Category Archives: The Ugly Fact Gang

William James once used the phrase “a beautiful theory brought down by a gang of ugly facts.”

Washing that Mummy out of My Brain

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It always annoys when my friends say something like: “I could have told you that,” after I report that some movie really sucked.  No, no you couldn’t have told me that.  Sure, the Mummy III: Tomb of Jet Li Phoning It In looked bad.  There were many warning signs.  But these friends would have said the same thing about Hitman, or Tank Girl, or Blade III: Trinity.  Say what you will, I enjoyed those movies.  I loved all three Resident Evil movies.  I savored the badness (and the cage scene) that was BloodRayne.  Would you deny me those pleasures?  So I take a lot of chances.  Sometimes, as with Babylon A.D., I get about what expect, a flawed movie with derivative elements and some good action.  Even the bad ending didn’t ruin it for me.

But sometimes I get the third Mummy movie.  It’s not so much bad as it is tired.  The almost ritualistic character portrayals using every old trope and stale piece of dialog dragged down the small moments in which the action actually worked.  I love Jet Li, and I like Brendan Frazier.  But neither of them showed up for this movie.  Surrounded by CGI badness, they read through the exhausting dialog with no hope of adding anything fresh to it.  Retired hero misses action.  Father has problems expressing approval of son.  Evil emperor wants to take over world.  (what to good emperors do?)

Fortunately I had already downloaded the unrated version of Hitman on my PS3.  I got home, feeling like I needed to bath in something to get that “Mummy-to-far” feeling out of my system, I started watching this hyper-cool, intense action flick, in which the characters actually seem to care about what they are doing.  Though the reviewers generally have gone negative Hitman, it’s really a lot of fun.

Dropped in to see how my laptop is doing

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Today I dropped by Best Buy in Pentagon City to see if they could at least tell me what’s going on. But the Geek Squad is using the “layered incompetence” defense. The laptop is locked in a cage, along with descriptive paperwork. They cannot find the keys. Seriously. This is really happening!

Add another $54 to money I spent somewhere other than Best Buy because of this: A copy of Unreal Tournament III, and a WoW playing guide.

I would also list people who I’ve discouraged from using Best Buy with my story, except that everyone I talk to says they have already learned not to trust the Geek Squad.

Today they called.

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Best Buy, in Pentagon City, Virginia, suddenly thinks my laptop is fixed.  So I get a call from the Geek Squad number, which invites me to call back.  I do so, but the “dispatcher” says I have to talk to the store.

“I can give you their number,” she says.  I wait.  Then she asks which store.  I tell her: Pentagon City.  “Is that spelled Penti?”  No, I spell it out.  She can’t find it.  I go online, look up the store locator, find the store, and give her the zip so she can find it herself.  She thanks me for the info and hangs up.  Anything I can do help the Geek Squad educate employees.

I call the store.  “Sure, it’s ready.”

I ask what’s been done to it.  They have to call me back.

A few minutes later, I get a call.  Turns out nothing has been done.  Well, they tried to find an operating system, but failed.  So they hoped I would just come pick it up and be happy?

Geek Squad stole my hard drive

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I would be updating this more often, with especially insightful entries on the classic “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and the new Starship Troopers III, except that I stupidly took my laptop to The Geek Squad for repair.  It was working pretty well when I took it in, except for the wireless card.  They handed back to me broken.  And didn’t even say “oh, by the way, this doesn’t work anymore.”  I had to take it home to find that out.  Now, I’m stuck between the manager of the Pentagon City Best Buy’s Geek Squad, and a service center in Knoxville Tennessee, and am unable to even find someone who will take responsibility enough to talk to me about.  Like kids in a schoolyard, everyone is pointing the finger at someone else.  More to follow.

A Defense of Uwe Boll

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Uwe Boll is, possibly, the worst director, ever. Worse, he has attacked one of my other loves, video-games in his ridiculous attempts to adapt a number of classic videogame franchises for the big screen. The primary crimes against video games, against movies, and against humanity itself include:

  • Alone in the Dark (ridiculous)
  • House of the Dead (OMG Stupid!)
  • Bloodrayne (Wow, not even Ben Kingsley can act in this POS)
  • Bloodrayne II: Deliverance (Wait, it’s bad, makes no sense, and this one has NO NUDITY!)

Unlike Ed Wood, who is often given that title, Uwe Boll isn’t trying to express some strange, complex vision, yet failing. Ed Wood had odd plots, mixing aliens and transvestites in some kind of pattern that you think secretly must make sense in his head. But Boll’s pattern is just derivative crap. You know pretty much what he’s trying to say, because other people have already said it better.  His best shots are clearly copied, his worst show that he didn’t understand what he was stealing.

All this I knew, but when I discovered my PS3 could actually sell me movies, the only thing worth downloading and watching was In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.  I’ve only played a few minutes of that particular game, so I have no particular fondness that could be violated, but I was definitely up for an evening of Uwe bashing.  Many parts are bad, and everything good is not original.  But, still, Jason Statham is putting it all out there, doing his athletic action coupled with sullen intensity.  Ray Liotta is at about half creepy, but that’s still pretty creepy.  And Matthew Lilard is nasty enough that you find yourself really rooting against him.  By the predictable ending, I was engaged.  Not impressed, or blown away, but I wanted bad things to happen to the bad guys and good things to happen to the good guys.

Of course it wouldn’t be a Uwe boll movie without some inexplicable old, but still respected actor phoning it in.  Bloodrayne had Ben Kingsley, this one has Burt Reynolds!  As the King!

But I’m not changing my mind about Uwe just because he directed one mediocrity amidst all his crap.  I loveUwe Boll because the world would be less mysterious without him.  How does he get money?  How does he get medium-large names to appear in his obviously bad movies?  Why does he insist that he’s a mis-understood artist?  Also, he’s the only director I know of who challenged his critics to a boxing match.  Two took him up, and were defeated.  How about having Spielberg fight anyone who didn’t like the last re-hash of Indiana Jones?  I’d be up for that.

The other thing about Uwe Boll is that he’s trying the best he can.  He doesn’t have much talent, and he doesn’t make up for it with technique.  He sucks, but he’s trying to make the best movie he can.  Not so much Spielberg and Lucas.  They have talent coming out the wazoo, but contine to foist crap like the latest Indiana Jones movie on us.  That smacks of contempt.

Leaving Lost Vegas

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Why am I writing this blog?  It’s not as if there aren’t enough reviews our there, or that Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t do a pretty good job of aggregating all those opinions into something you can use.  But people often ask my opinion about movies, and I find myself explaining.  And sometimes, with movies like Leaving Lost Vegas, my view is a bit different.

I saw this years after it came out.  I had long heard that it was a gripping, but tragic performance by Nicholas Cage.  I was never quite in the mood to watch a drunk slowly die, though, so I kept skipping it.  Netflix is where I put movies that I know I should watch, but not right now.  Sometimes, because I don’t alway check to see what’s coming next, a movie like Leaving Los Vegas gets through.  So, instead of letting is sit, I decided to watch it.

First, I can’t say anything bad about the acting.  It’s all good, spot on, gripping.  But the story, I just didn’t buy.  I know a lot about alcoholism, a little about despair, and something about being a frustrated creative.  The story here seems to romanticize those elements, seeing something slightly noble about falling down the hole, knowing full well there’s only death at the bottom.  Waving away all offers of help.  Maybe, but I got bored after a while.  In fact, I started playing World of Warcraft while watching the movie.   I was doing this quest where you have to take some kind of magic cloak to some guy in a cave.  The only way to find the cave is to attract the attention of his pet bear, and it will point the way.  But the mechanics of getting the bear’s attention eluded me.  Stand in front, type wave, stand to the side, right click the bear, left click the bear, I kept trying different things.  It occured to me that I was playing a game that had me waving at a bear.  Over and over.  This is the game that somehow has me addicted.

I finally figured out the bear when the movie went off the rails.  Instead of sticking to the dying drunk, it went off to trail the somewhat random life of Elizabeth Shue’s hooker.  Dead pimp, frat rape, being thrown out of a casino, flashbacks to an abusive father, the cliches piled up quickly.  All bad men in her life, somehow contrasted with the drunken guy lying on her couch.  It didn’t make sense to me, either, but then she ripped off her top and he poured booze all over her at the pool.  That was pretty good.

In the end, I did feel guilty about the World of Warcraft distraction.  There was some sort of meaning going on, and it was passing me by.  But I think the movie could have done more to hold my attention, and I really think that the central premise never gave me anything to by into.  It’s always possible I would have enjoyed this in a theater.  Trapped in the darkness, alone in a sit, but anonymously part of a much larger crowd, I may have been open to the depths of the movie.  You never know.

Speaking of The Incredible Hulk

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I love cameos, but they raise an interesting question.  When you suddenly see, and recognize, Lou Ferrigno, you are participating in the movie, not as pure story, but as part of a continuum with other movies on the same topic, as well as the genre as a whole.  When Stan Lee shows up, or when a pizza parlor is called “Stanley’s”, we are not immersed in the movie as movie, but watching it and enjoying it’s connection to the Marvel Universe.

The reality level of the movie is not set at the story level, but at an understanding of the movie in context of other tellings of the same tale.