Cynical Cinema

I hate to be a downer here.  I understand that the vast majority of men find Jessica Biel to be ridiculously hot.  But I just don’t get it.  She has a strange, round face, and I suppose that it’s her body in many movies that inspires the lust of so many of my compatriots, but I’m a face guy.  And she just doesn’t do it for me.  Which means that there is actually no reason whatsoever for me to watch Seventh Heaven.  Season Seven comes out on DVD today, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment.  And it really depressed me.  Because it sucks.  You see, there is this family with seven kids.  Some of which are their actual kids, and some of which seem to be former girlfriends and boyfriends and brothers and sisters of girlfriends and boyfriends and…I gave up trying to figure it out pretty fast.

This is basically a soap opera, only incredibly PG-rated.  Teens at the age of 17 or 18 trying to “decide” whether to have sex or not.  Decide?  Sex?  What place is this?  Where does this show take place?  It doesn’t appear to be SET in the 50s.  And yet it has that Leave It To Beaver quality that drives me nuts, and hot chicks could maybe make it worthwhile.  So Ashlee Simpson is a bit of a help.  But even Jessica Biel is barely in this season (part of that contractual dispute where she wanted to play sluts in movies and not loser goody-two-shoes in this show).  There are lots of daughters.  Lucy, who is a maniac who is studying to be a minister.  Ruthie, who is that standard sit-com kid who is wise beyond her years but still just a kid…boring.

Everything about this show is boring.  The father is a minister, and he is not nearly as wise and understanding as one would anticipate.  In fact, he’s a neurotic, unbalanced man who would make a pretty obnoxious father.  And an even worse minister.  He and his wife, who is an enabler and a bit of a jerk, hold quaint little “family meetings” for situations that barely demand a conversation, let alone a full-fledged meeting.  This family is, of course, fictional, but they are so VERY fictional that it’s disconcerting.  Even the involvement of Ashlee Simpson and Rachel Blanchard is not helpful.  No amount of eye candy is worth sitting through this garbage, especially since they will obviously never take any of their clothes off.  I’m pretty upset with Warner Brothers right now.  I might have to buy some porn just to balance out my own chi.

Alliance Films came out with the Blade trilogy on August 26th.  It’s a two-disc edition, with two of the movies on one disc and one on the other.  There are no terrific special features, it’s just a plain, bargain set of the three Blade films in a package that is conveniently the same size as every other DVD in your collection.  And if you don’t have these films already, this is one you should add to your collection.  Here’s why:

Blade (8/10):  The original Blade movie was terrific, a real breath of fresh air in the world of comic book movies.  Wesley Snipes was big, muscular, bad-ass and mean.  Kris Kristofferson was amazing as Whistler, Blade’s mentor.  And Stephen Dorff was terrific as the bad guy, a vampire who wanted to trigger the Blood Tide - an event that would, I think, turn everyone in the world into a vampire.  Or something.  The point is, this movie was awesome.  Sword fighting, guns, vampires disintegrating and great special effects, and Snipes as the most ass-kicking, toughest, meanest comic book character of all time.  There was even some good comedy - mostly provided by Donal Logue, who kept getting his arm chopped off.  And for the really cult comic book fans - some appearances by Traci Lords and Udo Kier.  Terrific!

Blade II (10/10):  By far, the best of the series.  Directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth), this film is as pulse-pounding and visually impressive as any comic book adaptation could aspire to be.  (Well, until 2008 when The Dark Knight came along.)  Snipes is now even more bad-ass, and he is given some awfully cool villains with which to work.  Luke Goss appears as Nomak, a new breed of vampire that preys on both humans AND vampires.  So now the vampires want a truce with Blade, because they are after the same enemy for once.  And Blade hooks up with the Blood Pack, a cheesily-named group of vampire bad-asses who have been training their whole lives to kill Blade, but now must work with him.  Ron Perlman, as the tough-guy leader of the Blood Pack, is amazing.  And even the secondary characters are cool actors - Norman Reedus as a stoner hippie helping Blade and Whistler, and Asian action movie legend Donnie Yen even shows up as a kung-fu fighting member of the Blood Pack.  And the vampire princess, played by Leonor Varela, is one of the hottest women ever in a movie.  Visually stunning, never-ending action, and some seriously bad-ass characters and actors made this movie not just a guilty pleasure, but the best in the trilogy.

Blade: Trinity (3/10):  One of the biggest letdowns I have ever had at a movie.  Del Toro is gone as director, replaced by David S. Goyer.  Kristofferson is gone early in the film, replaced by Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel.  And I really like Ryan Reynolds - he even has some solid comedic scenes in this film.  But an action star?  Jessica Biel an action star?  I know she really wants to be, and she keeps trying and trying to be one, but she isn’t an action star.  Or a great actress.  She’s hot.  That’s about it.  I mean, stick to movies where you are hot.  Those, you can do.  Blade II had Ron Perlman and Donnie Yen.  Blade Trinity can only suffer by comparison.  But it isn’t just Reynolds and Biel that are the problem.  Snipes is the only genuine action star in the movie, but he is given just about nothing to do.  The script is dreadful, the concept just doesn’t work, and there are some really long, extended scenes that make absolutely no sense.  The other Blade films were genuinely dark, tough, gritty entries that could, on some level, be considered horror films.  This one is an absolute joke.  Not only that, Blade is now the co-star.  In his own film.  Because Biel and Reynolds are the real action stars.  Come on!  This one is total garbage.

 The two-disc Blade trilogy came out August 26th from Alliance Films.  Pick it up!  And ignore that third one.

After watching Samuel L. Jackson half-ass his way through S.W.A.T. and Jumper, I got a hankering for some good Jackson stuff.  And I grabbed a film I picked up a while ago but never got around to watching.  Home of the Brave is a movie with an ambitious concept but a very un-ambitious delivery.  It involves several soldiers who return from Iraq, and have difficulty re-adjusting to regular life.  The type of idea that often leads to some brilliant work, like The Deer Hunter.  The Deer Hunter this is not.  Jackson delivers an excellent performance as a doctor who returns to his practice, but starts to drink heavily and behave erratically as he can’t get over his wartime experiences.  And Brian Presley is good as Tommy Yates, a young man who tries to keep it together after his best friend is killed in front of him in the desert.  But the rest of the cast is weak at best.

Curtis Jackson, better known as 50 Cent, is wooden and irritating as a guy who comes back from Iraq unable to control his rage, and unable to deal with the fact that he killed an innocent woman and threw out his back jumping over a wall.  Which pains him more, it’s tough to tell.  Jessica Biel, who’s still not a great actress, loses a hand to a roadside bomb, but discovers that when you’re a female Iraq war veteran, all you need to make things OK is the love of the right man.  Men have it tough - just finding a great woman doesn’t fix their heads, but for a woman, I suppose it’s just that easy.  Or so this movie would have you believe.  And Christina Ricci, a fine actress, has what amounts to a brief, useless cameo appearance in the film.

There is just no depth to what ought to be a very in-depth character study of these four people.  But you have to think that when they were casting the movie, they were looking for names that would bring in money - 50 Cent will bring in the rap fans, they figure.  Jessica Biel will bring in the Maxim readers.  And if that’s the kind of thinking that went into the casting, they can’t really have cared too much about the concept.  What could have been a very heartfelt and engaging movie ends up being a glossy star-fest with a lack of star power.  It’s too bad.