“TRON: Legacy”

I should have trusted my gut on this one. You know, that little voice that kept telling me not to get too excited because even though it had rad, state-of-the-art (at the time) effects, the first “TRON” kinda sucked too.

Unfortunately, I did not listen to my inner voice and have spent the past few weeks hyping the shit outta “TRON: Legacy” to Christine, who, had absolutely no interest in seeing the movie. Well, what can I say, amigos? Once again, Christine was righter than rain.

“TRON: Legacy” is a bloated, boring, totally derivative peice of crap. I’m not kidding, man, this movie sucks major ass. At least the first flick had the wow factor of the cool “in the grid” effects and all, this movie plays like a soulless, two-hour ad for toys and spinoff sequels and shit. And except for a sparkling, seriously transcendent score by electronica legends, Daft Punk, the movie is a complete and total waste of your time.

I mean, hell, if I — a child of the 80’s who worshipped the effects of the first movie and played the hell outta the “TRON” videogame — hated it, just imagine what non-“TRON” geeks, people like Christine, with no connection to the first film whatsoever, will think of this junk?

Yikes…thanks for ruining another cherished, childhood memory, Disney.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

I should start by saying that I absolutely love almost everyone associated with this movie, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, David Fincher, hell, even the writer of the source material himself, F. Scott Fitzgerald. But the movie that this extraordinarily-gifted crew has cobbled together is just plain bad.

I won’t go into detail because I know a lot of people who are seriously dying to see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, and I was too. I mean, that teaser trailer rocked! But, sadly, trailers are not movies, amigos…

I think the kindest compliment I can give this syrupy-sweet, butt-numbingly long movie — seriously, it makes “Australia” look like a short film — is that if you liked “Forrest Gump”, you’ll love “Benjamin Button”.

And if you hated “Gump”, like Christine and I did (sorry America), then you will probably hate this movie too. Brad Pitt’s hokey, ever-shifting accent aside, there are so many Gump/Button similarilities that you could do a scholarly work on it.

Just to give you an idea of how liberally “Button” borrows from “Gump”, there is a sassy Momma character, a crazy sea captain best friend, a legless man, a thwarted longtime love born in childhood, and even a lame ongoing joke that rivals that annoying “shrimp this, shrimp that…” sequence from “Gump”.

And yet all that said, I gotta tell ya, “Gump” is a much better movie. Yep, it seems that that old hambone Robert Zemekis has Fincher beat in the epic crowdpleaser department. And since I am not one to ever shower Bob Zemekis with compliments of any kind, you know I must have really hated “Button”. Yikes…

So, come Christmas, save yourself a little hard-earned dough and rent “Forest Gump”, or better yet, check out a truly great movie like “Frost/Nixon”, “Milk” or “Slumdog Millionaire” instead…

“Cloverfield” on DVD

Rented the insanely over-hyped Godzilla-lite movie “Cloverfield” over the weekend and all I can say is…wow…what a disaster, literally. This movie sucks so bad that it might just be one of the worst movies we’ve ever seen. And that is really saying something as we see tons of movies.

If the annoying, herky-jerky camera work doesn’t make you wanna hurl, than the acting and dialog surely will. I’m not kidding, the script is so bad you can’t even laugh at it. And this cast of pretty WB/CW rejects is so terrible that Christine and I were actually rooting for them to die.

Not to give too much away, but let me tell ya, when the most annoying character, Marlena, met her end in a spectacularly gory fashion, I literally stood up and cheered. Of course, the way she died — like so much of this crass marketing scheme of a movie — was lifted directly out of another movie (“Alien”) but hey, at least she died, so we were happy.

As for the camera work, yikes. I already have a hard time not throwing up during good movies with hand-held camera work — “Husbands & Wives”, “Breaking The Waves”, etc. — and when the movie is bad, wow, it kind of multiplies the nausea factor by a million.

Now, before you call me a film snob, let me say that bad acting and bad writing I can forgive — we have enjoyed some really bad scary movies over the years — but the biggest problem I have with this movie is that it’s not a movie at all. Seriously, “Cloverfield” plays like an extended YouTube video, and in fact, would probably have been much better had it been confined to three minutes instead of a 84.

You can almost hear the “story and plot be damned” pitch: “It’s BLAIR WITCH meets GODZILLA for the YouTube age”. I kid you not, that’s all it is. There is absolutely no explanation for anything that happens in this movie and the framing device (again clearly stolen from another movie) that this tape was found by the military is laughable.

Trust me, man, if the military found this talky, God-awful videotape, they would do some serious editing and skip to the good parts. Yes, I said good parts. Because this movie has two scenes that are pretty amazing. If you’d like to see the movie for yourself sometime, stop reading now while I discuss them.

SPOILER ALERT: The first scene that is worth checking out is when the monster attacks the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s very cool and totally scary.

And the second (and only other!) scene worth seeing is near the end of the movie when we spy the monster being bombed by the military. Shot from a helicopter as our surviving heroes (if you can call them that) are whisked to safety, it is our only clear view of the monster and it looks pretty damn cool.

And then, just when it seems like he’s beat, the monster jumps up and takes the helicopter down. Wow! This scene isn’t just awesome, but it is probably the only truly original scare in the entire film. Too bad the rest of this boring, crapfest sucks so much ass…

At the end of the day, I guess the best thing I can say about “Cloverfield” is that, thankfully, we saved some money by NOT seeing it in the theater. So, yeah!