Courtesy of www.deadlinehollywood.com

Upstart distributor Phase 4 Films has given a home to controversial German filmmaker Uwe Boll. Phase 4 has acquired North American rights to three Boll films that include Darfur, the genre filmmaker’s departure into serious subject matter. Billy Zane, Edward Furlong and Kristanna Loken play journalists in Sudan who see gunmen approaching a village and must decide whether to cover an atrocity or prevent it.

Obviously we’re not to be confused with Phase 4 Films, but it’s still fun to imagine any potential partnership with Dr. Uwe Boll himself.

Shutter Island is a good film.  It’s not a particularly memorable movie, nor is it anything that we haven’t seen before, but when Scorsese is involved you’ll at least know that it’s going to be made with a certain level of quality that is inherent just by Scorsese’s affiliation.  I usually tend to avoid talking about big, prestige films made by movie gods.  What is there to say about Scorsese that hasn’t already been said?  Even on his worst day he is still the man, and I am but a lowly cretin rummaging through his garbage at night.   I find it hard to talk shit about the man because it’s like turning your mother into the police after she stabs you.  You just gotta let that shit go.  I guess the main problem I have with Scorsese’s cinematic output post Casino, is that he’s become a big time studio filmmaker characterised by casting big stars, and working with large budgets.   I really don’t mind this, he’s earned the right to make whatever he wants, but there is one constant throughout that I just don’t understand:  Leonardo Dicaprio.

This is what Scorsese has to say about Dicaprio, taken from a recent Esquire article.  (I don’t advocate reading Esquire):

Commitment. Adventurousness. A sense of truth. An ability to hold the screen. These are among the rare qualities that make Leo Dicaprio an essential actor.  There’s an old phrase that certainly applies to Leo: The camera loves him. In other words, his presence before the camera magnetizes us instantly, draws us into a mystery, compels us to follow him… He is absolutely essential to me, to all of us, and essential to the history of movies.

Really?  Essential to the history of movies?  Who am I to argue but I just don’t see it.  Dicaprio is not a bad actor, but I can think of tons of far more deserving and capable young actors that fill Scorsese’s criteria far more effectively.  More so, the guy just doesn’t hold his own when working onscreen with far better actors.  See Gangs of New York and Daniel Day Lewis to get the gist of what I’m saying.  In Shutter Island you have a similar problem and I think it comes down to his face.  You can always tell what Dicaprio’s character is thinking because he just grimaces so goddamn much when he plays anything else other than a pretty boy.   He translates toughness by squinting his eyes and furrowing his brow with one days’ growth of beard stubble.   Look at that still above the review if you don’t believe me.   I get it, you’re intense.  What else can you do?  In hindsight, although he isn’t as grossly miscast in Shutter Island than in say Gangs,  his melodramatic tendencies give away too much too early on in the film.  I won’t spoil the twist, but Dicaprio’s performance allows you to see the mechanics of the screenplay a little too clearly.   He seems more suited to the silent film era than anything else.  As I said, I can’t pretend to know more than Scorsese does and this is more of a rant on the insistence that Dicaprio is somehow an essential actor.  The man bangs supermodels left and right.  I just don’t buy it. More on the supermodels later on.

If you haven’t seen a Scorsese film then you have a problem and I have no idea what you are doing reading this, but if you have you know what you’re in for stylistically.  If there is one thing that hasn’t changed, it’s the man’s ability to compose shots and move a camera.  I’ve read that Scorsese made this film as an homage to Kubrick’s The Shinning.  You can’t help but get a little excited by that prospect.  The most effective moments in the film are when Scorsese channels Kubrick’s cold, calculated compositions in the context of setting up the film’s more supernatural elements.   The homage is quite blatant and actually works very well.   Unfortunatel,y the narrative shifts about half way through and Scorsese ditches the Overlook Hotel overtones and goes into Shyamalan twist-ending territory.  It’s too bad, really.  There are some really great performances from essentially every cast member other than Dicaprio.  So much so that I was far more interested in the secondary characters and was disappointed that the film choose to have Dicaprio carry most of the film.  I’m complaining about a lot of things that aren’t entirely based on a qualitative assessment of the film.  I guess I was just hoping for a Scorsese horror film through and through, rather than the cinematic cock tease that the movie ends up becoming.   At the end of the day, you can say much more than I have about the film. I just don’t really care enough about the movie to get into any more detail over what works vs. what doesn’t.  I will say however that the first 20 minutes are probably the best bit of filmmaking Scorsese has done in the last 15 years.

The review is now over, and I’m going to go off on a tangent right now.  In reality the whole reasoning behind a review on Shutter Island is just to have an excuse to express this theory I’ve developed over the past 4 collaborations between Scorsese and Dicaprio.  Martin Scorsese is 5’4” tall.  Leonardo Dicaprio’s supermodel ex- girlfriends Gisele and Bar Raefeli are 5’11”, and 5’8” respectively.  That is all.

I remember the night as though it was yesterday, December 26^th 2006.  Whilst my brother and I sat down to enjoy a snifter of porto, we thought to ourselves what better way to wind down the day than to enjoy a movie.  What could possibly go wrong?  Lady In The Water is what went wrong, and it set in motion what was to be a brief stay in the hospital for yours truly.

So far I’ve reviewed a lot of “shitty” movies, but in doing so I’ve always looked for something worthy of critical reassessment, the silver lining to the shit cloud as it were.  I can say with as much certainty as I can possibly muster that Lady In The Water offers no such lining, and in reality is the worst film ever made by anyone from this galaxy.  All you really have to do is look at the opening scene of the film; it basically serves as the shit-prism in which everything else can be viewed.   Apartment building superintendent Cleveland Heep, played by Paul Giamatti, attempts to crush a bug under the sink while a family cowers in the background, screaming in terror as he tries to smash the bug.  It’s filmed in one continues take, and it goes on forever, and you really do think that it’s a joke.  Everything from the overtly stereotypical Mexican family wailing in horror at the violence being committed in front of them to a fucking bug, to Paul Giamatti’s incomprehensibly awkward Porky Pig stutter, to the camera’s static position and insistence that what you are seeing is somehow significant, all led me to believe at the time that the film was a parody.  Whether people are aware of this or not, the opening scene of every film is the most important; it sets up the tone and the visual language which will inform the rest of the film.  Think of The Godfather, The Dark Knight, Pulp Fiction, etc.  In a way this scene does just exactly that, just not in the way that benefits the narrative.  What it sets up is the same sense of disbelief that you will continuously encounter throughout the film over how goddamn stupid every single writing and directorial decision truly is.

Seeing as though I hate this film I won’t bother producing my own plot synopsis. I’ll just steal it from IMDB.

Apartment building superintendent Cleveland Heep rescues what he thinks is a young woman from the pool he maintains. When he discovers that she is actually a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the journey back to her home, he works with his tenants to protect his new friend from the creatures that are determined to keep her in our world.

That’s the plot, and in reading such a concise write up you can see that it actually isn’t bad at all, perhaps even original.  And herein lays the root of every single, cringe worthy moment in the film.  M. Night Shyamalan is so concerned with setting up a mythos to his self-constructed fairy tale that he confuses bad ideas with originality, bloating a simple idea for no other reason than to stroke his own ego as cinematic auteur.  You want proof?  The name of the mythical nymph that he saves from the pool is “Story”.  How meta.  Oh, and he also casts himself ala Hitchcock as a writer, who will one day write a book that changes the world.  You gotta be fucking kidding me.   It’s filled with horrible plot contrivances like this, but I digress.  This isn’t a review as much as it is an account of the violent bodily reaction I had to it.  There are just way too many instances of utterly offensive stupidity to fit in this measly review.  Also I find that talking about this film at length gives it too much credit.  Watching it was a waste of time, writing about it is almost a bigger waste.   I have a bad habit of not turning off movies that I don’t like because I always try and give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe, just maybe, there will be something worthwhile.  By the end of the film I needed my whole body to hate this thing, so much so that I noticed a slight discomfort forming in my chest.  I thought nothing of it, and I went to be bed.

In the morning the pain hadn’t gone away, but had gotten worse.  Sharp stabbing pains in my chest, pains in my upper arm, I thought I might have had, or was presently having a heart attack.  I went to the clinic, they sent me to the emergency room as a precaution were they plugged me up to all kinds of Weapon-X styled machinery to measure any fluctuations in my heart beat patterns.  On day two they gave me an angiogram where they injected a dye into my blood stream and tracked the flow via a real time x-ray machine.  They tried to inject the dye several times through my arm; thankfully it worked in the last attempt.  Otherwise,  it would have had to go through an artery in my groin.

SO.  Turns out I didn’t have a heart attack, or any blocked arteries.  What I had was a virus called pericarditis which inflames the heart muscle, thus explaining the constant pain.  They put me on anti-inflammatory and eventually it all went away after a few months, with a follow up 6 months later just to make sure that it had been eradicated.  Like with many illnesses, it’s difficult to pinpoint the specific moment where one comes into contact with the contagion.  However, I don’t think that there is any question as to how I got sick; this movie is a fucking disease riddled, prostitute corpse that molested me for 2 hours, thus transferring the virus.  I don’t care if the science doesn’t add up. I know that I was the picture of health beforehand.

I’m not a Shyamalan hater.  The Sixth Sense is an effective ghost story, Unbreakable is a highly original take on superheroes, but that’s about as far as I can go in supporting his filmography.  The quality of his films seems to be directly proportional to the growth of his ego as a “writer/director/producer”.  Not many filmmakers get a marquee title above the actors’ names in the promotion for their films, and it’s gotten to his head.  He has the chops to develop concepts that regardless of execution are at least attempts at originality.  He should just learn when to shut the fuck up and maybe direct from another writer’s script whose head isn’t as far up his own ass.

Oh and that header is an actual line of a dialogue from the film.  Check mate Shyamalan.

Oh well, I guess the Streamys felt that such a popular and star-studded webseries like Jordan and Bear wouldn’t benefit from a nomination.  I guess it’s better to shed some exposure on lesser known talent.  I mean, who the fuck is this Zach Galifinakis guy?  Next thing you know they’ll be giving awards to shutins like Joss Whedon.

Uhhhh.  Fuck me.

http://www.streamys.org/winners/2010-nominees/