Gigli

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This movie was so bad, I almost broke my TV.

It costs $54m to make this movie and all it could bring in was $6m. This Director stopped making movies. The two leads that were in a relationship off-screen even broke up.

This 2003 movie is about a gangster that steals a special-needs kid. I don’t know if it was for ransom because he doesn’t get a payout in the end. During this theft, he meets another gangster, a woman, and they team up to complete the task. The rest of the movie is about silly situations that ensue where they need to act like they know the kids very well and they act like a couple.

You never get the impression that they are bad people and have done bad things. They don’t do any bad things during their time in the movie. The dialogue is also extremely annoying and unnatural. One person says or asks something. Second person responds vaguely with one word. First person tries again and get the same result. First person goes into a five minute soliloquy that looks like they prepared the speech months ago and it wasn’t directed at the second person.

So this movie was terrible. The story is supposed to be about a thug with a heart of gold. But you don’t see him being a thug and you don’t see him doing good things either. The cast don’t seem to have a good chemistry. You never see them slowly warming up to each other. Its cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, hot. For no reason.

The cast is bad and the story is shit. Why was it made? Martin Brest was the Director and everything he made before this was amazing and a critical success. Meet Joe Black, Beverly Hills Cop1, Scent of a Woman. He gets Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were successful in their movie and music career and were already in a relationship with each other. Surely the on-screen chemistry would have been a non-issue? The guys paying for everything looks like Revolution Studios who seems to have money from Sony and Fox. They get Martin to quickly hack his script about thugs to be more about thugs that are romantic with each other. Martin doesn’t like the idea but he does it anyway. Money money money. So its Martin’s fault.

Should you watch this shit? Its two hours long and you don’t like anyone or anything about this movie. But who am I kidding? You read this entire review when you could have said “duh” and closed the window.

Glitter

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This movie is so bad it gave me cancer.

Glitter was made in 2001. This was the historical year where no one cares about anything. It’s a vanity project for Mariah Carey where she details her rags to riches story. Her mother is a singer of a shitty bar and then she sings a bit and likes singing and then gets discovered because she was a background singer thats better than the lead singer. A guy that looks like a discount Mark Wahlberg says he buys her out of her contract and becomes her manager. They show all the trivial details of how business people treat her like a business asset and not like a person. Didn’t anyone tell her that this is how the industry works? Why is she surprised by all of this? It ends with her singing at a big concert and before she sings, she finds out that her boyfriend, discount Wahlberg, died. She is a bit sad and carries on to sing. It ends with her going to find her mother and they hug and cry.

Her name in the movie wasn’t Mariah. It was Frankie or something like that. Why? Was it because she knew she’s taking liberties with her own history? She can now add in more fake scenarios that will make the audience more sympathetic to her unrealistic story. Pandering and filled with clichés should be the description.

She also was in charge of music of the movie. This was a terrible decision. She manufactures scenarios so that she can play she own music as the sound track of the movie. This makes the scenes not logically fit into each other. Some scenes makes sense but the music doesn’t fit. Then there are other problems with really bad dubbing where it is very obvious that a person’s mouth doesn’t match the voices that you hear. Then its all set in New York but its always quiet. You don’t hear the cars or trains or people shouting in the background.

The cinematography was the worst we’ve seen in a long time. Every scene lasts about five minutes and its repetitive to the point where we saw the formula about 30 minutes into the movie. Each scene starts with an aerial shot of New York. It lasts about 5 seconds. Then its footage of the busy traffic and the taxis driving by the location. Then a side character says a line or two. Then Mariah can talk or react for the next four or so minutes. Repeat until its over.

So this movie is terrible. Why was it made? Vanity project? Yeah, maybe. But it costs $22m to make it. Who knows how it was marketed? Mariah didn’t pay for it. Someone else did. Fox. Maybe Fox thought that they could take a successful singer and make a buck on a cross over. Mariah had a mental breakdown in during this movie and regrets making it. Thats how bad it was. She started working on this movie since 1997. Five fucking years go by and all they can show for it was $5m in revenue.

Should you watch this movie? Only if you want to ogle Mariah’s body while watching it on mute.

 

Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles

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This movie was so bad that it didn’t even want to be made.

This was made in 2001. The first two were made in 1986 and 1988. Paul Hogan is 63 here. His real life wife and co-star wife is 20 years younger than him. He has a limp like he went for a prostate operation. Wait a minute. Thats it. This movie was supposed to be his ticket to pay for his medical bills.

So the plot. He’s in LA because his wife needs to make a movie. The movie maker is a bad guy. Drugs or something. Dundee steaks the movie lot out at night and foils the baddies.

Simple plot made so that you could hang all the ‘hey look at the crazy outdoorsman’ gags. Here’s are the gags

  • He talks to a chimp.
  • He grabs a gun talking about animal reaction time.
  • He confuses Mel Gibson with Mal Gibson.
  • He stops traffic to save a dog. The dog was a skunk.
  • He smacks a bug and turns on a light thats sound activated.
  • He goes to a Wendy drive through and calls the lady in the speak Wendy.
  • He stabs an anaconda.
  • He predicts the attack of the lions to the bad guys.

Dundee also has a friend in the movie as an excuse to repeat shitty fish-out-of-water jokes that he did in episodes 1 and 2.

This movie is awful. Avoid.

Mitchell

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This was an awesome movie.

This 1975 gem was great. Joe Don Baker was Mitchell. A cop that takes down drug dealers. He first finds that a guy shot a thief in the guys house. The guy claimed made it look self inflicted but Mitchell knows whats up. He could recreate the scene based on how the thief fell and the placement of the gun. Then he gets assigned to get a drug dealer to confess. He befriends the dealer and makes it look like he’s a dirty cop. There are very long chase sequences that end up in some quarry and a car explodes.

There is a subplot of a prostitute that is servicing Mitchell and then he busts her for it. Mitchell also likes porn and hates kids. He also lives in a tiny apartment with a single sleeper couch. But thats normal for raging alcoholics.

The thing about this movie is that Mitchell isn’t a young tough guy. He’s an old fuck up gets the bad guy. Not because he’s good at his job. No, he’s terrible and no one likes him. He gets the bad guy because he never gives up.

The ending is especially good. He’s in some shitty helicopter and the only way to stop the bad guy is to hang a gas tank to the helicopter and swing it at the boat to demolish it one plank of wood at a time.

Watch it. Its funny.

After Earth

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“How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren’t real?” – Jaden Smith

There’s these humans. They left Earth a few thousand years ago to a new planet. Now Will Smith is in an army and he is traveling somewhere with family. For no reason, his spaceship is hit and he land on earth. He is injured and so his son needs to run around the planet and do things. Will is play the part of a father that hasn’t been with his family for a long time. He plays it well. Almost too well. He treats his son like a soldier and the son is fucked up because of it. The son tries so hard to impress that he almost dies in the process of going from one place to another place. The is mention of a battle technique called “ghosting” where you pretend that you have no fear because, for some reason, the animals can literally smell or see fear. If you have no fear, you’re invisible. This is retarded. Why aren’t the animals walking into walls all the time? Do walls fear animals? How would someone scientifically test for fear? Its not a chemical. You probably have a higher heart rate but thats it.

Then the kid has these Oreo shaped asthma pumps. Why isn’t asthma cured in the future? The pumps are single use and the size of an Oreo. Why isn’t it smaller? Why isn’t it embedded into the suit? Why does the suit have only 4 servings? The only explanation is bad screen writing.

The names are also needlessly foreign. Kitai Raige and father Cypher Raige with sister Senshi and mother Faia. What the hell. They could have been called Will, Jaden, Willow and Jada and the movie would have not been worse. Probably would have improved because when you introduce strange names from people that were based off earth people, you need to explain how the names evolved from Latin or Roman or whatever names to this strange world.

From IMDB, it looks like M Night Shayamalan and Will Smith met up one day decided to make a movie for the heck of it. Ok, thats on them then. The plot is simple but you have shot after shot of Jaden running and jumping and shouting the father and getting asthma and it goes on. They could have made the story better but they probably didn’t think they needed help. This is what happens when you’re too rich. You think you’re too good.

It made $60m and costs $130m. Bit of a stinker. Where did the money go? Sony probably paid for it. Probably to build Jaden’s career as a green screen expert. Because all of this movie was made in a green screen. M Night probably was paid a shit-ton. He normally makes his own scripts. This was made by Will using Sony money.

This is a stupid 2013 movie with no redeeming qualities. Avoid it.

The Neverending Story 3

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This movie is so bad, it will ruin its predecessors.

I watched Episode 1 and 2 about 20 years ago so the story was a bit blurry. I remember that there was a main kid named Bastion and he had a book that put him in a fantasy land and he had to save it from some bad person. The bad person tried to trick him buy making him swap a memory for some arbitrary wish. I was very young.

This piece of shit is way worse. Bastion goes to the same store and finds the same book and rereads it but gets a different story. Because thats how this shitty book works. He jumps into fantasy land, fucks around, jumps out and leaves the book in a place that can be stolen and exploited by some school bullies. The bullies seem to only want to bully him. For no reason, they also live in a parking lot of a shopping mall. And this hideout has fans, TVs, couches, and other shit. How did they bring it there? Did anyone see them? What if the mall wanted to expand the parking lot? So many questions on this point. The bullies opened the- book and saw that it was being written in real time. This tipped the main guy off that he can exploit it somehow because he was able to think of something, it gets written, it materializes. Yes, this is retarded. Why not imagine wealth and disappear? Why not imagine world peace or something? Why is this book unlimited in wishes? What happens when you wish? Is it like fantasy land where you slowly lose your memory? So many questions. Then fantasy land is in turmoil because the real world can affect the fantasy land. The bullies own the book and they were playing loud music so naturally this translates into thunder in fantasy. Then there was a bad guy again in fantasy land. I cant remember.

There’s a strange subplot with Bastion’s father marrying some woman with a daughter and this girl manipulates Bastion and somehow gets hold of some necklace that does magic wishes as well. She gets the book in the end, imagines the end of the story and the problem is solved and the movie ends. I don’t know what the fuck was going on. We’re never told that the marriage is shit and the end has the little girl running to the step father and telling him not to go while he’s packing his car.

There’s more problems. The flying dog in episodes 1 and 2 looked healthy and sounded like he’s full of energy. This dog was put in the washing machine too many times and was fed heroine for a few years. He was missing the thick coat of fur and maybe said about three words in the whole movie.

The rocks creatures in the first two were the size of mountains and were not the type of creatures to get involved in anything or care about anything. They sat and chowed rocks all day. Cannibals. The rock creatures in this movie were the size of humans and they watched TV and curled their rock hair and had a kid wearing rock diapers. What the fuck is going on?

Then there is a stupid couple of dwarf fairy characters that find ways to travel to different places where bastion is. They make annoying fart noises and have stupid-people dialogue.

The cast was a strange choice. The leader of the bullies was Jack Black. He’s not scary. The mother looked like a horse. The daughter was evil. The princess didn’t look like herself in episode 2. Bastion was a different actor. I think everyone beside the father was played by a different actor.

Why was this movie made? The original was made in 1984 and the writer sued the producers for making such a shit movie. The second movie was made in 1990 and that had terrible reviews. This was 1994. Third time lucky? Nope. The child-like empress is also no longer a child and she’s looking to score some dudes. Bastion should have grown up too in this time but is the same age as the first two movies. It costs $17m to make and brought in about $2m. It’s got a 3.4 out of 10 on IMDB. The kids that watched these movies would also have grown up to an age where these types of movies are not appealing. There doesn’t seem to be a reason that this movie should have been made.

Do not watch.

 

 

 

Kick or Die

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We’re back in 1987 and back in South Africa for a fight movie.

The movie is pretty competent. It starts with a couple parking in the dark for some private time and then a bad guy kills the guy and rapes the girl. This is on some school and guess what’s the only way to stop this? Get security? No. Get cops? No. Teach the girls self defense? Yeah, but not so fast. You first hire a music producer and get him to hire the defense instructor. So teach the girls to fight. They hire Kick or Die guy to do the teaching and he ends up killing the bad guy. He is Don Potter.

Obviously there is a biker gang causing mayhem but they are a subplot that starts about halfway into the movie and then concludes. It added nothing but runtime.

We never see a montage of women learning karate or women beating up bad guys. For this reason, the movie fails in its premise. You didn’t even need him to be a karate instructor.

Oh, and the boom mic in almost every scene is in the camera frame. Drinking games are fun with this.

The accents are supposed to be American but every now and again they drop back into the good ‘ol South African accent.

This is like Scooby Doo where the real bad guy is the music producer and Don finds out and kills him in the end. The reason he found out was through his girlfriend that wanted to be a singer. Don gets her to meet music producer guy who is all about rape. What the fuck? Ignore the fact that rape is retarded on it own, he and Don are friends. Why would he come on to his friend’s girl? He also knows that his friend is a karate master guy. Was music guy not expecting to get his ass kicked? He is probably the dumbest villain in movie history.

If you’re wondering about the girlfriend, shes a 6/10 and a terrible singer.

So why was this movie made? I have no idea. Its South African and hardly anything is written about it online. Its distributed by AIP (Action International Pictures) that did about 70 movies between mid 80’s to mid 90’s. Kick or Die guy, Kevin Bernhardt, is a a good karate actor and was in tons of movies with pretty much the exact same role.

Watch it. It extremely OK.

 

Code Name Vengeance

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What do you get when you cross Rambo with Indiana Jones with a low budget?

Its 1987 in South Africa and everyone is exploiting everyone else. Except for the victims, who are everyone.

The Director is David Winters who probably lost a bet and had to come to South Africa for two years as a penalty. He made this movie in 87, Rage to Kill in 88, Space Mutiny in 88 and Mission Kill in 86. All four movies star Cameron Mitchell for some reason. This movie and Mission Kill have Robert Ginty. Space Mutiny had Reb Brown. James Ryan was in Rage to Kill and Space Mutiny.  Ginty was very busy in this time too. He made six movies in 1986 and 7 in South Africa, UK, US, France and I think in Turkey.

So what is this movie about? There is this family that rules some African country. No mention of the name. The daughter and the wive of the president get kidnapped by Arabs. Some American thinks he can save them if he releases a kick ass Ginty from prison to do this job. That pretty much it on plot. Not too bad here because everything else is bad.

The screenplay. Long boring chase scenes. Then playing cops and robbers in some abandoned warehouse. There are three skirmishes that could have taken place in any order. Come to thing of it, this is Space Mutiny before it was shot. Ginty only meets Mitchell half way through the movie and Mitchell is running a bar. Who would have thought that Cameron Mitchell would be near alcohol in his role. The helicopter scene was all done while it was on the ground. The rail carts in the mine were done slowly and the footage was sped up. At some point we’re told that this is Qatar. I don’t know anymore.

Shannon Tweed, a Playboy model was Ginty’s love interest. Of course Ginty gets all the ladies. He does it in every movie. Its his trademark, along with not having much dialogue.

The bad guy was pretty shit as a character. James Ryan the actor was awesome. The bad guy name was Tabrak. It sounds just like you can imagine with a South African accent.

Watch this movie. Its mostly fun and sometimes boring.

 

Left Behind 1, 2 and 3

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The apocalypse is so lame that survivors wished they had died.

We watched the trilogy. 2000’s Left Behind, 2002’s Left Behind 2: Tribulation Force and 2005’s Left Behind 3: A World at War. These movies were so boring that we often lost concentration and forgot what was going on. I think I know what was the point. I didn’t grow up exposed to Christianity so most of this stuff went over my head. I think the basics are about God has come to take the good people and the bad people need to stop being bad. Immediately you realise the stupidity of this argument. If God already took the good people, then there’s nothing you can do now. If you’re doing something, then you’re assuming that he will do this again. Like maybe his bus was full and he’s making a second trip. So for me, everything after the first five minutes is pretty pointless events. Then there’s all this stuff about devils which I don’t understand the benefits of what he’s doing. Why does he want to control things via other people? Can’t he just do it himself? Is it because of money? What does he need the money for?

Let me point out the plot for each of them. I’m using IMDB and Wikipedia heavily because I probably missed symbolism in something I don’t understand.

Left Behind 1 (2000): The Biblical prophecy of Armageddon begins when the Rapture instantly takes all believers in Christ from the Earth. A reporter left behind learns that the Anti-Christ will soon take power.

Left Behind 2: Tribulation Force (2002): After the Rapture and the revealing of the identity of the Anti-Christ, a group of converts form the Tribulation Force, a secret society with the sole purpose of converting non-believers to Christianity.

Left Behind 3: World at War (2005): The world falls into chaos as Nicolae Carpathia (Anti-Christ) detonates nuclear devices across the globe and stages multiple devastating attacks against both the Tribulation Force and an international militia, led by U.S. President Gerald Fitzhugh.

I’m not religious so I’m looking at the pure logic. The logic of #1 is silly. If the people that believe in Christ are gone, the ones left over don’t believe. So why do there even care about an Anti-Christ? To believe in an Anti-Christ, you would have to believe in Christ. And therefore be taken up in the Armageddon event. There are other stupid events in #1 too. Day turns to night for no reason, then someone is planting crops in a desert, a flight attendant is going to work for the UN for some reason, the head of the UN is the Anti-Christ for some reason, Anti-Christ wants to bankrupt the UN which shows he cares about money, but what would he need to buy if he has super powers? The air hostess that will go to the UN has an affair with a plane Captain called Captain and then he tell her it was wrong and then he asks her to forgive him. What? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? For some reason the Anti-Christ declares seven years of peace. Why? He is in the UN, which means he pretty much doesn’t get involved with anything. He doesn’t have the power to declare anything. Then the Anti-Christ, besides his UN job, has superpowers but also needs money. He doesn’t have an army and isn’t really doing anything bad other than looking like an evil guy and talking about plans but not actually doing anything. So Anti-Christ is useless in driving the plot forward.

Before I talk about #2 and #3, let me point out the main character of the movies. Its our old friend Kirk Cameron from Saving Christmas. That badly made movie which didn’t have a point and was made to fleece his supporters. Yes him. But these are made 10 years before that. In these three movies, he is a reporter and conveniently he goes around asking questions to get exposition of the plot. He doesn’t actually do anything. In #2 he talks about making some team but his job in the team is to do what he always did, ask questions and get exposition. Each of the three movies cost about $4m and make about the same back in revenue. Hardly any marketing, cast are mostly volunteers, sets are shit and distribution is to churches. So most of the money went to Kirk. Probably. I can’t imagine him getting less.

Now #2 is a terrible movie. Nothing much happens. They movie the scene from person to person where they talk about how they feel. What they did in the past and what all of this means to them. The only important plot point is the formation of a team called the ‘Tribulation Force’ where they need to find people that don’t believe in Christ and convince them to believe. Why? Are they expecting a second rapture? What happens in a Rapture anyways? Do they go to a utopia? Has anyone ever been graded on a bell curve? They do know that even if you’re one of the good guys, some people are better than others. Also people can change. People can go bad if they are in a bad environment. So there is massive challenge to the Tribulation Force to convince people to change ‘after-the-fact’. Its like closing your barn doors after the horses have left. Also, what a stupid name. “Tribulation Force”. What force do they have? Force you to change? Praying by gunpoint? And Tribulation. This is defined as “noun – a cause of great trouble or suffering.” It sounds like the team are intentionally doing bad things. To someone that doesn’t know any of this Christ stuff, if they came to me and said they were a Force called Tribulation and they wanted me to convert from whatever to Christianity, I would probably think they are the bad guys and tell them to fuck off. They didn’t have guns or other weapons. They actually looked quite dopey. Kirk, a plane pilot, an air-hostess and a priest were the team. Not exactly a convincing bunch.

By the way, the bad guy, Anti-Christ, is called Nicolae Carpathian is has a strange Russian accent in some scenes and in others he sounds American.

#3. Oh boy. What a shit-show. It starts off with the president recalling the events of #1 and #2 and saying that Anti-Christ has detonated nuclear bombs around the globe and he has a military force to do something. I don’t what they would do because the the bombs are already blown up, all you can do now is save some survivors and fix the environment from more hazardous materials.  So, the president is Louis Gossett Jr. A solid actor. He has two scenes, starting and ending exposition. The president is in the white house which is on a computer generated fire. The logical questions I ask were, why wasn’t he evacuated? Why are there no other bodies? Where is everyone? How did a blast not hurt or scratch him? How was Kirk able to walk in the white house and talk to him without being stopped or killed or hurt? The survivors of the nuke blasts are all sick and somehow drinking blessed wine cure them of their unidentified ailments. Then in the end, The president talks to Anti-Christ and an asteroid hit and kill them both in a CGI blast. Before the credits come, Anti-Christ walks out from a fire like Terminator 2. So all of these three movies were for nothing. They solved nothing. Anti-Christ is still around and Rapture number two didn’t come. The people that remained on earth after events of #1 could have carried on with their lives and would not have been different. This third movie was also distributed by Sony and they probably paid to get Loud

These three are the worst movies ever made. Nothing has any consequence and it doesn’t conclude. My guess is that it made by religious people to show to religious people to make them think something deep and meaningful is happening. This will instill fear in them so that they keep doing church things. Also, Kirk makes money from this.

Do not watch this manipulative shit.