Cynical Cinema

Shannyn Sossamon looks to be the Jamie Lee Curtis of the last few years.  After One Missed Call came out on DVD a few weeks ago, she adds to her horror resume with Catacombs, a new horror flick about the Catacombs that apparently exist under Paris.  This myriad of tunnels apparently also houses thousands of dead bodies that couldn’t be buried elsewhere.  Well, this is actually true.  And they are actually lined and paved with human skulls.  That seems far-fetched to me, but wikipedia says it’s true, so I believe.  There is a cult classic called Les Gaspards, starring a young Gerard Depardieu, that was filmed and set in the creepy Paris catacombs.  It was far, far better than this one.  Here’s an indication that should have tipped viewers off - Les Gaspards, (The Holes in English), had permission to film there.  Catacombs didn’t.  Maybe because the people in charge of the catacombs knew how stupid this movie would be.

But here’s the thing - this movie should be good!  This is one of only two major motion pictures that has made use of the creepiness of the Paris catacombs, one of the most naturally creepy places in the world!  So how can you make a non-creepy movie about it?  Well, you can do a movie like this.  Catacombs reminded me a lot of one of those jokes that goes on for ever and ever and then has no real punchline, or an obvious one.  For example:  that joke about the guy who stays overnight at a monastery, and hears some really weird noises, but the monks say they can’t tell him what it is.  They say “I can’t tell you, you’re not a monk”.  So he becomes obsessed with finding out, so he sets out to become a monk.  And he takes eleven years of theology, and four years of monastery training, and becomes a junior monk, and moves up through the ranks until he gets back to the monastery (all explained in FAR greater detail in the joke).  And once he gets there, he can finally find the secret of the bizarre noises.  So he opens the door and you know what he sees?  I can’t tell you.  You’re not a monk. 

That’s the joke, where the punchline is irrelevant, the fact that it took two hours to tell the joke is what is supposed to be funny.  That’s how this movie feels.  The ending is not only a sour punchline to a pretty boring film, but it’s also completely implausible given the rest of the film.  (And, for those of you who have seen this, completely forseeable for the people involved, which makes their reaction idiotic.)  Shannyn Sossamon is actually a very hot, very good actress, and I really hope she manages to move on to something other than annoying horror movies very soon.  Also starring in this film is Pink, the singer, who is bizarrely hot in a goth-freaky-chick sort of way.  She’s pretty good too, but this movie is so boring it doesn’t matter. 

Getting lost in this creepy place could be good for some scares.  Especially if, somewhere in the shadows elsewhere in the catacombs, there was a homicidal maniac wearing (for some odd reason) a pig mask.  But just being lost in a creepy place could make for ten minutes of fright.  Not sixty.  The beginning is promising, with Sossamon arriving in Paris to meet Pink, her sister, and being taken to this creepy rave party in the catacombs.  She drinks some absinthe, and the guys try to creep her out with a story about a crazy dude in a pig mask who may very well be the antichrist who lives in the catacombs and kills everyone he meets.  Although it’s supposed to be a silly story, we know very well that it will turn out to be true.  And therefore…silly.

The first twenty minutes are like some sort of bizarre, obnoxious music video, with lights flickering so fast that you can hardly make anything out, and the strobe effect obscuring the right things at the right times which could lead to a huge scare…but it doesn’t.  Even the flickering camera and lights can’t pull off the most obvious scare, which is intended to begin the proceedings.  More flickering obscures other seemingly important plot points - like, did the cops actually kill that guy themselves?  Or what…who knows?  Then the catacombs.  Which are dark.  And full of skulls.  And creepy.  For ten minutes.  Then there are the noises in the distance, which are not frightening at all, but rather irritating and lame.  Of course, she has to eventually meet another guy lost in the catacombs, because one woman walking around, alone and lost, for an hour would be…tedious?  But the new guy is useless and is gone quickly.

This whole movie is basically useless, and was gone quickly.  It premiered on a scary-movie channel in the States called FearNet, and disappeared onto DVD almost right away.  Likely, it will disappear from there soon too.

Blood of My Brother is in many ways an incredibly impressive achievement.  It is a documentary on the Iraqi war that is incredible in terms of the access these film makers were given to shoot in Iraq.  They get behind the scenes at fundamentalist, jihad-fueled rallies.  The manage to come along with an attack on American forces.  They ride along on a tank with American forces.  And no judgements are passed one way or another.  There is no narrator in the film.  The only dialogue is from the interview subjects themselves.  It’s therefore almost all in Arabic, with English subtitles.  It follows one particular family so closely that you feel like not only are you there, but you’re almost a family member.

And it’s this Iraqi family that defines both the film and the plight in the country itself.  One of their sons and brothers has been killed by American forces while guarding a religious building.  His younger brother, Ibrahim, has become the family’s provider.  In his heart, he’s torn between a desire for revenge toward the Americans and the need to provide for his family, which would be destitute if he died.  This is a real insider’s look at the Iraqi insurgency, as the film takes us inside the Mehdi Army, one of the insurgent groups in Iraq.

 All of which makes for some powerful imagery and moving scenes, especially the scenes of mothers weeping over the death and the gravesites of their sons.  And yet, somehow, without a narrator to move the story along, and without any defineable position or purpose, it feels more like we’re eavesdropping on tragedy and militant anger, rather than understanding any of it at all.  Sure, we understand how the rallies and the speeches and the fury toward the Americans creates an insurgency, and makes suicide bombers out of people who would ordinarily abhor such violence.  All of which is an amazing thing to see, in terms of eavesdropping.  But as a movie, there just isn’t enough continuity to make it exciting or to make it very watchable.  An amazing achievement, a movie that ought to be seen, but one that’s an effort to watch.

Just a few weeks after the amazing biopic Control was released on DVD, about Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis, his gravestone has been stolen in Macclesfield Cemetery in England.  The inscription on the gravestone read “Ian Curtis 18 - 5- 80 ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’”.  Curtis was found hanging in his home May 18th, 1980, at the age of 23.  For my review of the film, type “Control” into the search feature.

Kung-Fu Panda is not a kids movie so much as it is a kung-fu movie.  For kids.  Jack Black is the voice of the panda, Po, who is a clumsy fat oaf with a passion for kung-fu.  He is a huge fan of the Furious Five, who are the great kung-fu fighters of his little village.  Each one represents a different style of kung-fu, styles which will be very familiar to any fan of the kung-fu genre of movies.  The crane (David Cross), the viper (Lucy Liu), the mantis (Seth Rogen), the monkey (Jackie Chan) and the tigress (Angelina Jolie).  The film opens with a dream Po is having, a scene out of so many kung-fu movies, where the bad guys show up in the restaurant where the hero is quietly eating his food, and soon he is forced to kick all of their asses, causing massive property damage to the restaurant.

 Of course, this is just Po’s dream - in reality, he is not a martial arts hero, he is an employee in his father’s noodle shop.  When he lies to his dad and says he was dreaming about noodles, his dad flies into a frenzy - his son has had the noodle dream!  He is ready to take over the noodle shop from his father!  (Another wonderful theme from so many kung-fu flicks.)  In reality though, Po wants to be in the kung-fu scene.  And when there is going to be a big ceremony to annoint the next “chosen one”, the martial artist to whom ultimate enlightenment will be given, he does everything he can to go watch.  Through a series of mishaps (most of them hilarious), he ends up in the arena, and actually looks to be the “chosen one” himself.  Of course, the choice of Po sparks controversy.  How can he be the chosen one when he’s a big fat clumsy panda with no kung-fu skills at all?

The master, Shifu (voiced by Dustin Hoffman), is very annoyed at the selection of Po as the chosen one.  He believes that his master Oogway (a tortoise) has become senile and chosen the wrong person (or…animal) to be the chosen one.  Oogway, by the way, is hilarious.  He dispenses this bizarre, cubicle-wall type wisdom that is incredibly cheesy, even for a kung-fu movie.  (”The past is history, the future is a mystery, and right now is a gift.  That is why they call it the present.”)  But it’s delievered so solemnly that it’s awfully funny.  Anyway, Shifu decides that he will do everything he can to get Po to quit, so one of the other students can claim the title of “dragon warrior”, and get a chance to read the “dragon scroll” and become the greatest martial artist in history.  But Po won’t be so easily dissuaded.

Compounding the problem is the fact that Tai-Lung (voice of Ian McShane), a snow leopard, has escaped from the massive prison that holds him captive.  Tai-Lung is the former disciple of Master Shifu, a kung-fu student who surpassed even his master in skill, but then went bad.  He tried to take the dragon scroll for himself, but was driven away and imprisoned by Shifu and Oogway.  He is now bent on returning to the temple, taking the dragon scroll, and exacting horrible revenge on all those who turned against him.  Only Po, of course, stands in his way.

Kung-Fu Panda is terrific because everything in the movie rings true in terms of actual kung-fu cinema.  References to other movies abound.  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill, Hero, Once Upon A Time In China, and many others.  The one film I think is most closely mirrored is Kung-Fu Hustle, a bonkers kung-fu comedy that is available on DVD now, with very similar themes.  The bad guy gets out of prison and comes to attack the good guy, who all of a sudden learns that he is the chosen one with crazy kung-fu skills…very similar movies, both extremely good.  And in terms of old classics, Kung-Fu Panda most closely resembles the Jackie Chan comedic martial arts classic Drunken Master, with the main difference being that Master Shifu is not drunk.  But substitute the booze in that movie with the food from this one, and you have many very similar scenes.

Kung-Fu Panda is definitely funny, and definitely kid-friendly, but it’s so much more than a silly kids movie.  It’s a solid, very well done kung-fu film.  And the resolution in the final scene is absolutely perfect.  I don’t think I’m giving too much away here - it is a kids’ movie after all - but Po defeats Tai-Lung in the end with a style that has been perfectly set up over the course of the rest of the film, with Master Shifu’s teachings, Oogway’s wisdom, and Po’s own proclivities.  The only difference between Kung-Fu Panda and a real kung-fu movie in this style is the fact that Master Shifu actually lives in the end.  Hey - after all, it IS a kids’ movie.

10,000 BC is unfortunate in that it occupies some distressing middle ground.  It IS too stupid to be a movie, but not stupid enough to be hilarious.  Which means it is just one long, boring, irritating, idiotic ball of suck.  This movie has absolutely no idea what it’s doing.  Ostensibly, it’s about a clan of cavemen from the mountains.  Cavemen who are not especially hairy, and who seem to have a fairly good command of the English language.  Which is fine, if you want to just assume that they know English, so the movie can be in English.  Like in Hunt For Red October, where all of a sudden they started speaking English.  That was fine.  We, the movie-goers accept that.  But the cavemen in this movie (so we don’t forget they’re primitive) talk in broken English.  Look - they couldn’t possibly know English.  It’s one of those suspension-of-disbelief movie devices.  Why not make them at least competent in English?

Then, the hero of the story kills a mammoth by himself, and becomes…the hero of the story.  But his heart is torn, because his new status means he will get to be with his girlfriend, but he knows he was only half-assed attempting to kill the mammoth, and whole-ass running away from it.  So, it being a matter of honour, he…camps thirty feet outside the village.  What?  It’s a good thing he does though, because it means he can see his gorgeous girlfriend (who wears makeup the whole time, by the way) get kidnapped by a marauding band of thugs on horseback.  Who speak another language!  With subtitles!  NO ONE KNOWS A LANGUAGE YET!  Make them all English!

Then the narrator comes in, several times, talking about “many moons this” and “many moons that”.  Ummm…OK…so now they’re native?  And the narrator, who talks like he is one of the tribe, is British?  Or is he modern…ancient…native…British…demented?  We just plain don’t know.  Or care.  What we DO care about are things like - why don’t they just call the mammoth a mammoth?  They’re speaking ENGLISH, why don’t they have the ENGLISH word for things?  Why call it a maddott, or whatever word they’ve invented.  And why does the bad guy have a computer-generated voice when he isn’t even speaking ENGLISH?  And at the end of the movie, when the good guys triumph over the aliens, did they do a ‘hip-hip-hooray’ cheer?

Yes, I said aliens.  And Gods, and supreme beings, and slavery, and pyramids, and a bizarre scene where the hero talks down a sabre-toothed tiger.  (By the way, THOSE things look bad-ass.  Why don’t the fight those, instead of the giant Moas?)  But anyway, who cares?  This movie stinks so bad that nothing could redeem it.  The great thing, usually, about caveman movies, is the loincloth-wearing brief glimpses of nudity.  Well…that and Ringo Starr.  And there’s none of that here - after all, this movie needed to keep it’s PG rating to reach a wider audience.  So no nipples, no nudity.  But lots of loincloths and exposed skin.  This, despite the fact that they’re in the mountains.  So, they’re basically wearing bikinis on a glacier.  And we’re basically turning this off at the twelve minute mark.

Persepolis is the story of a young girl named Marjane growing up in Iran, under the regime of the Shah.  She is precocious, cute, and to a degree bilssfully unaware of the repression that surrounds her.  Her family is a fairly forward-thinking one, with strict ideas of honour and morals, but not one of those crazy-religious repressive families that have become the stereotype.  Her mother is a free-thinker and a stong, independant woman, as is her grandmother.  Her father and his brothers are tough-minded, and willing to take their beliefs to the limit.  When the war with Iraq begins, however, and the Islamic revolution takes over, Marjane’s world view is drastically altered.

 An outspoken girl, there are some scenes which resonate powerfully.  There is one where she speaks out in her university about the new rules that are all of a sudden penetrating into higher education.  If girls can’t wear makeup, because it might arouse the boys, why can’t they wear baggy pants either?  Baggy pants are the fashion right now, and they hide the female form, whereas tight pants show it off.  So is mandating tight pants a decision that was made based on the proper way for girls to behave, or is it because they are against fashion in principle?  A simple, yet powerful scene in a movie that is absolutely crammed with simple and powerful scenes.

The cartoon is almost entirely in black-and-white, which is terrific.  It creates a sort of oppressive atmosphere in a place and time where oppression is the order of the day.  As Marjane grows into womanhood, and starts to question the world around her more and more, she starts to listen to music.  Music that has been banned by the government - it starts with ABBA.  Then ABBA sucks, you gotta hear the Bee Gees.  Eventually this grows into a love for Iron Maiden, perhaps informed more by a form of conscious rebellion at the oppressive society than by an actual love for heavy metal.

Marjane moves to Europe to escape the Iranian craziness, and quickly finds that the nuns she lives with there are, in their own way, as repressive as the Iranians.  A real fish out of water in Europe, she finds that it is tougher to be a stranger in a free land she doesn’t know than it is to live in oppressed land that she does.  Upon her return to Iran, she reconnects with her family, especially her grandmother, who imparts many wise life lessons, and enables Marjane to define herself in terms of her heritage and sociocultural identity. 

Since the whole movie is told through the eyes of this young girl, and then the young woman, hers is the only perspective we see, and it is fairly bleak.  Her perspective, in turn, is informed only by her own personal history, and the cultural and religious background of her upbringing.  Through war, turmoil, executions and horrible oppression, we get two stories, both of them harsh, but both of them fantastic.  The one of the horrors visited upon Iran by the Islamic revolution, and one of a young girl trying desperately to find her place in the world - her world and also a foreign world. 

Something I feel I should add - she has a few experiences with men throughout the film, and I felt, in watching it, that the end could be irritating.  Like, one of those endings where if she just finds the right man, everything will be OK.  And thankfully, the movie does not go down this obnoxious path.  It remains as constant in it’s themes and purpose as Marjane would herself hope to be.  Persepolis is based on the autobiographical graphic novel written by Marjane Satrapi, and she collaborated on the screenplay as well.  She shows herself to be a very courageous woman, laying her sould completely bare, warts and all, up on the screen to tell a story.  A wonderful, smart, funny, poignant and powerful story.  Rent this movie.

In Bruges (10/10):  Violent, hilarious, totally politically-incorrect.  This is a little movie, a smart movie, and very nearly a perfect movie.  Rent it now.

Drillbit Taylor (2/10):  The little chubby kid has some seriously great lines and moments, but that’s all there is to recommend this movie.  The rest of it absolutely sucks.

Meet The Browns:  Tyler Perry is still making movies…this is another one.  Stars Sofia Vergara and Angela Bassett, but it may just not be worthwhile anyway.

City of Men (8/10):  A reasonably good follow-up to the all time classic City of God, this is a spin-off of the TV show in Brazil which was a spin-off of the original movie.

Mad Men Season One:  1960s New York ad agency.  A well-respected, highly regarded TV series that gets it’s DVD release today.

Vantage Point:  A presidential murder told from several different viewpoints, a la Rashomon.  From all critical viewpoints, however, this movie is dreadful.

Days of Darkness:  A man lives a double life - one life is a fantasy life, the other is real.  In real life he’s a loser.  In his fantasy life, he’s a knight in shining armour, irresistable ladies’ man.  Could go either way.  Denys Arcand directed this French Canadian film, so that’s something on the plus side.

Asterix Et Obelix Contre Cesar (5/10):  The famous French comic books are brought to life in this 1999 film starring Gerard Depardieu and Roberto Benigni.  A little too much reliance on the comic books themselves, but all in all a decent way for kids to learn French.

Asterix Et Obelix:  Mission Cleopatre (6/10):  An even better movie than Contre Cesar, simply because Monica Bellucci is ridiculously hot as Cleopatra.  Ridiculously hot.  Neither of these two films has English subtitles or English dubbing available.

Walker:  Texas Ranger, Season Five (4/10):  If you watch with a developed sense of irony, you may well enjoy this.  But boy, you really can’t take it seriously, or you might have brain failure.

Streets of San Francisco, Season Two Volume One (7/10):  Karl Malden and Michael Douglas are the stars of this series.  One of the best casts for a TV series, and the San Francisco streets are amazing as well.

Also out:

100 Million B.C.
Get Smart’s Bruce and Lloyd:  Out of Control
Shotgun Stories
X-Files:  Revelations
Time Bomb

Next week:

The Ruins
Superhero Movie
Funny Games
The Tracey Fragments
Stop-Loss
Charlie Bartlett
Batman:  Gotham Knight
Romulus My Father
Blind Eye
Dungeon Girl
Impact Point
Towards Darkness
Shaggy and Scooby-Doo Get a Clue Vol. 2
Bella
Bonneville
Heavy Metal in Baghdad
Late Fragment
Stories of Lost Souls
Backyardigans:  The Mighty Match-Up!

The first 20 minutes of In Bruges are absolutely hilarious. Minutes 20 through 25 are heartbreaking and suddenly, crazily brutal. And the last 82 minutes are hilarious and brutal. And all 107 minutes of this movie are joyously, darkly, utterly fantastic. In Bruges has got to be an early candidate for best movie of 2008. It’s beginning to end fantastic, it never stops being side-splittingly funny, and at no point does it ever half-ass anything, shy away from offensive subject matter, or compromise itself in any way. And this movie could well be considered offensive. To everyone. Blacks, whites, natives, Irishmen, Americans, Belgians, and especially the Vietnamese. Fat people, pregnant people, Christians, tourists and especially midgets and dwarves. And boy, is it ever funny.

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson star as Ray and Ken, two Irish hitmen who have just carried out an assignment in London that has gone horribly wrong. Their employer Harry (Ralph Fiennes) has sent them to lay low in Belgium, in a tiny town called Bruges. Bruges is actually a real town in Belgium, one of the prominent “World Heritage Sites” of UNESCO. It’s a famous town because most of the buildings and structures from the medieval era remain intact, and because, like Venice, it is one of the few canal-based cities in the world. There are roads and plazas, but for the most part people get around on the canals. Bruges features dozens of museums, concert halls, festivals, theatres, and sightseeing locations. And that makes the town an absolutely wonderful place to set a movie filled with such coarse language, gratuitous drug use and graphic violence.

Brendan Gleeson gives an absolutely mesmerizing performance as Ken, the hit man who is completely enamored with this quaint little antique town. His glee at seeing the sights is as charming as Bruges itself. Farrell, on the other hand, absolutely hates the place. He hates the tourists, he hates the sights, he hates the quaintness and the charm. And he has never been funnier in his life. On top of his hatred of Bruges, he has an obsession with midgets, (and their tendency to commit suicide in disproportionate numbers), abuses many substances, and is himself suicidal. There is real pathos in his character, and through all the jokes and the ridiculous situations and the violence, he manages to convey a real sense of pain, loss, and heartbreak in his character.

There is certainly violence in this film, but it’s all first-rate violence. And by that I mean that it’s violence played for laughs, then violence done to tear-jerking effect, then violence for the sake of violence, and then violence for the sake of emotional effect. And it’s all letter-perfect. In fact, just about everything in this movie is done to perfection. The recurring themes - suicide, dwarves, honour - could have seemed very contrived in lesser hands. But in this case, every theme fits perfectly into the scope and tone of the movie. A tone which is sometimes dry, sometimes ironic, sometimes totally insane, and always, always, totally ballsy. This movie does not hesitate to break any taboos, to push any limits, to test any outrage the audience might feel.

Gleeson and Farrell are amazing together. They have the sort of relationship Jules Winfield and Vincent Vega had in Pulp Fiction. And many parts of this movie - especially the dialogue and the drug use and the violence - are very reminiscent of Pulp Fiction. And these two Irish hitmen are every bit as funny and interesting as Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta. And then - Ralph Fiennes shows up! Fiennes, one of the great actors in movies, is playing a psychopathic character that is unlike any other he has played in his career. And yet, he is perfectly cast for the role. While his arrival on the scene seems to forecast a darker, less humourous turn to the movie as it reaches it’s bloody peak. And it certainly does get even darker once Fiennes enters the picture, but amazingly, it actually gets funnier too!

In Bruges is that rarest of movies that manages to be dark, comedic, dramatic, violent, charming, sweet, bad-ass, action-packed and clever all at the same time. It even throws in a little romance. This is the first great movie of 2008, opening in limited theatrical release in February. It made a total of 8 million dollars in North America, 21 million worldwide. The Love Guru, which by all accounts is an absolute pile of crap, made 14 million in it’s first weekend. But then, how many people watch the great films at the box office? In Bruges was the film debut for writer and director Martin McDonagh, who is one of the great talents to watch in movies. Some day, In Bruges will be remembered the same way people remember Reservoir Dogs. As the brilliant first film that launched a brilliant career. And you can pick up this wonderful movie today, July 1st, thanks to Alliance Films.

Seth Rogen was clearly the fat kid in high school. The funny fat kid, mind you, but also the one who was picked on a little. Which is why, in every movie he writes, the fat kid gets all the best lines. It worked amazingly well in Superbad with Jonah Hill, and it works almost as well in Drillbit Taylor, out tomorrow, July 1st, from Paramount Home Entertainment. The fat kid in Drillbit Taylor is played by Troy Gentile, who is almost as good as Hill in Superbad. It’s too bad the rest of the film doesn’t live up to that promise.

Because really, Drillbit Taylor is nothing but a “prequel” to Superbad. The same characters are there - the geeky best friends, one fat one mild-mannered and skinny. Their third friend who is far geekier than either. And the fat kid is still actively trying to get rid of the even-nerdier kid, because he will bring them down in the eyes of the “cool kids”. So - the kids from Superbad, four years earlier. Seth Rogen co-wrote the script for this film with Kristofor Brown, and Judd Apatow produced the movie, so the pieces were in place to make something on the level of Superbad, if not Knocked Up or 40 Year Old Virgin. But…this movie sucks.

It’s not Owen Wilson’s fault. He plays his standard, overly-sincere loser character. But the movie isn’t written to fit his style, his style isn’t adjusted to fit the movie, and he feels miscast because every scene he’s in is worse than every scene where it’s just the kids on their own. And Wilson is in almost every scene. He plays a homeless man who poses as a bodyguard to get hired by some kids to protect them from the high school bully. In order to do this, he poses as a substitute teacher at the school. Making him a homeless guy posing as a bodyguard posing as a teacher. Why is he homeless? He doesn’t have a substance abuse problem or a mental problem. And he seems to be more than willing to work for money - in fact, he’s going WAY out of his way to fake his way into this job…it doesn’t make sense.

Also fairly strange is the school bully. I don’t remember school having bullies like this, ever. Bullying in schools usually involved the threat of force and the teasing and the shoving, but never punching kids and beating them and attacking them on a daily basis. These bullies are implausible, but then if they weren’t so mean and violent, the little kids wouldn’t need a bodyguard. I guess. And the young kids are bullied their first day of school in grade nine by some kids who are 18 years old and clearly, at least, in grade twelve. So…how come they’re in the same classes? Are we to believe that the bullies have failed every single year they’ve spent in high school? Or just that nobody bothered to think that through?

In the end, these are the minor problems with Drillbit Taylor. The major problem, amazingly enough, is the script. Other than some truly memorable lines from Troy Gentile, there is nothing funny about the rest of the movie. At all. Owen Wilson is not funny. His character is not funny. His sexual conquest of another teacher at the school is not funny. The other two kids are not funny. The bully is not funny. And the concept, while kind of interesting on the surface, is never explored at all. This ends up being exactly like every other overcoming a high school bully movie, and might actually be the most predictable movie in years. The second we meet Owen Wilson, as Drillbit Taylor, we know exactly what will happen, in every scene, for the entire rest of the movie.

Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow have managed to turn standard movie arcs and plots into true gold. Superbad was so funny and smart that you forgot very fast that you had seen this exact movie many times before. Just never that funny. Knocked Up was a movie many others have made in the past - but writing it from the guy’s perspective was something the fifty-five movies like it had never thought to do. And it was so funny and smart that you forgot you’d seen it before. But Drillbit Taylor is not one of these movies.

I think the success of their oeuvre has made Apatow and Rogen such sought-after commodities that studios and producers will purchase absolutely anything they do. And if that includes a throwaway script that they wrote in high school and never edited and forgot about for fifteen years, then so be it. Which is, I think, what happened in the case of Drillbit Taylor. This movie is a total waste of time.

In 2002, City Of God rocked the movie world with what can be considered one of the greatest movies ever made. Fernando Meirelles directed this masterpiece, a sweeping saga of poverty, crime, and conscience in the slums of Rio De Janeiro. The film became an international sensation, and in his native Brazil, Meirelles sort of spun the movie off into a TV series called City of Men. Douglas Silva was one of the stars of City of God, playing the staggeringly scary and powerfully psychotic Lil’ Dice. He became the star of City of Men, the TV show, and he is the star of City of Men, the movie, which is a movie version of the TV version of City of God. Make sense so far? His character in this movie, however, is far removed from his violent psychopath character in the first film.

City of Men is a little more light-hearted than City of God, in that there is a little bit of humour. Silva plays Acerola (Ace), a young man who is struggling with fatherhood. Barely 18, he works at a watch-post to support his wife and infant son. We learn fairly fast that he is too young and unprepared for being a father, as he forgets his son at the beach, where he is rescued by the local gang crew, led by a charismatic leader named Midnight. The gang, while being a group of drug dealing, murderous thugs, is still fairly friendly with the community around it, and there is never a problem as Ace’s son gets returned to him through several sources. And we learn that Ace, while not being a part of the violence or the gang in any way, is still content to co-exist with them in the particular slum in which they live. Ace’s wife Cris, also a youngster herself, is threatening to move to Sao Paolo, where she can make a much better living than she can in the slum.

Ace’s best friend, the kid who has been closest to him since childhood, is more a brother than a buddy. Laranjinha is also struggling with fatherhood, but from the other side. He has never known his father, or even who he is. As his 18th birthday approaches, Laranjinha is desperately trying to find and meet his own dad. Ace is right at his side the whole time, helping him to discover who the man is and where he lives. When Laranjinha finally does find his father, however, the neighbourhood has gone up in smoke. Midnight’s second-in-command, Fasto, has decided to take over the gang for himself. Through a series of events too complicated to detail here, the new gang that installs itself at the top in the slums, and they believe that Ace has somehow been complicit in Midnight’s activities, warning him of the impending coup. Fasto’s gang is driving everyone related to Midnight out of the slums, which includes Laranjinha, Midnight’s cousin.

So now, even though neither of the kids has participated in any of the gang violence, and both have done everything they can to steer clear of the criminal world, they are involved whether they like it or not. Laranjinha goes to live with his new-found father, and Ace is forced to flee. With nowhere to turn, he ends up living with Midnight in another Brazilian slum, as Midnight prepares to retake his hill. As the movie works up to the inevitable, violent confrontation, the two kids at the centre of the story are swept up in something they can’t control. It all boils down to a question of whether their relationship is stronger than their violent surroundings. And I’m not going to give away the ending here.

City of Men works, but it suffers for being associated with City of God, which was an absolute masterwork. There is a reason there has never been a Casablanca II: The Rise of Captain Renaud, or a Citizen Kane II detailing the construction of Xanadu. Some films just stand alone, and City of God is one of them. Which is not to say that City of Men doesn’t work, or that it’s a poor film, it’s just not nearly as powerful as one could hope. The first film used mostly non-actors from Rio, which gave it an air of immediacy and brutal reality. This new film features actual actors, who do a great job, but some of that visceral feeling of the streets is lost. A fine movie, and even a very good one, City of Men has really one failing, and that is that it isn’t City of God. It comes out today, July 1st, courtesy of Alliance Films.