The Battle of
Britain in Pearl Harbor (2001)
Remember in Part 1
where I unfavourably compared Passchendaele to Pearl
Harbor? The time has come to talk about Pearl Harbor
itself; it's a pretty bad movie. It's a sappy by-the-numbers romance
with weird dialogue and the type of logic that would exist in an
elementary school student's short story. The titular battle scene
could've been great if it weren't for (1) the historical
inaccuracies, (2) the US sailors are incompetent and helpless, (3)
the audience isn't given time to get attached to the servicemen and
as such won't be invested in what happens to them, and (4) much of
the focus of the attack scene is given to the fictional characters
whose actions are only loosely based on true events. Having said all
that, the one aerial battle scene with Rafe McCawley over the English
Channel is pretty good (he volunteers to join the RAF, which in real
life wasn't allowed to active USAF pilots) even if it is fictional.
It's an intense, thrilling scene that just goes to show that director
Michael Bay can do a decent action scene every once in a while.
Leonardo
DiCaprio in J. Edgar (2011)
It's no secret that
Leonardo DiCaprio is one of this generation's best actors. But it
wasn't until 2016 that he finally won the Academy Award for best
actor (for The Revenant), which means that before then we got
performances like this one in which he tried Oscar-baiting so hard
but to no avail. DiCaprio tries so hard to go for gold – in fact
one could be forgiven for thinking the word is spelled “Oscurbate”
– but the film it's in just isn't interesting at all! I must
confess, I found J. Edgar to be so boring that I couldn't
finish it; I quit at about the 45 minute mark. And I'm not a guy who
usually quits watching stuff due to boredom (I made it all they way
through the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries, for cryin'
out loud!). But what do you expect when you're watching a movie about
a dull long-serving bureaucrat?
And speaking of Leo
DiCaprio...
The soundtrack
to Before the Flood (2016)
I stand firmly
against the commonly held misbelief that celebrities know what's best
for us. Celebrities live in a completely different world from us
normal folks and lead very different lifestyles than ours; they don't
have to worry about the same things us commoners do and so their
political advice and opinions are unrelatable at best and nakedly
cynical at worst. (For example, I don't want some super-rich
late-night talk show host who can afford to airlift his family to any
hospital in the world to get the best medical treatment money can buy
lecturing me on which political candidate will support a half-assed
public healthcare service.) Additionally, celebrities certainly don't
hold any moral high ground, as their never-ending stream of scandals
will attest. Honestly, I could write a whole article on this topic
but I'll just get to the point: Leonardo DiCaprio is not someone to
lecture us on climate change. The man is notorious for his obscene
overuse of private flights – which burn more fossil fuels than
dozens of ordinary people will burn throughout their lives – and
his affinity for hanging out with Arab royalty (ie. oil barons) on
giant, diesel-guzzling luxury yachts. Apart from that, Before the
Flood itself is a terrible argument. Not much scientific evidence
is presented, not a single counter-viewpoint is put forth. For
example, the Athabasca oil sands surface mine is shown to demonstrate
how oil sand extraction is ugly and scars the landscape when in
reality those mines were opened in the 1960's and 1970's and only
about 10% of the Canadian oil sands are shallow enough to be mined in
this way. It's pure and simple propaganda. But at least the music is
nice. For all its faults, Before the Flood has one of the best
soundtracks I've ever heard in a movie. The mix of ambient
electronic/experimental scoring from the likes of Mogwai, Gustavo
Santaolalla, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross sets up an organic,
introspective, and cerebral atmosphere that deserved a better film.
My recommendation: listen to the soundtrack, skip the movie.
Private Witt's
death in The Thin Red Line (1998)
OK for the record,
Thin Red Line isn't a terrible movie, but it is a very
disappointing one. I went into it hearing that it was one of the
greatest war films ever made. But what I got was an almost 3 hour
snoozefest where director Terrence Malick periodically forgot he
was making a war film and instead made a bunch of nonsequitur
dream-like, abstract inner reflection bullcrap, the same kind of
bullcrap that made Malick's The Tree of Life (2011)
utterly unwatchable to me. One of the most annoying parts of Thin
Red Line is this Pvt. Witt character. Played by Jim Caviezel,
Witt is a frequent source of the whole shoe-gazing boredom that
pervades the whole film. He's a total slacker hippie loser who makes
you wonder why he ever joined the army in the first place. The only
part of Thin Red Line that made me stand up, pump my fist, and
shout “yeah!” was the part where Witt freakin' dies! That may
sound callous of me, but unless you've seen this movie you have no
idea how irritating this dude was. They even made it a heroic death
too, so kudos there.
The possible
trolling of Saving Christmas (2014)
Saving Christmas
is a pretty bad movie, even by the standards of Christian movies.
It's a shoddily put together load of faux-festive materialistim and
weird conspiracy theories pumped full of padding in an effort to
barely scrape the threshold of feature-length (79 minutes). Some of
the theories put forth in this film are so out there and held
together with only the thinnest of logical explanations, like how
stacks of presents under the tree symbolize the skyline of New
Jerusalem (because boxes are the same shape as buildings, you see).
And yet, consider for a moment that perhaps none of this was ever
meant to be taken seriously and that the audience is just being
screwed with. What if Kirk Cameron is actually just trolling us and
that this movie is really just an elaborate satire of the War on
Christmas? If this is true then Kirk Cameron might just be a comedic
genius the likes of which we haven't seen since Andy Kaufman
himself!...or it might just be a load of crap. Who knows?
Jack Black as
Slip in The NeverEnding Story III (1994)
I really like Jack
Black. He's one of those rare actors who makes good movies better and
bad movies watchable. He's pretty much the only good part of
NeverEnding Story III, a sad little sequel that really had
nothing to add to its series and was clearly made just to earn a
quick buck. But Black's rendition of Slip, the school bully,
is truly something to admire. He plays this leather-clad, monobrowed
punk villain like some kind of elaborate mastermind; a
combination of Kahn and Blofeld. And he clearly revels in it. Jack
Black gets so into this role and has so much fun that the audience
can't help but feel it too. Like Michael Ironside in Highlander
II, Jack Black is in his own little world with this one and it
makes for some great entertainment.
Meat Loaf in
To Catch a Yeti (1995)
Now we get into the
truly awful stuff, starting with To Catch a Yeti, a movie
whose quality is pitiful even by the standards of made-for-TV
children's films. The plot and characters are forgettable, all
problems are solved within minutes (mostly by random chance and not
any actual thinking on part of the characters), the special effects
don't deserve the moniker “special”, and the acting is almost
uniformly bad. The reason I say almost is because the one bright spot
in the whole film is Meat Loaf's performance as Big Jake Grizzly, a
grumpy big game hunter. Similar to Jack Black in NeverEnding Story
III, Meat Loaf plays a riveting villain, but in this film he
brings a surprising amount of intensity found nowhere else. He also
gives the irritating bad guy kid his comeuppance at the end.
Matthew
Lillard as Shaggy in Scooby-Doo (2002)
Let's face it,
Shaggy is the best character in any Scooby-Doo show or movie. He's by
far the most fun and most memorable of the Mystery Machine bunch. And
so it's only fitting that he is the only good part of the live-action
Scooby-Doo film from 2002. Matthew Lillard – who apparently
watched as many episodes of the show as he could before filming began
– is spot on in the role of the laid-back, lanky, cowardly
slacker/jokester Shaggy. His speech and mannerisms are uncanny; if
you're patient enough then the film might be worth watching just to
see the Shagster brought to life. Since 2002, Lillard has gone on to
play and voice Shaggy in subsequent Scooby-Doo media so I
guess some lasting good came out of it. And let's not overlook the
fact that if it weren't for Lillard the role likely would've gone to
either Jim Carrey or Mike Myers. That fact alone is enough to earn
this actor's efforts a spot on this list.
Al Pacino as
himself in Jack and Jill (2011)
Yeah, yeah. We all
knew this was coming. Who hasn't heard of Jack and Jill's
legendary awfulness? Is there anyone who doesn't immediately think
“disaster” when they hear of a Happy Madison comedy in which Adam
Sandler plays identical twins, one of them female? (Fun fact: this is
impossible because identical twins are almost always the same sex.
There've been a few confirmed cases of boy/girl identical twins being
born, but each time the girl is born with Turner Syndrome. I really
hope that this wasn't what Jack and Jill was going for!) Apart
from its stupid premise it suffers from the usual Sandler comedy
problems: the humour is dumb and mean-spirited, the plot is
directionless, the child characters are creepy, the tone shifts
wildly between low-brow comedy and sentimental schmaltziness, and
Sandler's character is an unlikable jackass who also serves as
Sandler's self-insert fan fiction. But the one thing that stands out
from it all is Al Pacino playing himself, giving his all in a
performance where he really didn't have to. Sure it's sad to see such
an accomplished actor in a film like this, but he really commits to
portraying an intense version of himself who is so obsessed with
acting that he's gone a little bit crazy. This affords the film a few
genuinely decent gags. This includes the last spoken lines of the
film, uttered by Pacino himself: “This must never be seen by
anyone... All copies: destroy them!” I'd like to think this is an
instruction to the audience as to what should be done with their copy
of Jack and Jill.
Michael
Chiklis as John Belushi in Wired (1989)
If you've never
heard of Wired, then allow me to fill you in. Wired is a
biopic of the “laughs and times” of comedian John Belushi who
died of a drug overdose in 1982 at age 33. It's pretty freakin'
terrible. It's a low budget, tone-deaf pile of trash that plays like
a melodramatic PSA about Hollywood drug abuse. Wired offers
little insight about its subject and focuses way too much on his
addictions. The anti-drug stuff isn't always handled well and mostly
consists of characters yelling at John to stop doing drugs. In other
words, the film lectures a man who is dead. And we haven't even
gotten to the part where Belushi's ghost/corpse lies screaming during
his own autopsy delivered by sushi chef as John's guardian angel
dances around. Yep, that happens. I could go on about how much truly
awful stuff is in Wired but I'll just cut to the chase:
Michael Chiklis is outrageously good in this film. He's got John
Belushi's manic energy, his mannerisms, and even his appearance down
to a T. He impersonates Belushi so well that it makes you a bit sad
that that actual comedian isn't around any more. It's a performance
that definitely deserved a better movie than this. In fact Wired
was so controversial when it came out that it kind of wrecked
Chiklis' career for a couple years, which is a shame. It's not his
fault the movie was crap!
