Spider-man (2002) Review

"You can give a dork superpowers,
but he's still a dork. A really, 
REALLY typical dork."

Since the Marvel superhero movies has gone to such wondrous heights over the last decade, it's worth checking out where it all originated from. Blade was just Wesley Snipes fighting vampires, X-men was freakshow black-ops missions...but Spider-man was where we learned Superhero Story 101. 

17-year-old Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is that kid we all saw in high school we never really paid attention to. He took a few pictures, he stared awkwardly at the cheerleaders and was always chasing after the school bus with the hope that his pants wouldn't fall down before the first mile. But when he's bitten by a genetically engineered spider, the side effects leave him with arachnid-like superpowers that will change the direction of his life. 

But taking the words out of Peter's own mouth, "the story of my life is not for the faint of heart." He's always trying to get the girl of his dreams, the popular Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) but can never seem to get noticed by her. And it doesn't help that he's become the target for New York City's newest super-villain, the mainiac Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) who just happens to be the father of his best friend Harry Osborn (James Franco). 

Whoa. That's one crazy, hectic life you got their, Peter...

Too bad the audience can barely relate to any of it on a personal level. 

In retrospective to this recently rebooted franchise (The Amazing Spider-man) this movie does have strength to stand on its own, but it leaves a kind of cheesy impression. To his credit, director Sam Raimi, famous for his Evil Dead series, actually handles the superhero drama in a very entertaining form. Action comes well choreographed and larger than life, but that last line is absolutely what defines this series: so big you just can't connect. 

Let's address the main moral of the movie, as hammered over the head through the voice of Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson). Say it with me, folks...

"With great power comes great responsibility..."

All fine when you hear it, but Peter comes off as such a responsible boy scout through the duration of the movie that such a motto comes off about as meaningful as, "Drugs are bad, mmm'kay?" He rarely shows moments of irresponsibility or abusing his powers in any form. Its not so much about Peter Parker playing Spider-Man as it is Spider-man playing Superman. 

The film's story is pretty much nothing more than a good guy vs bad guy showdown when you think about it. The first bad guy Spider-man is pitted against is your typical smack'em-around wrestler and his rogues gallery from then on have just as much personality.

Dafoe as the Goblin is basically Jack Nicholson's Joker with double the firepower, twice the crazy but only half as scary. That mask is barely hiding the fact that Dafoe spends the majority of his screen time mugging for the camera. 

What makes the movie strong however is its ability to at least find something for everyone. The chemistry between Maguire and Dunst is nothing short of sizzling. And tons of kids will walk away energized at watching their favourite childhood hero swinging across the screen. If it weren't for the cheesy feel that comes from this script, this could have been a movie to be thoroughly enjoyed by both children and adults. 

Worst Director in Film History

When it comes to Hollywood's directors, all us film critics have our cream of the crop. Their our  Spielbergs, our Kubricks, our Scorseses and every time they're gearing up for a new project, we can practically see the money trying to sneak its way out of our wallets to buy the first ticket possible for opening night.

But in this metaphorical schoolyard of the film industry, there's always those annoying kids you just wish... no...pray won't come near you. Sometimes out of personal distaste and others, out of a decent moral code. These loud, obnoxious and occasionally offensive movies are done with such a common thread of vision that you can't help but think to yourself...

"Dude! Just...go...away!"

Personally I like to always give directors a chance to prove me wrong. But sometimes the proof is so blatantly obvious that there's just little to no salvaging the project. Is it just bad luck or are these directors actually the diabolical masterminds we've imagined them to be? Let's get started by tackling Hollywood's Most Wanted List with the most infamous names in the business...

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Is it...................UWE BOLL?

"Yes...clearly beating a critic in a boxing match proves you're a great director.
Forgive us, Boll! We did not know!"


If you remember the movie adaptations of Dungeon Siege, Alone in the Dark or BloodRayne...well friend, that photographic memory of yours is one sharp double-edged sword. For those titles are the works of Dr. Boll, a filmmaker and amateur boxer.

Boll has spent the majority of his film career turning video games into thinly written, low-budget action movies. And just in case your slow in picking up a clue...they're all terrible.

Constantly his movies are loaded with production errors, his cast members are quite often put into just laughable performances and too many a time his movies are so distant from the video game source material they're rooted from that they'd be unrecognizable without the title. Surprisingly despite his reputation he's even managed to rope some big names into his  movies. John Rhys Davies, Sir Ben Kingsley and Christian Slater are just to name a few.

But despite Boll's flaws, there remains one saving grace to the man: his cult following. Oh, you better believe it. There is actually a significant number of fans dedicated to watching Boll's movies...solely because they're so awful. As mentioned above, many of the errors are so laughable in his adaptations that it's hard to keep a straight face while watching it in its duration. Boll may be bad, but hey, he's giving the people what they want. That and he has at least one positively received movie to his name...Rampage.

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Is it.................MICHAEL BAY?

Certainly any of you who have curb-stomped every one of your old Transformers action figures after the year 2007 can put one face to that name...Michael "Macho Machine, Military Lovin'" Bay.

Even his own photos are riddled with product placement...

Which should we address first? His critically slammed and yet box-office record breaking hits, Pearl Harbour, the Transformers film series or Armageddon? Or how about the fact that his movie's are dominated with stock characters to the point of heinous racial stereotyping.

This director has yet to show a movie without a cast of characters with attitudes a junior high student wouldn't believe and shoehorning in super models who walk around everywhere in the skimpier clothes than you'd see on a cover of Maxim magazine. The comedy in his movies is usually immature to say the least.

But who are we to say that Michael Bay is full of nothing but frat boy humour? Why he has more dignity than tha-



Oh...WOW Mikey!
(Michael Bay in Mystery Men)

But here's where Michael Bay gets butts in the seats and dollars at the video store; his action. True, most of the time it's so fast paced and poorly choreographed that it's hard to actually comprehend what is happening in said action scenes, but it remains epic nonetheless. He knows how to ramp up the tension and throw an audience in the fray. Bay is well known for his Friday night popcorn movies and for that, he has developed billions in box office revenue.

In summary...Bay may be a fool, but he's a rich fool. And he always will be.

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Is it................TOMMY WISEAU?

Our "One Hit Wonder", ladies and gentleman: Tommy Wiseau.

Take a look at this face, people. This is the face of an underground LEGEND.

If you have ever watched the "black comedy" The Room(or bad drama, depending on whether Tommy's present or not) then you know exactly what I'm talking about. Because anybody who did watch that movie walked out with the following questions...

• What in the world was that?!
• Is this director nuts?!
• Who wrote this thing?!  
• Where can I buy a copy?

It truly is one of those phenomenon you won't understand until you've experienced it yourself, which this critic highly recommends. The Room has been labelled one of the worst movies ever made, turning what should have been your typical "Girlfriend-Cheating-On-Boyfriend" plot into a movie that is now shown all around the world for the fact that it's...crap.

The movie's direction drops story arcs (and characters)  off the face of the Earth without blinking and whatever story you can dig out of this film is just buried under ridiculous antics that...likewise...GO NOWHERE!

One key thing to remember though; The Room is his claim to fame. Aside from that and touring his movie around at the demand of his fans, he doesn't work on many other projects. Not really fair to judge a director's talent on one movie, no matter how bad it was received. 

And once again, Wiseau still is earning a following for his work and finding entertainment value. So he at least is getting something out of it. From what I can tell after meeting him...

...Oh yeah, you read that right...

He seems to be enjoying the attention and has a lot of fun with his fans. So if the guy's happy, just let him be, I say.

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So with all those candidates scratched off, let's meet the prime choice. The man, or rather men, who we shall now spend the remainder of our bad movie watching days, stapling their pictures to the nearest dart board.

People, I present to you...

 

JASON FRIEDBERG & AARON SELTZER:

THE WORST DIRECTORS IN HOLLYWOOD

Why choose these two "gentlemen" as the worst creators in the history of motion picture? Numerous reasons, my friends. And like bottles of wine (which you'll need plenty of watching one of their films) they just get stronger with age.

Let's begin my addressing their work. If you don't know their names then you likely know their productions. Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, etc. 

Are we sensing a pattern?

Since Spy Hard - which this critic will admit, there were some entertainment buried in the rubble, though that's more Leslie Nielson's doing than these two schmucks - the directorial pair have dedicated their careers spoofing movies with pop culture followings. Date Movie was lampooning the characters of romance movies, Meet the Spartans was lampooning the movie 300, and so on and so forth. 

Just one teensy problem arouse from these movies that quickly became realized by about ten minutes into viewing...

ALL OF THEIR JOKES SUCK!

Friedberg and Seltzer's films revolve around the genre of comedy, but not one of their jokes sticks, the delivery is given with little to no effort or charm and the majority of their ideas strike viewers as more bizarre than enjoyable. 

It definitely doesn't help the movie's premise of parodying a genre when the film itself has almost nothing do with the subject matter. If you're watching Disaster Movie for example, you're more likely to catch badly written jokes about Juno or Enchanted then you are, oh I don't know, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW!

What kills the movie's entertainment value is that most of the cast members, however little known they were at the time, have proven themselves in at least one audience or another to possess some merit of funny to them. But Friedberg and Seltzer just can't take a hint! Frequently the Mad TV comedy troupe joins their productions and the script their reading from is just so asininely torturous you're praying these young actors will walk away with some dignity after the wrap party. 

But making terrible movies isn't the main reason these two have have been chosen as the Demonic Duo of filmmaking. Anybody can make a terrible movie (as the list above clearly shows). Friedberg and Seltzer have a certain strategy to their careers and directorial style that seperates them from any of Hollywood's exiled...

THEY NEVER PROMOTE THEIR OWN MOVIES!!!

Oh, I don't mean they don't try to make the movie marketable to audiences. I mean these two con artists throw the same crap over and over again at the theaters, never learn from their mistakes and have yet to even respond to their critics!

If you don't even have the balls to step out and say either...

A) "We made a bad movie and we're sorry."

or 

B) "We're still proud of what we've made and we stand by our project."  

Then there's only one logical conclusion: these two are charlatans who know they've made crap, will continue to make crap and make a living off the money they know you paid to watch their crap. That's not just awful, it's downright criminal. 

In researching these two, I have yet to find either of them so much as sit down for an interview about their films and give you one bloody reason to go watch it. They can't even lie to the camera and say, "Hey, it's funny. Who doesn't want to laugh?" 

Friedberg and Seltzer's method of movie-making is nothing more than a despicable, get-rich-quick scheme that apparently they haven't even given up pursuing. And they know that as long as you hear the joint message of "_____ is popular" and "Here's a movie poking fun at it," the public will swallow any foulness they pour down its throat. 

I pray the audience come to its senses about what good entertainment means to them, instead of supporting anything these two frauds put out.     



That's not them laughing at their movie. That's them laughing at YOU!

Terminator Salvation Review

"With a plot twist you'll never see coming...
Unless you watched the trailers...
Or saw the first five minutes...
Or have any thinking capacity whatsoever..."

Before judging this movie, you have to establish what exactly you're viewing it as: a Terminator sequel or a sci-fi action film. If it's the former, you might just like this new direction. If it's the latter, then this movie will remain very, very confusing to the uninitiated.

The year is 2018 and humanity is all but scraps after Skynet launched its war against the human race. Since then, John Connor (Christian Bale) has become a soldier in the Resistance with a crew of freedom fighters dedicated to finding a way to destroy the machines once and for all. He's also trying to find his father Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) who is meant to travel back in time and father John in the year 1984.

It's a Terminator thing...

But John discovers that Skynet is preparing to hunt down Kyle with the intention of killing him, and in turn, rewriting history to Skynet's advantage for a John Connor-free future.

Another Terminator thing...

But hope may be in store with one of Kyle's traveling buddies, a former death row patient named Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) who has somehow survived execution and woken up in the middle of the War with the Machines. Not only is Marcus possibly able to save Kyle, but he might be the key to stopping Skynet once and for all.

I've completely lost you, haven't I?

For Terminator fans, this is an installment full of juicy fan service and worthy cast members to take up their roles. But when the movie has to step back away from the franchise, it just falls apart. Anybody trying to come into this for the first time are highly unlikely to pick up most of what's happening in this screenplay.

This movie also does little to tell its story in the method of any of the Terminator movies before it. John Connor is demoted to secondary protagonist, the T-100 character (archived footage of Arnold Schwarzenegger) is in the movie for all of ten minutes and with a plot that is heavily founded on traveling to the past to change the future, we don't see any time travelling.

What strengths this movie has, its all done with subtlety. Director McG helps to give a new desert war-zone atmosphere to a series that was originally all just darkness, so the action that's delivered (however light) is done in a realistic setting. But one must remember this is not a franchise about who's the grittiest soldier in the barracks.

If you can salvage Terminator Salvation for a decent sequel, you might just get your money's worth...even in a rental. With a sequel fully set in the future we've been looking forward to seeing, it doesn't wrap up much in terms of story or character development and the action everybody loved from the previous films is just not at the same epic level. A good attempt, but needed a sharper script and a lot less plotholes.

 

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

 

 

So anybody who saw the end of Terminator 2: Judgement Day was probably thinking to themselves, "How in the name of Kyle Reese' ghost does Arnold come back from that to be in the third movie?" The answer: some things were better left unmade.
John Connor (Nick Stahl) is now his own man after supposedly preventing Skynet and a war with machines from destroying most of humanity. But Connor, like his mother before him, has spent the last several years in paranoia of that future. As you can guess by the movie poster, this rightly so.
Again Skynet has sent an upgraded Terminator assassin, the T-X (Kristanna Loken) to destroy the Resistance of Mankind before it can ever be created and ensure the survival of the computer system that will eventually take over the world. But a new T-101 Terminator (again played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) has arrived on the scene to defend both Connor and another pre-destined war hero Kate Brewster (Claire Danes). These three are the only ones capable of preventing the rise of machines before they fight back against the humans who designed them.
For a franchise with the moral message of "There is no fate but what we make" this movie rewrites drowns the series and its characters into destinies that not only steer them away from the development of previous movies but solely exists for the sake of fan service. It tries to bring the Terminator world into the modern digitally-centred age but seldom comes up with anything creative with what it offers.
Schwarzenegger's performance is thankfully just as good as his last turn at the Terminator character, but the script really tries to make this robot into something he's not. New cast additions Danes and Stahl aren't bad, but they aren't given much development. Whereas the previous movie at least had a strong supporting cast, the movie makes little attempt to hide the fact this whole cast is built around Schwarzenegger. This also doesn't help with our new baddie, the T-X who has little cool factor to her name. She may have superior CGI, but she's definitely no T-1000.
For a movie that's set on the verge of a nuclear apocalypse, they don't give the audience much to invest in. One solid chase scene will keep your adrenaline at its peak but its fairly early and by the end of the movie you're left with a bittersweet impression at best.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Picking up where I left the Terminator marathon (yes, months ago) we revisit the iconic action/sci-fi series that launched the career of the Austrian sensation himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, by checking out Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Over a decade has past in movie time since Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) avoided assassination from the cybernetic T-1000, a Terminator sent from the future programmed to kill her, and in doing so, prevent her from giving birth to the saviour of mankind; John Connor. Since then, John (Edward Furlong in his film debut) has grown up in separation from his mother, who has been locked away after being deemed insane for his beliefs about the coming robopocalyse. Turns out John and the rest are in for one huge "I told you so lesson" when not just one, but two Terminators show up to throw their lives back into panic mode. ; one with the mission to protect John and the other ordered to kill him.
Reading this synopsis you might be assuming that this is just rehashing the same plot thread as the predecessor, but this is where James Cameron widens the scale of the story and much more is invested. It's the equivalent of what the movie Aliens (another Cameron sequel) did for Ridley Scott's Alien in terms of developing a larger movie. Here, bigger things are at stake, more lives are put in jeopardy and the tension is nothing short of edge-of-your-seat variety.
Character development especially goes into interesting turns for this film. Somehow they're able to give the T-1000 a character arc, even though he's specifically written to be anything but human underneath. Arnold's not just playing a literal killing machine anymore.
Sarah Connor has also seasoned over the years (quite bitterly in this case) and replaced her frightened scream queen persona from the last movie with the stone-cold pro-active soldier attitude her late beau Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) had in the previous film.
And John, since of course the events of the story essentially revolve around him (though Arnold enthusiasts would say otherwise) finally has a character since the last time we saw him, he was nothing more than a baby bump. He's a snarky, fun-loving hacker that Furlong simply nails in his performance for such a young age. To this day, I still don't know why his career hasn't taken off in a better direction.
This is a movie that best represents the themes of man vs machine and the overall message of "fighting against the future and the future fighting back." Though the marketing already kind of spoils the twist before it happens, I won't be the one to say who the villain truly is in this picture. Just know that not everything is what it seems in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Once again, the production quality of the movie is phenomenal under the vision of Cameron, with tightly-knit editing and strong cinematography that is something worth the Hollywood history books. Terminator 2: Judgement Day remains the most viewed installment of the franchise and personally my favourite chapter in the series. I highly recommend the Extreme Edition DVD for home viewing, as it contains a lot of new footage and documentation of Cameron's direction over the movie.
So it can only go downhill from here...