REVIEW - more movies, part 3

i'm continuing a largely nic cage-centric movie rampage. here are the results as of the last few days:

1) crank: this movie was ridonculous. basically the premise of the entire movie is that Dude has been injected with some weird poison that will kill him unless he keeps his adrenaline constantly flowing. Dude, of course, is Jason Statham, which means we get to see lots of nudity, violence, and violent nudity as he resorts to all kinds of shenanigans to keep himself from getting dead, including but not limited to driving a car through a mall, shooting lots of people, beating up some innocent guys for no reason, snorting coke, stealing drugs from a hospital, and bending his girlfriend over a teller machine in the middle of a crowded square (unfortunately, i'm not kidding). i decided to watch this movie because the premise sounded really weird and i didn't think it could be crazier than "shoot 'em up". i was wrong. boy, was i wrong. coincidentally, this movie also ends with a really poorly filmed guy-falling-out-of-the-sky sequence. how the fuck hard is it to film a guy looking like he's falling out of the sky without making it look like he's surrounded by 1980s-era matte lines? judging by the last 2 movies i've seen, very damn hard.

there's not a whole lot to recommend this movie on, unless seeing all the things i mentioned above sounds like fun. also, if you are simultaneously drunk, high, and enjoy watching human suffering more than you probably should, you should watch this movie because then it will be awesome.

overall: the movie equivalent of the mcgriddle.

2) the weather man: another one of the nicholas cage movies from the "matchstick men"/"lord of war"/"weather man" era...where cage put out a bunch of films nobody watched but that critics seemed to think were soaring triumphs of moviedom. i liked the fuck out of "lord of war", and i haven't seen "matchstick men" yet, but that's on the list for this weekend. "the weather man" looked like one of those movies that i love like "in good company"; you know, where the guy has a posh job but can't figure his life out and he realizes that there are more important things to life than having everything figured out. these types of movies make me feel better about what a fucking loser i am, and so i like watching them. this movie was that type of movie, it was just also a not-good movie. also known as a "bad" movie.

the main problem with it was that there wasn't any sort of cohesion or rhythm at all to the film. basically it was just cage plodding around getting into various random misadventures while being frustrated with his life. occasionally there would be a halfhearted attempt at continuity or character growth, but that was rare. mostly you were just left sitting around wondering what the fuck was happening. and the answer, usually, was "nothing".

i sort of got the impression that the filmmakers were hesitant to follow the typical movie structure: guy has epiphany, guy enacts New Lifestyle, guy Gets Wife Back, guy Starts To Understand His Estranged Children. i have no idea why i didn't capitalize "Has Epiphany". it seems like they wanted the film to be more "realistic" than that. so they eschewed the form, but then they couldn't figure out what happens in reality either. so what happens is you just sit and watch purgatory for 2 hours. occasionally there are moments of excellence, or the emergence of a theme or plot string, but then just when you sort of see a half-assed connection then everything falls apart and drops you on your head again.

overall: like trying to get through candyland without a fucking die.

3) national treasure 2 (and sort of national treasure 1): i liked "national treasure" the first time i saw it. i liked it as a sort of modern "indiana jones" wrapped up in a weird conspiracy-theory-type wrapping. i liked it as a movie with nic cage doing Nic Cage Stuff. but mostly i liked it because it was based entirely around going places you aren't supposed to go in order to find cool shit that nobody knows about. which is basically my favorite thing to do in life.

i watched it again the other night because i knew that i was going to see part two last night, and i liked it even better the second time. sure it's implausible, but it's fun, over-the-top implausible. throughout both movies, there's this occasionally overt insinuation that nic cage's character lives by a romantic explorer-type code that nobody understands anymore and that has no place in today's society (pee wee's talking chair screams, confetti falls, cake hits you in the face). i think the movie feels the same way about itself. you have to be willing to accept that attitude at least during the film or else you're going to think it's asinine.

the majority of the reviews i read didn't like the second movie on account of many of the same reasons the same reviewers said the first one was great (i.e. implausible, senseless exploring and adventuring, archetypal characters, cliched love interest, etc.) so apparently it's okay to fall for this trickery once, but when they make a sequel, it better have a completely different ideology behind it, dammit! who makes sequels that are at least partially reliant on the first film for their plot and storytelling devices? wait, isn't that what a sequel is? nevermind.

anyway, i thought the second film actually improved on some things, and though the story was perhaps even more farfetched than the first, it was also more fun to watch as the clues got the characters into deeper and deeper trouble, while they stayed consistent in their superheroic incredulity, hilarity, and eventual actual emotion-havingness. it was cool. if you liked the first one, you'll like it. if you didn't like the first one, you're stupid.

overall: i like that last sentence in the previous paragraph. it should be down here.