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Under discussion:

The Sixth Sense  (1999)

Memento  (2001)

A History of Violence  (2005)

Hancock  (2008)

I get suspicious when a movie becomes famous for its twist.

Sure there’s the kind of twist that makes you want to watch the whole thing over again right away (like in The Sixth Sense, Memento, and A History of Violence). But when the best running gag in a movie is the character doesn’t like to be called an “asshole,” you can’t rely on a twist to give the film more juice.

Hancock hits a point where you can practically feel the filmmaker say, “Oh shit, this is going nowhere, so we better surprise them.” And then the twist comes with the subtlety of saying “Oh by the way, I forgot to mention…”

M. Night Shyamalan has become the master of the BTW twist. “Oh by the way, Samuel L. Jackson’s a bad guy,” (“They called me Mr. Glass!” Scary.) “Oh by the way, this Village is in modern times.” And now Peter Berg pulls a Shyamalan: “Oh by the way, Will Smith and Charlize Theron have been married for 3,000 years.” (Any reason for 3,000? It’s longer than shit, but just shy of eternity?)

So, the twist goes like this, for inexplicable reasons when two superheroes are together their powers fade (no X-Men like battle scenes in the future for this franchise!). So, when Charlize Theron just starts telling Hancock they’re “the last ones,” she also throws in a little bit about how she became a bigamist once she saw Hancock no longer recognized her, post skull fracture, which was brought on by her bootylicious presence.

Anyway, lesson to script doctors: if the movie isn’t already humming along, no twist can make your movie roar.

Oh by the way, I’m writing this naked.

Under discussion:

Wall-E  (2008)

I spent much of last week trying to avoid all that hysteria about Wall-E being “left-wing, America-hating propaganda,” even though I’m absolutely positive that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was responsible for that steep rise in an interest in black magic amongst teens in the early 50s, and also that there would be neither PETA nor any form of federal gun control if it weren’t for Bambi. But what can I say? For whatever reason, I wasn’t in the mood to hear Steve Jobs compared to Joseph Goebbels, or to sound the violins for the poor demonized corporations, any of which could surely rule our state better than any democracy. Chalk it up to the holiday, I guess!

But now, here comes Frank Rich, late to the party but determined to shoot it up nonetheless. “Wall-E For President!” his NY Times Op-Ed column shouts from the headline––the exclamation mine, but definitely implied. Tired of seeing Wesley Clark’s talking head on TV, he explains, Rich went to the movies last week to see Wall-E. After making the patently false statement that the film counts as “a rare economic bright spot” in the current movie year (yes, it did well, but a LOT of movies have been doing well––virtually every movie vertical is doing better than 12 months previously), Rich declared the apocalyptic animated film to be “more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex’s walls.” Read: people are fat, they live amongst garbage and they allow corporations to control their lives, and John McCain and Barack Obama don’t even notice! But the kicker doesn’t come until the final paragraph:

Mr. McCain should be required to see Wall-E to learn just how far adrift he is from an America whose economic fears cannot be remedied by his flip-flop embrace of the Bush tax cuts (for the wealthy) and his sham gas-tax holiday (for everyone else). Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner’s complacency. Americans should see it to appreciate just how much things are out of joint on an Independence Day when a cartoon robot evokes America’s patriotic ideals with more conviction than either of the men who would be president.

I haven’t seen Wall-E, and though I’m sure it’s just as good as everyone insists it is and totally deserves 20 million Oscars (or else it’s a virus that’s going to turn Our Children into tax-hiking Commie zombies––whatever!), there few things in this world that irk me more than the sanctimonious suggestion from a newspaper columnist that prospective world leaders “could really learn a thing or two” from watching a Hollywood movie, let alone a Hollywood movie geared toward an audience old enough to be susceptible to the charm of the film’s assorted synergistic tie-ins, but too young to actually pay for their own ancilaries themselves. Shit is, as we know, pretty bad out there, but it’s hard to decide what’s the more ridiculous rhetoric suggestion for the replacement of our current political system: rescue by corporation, or by cartoon.

Under discussion:

The Fly  (1986)

Hancock  (2008)

The Wackness  (2008)

• Hancock made $107.3 million over the five night weekend, giving the Will Smith fractured superhero tale the third best July 4th opening of all time. It’s considered a victory for Smith’s star power, but it’s still almost $50 million less than Spider-Man 2 managed in a similar time frame. Meanwhile, The Wackness enjoyed the highest per-screen average of the weekend, earning $24,177 on each of its 6 screens.
• SAG is expected to make an announcement today about AMPTP’s “final offer”––although they might just announce that they need more time to think it over. Meanwhile, at a press conference at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival over the weekend, Robert DeNiro argued against a strike, accusing his fellow actors of not having “done their homework” on the economics. “I do not know if it is the right time to be doing this at all with the economy the way it is,” he warned.
• The opera directed by David Cronenberg based on his movie version of The Fly is bombing with French critics. Though complaints regarding the score’s “lack of expertise and imagination” have damaged ticket sales somewhat, apparently “Cronenberg diehards, Paris’ trendy 30ish art crowd and a sprinkling of goth girls” are still coming out in full force.