DANGEROUS DAYS

sometimes i feel like i'm one of those pretentious douchebags that rant on and on about "outsider art" and how brilliant the crazed scribbling of some brain dead psycho drawn on a toilet seat are and all the insightful things it says about our society. sometimes i feel like that, except substitute brain dead psychos with coked-out movie industry hacks. some of you may remember my dissertation on michael bay's masterpiece "bad boys II", some of you may not. anyway, consider this part of an ongoing investigation into the enigma that is hollywood filmmaking.

don't ask me why i do it to myself, but i've given every resident evil movie to come out so far a fair chance. partly because of the potential, but also because at the very least i can be secure in the knowledge that mila will be lookin' fine and possibly gettin' naked. that said, i've never actually been able to make it through an entire film in the series. they're just so bad i have to turn them off within 30-45 mins.

recently i legally obtained a copy of the latest, resident evil: extinction. based on the trailers, this installment looked like a fairly big departure for the franchise, so i thought "hmm...maybe this time they'll finally get it right". well, having sat down and watched it (yes, the whole thing!) i can say that yes, they finally have gotten it right. the fact that i didn't shut it off 30 mins in is probably the biggest indicator that the film is light years ahead of its predecessors, but on top of that, i was actually pretty entertained by the movie. believe me, i'm just as surprised as you are.

i'm not saying its a great movie because its pretty mediocre, but for all its hackiness, it also does a lot of things well. most noticeably, the directing in this one is pretty strong. i've never heard of russel mulcahy, looking at his imdb it seems that he's done mostly TV and music videos, but the guy is pretty smart. i say this for a few reasons. first, the film is very video gamey, but its all pretty subtle and doesn't get in the way of it being a movie. little flourishes that evoke the video game experience are sprinkled throughout, so that if you've played any kind of action/adventure game before you'll notice them and smirk, but if you haven't it would just blend seamlessly into the film. second, we're all aware of the fact that mila jovovich, for all her beauty, is a pitiful actress - same goes with the rest of the cast (which includes academy award winners ashanti, ali larter and mike epps), but the thing is, whoever this dude is, russel mulcahy, is obviously aware of this as well and fully compensates for it. nobody is given the opportunity to suck. it really is astounding to watch. they either die or get distracted or the camera cuts away from them before they get a chance to unleash a lethal dose of their own individual brands of suckitude. if you'd walked up to me on the street 3 weeks ago and told me i would not only sit through, but also be vaguely entertained by a movie starring mila jovovich, ashanti, ali larter and mike epps, i probably would have said something pretty humorous about how stupid your face was (or something along those lines...its hard to say for sure). i guess it just goes to show how strange and wonderful this world can be at times.

but wait, before you get all amped up and franticly download this movie with hopes high, let me make a disclaimer. the story itself (which was penned by paul w.s. anderson, the genius behind the first resident evil and other classics like AvP) is a total hack job. its basically 'day of the dead' verbatim, except its post apocalyptic and slightly more sci-fi. think george romero meets stephen king and you've pretty much got it. nothing original at all going on here. nothing at all. BUT, i'm not a snob, i don't think everything has to be ground breaking, its more important that it does what its trying to do right than doing it first. this film does it right...ish. there haven't been a whole lot of post-apocalyptic movies made in recent years, so we haven't really had the chance to see all those sprawling desolate landscapes in high definition with all the bells and whistles that new technology affords. first thing you notice about RE:E is that its pretty to look at. the camera work and aesthetics of the film do a good job at immersing you in the environment. the costumes are spot on. total anime ripoffs, but spot on, nonetheless.

sometimes you want to sit down and watch a really mindblowing movie that wows you and reinvigorates your love for the medium. this isn't that film. but other times you just want to sit down and meditate on something familiar, yet strangely beautiful in its mediocrity. well, maybe you don't, but i certainly do. i'm one of the few people out there in the world that understands that the movie industry is not about producing art, its about producing product that will produce money. at every step of the process, filmmakers are told "nope, you can't do that", "can't show that", "can't say that", "gotta simplify that", etc. i'm not delusional, i know that every movie i see is the product of 100 or so muddling hands, each of which has stripped away a little more of the movies original incarnation. its a sad reality, but it IS the reality. there just isn't much of a market for masterpieces these days. but to my weird, crazy, pretentious artfag brain, sometimes this debilitating meddling, censoring and restricting comes together to create something worth stepping back and admiring for what it is. and that, folks, is why i dub resident evil: extinction the best mediocre movie of the year. see it for yourselves. open your mind and don't be a stuck up cunt. you might just be slightly entertained like i was.

bad boys II

misunderstood genius or totally understood hack?

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so the other night i had the rather alarming urge to watch bad boys II. don't know why, something in my head was just telling me "watch bad boys II.....oooooooo...." so me and the lady got blazed and fired up the ol' dvd player. i should say first that in general, i love the action genre, i like will smith, i like martin lawrence...i'm not always a fan of the movies they make, but in general, they're both relatively funny, genuine and likable. i was never a fan of the bad boys movies though. just not really my thing, but recently i've been having a little bit of a philosophical dilemma regarding michael bay. i just can't figure him out. part of me wants to dismiss him as a simple hack who has very little control over his own movies (resulting in them being a mish-mash of other people's opinions on what a movie should be rather than being the cohesive vision of a director with an ultimate goal), but another part of me sees something just below the surface of his movies that is very abstract, innovative and perhaps a little brilliant. i dunno.

anyway, i was watching bad boys II, i was high and spacing out, looking at the visuals, but not really paying attention to the sound and i was really blown away by what i saw. every frame of that movie is put together meticulously in terms of moving compositions, shapes, colors, etc. almost in the way that an experimental abstract art film would. it was really strange. almost every shot in the film contains movement of abstract shapes across the screen and the beginning of each shot is just as beautifully composed as the ending of each shot. i found that if i looked passed the flashiness, the product placement and the one-liners, what i saw was actually a really artsy action film. most of the film relies on implication to determine what is going on - you piece together a cohesive idea of what's taking place based on an amalgam of abstract images shown in rapid succession. if you start to really discect the action scenes, you see that very rarely are you getting a true representation of what your mind believes is taking place on screen. you'll see a tight shot of will smith and martin lawrence in a car, then a shot of a car swerving from one side of the screen to the other, then an abstract frame of various automobiles criss-crossing around the screen, then a shot of smoke and from all those rapidly sequential images you infer that a high speed car chase is taking place with cars crashing left and right, but you don't see that many shots that actually show one vehicle chasing another. when you look at things like this out of the context of how these kinds of movies are perceived in society, its really quite a brilliant achievement.

i've always given credit to michael bay for his immeasurable influence on the action movie genre, but i've also written him off as a filmmaker because i've typically seen him more as an industry guy that happened to fall into the role of director than a true artist. lately i think i may be wrong though.
the thing is, i don't really know how much of the brilliance that occasionally shines through his films is actually michael bay's brilliance as opposed to the brilliance of whoever the director of photography happens to be or art director, etc. its hard to gauge. on one hand, i understand having to dumb your films down to appeal to the widest possible demographic and i understand that hollywood filmmaking is a business first and foremost before its an artform, but like the brilliant directors of the 30s, 40s and 50s, perhaps it is how the director chooses to work within and secretly against those confines that truly defines their artistic merit. all of michael bay's movies are disasters in their own special ways, whether it be because they are over-the-top cornball, ridiculously implausible or just helplessly middle-of-the-road perspective wise, but they each have their hidden, mysteriously profound moments as well.

let me break it down like this - transformers was all in all an awful movie, but it had a very strong theme of political commentary running through it that you don't usually see in films made for that wide an audience pool (probably more than just that, but i've only seen it once in the theater, so its hard to judge just based on that). the island fell flat in a lot of respects, but it was also a very strange concept for a film...it was an action film that had absolutely no action for 50% of the running time. the first hour of the movie has more in common with THX 1138 or logan's run than it does with bad boys. it may not have been completely successful, but it was definitely a different approach conceptually. i haven't seen his other movies in a long time, so i can't really comment on those, but i plan to rewatch them with fresh eyes soon.

so, now on to the discussion. michael bay, misunderstood genius or occasionally profound hack? do you think he has an artistic vision or do you think his movies reflect purely the muddling of producers, studio execs and people who generally have no idea what the general public truly wants to see on screen? i don't think there's going to be any debate that the scripts in all his films are formulaic and most likely written by committee, so i'm talking more about the other stuff. how much of a michael bay film is actually michael bay and how much is the combined effort of people much wiser than him?