Review: Jonah Hex (2010)

Director: Jimmy Hayward

Starring: Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malkovich

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1075747/

"Christ, woman, how many men you seeing today?"

-Jonah Hex talking about Megan Fox

You know what we don’t have enough of yet? Comic book movies. Yeah, ain’t tired of those yet, are you America?

USA: "HELL NO!"

Well, then, here’s an 80 minute cash in on an underground comic book series that most people don’t know about. 80 whole minutes! These guys are really pushing the limits with this one! Yeah. This is Jonah Hex. It sucks, and you’ll probably want your money back…even if you got it for free. I don’t suppose I need to tell you what happens next.

Our movie starts off with some pretentious narration beginning with a guy saying something along the lines of, he’s cashed his last check. I guess he should have switched to Geico, then. The story here is apparently that a gunslinger named Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) sold out some of his own guys for being corrupt. The leader of these guys, named Turnbull, came and killed Hex’s family, forcing him to watch and then branding his face with a cattle prod. Because I guess tattooing the name across his ass would have taken too much time. By the way, that’s John Malkovich as Turnbull, too. I hope you’re all ready for some more big white teeth action!

No? Well, how about some more mind-fucking, reality-bending existentialism a la Being John Malkovich?

"You'd best not be asking those kinds of questions 'round these parts..."

…we don’t get that either, because I guess John Cusack was off making worse movies. Well, fuck, count me as disappointed, then. Half the time in this film, you can barely even tell it’s Malkovich, the performance is so generic and uninspired.

And then we go through a long, long sequence of animated, pastel-colored images that the filmmakers couldn’t afford to shoot with real actors in this movie’s 80 minute runtime. Because that makes sense. Your movie is already shorter than most made-for-TV movies and it’s padded with cartoon images that move like cheap animatronics. Isn’t that just magical?

Then we see him carrying a bunch of dead bodies on the back of his horse through the desert. All I can wonder is how those actors felt when they had to do this scene over and over again while Josh Brolin scratched his makeup. Seriously, he looks like a horse ate his face, shat it out, ate it again and then spit it all over the camera. When a fat little man with a big, curly mustache straight out of archaic stereotypes refuses to pay Hex for his bounty, Hex shoots them all and then blows up the entire building they’re in. Because that’s just so badass it’s unbelievable!

Because when you can't go for compelling, interesting character development, at least a guy who looks like Two Face can blow shit up!

After that, he goes to visit a hooker played by perhaps the most apt casting choice in this film, Megan Fox. Yes, after all these years she’s finally been given the role she was born for. Isn’t that just wonderful? An actress finally found her way. It’s a story that has been featured in many inspirational magazines in the past. I’m glad she’s finally been put to good use as an actress! Anyway, she and Hex exchange soulless pleasantries and don’t really establish much other than that Fox is a stereotypically sultry seductress without much else to distinguish her as a character. Boring. Oh, but she does dig Hex’s scars! Hah. Don’t make me laugh, movie.

The only reason anyone actually went to see this movie.

This really isn't the time for bondage games, you guys.

So after Malkovich hijacks a train and steals some apparently important stuff, he blows that up too, because it’s an action movie, and it has to have explosions. There isn’t really any other reason for them to be here. One of Malkovich’s guys gets captured by the military and put in a cage for some reason? I don’t know. But he is dead. They call Hex because he was wronged by Malkovich in the past, but luckily due to plot convenience, he can also communicate with the dead. That’s right. Instead of actually having him do work and hunt down the bad guys, or anything else actually EXCITING, they just throw in this half assed cop out. Oh, so he can talk to the dead and threaten them with incredible pain if they don’t cooperate (some kind of weird thing where they burn up if they’re kept ‘alive’ too long)? HOW CONVENIENT!

On top of that, this scene is just horrible, too. Hex starts off by saying what I just told you; that he can raise the dead by touching them, but if they spend too long like that, they start to burn up. But then he keeps talking for so long that it’s like he didn’t even know what he was just saying, and the guy keeps smoldering like a fresh cigarette butt. Come on, man, put the poor sap out of his misery! It’s not so much cruelty and intimidation as it is just plain old retarded, like he wasn’t paying attention.

So then we’re treated to more meaningful cinema, like a guy fighting a weird mutant snake-man hybrid in a primitive cage fight where onlookers bet money on who will win. That’s got a big reason to be in the film! It’s like…uh…wait, I guess I was wrong. It’s completely pointless and only serves to confuse us more as to how this fantasized version of the Wild West works. God, they have this whole new world to show us, but are instead just focusing on trivial, menial things with no real relevance to anything else. Fuck that.

After that scene, we’re given some exposition from Malkovich about the machine they’re building as he talks to his weird tattooed Irish henchman about the superpowered weapons he has, which look like the Dragonballs. This is such an original picture! Apparently these are some sort of weird, primitive nuclear weapons developed strangely in this world by Eli Whitney. Huh? Why Eli Whitney? Did you pull the name out of a hat or something? You could have just as easily gone the extra mile and claimed that Robert E. Lee was secretly a member of a cult of insane fanatics worshiping the Energizer Bunny, who gave them all these glowing ball-sacks to use to destroy the world. I mean, come on. Don’t hold back on us now, movie!

So Hex gets wounded in a fight in town and collapses in the middle of the woods somewhere. While unconscious and being healed by his Indian friends – yes, he has Indian friends now – he experiences a series of psychotic seizures (well, that’s what I’m calling them, anyway) in which he is fighting Malkovich and losing. There’s one part where he gets buried and rises up from the ground covered in dirt…a lot of weird dreamlike camera angles and colors…and I’m just so immensely confused. Was the director just doing a lot of acid? I seriously think this warrants some investigation. He might be in deep shit.

Okay, so Hex is healed, and gets summoned to fight Turnbull at Independence Harbor. Even though he could probably have a whole army with him, as this is now a threat to the entire nation (Malkovich just flat out says that he wants to destroy America…HAHAHA), he goes alone. Because he’s edgy and cool and a loner. This whole thing could be solved in like a second if he just took a bunch of trained soldiers with him and had them all attack. What are you guys, morons? It’s SO EASY to solve this and here you are letting just one battered rebel do it for you? What a bunch of lazy asses. Maybe Malkovich should just go ahead and destroy you all anyway. Hex fights Malkovich, which is interspersed for some reason with scenes from the hallucination he had earlier, in which he…also fought Malkovich. So you get to see two fights between the same characters, at the same time. How worthless are you, movie?!

But oh no! Megan Fox has been kidnapped! Instead of just letting her rot like any sensible person would do, Hex’s brain is apparently still fried from hours out in the sun while he was unconscious, and so he dives selflessly in to save her. Or rather, not selflessly, but for the love of his own penis, which will be quite lonely if he doesn’t save her. So, let’s take a vote: Do you think Hex will save Megan Fox? Write your answers on the papers on your desks and I’ll give you a minute or two to think about it.

Of course he saves her, and of course Malkovich is killed, the nuclear weapons turn into pretty 4^th of July fireworks (because it has to be the 4^th of July when these events take place) and Hex is offered a position as – get this – SHERIFF OF AMERICA.

I don’t even have words for this. Oh wait, yes I do: Jonah Hex, everybody! Or as I like to call it, Half-Assed, Bottom of the Barrel Dog Shit, the movie! I mean, this is just shit, man; fresh, unfertilized shit straight from the ass of corporate America. The acting is phoned in and lazy, the story is full of holes and wasted potential and there’s just nothing enjoyable about it. I guess some of the action scenes are OK, but are you really going to sift through the rest of this manure for that? No. And you damn well shouldn’t.

All images Copyright (c) of their original owners. None of them are mine.

True Grit (2010)

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin

Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1403865/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Grit_(2010_film)

They got it right this time. Remakes are usually frowned upon by critics and the general public, and for good reason: they have a tendency to either fall short of the standards set by the original films or are just seen as a waste of a film altogether. However, there are occasions when they turn out well, especially when the said original film needed to improvements in the first place (http://docuniverse.blogspot.com/2010/12/true-grit-1969.html). So how did the Coen Brothers manage to take on a western made famous by John Wayne himself? Like this:

Once again based upon the book of the same name by Charles Portis, the story starts out with a young girl named Mattie, who's father is murdered and she goes on a quest to find his killer. The character of Mattie as played by Kim Darby was the part of the original movie that I really hated above anything else, but the Coen brothers thankfully helped change that around. First of all, she actually looks like a real girl from the 1870s, as opposed to a weird Justin Bieber clone. Secondly, the actress who plays her, Hailee Steinfeld, can actually, well, act. She comes across as a girl who is tough and certainly able to hold her own. While she has a bit of a self-righteous streak and a prim-and-proper manner that can turn people off, Steinfield is still able to reveal Mattie's warmth and personal conviction, making her very likable character. This is in stark contrast to Darby, who acted more like a monotone robot trying to give the illusion that she was tough but ends up looking like a deer in headlights.

Anyway, Mattie eventually comes across a one-eyed U.S. Marshall named Rooster Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges, whom she asks to help her capture her father's killer. Bridges does a great job as Cogburn; he is gruff and is not afraid to take on the bad guys when necessary, even if some complain that he over does it. At the same time, he is shown to have some flaws due to his age and alcoholism. Fans of "The Big Lebowski" may notice some hints of The Dude when Cogburn is a little...disoriented, but as much as I love that character, I think Bridges and the Coens were smart not to try and force their creation into this particular film; it would not have be right. My complaint is that his accent is so thick that I could not understand about half of the stuff he said, but I am willing to give that a pass because I get the idea of what he is saying and I guess that it makes Cogburn more memorable.

The rest of the story is pretty straight forward: the two of them, along with a Texas Ranger named La Boeuf (Matt Damon), begin their journey as they come across a pair of outlaws, a hanged body, and a man dressed as a bear. Okay, it is not entirely straight forward, but come on, its the Coen brothers, you got to expect a little weirdness! Anyway, generally speaking, the film moves at a productive paste and keeps you intrigued to until the end, using both action, humor, and good dialogue.

I did not have to much to complain about, but if I have to nit-pick...There is a part at the beginning when Mattie is arguing with the man her father had sold horses to before his murder. I disliked this part in the original movie because I thought that it was a pointless scene that did not need to be done on-camera, and while the Coen brothers make it a tad better, it still seems like a time waster. The film also has a tendency to marginalize its supporting characters. Damon does well with his role, but he is mostly absent from the picture; he just has his little bouts with Bridges (which are pretty amusing), but then gets annoyed and leaves not once but twice. James Brolin is good as the murderer Tom Chaney, someone who is somewhat stupid but can be intimidating when he needs to be. However, he is on screen for barely five minutes and his impact is lacking. A nearly unrecognizable Barry Pepper also does a decent job as the outlaw Ned Pepper, but is also underused. To be fair, these characters were not on-screen that much more in the 1969 version, but I guess they were so unimpressive in that version that it kind of did not matter. By making them interesting, the Coen's have been hurt by their own success. Another part of this may have to do with the 110 running time, about 18 minutes shorter than the original. Overall, I am glad this was shorter because it made the movie more concise, but it was not without its draw backs.

Despite that admittedly bloated paragraph I just wrote, it is still a very enjoyable film that shows that not all remakes turn out bad, and I recommend it.

W. (2008)

Staring: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell

Directed by Oliver Stone

"W" is Oliver Stone's film about the life of George W. Bush, who confronts many challenges and disappointments as we makes his way out of being the black sheep of the family and into the White House.

This is a terrible movie. I was surprised at how bad it was. I was not expecting it to be a masterpiece, but I was expecting it to be at least halfway decent. It wasn't: the story-line was disorganized, the acting ranged from mediocre to crappy, the dialoguewas ridiculous, and worst of all, it does not really serve a purpose.

The first part of the movie goes back and forth between the run up to the Iraq war and the events of Bush's young adulthood at a rapid paste and it is hard to keep up with it. There are also a lot of random scenes (like the pretzel incident) that make no sense in the overall picture or are just awkward. This eventually settles down, but then the movie continues to suffer as it goes from being confusing to just plain boring.

Josh Brolin does an okay job as Bush, but for most of the movie you can't help but notice that he seems to be playing a caricature of him instead of making seem "real"; he comes off as being like a second-rate Will Ferrel or Frank Calendo. Richard Dufress does a decent Dick Cheney impersonation (though his voice is a little off), but virtually everyone else either does look like/act like who they are supposed to be, does not try, does not really need to try, or does try and fails. The woman who played Condoleezza Rice deserves special mention; she combined bad acting with a random accent that does not appear to belong to any person, nationality, or ethnicity that I can think of.

Even if the acting was better, the performers would still fall victim to the bizarre screenplay; many scenes look like bad Saturday Night Live sketches (and those of you who have seen bad SNL sketches know just how low they can go). Sometimes they will bring up controversial political topics for about five seconds and then move on to something else without ever expanding on what they were talking about. It seems like they just pasted together a bunch of news paper headlines and infamous Bush quotes (yes, "misunderestimate" is in there, along with others) and tried to pass it off as everyday dialogue.

 
Perhaps one of the worst things about the film is that, in the end, it has no point. Supposedly, Oliver Stone wanted this to be a psychoanalyst of the president and how he came to be who he is and how he arrived at the decisions he made. Yet we are left not knowing how we are supposed to feel about Bush. Is he a stubborn jerk who didn't think properly? Is he a noble warrior who made some mistakes along the way? Is he a pitiful loser who had daddy issues? I suspect we are we supposed to decide for ourselves, right? Well, that may be a problem because Stone has been very outspoken against the former president, so no matter how much he may deny that his politics will slip into this movie, the objectivity of the film is always in question and is further injured by everything I have mentioned in the previous paragraphs. Whatever the answer is, it is not likely to satisfy anyone. Most conservatives probably will not see this movie, but even liberal Bush critics may be disappointed by it because Oliver Stone (sort of) tried to make the film balanced in order to avoid the type of controversy that he received when he made "JFK".

This film also shows that you should not try to do a movie about a president while he is still in office: everyone, including Stone, has their partisan opinions about him and everything is still in motion; its like making a movie based on a novel that has yet to be finished. Besides, why pay money to see a guy you could, up until recently, see in the news for free everyday? It's not like you are going to learn anything new about him.

Well, that's pretty much it. I may be being a bit hard on this movie because I am obsessed with politics, and I get annoyed when filmmakers feel like they are being politically astute when they are really just putting out a lot of garbage. However, no matter which way you spin it, (get it? politics, spin? heh heh heh...) you cannot escape the simple conclusion: this movie is really, really, really, bad. The End.