A Nightmare on Elm Street: thank you, michael bay, for all you've done for america. and me personally.

A Nightmare on Elm Street: revamped wes craven conceit with really skinny suburban teens, including beaver from veronica mars season 2 mostly

if writing reviews on this blog is my duty to myself, then i have been failing at my duty lately. i apologize for the radio silence...i saw hot tub time machine and REALLY didn't know what to say. plus there were performances to be in.

but i'm back, for a nightmare on elm street. this probably isn't going to be long.

surprise, this wasn't a good movie. rather vapid teens might have had issues, but then the whole thing becomes prosaically clear due to a hearty dose of child abuse and a metaphor about menstruation...bah. i mean, there's the "the evil was us all along" tradition of horror movie-alia, and then there's the "set 'em up, knock 'em down" theory of horror-making--this definitely fell into the second category. the evil actually was evil, and the teens were all ten pounds underweight, and you didn't really care about any of them, and the mechanics of the horror wasn't explained even a little.

i get the feeling that michael bay has forgotten what it's like to have bad things in his life. it's probable that i'm being an insensitive bastard in saying that--but judging from this movie, it's also possible that michael bay doesn't exist, but is instead a computer-generated logarithm that churns out directorial decisions based on a complex system of adjusted profit margins, and the pictures you see of him standing next to shia leboeuf (sp?) on yahoo omg (heh heh, not that i ever go on omg or look at celebrity photos [i'm lying through my teeth--bring on the olson twins' fashion mishaps! show me jessica alba grocery shopping with her baby! i am a bad person to feed the paparazzi industry so]) are actually of shia leboeuf (sp?) cleverly manipulating a poseable cardboard cutout of a handsome older man. it's possible that michael bay, in learning to cater to the statistical desires of the populace, has completely lost his understanding of the human soul; it's also possible that he just shuts off his soul while working, and manages to retain his wonderful, caring humanity by completely eradicating any trace of it from his movies. i'm going to go with the second one; i like it better.

and, you know, i wouldn't ask him to change. a nightmare on elm street was stupid, not scary, and wide-ranging in its derivativeness (robert duncan and his partner jess sprang to mind in the opening credits [requisite high-brow joke--i'll start pointing these out]; paranormal activity definitely got channeled in the asian dude's video blog). it was a juvenile treatment of a terrifying yet trendy subject, what with the abuse of the children coming to fruition in some really stupid pick-up lines from melty-face, who didn't seem to know how to treat the subject of what he'd done to nancy any more effectively than the screenwriters did--a fact that could have actually been treated really interestingly if, as aforementioned, anyone involved in the movie had known what to do with the abuse backstory (nancy screaming "noooo" at some polaroids for about two seconds? i'd call her whole reaction to the repressed memory thing...i don't know, "underwritten," maybe? especially considering the amount of time the movie spent hacky-sacking teens around. yes. time mismanagement: definitely the main thing that was wrong with this film. [that last, hopefully, read as sarcasm.])

but it was harmless. maybe. i mean, it was entertaining. probably. i mean, i enjoyed it. i probably would have enjoyed it more if i'd seen it at home with my friends, because then we could have made fun of it openly and honestly, as opposed to in the theater, where you don't want to ruin someone else's quality moviegoing experience...

ha ha, sorry. it was really bad.

i did like beaver-from-veronica-mars. i like him in stuff. nancy didn't seem like she had a chance, nor did other guy. i felt like the blonde girl was paying way too much attention to what position her mouth was in. i mean, at a certain point you have to give it up, blonde girl. people's mouths do sometimes relax, no matter how pretty they are. i mean, for the sake of realism...

again, who am i kidding? this movie was bad.

plus, if you didn't wear massive amounts of eyeliner to bed, you wouldn't get raccoon eyes every time the horror showed up. yeah. chew on that, america.

Clash of the Titans: this movie will receive such a BLOGGING as it has never known!!

Clash of the Titans: new release starring avatar dude

who, again, i liked. i really thought that this actor (name, sra, give him a name--sam worthington, that's the name) was pretty much the best thing about avatar. even sigourney weaver at her feistiest couldn't give fill her avatar character with logical personhood, but i thought sam worthington managed his avatar-guy as he managed his perseus: that is, well.

now, admittedly, worthington has somewhere between five and six lines in the entirety of clash of the titans, which, considering that he's playing the main character, is perhaps not a great screenwriting choice. and there are some moments where he just stands and stares at the ground, with his head sideways, like an extra from one flew over the cuckoo's nest (yeah, when are they remaking that? except as an action flick, probably one with jeremy statham as macmurphy, nurse ratchett played by the delectable and incredibly unsuitable-for-the-part kristen bell, and a soundtrack prominently featuring evanescence for the tender moments and andrew w.k. for the surprisingly appropriate accompaniment to the inevitable harbor explosion. i know it's bad, but i so enjoy making fun of stuff). but when worthington gets the chance to actually act, i feel like he does it well.

my friend pointed out that the captain dude, o he of the braided head and INCREDIBLY CONFUSING backstory, seems to be in a different movie. my friend made the point that clash of the titans would be clipping along, and then suddenly that dude would have a line, and the whole story would slow to a gentle glide, torquing itself around the mystery of why the heck he was there in the first place. really, him, and the whole band of soldiers that accompanied perseus--lecherous, erastes, and the older dude (these may not be their actual names)--in fact, all of the argosian soldiers' presence was pretty much a wash, both pacing and plotwise. same goes for the hunters (you know, those completely random brother characters who show up with crabs at the end of the movie?) that came out of, and then went back into, nowhere (my friend thinks that those actors got paid before the movie's creators realized that there was no use for them in the movie, and so they ended up included--my own theory is that those two characters are in fact prominently featured...in the director's cut).

and oh my heavenly creatures, the sheer amount of needless slow mo--it boggles the mind. i know the slow mo parts were supposed to be 3-d, because my friend tells me so, but...sheesh. the thing is that the graphics were really good. the plot, as much as was possible, sucked balls--i mean, it's, literally, a classic plot, and the base material is quite engaging, but what was done to it was super-not-great. making sense was not the movie's strong point. providing opportunities for graphics was its strong point, and, as far as this went, the script was extremely strong. clash of the titans was awesome, graphically. from various previews and billboards, i kind of thought that the visual aesthetic of the film was going to resemble that of battlefield earth, but aside from the men's hairstyles i was proved wrong. the graphics are wonderful. i don't say that that often--in part because i really don't know anything about graphics, but in part because i feel like a lot of cgi work is pretty derivative (see percy jackson entry--and note that i may have picked up feeling entitled to say these things from my oft-aforementioned friend, who is qualified to make said judgments). i mean, it wasn't like the clash of the titans cgi came out of no tradition whatsoever--giant things have taken up a screen to roar at us before the kraken did it--but clash of the titans's cgi was neat. it was cool. a professor of mine points out that coolness is intangible in a thing. it's hard to say what makes this cgi cool and other cgi derivative, but one can feel the difference. so the 3-d stuff really wasn't necessary. it drew attention away from the coolness of the effects and just made them look way overblown.

i also liked the king that hades was able to use as a pawn for reasons that the backstory did much to obscure--acrisius is his name, according to imdb. i liked how the movie took out the golden showers aspect of perseus' conception, and replaced it with this lightening-struck badass, who bites a chunk out of perseus' arm that later gets healed by one of the frosting men in a confusing proof of friendship. i liked the acrisius/hades relationship--it had a very the-emperor-and-anakin vibe, especially the, um, four seconds in heaven (?) scene, in which acrisius gains the power of the underworld by being fired up with hades-breath--or something. i also really liked the scene in which perseus is being taught to fight by the captain guy: it takes on a real step up 2 the streets vibe, especially when the soundtrack starts pointing out that after captain dude has shown what he's got, perseus takes up the beat and makes everyone see that he might be a humble fisherman, but he's got the moves. all that's really missing is opposition from some sort of high school principal; the sexual tension is definitely there.

finally, io is really really really hot.

the end.