VANCOUVER - The Movies Sucketh

I'm mildly irritated by the almost uniform awfulness of everything I have seen at the cinema for the past month. I feel I need to vent; and this is my favourite exhaust pipe to the world. Now this isn't a "I hate sequels, I like art" rant. I love blockbuster films; I think genre films are almost always more satisfying cinema going experiences and back in my journalistic days I was always "Hollywood defender" when some precocious first year film studies student wanted to publish yet another rant about how brilliant Scorpio Rising was; purely on the basis that they'd watched it in their previous week's lecture. I live and breathe big budget nonsense. And, yet, even I must conceded that the cinema of summer 2007 is in a dire state. Let's rundown the usual suspects and worth out why:

Spiderman 3: So, okay, I wasn't crazy about the first two. The interesting thing about the Spiderman series is that it's the only successful comic book franchise which has remained truly close to its original source material and style. Batman and X-Men quickly ignored their brightly coloured roots and went straight for the modern gloominess and heavy philosophising. Spiderman was all about the colour, the thrills and the fact that it really might be quite fun to be a superhero. Trouble is that when you're painting adolesents with such bright colours you don't really get to any psychological depths. So Spiderman for me has always been a little disposable. Like the OC with action scenes.

And Spiderman 3's problem is not just that it's the same as the others but that, this time, there isn't anything left to say. Here's where movie franchises have big problems (and we'll come back to this in every review): unless you have some sort of Lord of the Rings cast iron guaranteed way of knowing you have sequels to continue a story; you have to wrap everything up at the end of each film in case you deliver a clunker and the whole thing is scrapped. Sometimes you can hedge your bets (George Lucas knew he could put a cliffhanger on The Empire Strikes Back because, by that point, he was pretty much financing Star Wars himself) but with a mega money gargantuan like Spiderman, nobody is willing to.

To recap: at the end of Spiderman 2, Peter Parker has successfully overcome both the desire to use his superpowers for revenge against folks who personally wrong him, and a whole bunch of normal fellas turned super villains by ever more unlikely industrial accidents. He has managed to get things together with the untouchable Mary Jane Watson...

What happens in 3? Well, basically, Peter Parker has to overcome to desire to use his superpowers for revenge against folks who personally wrong him (in the most unlikely bit of continuity wrangling you'll see all summer, it turns out the random killing of his uncle wasn't quite so random as once thought. A turn of events so dumbass it not only messes up the film, but also messes with our experience of the first) He also has to battle a normal fella turned supervillian by the most unlikely industrial accident in the history of industry (frankly, any city which allows a 'Particle Physics Facility' to operate with such shoddy safeguards deserves to get smashed to bits) and, after a quick bit of mid relationship angst, he managed to get things together with Mary Jane Watson.

It's pointless. It's insulting and it's really, really annoying that the whole thing takes half an hour longer than the last couple of films when nothing of importance is actually happening. Anything to redeem it? Well, the action is all good, especially in Imax. But, you know what? It cost two hundred million dollars, of *course* the action is going to be good. And I did enjoy the EMO sidetrack; only because it reminds us that Sam Raimi is the sort of guy who finds pretentious superhero cliches as pretentious as the rest of us and is happy to undercut it with ludicrous dance numbers whenever he's allowed to by the producers. Sadly, after that, we're back to the same old, same old... Also worth mentioning is the performance by James Franco who is either such a gifted actor, or so devoid of acting ability, that all his truly sinister moments take place when he's smiling in a happy and carefree way. Those teeth can cause damage, man. Just put them away.

Shrek the Third: Joining Spiderman on the pantheon of 'films which have nothing new whatsoever to say' is Shrek. To be fair, the first one didn't have *that* much to say aside from 'body image doesn't matter, as long as ogres only date other ogres' but there was some reason for its existence and that was pushing the limits of computer animation further forward and yet still maintaining the simple fairy tale charms which ink and cel animation has dominated since Snow White. I love traditional animation but I'm not against a little progress. Nor exploding birds; the highlight of the whole enterprise.

Shrek 2 was more of the same; although with most of the story removed and replaced with sitcom set pieces (the embarrassing dinner with the in-laws, double entendres from the gender-ambivalent bar person, the bit where the sidekick has a fight with a new sidekick etc.) and, for the highlight, Rupert Everett turned up in a great extended cameo as Prince Charming. Not surprisingly; the first thing Shrek the Third does is to destroy those small moments of good will by bringing back Prince Charming as a *completely different* character who's suddenly not a fully grown mummy's boy but an evil genius hell bent on domination of the increasingly dull fairytale kingdom of Far, Far Away.

Can anyone explain to me what the point of Far, Far Away is and why it's so tremendously important who's the king, queen or court jester of the place? Who cares if Prince Charming takes over the place and turns into into dinner theatre? There's a perfectly good kingdom back where Lord Faquuad ruled in the first film. As with Spiderman's indecisiveness on the subject of Ben Parker's death; Shrek suffers from retroactive story dis-continuity of the highest disorder. Except this time the material is aimed at ten year olds and, although I can take crappy storytelling aimed at my age group (I'm an expert on that myself) I refuse to let it taint the minds of impressionable youngsters.

For adults, then, Shrek the Third's problem is, simply, that it's not funny. With original scriptwriters off punning away on the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels (more on *them* later) a whole raft of new gag writers have come in and attempted to string the gags together and call it a script. Not the same thing, fellas... Comic set pieces are replaced with one liners of the lowest order, Live and Let Die is utilised completely out of context (a crime in my book) and Justin Timberlake is in it. Sigh.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: Now this was the one which really hurt. I couldn't really care less about Spiderman or Shrek but I *loved* the first Pirates film. I loved that it snuck up almost entirely unawares between those tiresome Matrix sequels and produced the funniest, most imaginative film of 2003. It was flippant; it mocked the concept of blockbusters and characters needing to be deeply felt. Of course my heart sank when the 'back to back sequels' idea reared its ugly head. I mean, come on, we were there. We saw what happened with The Matrix when a great one off idea was suddenly rewritten into a franchise. We all knew Pirates 2 and 3 had to be crap.

I forgave Dead Man's Chest a whole bunch of problems on pure good will alone. Yes, it was too long and suffered exactly the same 'break up happy couples and decent endings for no reason' syndrome of Spiderman and Shrek before it. Yes, it squandered a lot of good will by taking Johnny Depp's wonderful supporting turn from the first film and repositioning him at the centre of the sequels. And, yes, Orlando Bloom's sex face is getting increasingly tiresome. But it was, generally, fun. New additions like Naomie Harris and Bill Nighy were allowed to run rampant with their characters; the location shooting was beautiful and there was that great bit where, in the middle of a swordfight between the boys, Kiera Knightley sat on a beach and pouted.

At World's End may be the worst film produced this year. Just before its release, everyone involved commented how, in the rush to get production off the ground in 2005, a script for Pirates 3 wasn't written when shooting got underway in the Bahamas. Let's just consider that again: scenes were shot, dialogue was spoken, and nobody involved really knew what was happening. This explains pretty much everything in Pirates 3. It explains why there is barely any action in the whole three hour mess (you can only write action scenes when you know where characters are in relation to each other and what everyone hopes to achieve by the end of them. The fact that, to get to the film's only two major set pieces, there are literally hours and hours of dialogue scenes comes as no surprise) it explains why Orlandom Bloom and Kiera Knightley give soul destroyingly awful performances (they have no idea what their characters are doing. First they love each other! Then they don't! Then they don't even trust each other! Then they're getting married! Usually all within the same scene! Then she becomes Head Girl of all pirates! And they stick his heart in a box! etc. etc.)

There are good moments; which there darn well *have* to be when there's this much talent involved. The afformentionned Bill Nighy and Naomie Harris: good.... Until they're both written out of the story because, obviously, somebody realised how they were acting all the 'stars' off of the screen. Geoffrey Rush is great fun as Barbossa; the only real piraty pirate in the film. And why is he there?... Ah yes, for no reason whatsoever... And then there is Tom Hollander's death scene. Best. Death. Ever. Of course, all of this is completley outweighted by the remaining two hours and fifty minutes of crud.

But the worst thing; the thing which makes my gut churn most is that it takes itself utterly, utterly seriously. Not only did the writers and director attempt to back engineer a mythology for a swashbuckler; but they've configured it in such a way that every single character buys into it whole heartedly. It's not only non sensical, it's not only badly directed: it's also no fun whatsoever.

And herein lies the problem with all three franchises and pretty much all of Hollywood's output this year: after one successful film and plenty of money made, various film makers now consider themselves to be gifted storytellers and masterful artists. They believe that because people paid a lot of money to see their work, that the work itself is elevated above the level of mere entertainment and must be far more significant. As such, when it comes to the inevitable sequels, the true purpose of the original films (in all three of these cases: to have a whole lot of fun and be flippant and offbeat) is thrown away in favour of pretentious garbage like Aunt May's hideous "heroes" speech in Spiderman 2, the whole issue of kingship in Shrek (I mean, hello; he's still an ogre) and the entire 'Davy-Jones-locker-pieces-of-eight-heart-in-a-box-crap of Pirates

These people have squandered vast amounts of money, the services of hundreds of professionals and our goodwill on producing sanctimonious drivel. And, with franchises popping up and being resurrected left, right and centre with the same idiotic delusions of grandeur, we're going to see much more of it to come. I have to confess; although I wish no ill will to one of my favourite actors I have secretly been hoping for many years that Harrison Ford will have some sort of major injury. Nothing life threatening, you understand. Just some sort of major, limp-inducing catastrophe which means he can no longer perform his own stunts. And, therefore, that Indiana Jones 4 will not get made. I've said many times that it's my favourite film series; and in many ways it encompasses the "screw you" attitude towards blockbuster movie conventions which I've professed so much admiration of in this post (is there another hero, aside from Daniel Craig's Bond, who gets so beaten up and battered as our man Jones?) The fourth one will be crap. There is no other possible outcome. And, if it is, I may stop caring about genre films. Really.

... Thankfully, there is always TV. Hurrah for TV! Constantly involving, constantly interesting and barely any back engineering / pretentious waffle in sight. Except for Battlestar Galactica, but its constantly desperate, ever despairing bleakness is what makes it so wonderful. Last week the season three finale of Lost probably restored my faith in the ability of visual media to be as involving as literature when constructed in the right way. The episode Through the Looking Glass is a masterpiece and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that, in this decade, TV has definitely overtaken the cinema as the best storytelling media. And as someone who loves cinema, that does make me a little sad.


Cliche? What?...

Anyway, enough of all that, here's a picture of some lumberjacks shinning down trees in the glorious Vancouver sunshine to make this blog look ever so slightly more Canadian than it did a few minutes ago. Hurrah!