Cynical Cinema

First came House of the Dead.  Then Alone in the Dark.  Then Bloodrayne.  And now comes Uwe Boll’s absolute best film!  On the heels of several of the most putrid, stinky directorial efforts in the history of cinema, Boll has managed to create a film that is merely putrid and smelly.  I recognized just about every actor in this movie, which stuns me.  How is this guy, the most villified director working today, able to convince people to appear in his films?  Well, it provides a pretty decent barometer for actors.  Which ones actually care about their craft, and which ones are in it only for the money.  In The Name of the King features the following actors who are in it only for the money:  Jason Statham, Claire Forlani, Lelee Sobieski, Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Kristanna Loken, Ron Perlman, Matthew Lillard and John Rhys-Davies.

 Why do you need a name actor (albeit not BIG-name actors) in every major role in a film?  When you have an inexplicable budget of 80 million dollars and no idea how to spend it.  What costs a lot of money?  Name actors.  Perfect.  So…we still have money left?  Good.  Let’s spend it on swooshy foggy special effects.  We can use that like forty times in the movie before it irritates people!  And since we have more than two hours to tell our story, but only six minutes of actual story, let’s have super-long battle scenes.  Each thirty-minute battle scene ought to have at least four thousand jump cuts, since it has been proven that movie audiences are unable to focus on a given image for more than one tenth of a second.  And they HATE knowing what’s happening in a battle.

Given the fact that one and a half hours of this two hour plus movie is taken up with sword fighting and battleaxes and creepy evil creatures killing innocent villagers and children, giving it a PG rating is bonkers.  By the standards of the MPAA, this movie does in fact fit into the PG area.  There is no real blood, and what blood there is is some kind of black smokey stuff.  Boll seems so intent on getting that rating, however, that the fighting is boring and sanitized and very confusing.  Which means three quarters of the movie is boring and sanitized and confusing.  Getting name actors at the very least means that you are getting fairly decent actors.  Which also means that when you cram them into this pile of garbage, it’s even more painful watching them struggle to make something interesting out of the horrible dialogue and idiotic set-pieces.  They literally have nothing to do, and no opportunity is given to them to make this any better.

The non-name actors, however, seem to think they are in a Shakespeare play.  They deliver their lines with stage-actor pomp and pretension, projecting their lines at some non-existent audience.  And at the beginning, the movie is written as though someone thought he was Shakespeare.  “Respect doth need be earned by the mass of men.  Mine be my birthright!”  What?  Mercifully, this ends fairly quickly and the movie forgets about it’s pretensions to the Bard by Minute Twenty-one.  Then the movie gets into painful, through-the-eyeball-into-the smoky-swirly shots, and slow-motion camera work that follows every object around as it is carried from  place to place. 

The movie is more than two hours long, and yet, plot points pop up incredibly abruptly.  You are the son of the king!  Wait…what?  Couldn’t there have been some kind of buildup there?  This leads to the film having absolutely no sense of pacing whatsoever.  Burt Reynolds seems to be channeling his lackluster performance from Striptease, there are multiple bizarre shots straight out of Tremors, there are ninjas.  Ninjas that do everything in a synchronized fashion, as though they are competing in the new Olympic demonstration event, synchronized ninja-ing.  The soundtrack music is awful and intrusive, there is a scene where Jason Statham and Burt Reynolds hold hands - in slow-motion!  Hundreds of “why did that guy do that”, or “what happened to that guy”, or “how did that guy get there” moments, and the grand finale involves a swordfight where the swords are controlled by the minds of magicians and - fight themselves!  There is nothing in this movie worth watching, nothing worth mentioning, and nothing that didn’t make me angry.  But it IS the best one Uwe Boll has ever done.  And it’s on Blu-Ray today.  Because any movie is Blu-Ray worthy.

I’ve always had a problem with Burt Reynolds. Much as I appreciate the long, successful career he’s managed to have, I dislike him. I have liked him in exactly two movies. Deliverance and Boogie Nights. That’s it. I think my biggest problem with Reynolds is exactly that. He was brilliant in Deliverance. And then he spent the rest of his career smiling, scowling and flexing his way through Fuzz, Gator, Stroker Ace, and City Heat. A terrible string of movies that, for me, ruined any legacy he had as an actor in favour of a legacy as a flash-in-the-plan box office draw. I always found him irritating, and so when I picked up Season One of Evening Shade, I was excited to savage this Burt Reynolds sit-com from the early 90s. This was going to be awful, and I was going to enjoy every minute of it!

But boy, was I ever disappointed. Evening Shade is actually…surprisingly good. Which was really disappointing. And Burt Reynolds was actually…decent. And this show features some of my favourite actors of all time! Ossie Davis, Hal Holbrook, Marilu Henner, Charles Durning, and (in Season Two), Hilary Swank. Reynolds plays Wood Newton, (a name which sounds like it comes out of an Archie comic), a retired football star who now works as a coach in the small town of Evening Shade. Marilu Henner is his wife, Ossie Davis is the owner of the local greasy spoon, Charles Durning is the town doctor, and Hal Holbrook is crusty and magnificent as Newton’s father-in-law.

What makes this show good is the fact that although it’s a sit-com, it doesn’t smack of sit-com at all times. The laugh track is the only reminder that it is in fact a comedy. And the laughs come at the right times, when something funny actually happens. The rest of the time, the show is actually trying to tell a story, and let the laughs come where they may. Which is the way to make a good sit-com. (The way to make a great sit-com is when the laughs come all the time and still don’t ever feel forced, like Seinfeld.) So you get decent stories, featuring interesting characters played by fantastic actors, and that in itself made this a good show. Despite the involvement of Burt Reynolds.

And he’s really not half bad here. His banter with Marilu Henner, and especially with Hal Holbrook, rings true. His persona is pretty fitting to him - it really was the part he was born to play. Wooden cartoon ex-football star. Like The Rock today. However, although Ossie Davis and Holbrook and Durning create some memorable characters, there are others on the periphery that are so cartoonish and irritating that they make the show obnoxious whenever they’re around. Reynolds’ assistant coach, Herman Stiles. Aunt Frieda. And the local stripper, Fontana Beausoleil. (Also a Dick Tracy name, no?) And a town HAS to be small when it has ONE local stripper. Where does she strip? There can’t really be a peeler bar with just one peeler, can there? I have never seen a sign that says “Live! Nude! Girl!”

Anyway, Evening Shade is by no means a classic TV show, but it’s pretty good. Which is better than I expected. And Reynolds is decent. Which is more than I can say for most of his movies. Even Episode Six of Season One can’t bring this show right down to the level of say…Wings. Episode Six is all bout Burt Reynolds’ moustache. No joke. And it features a guest appearance by Ted McGinley. (Jefferson D’Arcy from Married With Children.) That episode alone could kill this show and season entirely. Ted McGinley and the moustache? Thank God that one wasn’t the pilot episode! But Evening Shade succeeds despite some really rotten ideas like that one, and Season One is worth picking up. It comes out Tuesday, July 15th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

First came House of the Dead.  Then Alone in the Dark.  Then Bloodrayne.  And now comes Uwe Boll’s absolute best film!  On the heels of several of the most putrid, stinky directorial efforts in the history of cinema, Boll has managed to create a film that is merely putrid and smelly.  I recognized just about every actor in this movie, which stuns me.  How is this guy, the most villified director working today, able to convince people to appear in his films?  Well, it provides a pretty decent barometer for actors.  Which ones actually care about their craft, and which ones are in it only for the money.  In The Name of the King features the following actors who are in it only for the money:  Jason Statham, Claire Forlani, Lelee Sobieski, Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Kristanna Loken, Ron Perlman, Matthew Lillard and John Rhys-Davies.

 Why do you need a name actor (albeit not BIG-name actors) in every major role in a film?  When you have an inexplicable budget of 80 million dollars and no idea how to spend it.  What costs a lot of money?  Name actors.  Perfect.  So…we still have money left?  Good.  Let’s spend it on swooshy foggy special effects.  We can use that like forty times in the movie before it irritates people!  And since we have more than two hours to tell our story, but only six minutes of actual story, let’s have super-long battle scenes.  Each thirty-minute battle scene ought to have at least four thousand jump cuts, since it has been proven that movie audiences are unable to focus on a given image for more than one tenth of a second.  And they HATE knowing what’s happening in a battle.

Given the fact that one and a half hours of this two hour plus movie is taken up with sword fighting and battleaxes and creepy evil creatures killing innocent villagers and children, giving it a PG rating is bonkers.  By the standards of the MPAA, this movie does in fact fit into the PG area.  There is no real blood, and what blood there is is some kind of black smokey stuff.  Boll seems so intent on getting that rating, however, that the fighting is boring and sanitized and very confusing.  Which means three quarters of the movie is boring and sanitized and confusing.  Getting name actors at the very least means that you are getting fairly decent actors.  Which also means that when you cram them into this pile of garbage, it’s even more painful watching them struggle to make something interesting out of the horrible dialogue and idiotic set-pieces.  They literally have nothing to do, and no opportunity is given to them to make this any better.

The non-name actors, however, seem to think they are in a Shakespeare play.  They deliver their lines with stage-actor pomp and pretension, projecting their lines at some non-existent audience.  And at the beginning, the movie is written as though someone thought he was Shakespeare.  “Respect doth need be earned by the mass of men.  Mine be my birthright!”  What?  Mercifully, this ends fairly quickly and the movie forgets about it’s pretensions to the Bard by Minute Twenty-one.  Then the movie gets into painful, through-the-eyeball-into-the smoky-swirly shots, and slow-motion camera work that follows every object around as it is carried from  place to place. 

The movie is more than two hours long, and yet, plot points pop up incredibly abruptly.  You are the son of the king!  Wait…what?  Couldn’t there have been some kind of buildup there?  This leads to the film having absolutely no sense of pacing whatsoever.  Burt Reynolds seems to be channeling his lackluster performance from Striptease, there are multiple bizarre shots straight out of Tremors, there are ninjas.  Ninjas that do everything in a synchronized fashion, as though they are competing in the new Olympic demonstration event, synchronized ninja-ing.  The soundtrack music is awful and intrusive, there is a scene where Jason Statham and Burt Reynolds hold hands - in slow-motion!  Hundreds of “why did that guy do that”, or “what happened to that guy”, or “how did that guy get there” moments, and the grand finale involves a swordfight where the swords are controlled by the minds of magicians and - fight themselves!  There is nothing in this movie worth watching, nothing worth mentioning, and nothing that didn’t make me angry.  But it IS the best one Uwe Boll has ever done.

Matlock was a series that began in 1986. At that time, it’s audience was, as is my understanding, comprised entirely of people over the age of 70. I know this because I watch the Simpsons - Maaatloooock! The first season of the show replaced another cautionary tale of 80s television, The A-Team, on ABC on Friday nights. That first season saw it’s release on DVD today, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. Now, I don’t want to question Paramount’s judgement - they have been good to me. But exactly who do they think might be buying this? The people who watched the show in Season One are now, at least, 92 years old. Which means that half of them are dead, and the other half are old-timers who are resistant to new technologies, and who don’t own a DVD player.

I have a lawyer. He is fairly competent, I think. He knows his way around the law, and he is doing some fine work for me right now. And if I ever get arrested for that murder I never committed, I would likely hire him to save me. However, while I’m certain he would be able to defend me on legal grounds, I doubt he would have the ability to investigate and solve the crime all by himself. For that, I would rely on the police. Matlock, on the other hand, can do it all. Amazingly, in every episode of Matlock over the course of the show’s nine years and 195 episodes, Matlock was never asked to defend someone who had actually committed a crime. This is the kind of luck that befell Jessica Fletcher only in reverse, on that other much-loved-by-octogenarians show, Murder She Wrote. Matlock was anchored by Andy Griffith, who plays Ben Matlock as some kind of cross between Columbo and Perry Mason. Both of which were superior shows to Matlock.

Which brings me to another DVD set released today. The 50th Anniversary edition of Perry Mason, a show anchored by Raymond Burr. I like Andy Griffith, and I like Raymond Burr, but what made Perry Mason better than Matlock was, for the most part, the fact that Perry Mason showed up late in the episodes. The beginning of the episode would deal with the crime itself, and the various people who could possibly have committed that crime, and then halfway through, Perry Mason would somehow become involved and solve the case. The 50th Anniversary edition is four discs, full of some great episodes and even better guest stars. A very young James Coburn, a very young Robert Redford, an aging Bette Davis, and many others. Can you imagine Matlock with Julia Roberts and Robert DeNiro as guest stars? No? That’s why Perry Mason was better.