should have been, but wasn’t. Everyone expected a movie with DeNiro and Pacino facing off to be the end all, but 6 1/2 hours later, we were all morerer bored than an emery board. My expectations were set on low for this one with the thought of a Jaime Foxx/white-haired Cruise teaming, but I was proved wrong twice over. Foxx is the real deal (like his Any Given Sunday character stated, “I aint going back to the bench”) and Cruise eggscelled in a rare baddie role. And when does a movie with Mark Ruffalo Wings sporting a shady mustache ever truly blow giraffe ball sweat? Never… until we saw him bang 76-year-old Meg Ryan in Jane Campion’s In the Cut. I won’t get into plot deetz, but for those of you who caught the David car-jacking ep on Six Feet Wonder, it was like that, times 3 and with more guns and gritty camera-work. This is a muss sea y’all. You want a thriller? Skip F Murray Shamaylamadingdong’s latest and set sail on this one bizotches!
Garden State
Wrong Exit On Turnpike
Why is Zach Braff being pimped-up as the next Jesus? The way people talk, you’d think that his directorial debut was Citizen Kane for the 00’s. It’s not even Reality Bites for any generation. He’s been compared to the Woodman, Hal Ashby, and posterchild for uber-coolness, Wes Anderson, but he’s more like a film student who somehow convinced Natalie Portman to pet and neck him and wear a bathing suit. Damn I wish I was a sitcom actor with connections. I’d be like “Lohan, why don’t you stop tanning and play me love interest in this movie about my home state of Maryland. I call it, The Old Line State. So sweet-teets, is you in or is you in?” And then people would hail me as the next Kubrick and post many a compliments on this .org as they do on his ‘blog’. Sure the direction was crisp, but haven’t I seen these shots in every movie of the past ten years? Sure the soundtrack rizocked, esp Simon & G-Funk’s “The Only Living Boy In New York”, but isn’t this movie about NJ and not NY? You wouldn’t even be able to tell by one frame of the entire film… cept when you hear the word ‘Newark’ in a VO or the Jersey accents that actors keep losing. And what’s with the plot? Boy disconnected with world. Mum dies. Goes home to NJ (did he really?). Ends up reconnecting. No thanks to his father Bilbo/Ian Holm, who was more wasted in this movie than Mickey Rourke in Barfly. And what’s the story with the Method Man’s back-alley peep-show cameo? Or the dude wearing knight’s armor after boning someone’s mum? Or the shirt that matches the bathroom wall? Don’t even get me firestarted. It seems like Braffster had like 312,332,176,674,434,566 cool ideas for scenes and somehow made a movie with them all. Now its time to play with letters: ‘e’ for nice effort, ‘a’ for not awful, and ‘c’ for lets wait and c what the kid comes up with next. By the way, my new b-friend Peter Sarsgaard should be in every movie ever and win every prize known to man, ever. Forever ever never battle of evermore ever!
Cube
Rubik’s Diarrheaing In His Grave
I think this was a Sci-Fi Channel original movie, but by the looks of it, a Bar Mitzvah videographer couldn’t even conjure up something this un-umcredbile. And I wish I could build a time machine and travel back to the casting call for this shitpick. They must have eggcepted the first 7 people who walked thru the door who were willing to work for Polly-O-String Cheese.