The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Directed by: Scott Derrickson

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, Kathy Bates

I’ve been adamantly against this remake since I first heard about it, but I hadn’t seen it until the other day. This movie pretty much proves that I’m always right about everything forever, and also that the screenwriter, David Scarpa, should never work again.

This “remake” has little to no similarities to the original Day the Earth Stood Still. An alien comes to Earth in an effort to get humanity to stop screwing up the planet’s ecosystem, or he’ll destroy them all with his army of giant glowing spheres and giant robot that is apparently made out of billions of smaller robots. However, he’s shot as soon as he leaves his ship and is hustled off to a secret government research center. Once there, he escapes with the help of his powers of controlling electricity and goes off to meet another fellow alien that’s been living on Earth for years to see if the humans are really worth saving.

He then leaves with a doctor who helped him and her son to meet a scientist (John Cleese, for some reason) and ask HIM whether humans should be killed or not. The kid calls the cops on the alien and he starts the world destruction program thing whatever. Eventually the alien sees the mom and her son hugging over the grave of his dead dad and changes his mind, deciding instead to stop the evil robot thing. Ughhhhh.

My problem with this movie wasn’t that it had minor differences like glowing orbs instead of flying saucers and the fact that the alien had magic powers to blow people up and bring them back to life and things like that (althought that WAS stupid), my problem was that they took a film with a legitimate message and turned it into an action movie with an afterthought of ‘save the whales’ thrown in to try and make it meaningful. It’s kinda like they watched the original movie, COMPLETELY missed the point, and thought, “Oh man, I’d love to see that giant robot blow a bunch of shit up with that laser! LET’S MAKE A REMAKE!!”

On that note, I just want to mention again that I hope second-time screenwriter David Scarpa goes to sleep every night haunted by the fact that he couldn’t write believable characters or an interesting story to save his life, until he eventually dies a lonely, bitter old man. That… might be a LITTLE mean, but I think I’ve got my point across. Keanu spends the whole movie hating humanity until he has a walk with the kid where they don’t talk about shit, and then suddenly he’s moved because he hugs his mom at his dad’s grave. What the fuck kind of humanity-saving moment is that? I’m not asking for anything grandiose, I’d just like it to be something that made a lick of goddamn sense. How is that particular moment ANY different than the other seven times the kid mentioned his dad being dead and both of them being sad about it? Are you seriously telling me that the human race is saved because of a HUG? Grr… I can’t even talk about this awful story anymore.

The last thing I want to mention is that Keanu Reeves was not the worst part of this movie. He was bad, yes, but it was his standard kind of bad, and they obviously “wrote” this thing to play to his strengths (displaying no emotion, being confused). In total… this movie was exactly what I expected. Except that I didn’t really expect to be angry after watching it instead of just sad. No movie has ever made me this angry before.

Office Space (1999)

Office Space (1999)

Directed by: Mike Judge

Starring: Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston, David Herman

I’ve never been able to understand how the same guy who made unfunny garbage like Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill can also make really damn funny movies like Office Space and Idiocracy. Anyway.

Office Space is about a computer programmer who has a shitty job that he hates. He goes to see a hypno-therapist, and after an accident, comes out completely relaxed, no longer caring about his job. Although you’d think his slacking would be detrimental, he actually ends up being considered for promotion while his two friends are getting laid off. The three of them decide to steal money from the company (using a scheme from Superman III) as payback.

Honestly, this movie kinda goes all over the place, but you don’t really care because it’s constantly funny. If you’ve ever been in a cubicle farm situation, you’ll definitely get where these characters are coming from… well, up until the second story starts halfway through about them stealing money. I guess they decided they had to do SOMETHING other than just work and be miserable.

If you haven’t seen Office Space and you work in a field that doesn’t involve manual labor or food service, it’s pretty much a must-see. And if you do have one of those other jobs… Get a real job, you hippie.

The Empty Acre (2007)

The Empty Acre (2007)

Directed by: Patrick Rea

Starring: Jennifer Plas, John Wilson, Robert Paisley

I was really on the fence about whether to call this one a horror movie or a drama, because it really has the feel of a drama, but is obviously supposed to be a thriller or something like that. Someone needs to tell writer/director/editor Patrick Rea that you have to have things happen besides a marriage on the rocks to make a horror movie.

A couple that live in the sticks have a baby, and that’s all that’s keeping them together. The man drinks, the woman lives in silent despair and refuses to do anything to try to improve her situation (she’s the main character and we’re supposed to feel sorry for her, but it didn’t really happen that way). One day, their baby gets stolen and they both go even crazier than normal. The woman starts having dreams of a mud baby and finds a dry spot in her field that appears to be crying. I think the idea is that there was a dirt monster or something, but I don’t really have any idea what he was going for.

This is obviously a very cheap movie, but that doesn’t always mean that it has to come out like this indie piece of crap. I mean, the movie opens with stupid editor tricks that’s supposed to suggest that we’re watching a series of home movies (which serves as backstory) interrupted by static, which keeps moving back and forth between the same bits. All it really accomplishes is to tell the audience that they might as well give up now, because the filmmaker obviously doesn’t care about them.

I’d go off more on the story being pointless and nearly existant, but I’m not even sure if what I gathered to be the story was what I was actually supposed to be seeing. There’s a lot put into the fact that the guy drinks (even though it doesn’t seem all that important to anything), and there are a lot of dream sequences that seem like they’d be more at home as a shitty music video for an industrial band in the 90’s. Other than that, the movie’s all about how awful this woman’s life is… which is awful because she just sits around and complains about it. How are you supposed to sympathize with a character who’s just a useless whiner?

Anyway, those’re my thoughts. I wouldn’t recommend this movie, or any of the other twenty movies written/directed by this Patrick Rea guy (though I haven’t seen them), just solely because he obviously doesn’t care about story or his audience. Not that those are important parts of film or anything. Daddy issues are way more important.

The Man With the Golden Gun (1974)

The Man With the Golden Gun (1974)

Directed by: Guy Hamilton

Starring: Roger Moore, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland

The second Roger Moore as James Bond movie, The Man With the Golden Gun is probably in the top… I dunno, five or ten Bond films. There’s a lot of good stuff in here.

Bond recieves a threat that the “man with the golden gun,” a famous assassin, is after him, so he decides to find the assassin first. It turns out that it’s a man named Scaramanga who thinks of Bond as his only equal, and wants to pit their skills against each other. This all culminates on an island in a crazy fun house that’s controlled by Herve Villachez. Also, there’s some stuff about a solar-powered laser.

Christopher Lee is pretty great as Scaramanga, one of maybe four memorable major Bond villains. He very much plays an evil version of James Bond (who is, let’s be honest, pretty much a murderous rapist as it is…), which is a neat dynamic I don’t think they’ve done before or since. I… don’t really have anything else to say about this movie. It was pretty good.

Earthquake (1974)

Earthquake (1974)

Directed by: Mark Robson

Starring: Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy

Apparently this movie was hot shit when it came out because it used “SenSurround” to enhance the earthquakiness of the earthquakes. SenSurround was achieved by putting huge bass speakers around the floor of the theater, which would make it shake as the earthquake happened in the movie. That would’ve been neat to experience.

Earthquake tells the story of a ton of people as they survive a massive earthquake that threatens to destroy a dam and which causes tons of other damage. There really weren’t any specific storylines that were engaging or interesting, but it did have Walter Matthau as a drunk with a pimp hat on.

I don’t know if I just wasn’t paying enough attention or what, but there really wasn’t a whole lot to this movie. Chuck Heston’s character was having an affair and Richard Roundtree was a stunt motorcyclist, but once the earthquake hits, nothing really changes to them. I always thought the point of these big disaster movies was that something disasterous brings out different parts of people, but that never really happened in here. Heston’s character dies trying to rescue his wife, but that’s about as close as we get. And this is a two hour long movie, which is mostly just people climbing out of buildings.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just inured to disaster movies because of the popularity of them around 2000, but Earthquake didn’t really do anything for me.

Apparently this movie was hot shit when it came out because it used “SenSurround” to enhance the earthquakiness of the earthquakes. SenSurround was achieved by putting huge bass speakers around the floor of the theater, which would make it shake as the earthquake happened in the movie. That would’ve been neat to experience.

Earthquake tells the story of a ton of people as they survive a massive earthquake that threatens to destroy a dam and which causes tons of other damage. There really weren’t any specific storylines that were engaging or interesting, but it did have Walter Matthau as a drunk with a pimp hat on.

I don’t know if I just wasn’t paying enough attention or what, but there really wasn’t a whole lot to this movie. Chuck Heston’s character was having an affair and Richard Roundtree was a stunt motorcyclist, but once the earthquake hits, nothing really changes to them. I always thought the point of these big disaster movies was that something disasterous brings out different parts of people, but that never really happened in here. Heston’s character dies trying to rescue his wife, but that’s about as close as we get. And this is a two hour long movie, which is mostly just people climbing out of buildings.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just inured to disaster movies because of the popularity of them around 2000, but Earthquake didn’t really do anything for me.