Don't See This Movie

Testosterone would seem to have everything going for it. The director, David Moreton, did Edge of Seventeen, which is a cute little coming out movie. Stars include marginal but talented TV actor David Sutcliffe, a hot former soap star Antonio Sabato Jr., comic character actress Jennifer Coolidge, and Latino cinema grande dame Sonia Braga. Equal parts eye candy and substance. Just what we want in gay films.

Unfortunately it is an unmitigated mess. The plot is incoherent. The characters are inconsistent. Character development is so poor that I don't believe any of their actions, or their reactions to major turns in the story. Jennifer Coolidge is the only good thing about the movie. She plays a brassy editor with a dirty mouth. Chalk up one point. But the rest of it? Sorry.

The protagonist, Dean, is a graphic novel writer. His hot boyfriend, Pablo, goes missing inexplicably one night. Dean, apparently feeling that his boyfriend is a piece of missing property he must retrieve, follows him two weeks later to Argentina. He finds out that Pablo is from a rich and powerful family. He befriends a woman, Sofia, who works in a cafe across the street from Pablo's family's house. With her brother, Marco, who was Pablo's lover a few years prior, and who we learn is supposed to kill Dean for reasons yet unclear, they reluctantly agree to help him find Pablo.

Up to this point, the movie is merely plodding, awkwardly paced, and annoying. Dean goes from frustrated graphic novel writer to spurned lover to ugly American to unhinged stalker. At one point, he pulls a gun on a cop who is called to the scene when he begins harassing Pablo's mother. We lose a little sympathy for him, but we are led to believe that certain facts will be revealed, and Pablo's disappearance, Dean's irrational behavior, and the strange connection to Sofia and Marco will all make sense in some big payoff scene at the end.

As it turns out, we are misled.

I get that the filmmakers were going for an unconventional arc, revealing plot points strategically to build suspense and achieve a sort of allegiance with the protagonist. And this would be commendable if it could manage to pull itself together into a coherent story. There is enough to work with to make this a suspenseful, unconventional (i.e., not just soft-core porn) gay film. Instead we are left with a disastrous, nonsensical collection of scenes that will leave you wanting two hours of your life back.

It starts out promisingly, even artfully. But the moment we learn that Pablo has gone missing, not only does the protagonist come unglued, but the entire film goes to pieces. Again, thematically interesting — the state of the story mimics the state of mind of the protagonist — but only if you are able to make sense of it for the audience. Otherwise you are wasting our time.

We learn that Pablo has left two weeks after it happens. Dean runs into Pablo's mother at an art gallery, and after manhandling her to get some answers, she reveals that Pablo has returned to Argentina (so why is she in L.A.?), but she refuses to say why.

Rather than helping Dean, Sofia and Marco delay and distract him (and us), promising to take him to Pablo, but instead taking him to places where they know he won't be, e.g., their house, Pablo's country home. Dean's resolve to find Pablo — and win him back, get an explanation, shake his finger at him (it is anyone's guess what he hopes to achieve) — grows exponentially.

Dean sleeps with Marco, in a classic fist-fight-leads-to-sex moment at Pablo's country house. Then the next morning, for no reason apparent to the audience, Marco kills himself. Or, has someone else killed him? (And, importantly, do we care?) Sofia seems mildly disappointed that her brother is dead, and she half-heartedly blames Dean. But they don't report the apparent suicide. (What happens to the body is anyone's guess.)

Despite all this, she continues to hang around with Dean, who has now decided, after remembering a story Marco told him about his and Sofia's ancestors, to cut off Pablo's head. We are left to wonder what Pablo has done that is so terrible that he deserves death. Maybe something juicy to look forward to later on? (Nope. Wrong again.) Dean looks over the chainsaws but opts instead for a machete, which he carries around like a lunatic adventurer. He also picks up a sporty red cooler to store Pablo's head. We finally lose any sympathy we may have had for Dean.

When he finds out that Pablo and Sofia are in phone contact with each other, Dean pulls a gun on her and accidentally shoots her in the hand, vowing not to miss next time. Under threat of death, Sofia arranges a time and place for Dean to meet Pablo, which turns out to be Pablo's wedding 𔃉 to her.

Dean crashes the reception, which is remarkable, because every time he so much as showed up at Pablo's house, his mother called the cops. He grabs a piece of cake, winks at Sofia from across the room, and kidnaps Pablo, who is getting it on with a waiter in another room.

This is our pay-off scene. So we can piece together why he left: Rich family needs to save face; gay heir marries some woman from a cafe across the street so the family is publicly proper, while he goes on sleeping with Argentine waiters and insane Americans.

Dean, who could barely communicate with a taxi driver three days ago, but who now displays a remarkable facility for Argentine highways, drives Pablo to his country house and — we are led to believe — hacks off his head.

Then, back in L.A., we see Dean's editor showering him with accolades for writing another winner (which we must assume is based on the events we have just witnessed). Conveniently, the cooler arrives at his editor's office via air mail while he is there. (Can't get a severed head through customs, I guess.) He snaps it up, tosses it into his driver's side seat where his dog playfully gnaws on the lid. And Dean drives off into the sunset.

So why was Pablo's mom at an L.A. art gallery at the beginning of the movie while Pablo was in Argentina, apart for plot convenience? Why did Sofia toy with him instead of telling him the truth? Why was Marco trying to kill him? It was Sofia's refusal to send Dean away that led to her brother being killed. And when she saw how crazy he was acting, and that he was literally out tom kill her future husband, why did she continue to help him? Why did she intervene when he pulled the gun on the cop earlier and convince him to let Dean go? (And what cop would have allowed it?)

None of these questions is answered. And by the end of the movie, I don't even care.

No one has acted in a remotely plausible manner. No one has any discernible motivation, except Dean, but he is just crazy and, frankly, a little tedious. Basically, all that happens is he gets unceremoniously dumped and he can't take the hint (It's a pretty big hint. He moved back to Argentina.) So he goes to another country feeling entitled to interfere with other people's lives just so he can ... again — what is it exactly that Dean is looking to achieve?

Then, to make matters even worse, infuriatingly, the final scene of the movie shows Sofia and Marco at their house sitting on the porch smoking. So Marco is alive. Great. Whatever. This at least explains why there was no funeral, which we now realize made no at all sense earlier. It also explains why Sofia was so untroubled by his death. (It wasn't bad acting. It's just that he really wasn't dead!) But what possible purpose was there in faking his death?

The director is throwing us plot twists for the sake of plot twists, apparently to distract us from the train wreck of the rest of the movie and to create some sort of illusion that there is something deeper and more interesting at play that we can puzzle out with enough review and careful thought. Watch the movie again, he seems to say, now that you know the wacky ending and see if you can figure out what's really happening. No thank you. It may have worked for a truly cinematically interesting movie like Memento, but I'd rather attend a sing-along screening of Mamma Mia than sit through this again.

Song Poison: My Heart Will Go On

Sometimes it's just torture.

My neighborhood grocery store is under new management, and they now play adult contemporary pop songs on the speaker system. I was serenaded by Vegas showgirl Celine Dion the other night, whose "My Heart Will Go On" seems to be making a comeback.

I heard it again several times in both its instrumental and lyrical form a couple of nights later while watching Titanic, of course the song's reason for existence. (There are other reasons to dislike the film. This is just one.)

We watched Brokeback Mountain immediately following. I must have been hell-bent on feeling miserable that night. Though it was fun to rewind and replay, over and over, the part where frozen, lifeless Leo slips from the piece of wood into the North Atlantic.

The final straw came the very next morning, when I heard — but maddeningly did not see — a subway busker playing the song on some kind of pan flute. This unhappy coincidence guaranteed it sticking in my head on infinite loop for days.

...

I once saw Victoria Jackson do a stand-up routine in glorious Lansing, Michigan in which she re-enacted the penultimate scene from Titanic the movie.

Rose! Rose, if you shift your fat ass, I can fit on this piece of wood, too!

She also sang a fantastic parody of a Jewel single — "These ghoulish fangs are tearing meat apart...". Luckily, Jewel is rarely as adhesive as Ms. Dion.

Green Lit

Best. Movie. News. Ever.

I am Jazz

Um... great. This is the one who gets killed in the movie.


Find out which Transformer you are at LiquidGeneration!

The Verdict

Anthony and I decided that we didn't care if the plot sucked or if the dialogue was dumb, we just wanted to see them transform. It's a good thing we set our expectations thus. The film is a series of clichés strung together by a shoddy story. Still, Transformers is like the fulfillment of a life's dream. And all it cost me was $11. Thank you, Michael Bay.

It is kind of like a long car commercial for GM, but product placement is no big deal to me (Apple, eBay, etc.). The fake computer science and government-military goings-on are getting harder to get away with as more realistic representations are shown on TV shows and cable news; Transformers is no exception. The dialogue was overwrought and sappy at times and could have been toned down a smidge, but when it's sexy Shia LaBoeuf or dreamy Josh Duhamel saying the lines, who could hold it against them? (I guess it depends on what exactly you want to hold against them.)

The filmmakers screwed with the back story and the characters a lot more than they needed to. Bumblebee is a Camaro, not a Volkswagen. Fine. (They work a Beetle into the film anyway. I am satisfied by the nod to our nostalgia.) The cop car is a Deceptacon. OK, whatever. But they invent characters (Frenzy) and completely remake others (Devestator). And of course, Megatron can't really be a gun that fits into Starscream's hand — but what is he? Some sort of flying cannon?

And what's with this All Spark contrivance? A device that has the power to create worlds — and to turn a Mountain Dew vending machine into a deadly fighting robot — is, in the end, kinda dumb. I'd have been satisfied with the original story from the cartoon: The Autobots crash land on earth, chased by the Deceptacons from their war-ravaged home planet Cybertron and wake up millions of years later. They rebuild themselves to mimic modern machinery: the Deceptacons, to ravage Earth's resources to produce Energon cubes; the Autobots, to stop them and protect all human life. Elements of this made it into the film, but the result made even less sense than the original idea.

This is not to say, however, that I have any real problems with the movie. Without the transforming robots, there would be no movie, but the actors hold their own in the non-CGI scenes. There is a fair amount of actually funny comedy and some decent character development. Never before had I been tricked into thinking an 18-wheeler could be a sentient being.

They even made some improvements, in my opinion. I like the idea that Bumblebee has armor for his head and that Optimus Prime's mouth is not a jiggling face plate but a a set of mechanical lips (though, Lord knows why) that only get covered in battle.

Incidentally, did anyone else think Starscream looked a little bit like the rancor monster from Return of the Jedi?

The reasons I went to see it were all there: The transforming effects were breathtaking. They kept the original sound effects of the transformations. They kept Optimus Prime's voice! My heart swelled when he called out, "Autobots, roll out!"

Things I realized while watching this movie:

1. Even robots blink their eyes.
   
2. There is always someone in a movie who knows how to hotwire a car.
   
3. Don't worry: You can get through to the Pentagon from the desert in Qatar on a cellphone while under heavy fire from an alien robot in less than two minutes.
   
4. You can always find "the only man in the world who can decipher this code" just up the street.
   
5. Even though there are only a handful of evil robots invading Los Angeles, it is easy to forget that one of them is never accounted for when the scrap metal is disposed of.
   

Thank heaven, they set us up so nicely for a sequel.

Bridge to Paradoxia

Some time ago, I heard that there was a new film adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia being made, but I didn't pay much attention. I remembered the book ... mostly. Jeff got me to read it once. I read so few kids' books as a kid, opting instead for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and other Douglas Adams treats and (nerd alert! nerd alert!) Choose Your Own Adventure. I think he thinks I missed out on something vital. So, as an adult, I've read several Newbery Award winners and liked it. He made me a Little House on the Prairie lover (but he won't read Harry Potter!). Ah, such is life.

I was alarmed to see Walden Media, producer of the Narnia movie(s), and Disney named in the full-page, full-color Bridge to Terabithia ad in last week's Arts & Leisure section. I thought it would be a special effects-ridden disaster — like maybe it would literalize Terabithia and trap the poor children playing the two main characters in an emotionless, Lucasian, green-screen hell. The ad featured a giant troll, insect-like soldiers, fantastical humanoids I presumed to be Terabithians, a castle on a hilltop, somone riding an ostrich, and an overgrown beaver with a colander on its head — which I was sure would talk! And the way the children were rendered, it looked like the whole thing was CGI.

But I knew Jeff and I would have to see it anyway.

I am pleased to report that there are no talking beavers. Jess and Leslie are played by real humans. Special effects, at worst mildly intrusive, were kept to a minimum, and the emotional value of the story rings true and clear. There is a central plot turn toward the end that made several people in the audience gasp audibly, but we, knowing how it ended, were getting weepy long before anything bad happened. So, I guess the film succeeds on that front.

The movie, as well as the book, is about being a free thinker, having your head in the clouds while keeping your feet planted on hard ground. It's about making your environment rather than simply reacting to it. It's about seeing the world around you in a new way, imagining something bigger and more real in many ways.

So, upon leaving the theater, I couldn't help but think: Doesn't the very act of making this movie, "revealing" a Terabithia to us that may not be anything like ours, fly in the face of the whole point of the book?

Please, God, Don't Let Me Die Before July 4, 2007

(Actually, please let me live past July 13, when Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is released. But, especially don't let me miss this movie.)



Sadly, my childhood heroes look very little like they did when they came packed in styrofoam blocks slipped into cardboard boxes. "Robots in disguise," indeed. What happened to the Megatron I know and love? Where's my Starscream? Where's my Mirage? My Hound? Jazz? Prowl? Red Alert?

For God's sake, where's my Bumblebee?

OK, I know... so Bumblebee sucked.

But what have they done to Optimus Prime's paint job?

I don't need this movie to look like a survey of the futuristic prototypes at the North American International Auto Show! I just want my old boys back!

Still, I can barely wait for this movie.

(Thanks to Justin for the tip.)

God is Dead

Take thy beak from out my heart!

I have lost my faith in everything.