I can get Angels & Demons. Tom Hanks made himself scarce in the second half of this decade, appearing in only three films just to prove that we can't live without him and will claw rapaciously, or just plain rapely, to see anything him and his hair choose to co-star in.

I can get Confessions of a Shopaholic. After all, who among us can say we don't drink mightily from the cup of shop?

I can even get Where the Wild Things Are, Wolverine, Whiteout and Watchmen, though someone ought to tell them they're fast running out of alphabet to steal ideas from.

But a book-to-movie adaptation of Shylock Homely? A stuffy, celibate, sexist Brit living in the late 19th century and subsisting on a steady diet of nicotine, cocaine and presumably the little balls of dust under his carpet?

Nay, say I. Nay and forsooth, I shan't weather another. Of course, the only other Christmas movie was Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, and while I'll admit that in my off-hours I'm lead around on a spiked collar and called "slippery skipper" by my Leather Master, I am not so submissive that I will make myself supplicant to that...thing.

So, make a party like it's 1899 joke, crack out your buckled loafers and sharpen your sword canes, cuz lo and beholdeth the ride ain't just good, it's damn fine sexy. We catch our London-based dilettante duo in medias res, Dr. Watson (Jude Law) moving out of his and Holmes' abode on 221B Baker St to be with his redheaded bombshell-to-be. Not one to be left with big blue balls over his homo-erotic bromantic heartbreak, the ADD'd antisocialite idiot savant learns of the revivification of their last victim of 2 guys 1 case, Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong). Holmes and Watson reunite for one last round up, all the while dealing with Sherlock's double-triple-quadruple crossing ex-honeybun (Rachel McAdams), a shadowy be-tophatted professor with retractable double pistols who's in desperate need of a Christian Bale-sized lozenge and a guy with a hammer so large it would make Donkey Kong blush. Hijinks and hornswagglery ensue.

Numero One-o on my dirty laundry list of surprises was the competence of the film's (compliment, incoming!) directing and vision. This is Guy Ritchie we're talking about, a man who made two brilliant and very quoteable films in two years called Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, and then spent the following nine years making crap that only a 20-hour Family Matters movie set in a porta-john starring Urkel, and only Urkel, could match in craptascity. Yet Holmes never stoops to the level of buddy cop, who-dunnit, trying too hard to be literary or Michael Bay, all genres a more action-oriented Holmes film like this had easy access to. Characters philosophize wittily, battle excitingly and manage to maintain flare and energy in the grayest city on the face of existence. It's fun from beginning to end, a failing in every movie this year whose name didn't include “activity,” “taken,” “crank” or “The Damned United,” a movie you haven't seen and shame I heap upon thee for the transgression.

Watson ranked after Ritchie on the concernometer, Law's performance excising the loveable, chummy, portly and porkpie donning appendage to Holmes in favor of a well trimmed, former military man with a gambling addiction. In the novels, Watson kept Holmes' at best tenuous connection to normal society in check by being the straight man, the one with reasonable questions and average observations. At his very best attaining the rank of Stooge, which in Holmes' worldview was just above Mildly Interesting Slutface on his two-rank system for Those Who Be Not Sherlock Holmes.

Rather than than being a character who tries in vain to daddy Holmes, this new Watson feels like a character in his own right, not needing to be paired with Holmes' screaming crazies to stand out as something more than an additional asshole on a character composed solely of holes in asses. Watson is a capable playah and fightah all by his lonesome, and when with Holmes they're more hilariously like bickering betrothals than Zordon and Alpha 5, keeping your gaydar just enough on the fritz to make your brain giggles turn into audible chuckleations. Though they could stand to rein in the dry and drole Brit wit a touch, because the jokes and their timing frequently descend into rudely condescending for no reason, which instantly capital punishments the funny.

Mr. Robert Downey, Jr., ala Iron Man, steals the show once again by playing a character not only amusing, but deeply troubled in a way that doesn't try to communicate unnecessary amounts of dramatic gravitas. Holmes, much like Gregory House, M.D., has one helluva asset crammed into his skull but for all his genius he's basically just Computer Man, analyzing, relaying and enacting. Whatever feelings he has will more often than not escape him like sand between his fingers, in the end choosing to serve his mind far more than the lives of others. One superb scene involves Holmes dueling in an underground boxing ring, not to work out stress, take down a worthy competitor or even for the money he wins, but because he knows he can effectively deal out pain. He lets his opponent maim him until he gets bored and then quietly plays out a few moves that totally and brutally undo his adversary. Halfway through the match, his foe hocks a loogie at his big beautiful brain container and Holmes casually launches a massive counterassault, vaporizing the man. Of the felled fighter Holmes says “Physical recovery six weeks, full psychological recovery six months, capacity to spit at back of head neutralized.” Holmes' war to wring emotion from his logic-driven noodle is one of the film's main attractions, balancing engaging characterization with pub-caliber brawlage.

Besides shaping the performances of Law and Downey, Jr. ironclad, Director Guy Ritchie made one other very smart maneuver: antagonist actor Mark Strong's snaggletooth. Strong's Blackwood isn't the most evilly villain in history, a more reserved and self-important Snidely Whiplash with a touch of theatrical pizzazz. What could have been a fairly standard first villain entry in this intended series of Holmes flicks became nth times creeptastic because every shot of Strong's face emphasizes the actor's dental deformity. Strangely pointy, this one out of place facial feature made the character eery in a sea of Hollywood actors who are required to have unrealistically perfected dentures every time the camera's red light goes on. Google Image Search reveals the truth of the matter when nary a picture shows the actor with his mouth open, every smile thin and sealed lip. I have to give it to Ritchie for allowing a little imperfection in a cinema world spit shined to a blinding gleam.

Now, woes. If you happen to fancy yourself a gator of the Investi variety, bully for you but this is not a film where you gather clues hand in hand with our, dare I say, "sparkling" lead. Like the books, the final answers to all the film's niggling questions are only solvable by Holmes simply because they're based on details about the time period, medicine and technology that even people in the late 1800's knew jack nada about and some of it's just flat out made up. The overly convoluted explanation's addition to Holmes is worthy of a hearty snort from those familiar with those weird rectangular bindings filled with paper and ink but for most movie goers it's a sudden halt in the action for Holmes to talk amphetamine-fast about stuff we didn't know about beforehand while the rest of the cast's jaws hang slack in catatonic awe.

Further, this being the first in a series of films, Holmes is way too eager to redirect the film's attention to the mysterious shadow man who pops up every 30 minutes. It has the nasty feel of something the film considers to be more important than the actual story of Mark Strong's Tooth as Lord Blackwood, and you know Blackwood has no chance of really achieving any kind of victory when Dr. McEvilson keeps talking about shit that isn't going down in 2009/2010, the year in which you're actually seeing this movie. “Ho-ho, wait 'til you kids see what nefarious scheme I'll unfurl at some unspecified time later this decade!” There was no strict guarantee that Holmes would take off at the box office, and as of this writing its never dethroned Avatar for #1, and so the film shows total disrespect for the viewer when it doesn't focus enough on maintaining storytelling tension with the tale its supposed to be telling. Let later stories happen in the future, y'know, in the time period in which they actually exist. The man behind the curtains doesn't even do more than abscond with more than what amounts to a cog in Blackwood's machine, making Blackwood, the film's villain for most of the film's two hours, come off as a meaningless distraction. Had we just a little less of Captain Guess-who-I-am, then the real meat of the story, the battle between Holmes' science and Blackwood's spirituality, could have provided some iota of thoughtful insight.

As it stands, Sherlock Holmes: The Phantom Menace Episode 1 is a far better prologue than the movie I just made fun of, but it's still neutered enough to make me wonder why Guy Ritchie would bother to spend $80,000,000 telling a story he didn't care enough about.

3.5/5 stars

2009 was a year of anticipation, of expectation. PROGRESS. CHANGE. HOPE. We were supposed to be entering a new age whose opportunities would improve our health and well-being, the very quality of our life. Promises were made, dammit.

I'm talking, of course, about Disney's return to cel animation. Quentin Tarantino's Nazi execution wet dream. Three consecutive George Clooney pictures (Quentin has his dreams, I have mine). Two different movies titled “nine” and one titled Ninja Assassin. And James Cameron ending his 11 year cinematical hiatusery to bestow upon us poor peons the Promethean pyre which daily ignites by even his whispered utterance of “Action.”

Forget True Lies. Begone from my memory, Aliens. Hasta la bye-bye, Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Stay drowned, Titanic. You're all done, finished, because with over a decade spent in secrecy and hiding, Cameron has finally unveiled project Avatar.

And the crowd goes...home to drown its sorrows in Jägerbombs.

Like Peter Jackson's King Kong, M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, the Wachowski's Matrix: Reloaded, and Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, JC (God, no wonder he's pretentious) has made his Because I Can movie. A movie whose existence is the direct result of several million doughy eyed lemmings investing their love and trust in a single director. The director in turn proceeds to open boxes of doodles and margin notes from grade school, and then films whatever the Hell they feel like.

Said Jimmyboy to Entertainment Weekly back in '07: “Well, my inspiration is every single science fiction book I read as a kid.”

Cameron and his marbles had parted ways long ago, I knew this. Anyone who makes a movie about Robo-Skeletor fighting Metal Aqualad while Sarah “Che Guevara” Connor takes sniper potshots at African-American suburbanites is not only off their rocker, they can no longer get back on their rocker because they've mailed their rocker to the Sun. But with Avatar, Cameron has also decided to part ways with you, the audience, concocting some half baked souffle of childhood fantasies and letting the whole traitorous dessert fall right on top of you.

Avatar is about Marine paraplegic Jake Sully (Terminator: Salvation School of Franchise Ruining graduate Sam Worthington) who goes to Pandora, the moon of a planet that is literally a blue version of Jupiter. Jake is there to take his dead bro's place as the brain pilot of a human/Na'vi (Pandora's residents) clone used to prove to the Na'vi how much we respect their culture, in essence the space age version of blackface. Meanwhile, back in Cameron's mind, he can't decide whether to use an obligatorially evil U.S. military or big corporation and decides to have both! MiliCorp's evil plot is basically an intergalactic game of “Hey, look over there!” where Jake plays friendly Na'vi ambassador while delicious natural resources are Iraq'd right out from under the Na'vi's methane-breathing noses.

Seemingly the center of all the drama in this Golden Globe-nominated Best Drama of 2009 is the Na'vi, Pandora's beleaguered indigenous population of ten foot tall blueberry tiger people. Any sympathy for their tribulations quickly feels misplaced when you realize their entire culture is a hodgepodge of stereotypes of African and Aboriginal peoples including: their most advanced technological achievement is a spear, they pray for the souls of the animals they hunt, they wear next to no clothing and there are a lot of scenes of them crying after their favorite trees-to-hug get bulldozified. It's okay Jimbo Cameron, 11 years just isn't enough time to come up with something better than ingrained cultural racism. Why don't you go right back into hiding until you catch up with a time period that doesn't refer to Europe's Southern neighbors as the Dark Continent?

Avatar isn't simply satisfied with being unoriginal on its terms, no sir. It decides to take a page from George Lucas' Because I Can how-to book and not offer actors any sort of direction. “Wow, what a great monotone voice, Sam Worthington. Why don't you try every line in that tone? Hey, get the other actors out here, I want them to see what I taught Sam to do!”

Then the script burning party began. And though the nearly three hour script was quickly recovered by the only actors giving craps, eccentric government weasel Giovanni Ribisi and still-sexy-after-all-these-years scientist Sigourney Weaver, something was amiss with the script. There were these gaping “holes” in the “plot.” So, mysteries like why the helicopter pilot chick (Michelle Rodriguez) was all for suddenly betraying her superiors even though she was in maybe four scenes the whole movie, or why the scientist dude (Joel David Moore) hates the very core of Jake Sully for half an hour before suddenly being his best bud, well, we'll never know. Surely, these plot holes were caused by the cast & crew bonfire I just described and not because a script in development since 1994 wasn't actually up to any standards of quality, right? Perish the thought!

Now, the reason most people care about this movie is the Action and the Visual Prettyness. The action, while helped by the massive helpings of prettytude the visuals serve up, is monotonous for one key reason: it's established from the get-go that if Jake's Avatar dies while he's operating it, he won't die IRL. Since every action scene involves Jake driving his giant smurf kitten Na'vi around for the purposes of causing havoc, this presents a problem. Because, well, you know he's going to be totally kosher since he's heroically operating his Avatar from hundreds of miles away. Sure, you could counter that Jake and his Na'vi hunnybunny will have a harder time getting it on without his jolly blue giant doppelganger, but if their love really knows no bounds, then those two should still be able to get it up for getting it on.

Now, people have been talking about the visuals in this movie like Cameron somehow drilled underneath the color spectrum and discovered a wholly new rainbow of visual opportunity, with colors named Fierce, Wicked Sick and Ballergasmtastic. While I won't go that far (though I dream of a world where I'd actually want to say nice things like that), Avatar is the greatest technical achievement in computer animation in human history up to this point.

Ahh, finally, a quote fit for a movie poster...I really, really want to write “penis” somewhere in there. Does that make me a bad person?

It is beautiful on IMAX. If you see this movie at some place other than IMAX, I can personally guarantee your immediate hatred of this movie. But if you ever wanted your eyes to experience sex, this is it. The story and the acting may be nonexistent, but if there was ever an award to be handed out for style over substance, Avatar deserves at least that much. This movie has no soul, but wrapped around that soul is the equivalent of Carmen Elektra, and who are you to argue with Carmen Elektra?

1.5/5

I readily concede to the admission that I had nothing but malice in my heart, going to see Precious. The evil movie hate trolls who spend most days simmering in the fetid stench of my mind bowels, the cretins, had gone Darfur on any remaining strands of kindness I deigned to feel for cinema, leaving my eyes beady, bloodened and zeroing in for the sweet, sweet kill.

So, why all the PMSing? Well, I took one look at the marketing campaign for Precious and realized that every single (OVERWEIGHT WOMAN) advertisement was (LOWER CLASS) geared towards showing (BLACK) one thing. Every image, commercial, thing we know about this movie is designed to blaxploitate lead actress Gabourey Sidibe’s body. A movie that conceptually is built to show something Precious, but shows instead something Pitiable, drawing the kind of attention that vehicular manslaughter draws from passing motorists. To keep the P theme going, Pain Porn.

Hi, my name is Morgan, I’m a cinemaholic, and its been five days since I was wrong about Precious.

Precious takes place in 1987 Harlem and is about Claireece “Precious” Jones, a 16 year old girl still in junior high school, living on welfare with her abusive mom, and pregnant with her second child. Ostensibly, a movie about an African American woman living in poverty in New York who has learning disabilities, health problems and suffers social, emotional, physical and sexual abuse and just needs one rogue teacher to help her believe in herself again sounds like a pretty damn racist movie. None of the things I just said have been missing from any movie about the struggle of a minority against adversity and in this way it doesn’t challenge a single preconceived notion we have about race or its associated stereotypes.

The film’s response to this is “So?” And it gets away with this because, one, there aren’t really any white people in this movie. The shadow of our pale empire isn’t felt in this movie at all, nor are there any comments made about anyone’s presence or lack of melanin in their epidermis, seemingly a hot button issue in human history for, oh, ever. Also, two, there are hardly any men in this movie, because movies about oppression usually aren’t complete without the dongle-equipped half of society brandishing big phallic guns to penetrate people with warm lead or wield girthy bureaucratic pens to box in the rest.

There’s not much romance in this movie either, save from a superb cameo by singer/songwriter/all around sexy individual Lenny Kravitz, and so love doesn’t throw a Hail Mary Pass in the fourth quarter just to save Precious Jones from all her misery and woeitude.

Now I find myself in the curious predicament of giving this movie a lot of credit for everything it didn’t bother to do wrong.

Hi Morgan, this is your constituency of readers, and you’re scaring us.

But think about it, when has a movie about race ever taught you anything about race? I mean, really. People are always praising a movie for being "inspirational," but are those people inspired to live their lives any differently? Of bloody course not, people just say those things to give their spine the warm fuzzy once over, which is just silly because now every major movie centered around non-whiteys has to in some way involve being downtrodden. Hell, if Precious had been about a thinner black woman, it’d probably be less popular just because we’ve seen enough thin black women be oppressed and need some slightly newer designer drug to get the same high we got from the last racist race movie.

Precious is the first movie I’ve seen since Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing that on the surface is purely about race, but below all that is really about people who life takes a dump all over. You can’t make a meaningful movie about social issues like race and gender if every frame is pregnant with accusations towards other races and genders, because yes, that makes your movie racist. You can hit people over the head with your [big air quotes] message all you like, but you’ll just give audiences brain damage if you make them think your stereotyping has any merit at all.

Beyond all my high falootin' bullpucky, Precious is a good drama. Precious Jones, far from being a Perfect Paragon (okay, stopping), is a girl who’s a little quick to anger, self-centered and simple-minded from time to time, who has some fascinatingly warped and bombastic dream sequences in the film’s first half as she’s try to squirrel herself away from reality biting and thanks to the performance (and not the poundage) of Gabourey Sidibe, has a lot of screen presence.

The film is sometimes a little too stylistic for its own good, its first half trying out new kinds of camera angles, editing, special lenses and color schemas every alternate minute, but it keeps the very familiar exposition material from getting stale until you get engaged in the characters halfway in. There are slip-ups here and there, like an inspirational teacher who’s a little too, but not too too and a plot that is akin to checking off a list of twists from an after school special.

And while soundtracks are generally the things reviewers only talk about when they're getting paid by the word, Precious has one of the most inventive, off the wizall soundtracks since Watchmen paired 99 Luftballoons with Me and Bobby McGee. Every moment of drama where you're prepared to feel like crap, some indie R&B piece detonates between your ears and you get sucked into Precious' skewed worldview. Every time you want to feel a little too hopeful, a woman cries sofly into the hole in her acoustic. I don't want soundtracks that blend unnoticed into the background, I want to be musically goosed! Then I want to take that unexpected aural violation and put it on my Zune, because that's how I do.

At most every turn, Precious very relentlessly insists on being treated like any other movie instead of a movie that needs a cast of people with a darker skin color to get attention, and so at its very worst it has the same flaws that any other drama does: that it’s about a procession of exceedingly sad things happening to human beings. I dot E dot, this is not escapist fantasy but rather a movie for people who like movies. A very sans humor affair that can best be described succinctly with a lot of :'(s. By following in the footsteps of the drama genre and not the drama/race/boy-howdy-you-sure-oughtsa-to-feel-guilty genre, it earns cinematic self-respect as well as its title.

3.5/5 stars

If the Internet were a blindfolded kindergartener with a two by four and a lust for partially hydrogenated soybean oil, then New Moon, its stomach walls lined with the promise of cynical nectar and sarcastic sugars, is the Internet’s piñata bitch.

If you live on the internet, and if you’re any familiar of mine then stop denying it to yourself you XKCD-reading, stumble-uponing, monitor-light-paled denizen of our growing digital empire, you are honor-bound to despise this film. Even now you’re devising particularly biting tweets to assure your 32 followers that, no, you are not on Team Jacob or Team Edward because Twilight is chocked full of Gay.

However, if you’re go-against-the-flow me, you probably don’t give two This Is Its about a movie that is now more popular than the Lunar calendar event after which it is named. Instead, Lord Morgan finds his manly self impervious to the massive waves of homosexual that are apparently bombarding New Moon’s audience. Your redheaded overman is instead concerned with how little this movie actually has to try in order to be 50%-off-hookers popular. Such ravenouscity defines its fanbase that the words “taste” and “quality” bounce off its supplicants as harmlessly as STDs off of Gene Simmons, and the utter lack of pressure for anyone on the production to staff to make a “good” movie ruins the essence of filmmaking: creative growth.

But for those out there living beneath the Earth’s substrata, using Anne Rice novels to sound proof your cave walls and bombarding your mole ears with TNT re-runs of Angel and Buffy because you fear change, New Moon is based on the second entry in J.K. Rowling Jr.’s goth teen fantasy opus, Twilight. It’s about some hoe and her on-again, off-again relationship with a vamp dude for whom the phrases “brooding,” “tragic” and “glistening epidermis” have been made redundant. Then there’s this other dude who, from what I understand, was about as visible as a Key Grip in the first film that the hoe falls in love with in between Nosferatu fixes.

The characters cry and yell a lot, then the movie ends. 300 Million Billion dollar check, please.

Having never read the books (a term I only use grudgingly to works lacking literatudinal merit, but hey, at least people are reading), never seen the first movie or bothered to read any of the uncountable anti-Twihard blog posts on the subject of New Moon, I went into this a little apathetic. And honestly, New Moon’s not all that bad.

Hey, why’s my Facebook friend counter running backwards?

Really though, ignoring all the excess bile and stink of a million angry webcams crying out in terror, it’s just a boring, mostly average kind of movie. The first 30 minutes are okay because you’re trying to get a sense of the mythology, and stylistically the film really loves slow motion walking, coats and hair blowing in the wind and a lot of long shots of people looking sad. Which is, y’know, cute. Then the melo yelo drama fuel injector kicks in and I basically walk out feeling like a voluntary victim of the CW’s primetime block. All in all, it’s certainly nothing new in the realm of Really Pissing Annoying Stuff (RePAS), but I think most people are worried Twilight is a bad contribution to human culture. We’ve weathered RePAS the likes of Coldplay and NCIS, however, so I hardly think humanity is plummeting down a black hole.

What really bothered me is that for a movie that is, ostensibly, a gothic fantasy story involving vampires and angry big transforming puppies, there’s no blood sucking, very little violence and, quizzically, scant few shots of the Moon. The fantasy horror style is just some poor genre condom the film is donning to keep its tweeny ejaculate from getting in the face of a viewership that’s simply tired of the standard romance dreck.

Movie reviewers the world over have been trying to prove how cool they are by unilaterally despising this movie, but no one aside from you gorgeous individuals read movie reviews any way, and to be honest there were far, far worse films this year, mainly because those films had higher expectations. They were either a continuation of a beloved series (X-Men) or a reboot of something that used to be cool (Star Trek) or, God fricking forbid, a fresh idea (District 9).

Bluntly, the year that has seen the highest gross in movie ticket sales ever, to re-use a Morganism by popular demand, has been a big wet pile of suck. The above movies had invested in them the most important capital of any in film enjoyment, that of hope. I went into New Moon hopeless, and was, at times, not entirely disappointed, nor did I fall asleep as I did during Where The Wild Things Are or The Box. It may have left a bland taste in my mouth, but it was more flavorful than the week-old mayonnaise I’ve been swilling at the cinema all bloody year.

All that said, I feel like I’ve had to point out sexism in films a little more often this year than I’m used to (2012, The Ugly Truth, for starters), and here we go again. Perhaps it’s because I’ve finally gone all progressive and forward-thinkery enough that I’ve accepted the idea that women can not only arrange a spice rack but also build one, but New Moon makes me feel very sorry for the multiple generations of women who will grow up idealizing the relationship between hoe…I’m sorry, Bella, and Guy-Who-Should-Have-Stayed-Dead-After-Voldemort-Smoked-His-Pasty-White-Ass-In-HP4.

Bella’s entire character is defined by her lack of quote-un-quote masculine traits, her subservience to men and her inability to think for herself. She buys them food, apologizes for everything she does, has night terrors and hallucinations when her men leave (and they’re always the ones breaking up with her) and she has to stop their fights or sacrifice herself in their name. One man tells her she can’t be with the other, she has to ask another to change her into his brand of monster du jour, and they always kiss her, not her them.

Even the much celebrated pick-up truck she drives isn’t all that much of a mark of independence because when Jacob or Edward are in the car, they’re the one’s driving. I even applauded the movie for, at first, allowing Bella to move organically from one relationship to the next, movies being notorious for characters that get over relationshits instantly magically. Then, her break-up pains rapidly descend into psychotic delusions and an attempt to kill herself 2/3 of the way into the movie. Why? Because the men in her life ARE her life. Let me tell you, Ladies, for serious not for fake, you need to respect yourselves more than this movie tells you to.

Or I’ll go gay. I swear I will.

2.5/5 stars

Courtesy of Buena Vista Home Entertainment. ©ABC Studios.

Courtesy of Buena Vista Home Entertainment. ©ABC Studios.

Right out of the gate, I felt sorry for 2012. Poor bastard film that it is, not only being marred by the fact that most people who've seen its trailer have seen all the movie has going for it, not only is it based on something that ISN'T GOING TO HAPPEN in three years, but to top it all off I sat in the first row, which made its special effects look so terrible that I had to rely on the "vibrant" storytelling and "rich" character development to enjoy the movie.

Har, dee har, dee har.

Based on an ancient Mayan prophecy that states that the world's mojo will run out on 12/21/12, 2012 concerns an out-of-work writer named Morg-err-Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a Geologist whose name I forgot (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an angry politician of some kind (Oliver Platt), President Thomas Definitely-Notbama Wilson (Danny Glover) and Woody Harrelson as some crazy guy (Himself). They all have a lot of very dramatic scenes where the camera zooms in on their shocked faces, and some of them die, but you won't care which. Then the movie ends and you realize, yes, its been three flippin' hours since you sat your American posterior down, and the groove in the seat now looks suspiciously like moons having sex.

If there's a heavy weight offender, 2012's is completely misunderstanding what makes disasters scary. It's weirdly cagey about showing death, as a super market being swallowed into the Earth early on mysteriously has no casualties. But once people are dying by the tri-county loads and reduced to teeny tiny little CG ants prime for the squashin', planetary genocide becomes a-okay.

Did Titanic teach you people nothing? We want disaster deaths to be so personal, grisly and affecting that when we walk out of the theater all we can talk about is our favoritest. And that's the most dramatic reaction you can ask of us because, honestly, you're a disaster movie and the best you can offer us is some new variety or ilk of indiscriminate maiming. Any combination of kittens, chainsaws, body butter, Toyota Camrys and soup will do.

2012 also mistakes its audience for people who will be sucked into the judgment day drama, offering us scenes like the opening which involves the theft of the Mona Lisa just moments before TWO ZERO ONE TWO appears in gaudy blue, Verdana Ref on the screen. I'm sorry loves, but when the waters rise I'm not going to be bemoaning the death of human culture, I'm gonna be using that hoe as a flotation device.

While we're on the subject of things that do nothing for the movie, our central cast is peopled by dreadful cookie cutter sound-alikes whose entire development comes in a witty little joke they make shortly after they appear on screen. Here's one: "Yes, but my wife's fish curry is still terrible!" Oh, I see what you did there, your wife can't cook! Sir, I love your clever observations and wish to seek out a method to produce your children. Please, please don't die.

Speaking of making fun of women, this is the most curiously sexist movie since The Ugly Truth, which was itself the most sexist thing since the invention of Republicans (ba-zinga!). All the men constantly group together to stare and drool at the ensuing havoc so that they can all agree on the exact phrasing of "Fuck if I know," and all the women are constantly pictured protecting children and crying a lot. Amanda Peet, the female lead's, big dramatic monologue begins with "As a mother," because women aren't really people, they're baby ovens. What, you didn't know? Get preggers now, ladies, or John Cusack will never love you.

Not that you'll care what anyone's saying or doing because every actor is here for their paycheck and no one seems to be having any fun with their role save Oliver Platt. Platt has always been comfortable in any role showcasing his rotund smarmyness, and his snorts of disapproval alone are more alive than the reanimated zombie goon squad he's forced to surround himself with, disguised though they are as “actors.”

We've long exited the age where computer animation continues to impress us, especially when YouTube gives us regular access to real life disasters, and while one might be able to enjoy, say, Transforminators El Secundo for its incredibly sexy, 23 year old, brunette...err...wit as opposed to its speshul effex, 2012's only draw is its over-the-toppery. While there are moments of tension from time to time, those moments are mainly achieved by increasing the bass and volume with each action scene, and by the time you're 45 minutes in it doesn't work anymore and none of us are watching the main characters thinking "Oh noes, they're going to get dry-humped by Death!"

Thinking back, I remember a similar experiment by 2012 director Roland Emmerich titled The Day After Tomorrow, which worked a lot better for two reasons. One, 2012 is a name and a gimmick to cash in on, whereas TDAT was just an event that happened to occur, and was made more threatening by not even having a name. The world wasn't breaking, it was just bending suddenly and violently. And two, TDAT's pay-off was, and still is, peerless and relevant, in that you realize by film's end that the majority of the disaster occurs to America and the once and former superpower must turn to the mercies of the rest of the world, which is a Twilight Zone-caliber scary-ass prospect.

But much like pulling out the magnification slider on GoogleMaps, 2012 reduces the minutiae and relevancy of life to a gaggle of pixels here and there and the tectonic bifurcation of Mozambique is met with a shrug. The final scene, which to avoid spoilers I'll only say involves Mt. Everest and the phrase "we're going to crash into it," is when we'd like the movie, and billions of human lives, to just go ahead and end already.

Instead, the best that can be said about 2012 is that it stayed as far away from ancient Mayan astrological hoohah as possible, so way to suck less, 2012. Way to.

1/5 stars

"Ghostbusters 3? I've heard that the writers of the Office are currently penning a script? How is this coming along, and should we look forward to this movie seeing the light of day?"

"Dan Aykroyd:  Script is commenced early summer. Hope to be in production by late fall 2009."

- via (AintItCool)

As a movie reviewer, my greatest fear is that I will be right a little too frequently, and that my ego will become so large that it starts eating itself. Horror movies, plagues which I avoid with about as much success as the pharaoh from Exodus, are the bane of this concern, an unstoppable march of movies that are just plain terrible, without caveat or addendum. Year in and out they flow into my local MISSION VALLEY CINEMA (There, I plugged, now comp my tickets!) like the wretched excess bile of some foul, multi-million dollar killbeast, heart obsidian black, whose very carapace is forged from the deepest wells of hate found only in The Hate Wells at the darkest margins of known space.

Wait, what?

Anyway I am remiss to inform you that The Final Destination did neither "suck" nor "blow," things I never could get my last girlfriend to learn (ba-dum-tish!), and was in fact a rizocking awesome good time. A few notes, though. This is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, it is a bad, woefully predictable cheap scare gore festival extravaganza with about as much self-respect as your average porno and regretfully fewer money shots.

I mean...err...who wants to go to church with me on Sunday and feel chaste?!

So why is it a good time? Weirdly, I felt transported back to 18 months ago when I saw Horton Hears A Who, though the only real similarity these two share is that they were written by someone for whom the words "hallucinogen" and "maniac" held biographical significance. Horton wasn't a great movie. It's at best a movie you would give to people that you never know what to buy for, hoping and praying that it doesn't engender the kind of passive-aggression that leads to flung turkeys on Family Attack Day.

Thanksgiving. Right. Always get those mixed up.

But, like me, you may have seen Horton on one of those days where something sweet and silly was necessary medication for a day described with perhaps far less friendly adjectives. A place of cats with hats, of processions of colored, numerical fish. A place of peace, whimsy.

Conversely, The Final Destination is good on a bad day because you get to watch people die! Come on, in these harsh economic times, isn't it comforting to know that people with only slightly more money than man servants, the film's main characters, are out there dying by the Lamborghini-load? Yes, no panacea is quite so fulfilling as one peopled by upper class, bored white kids with an obvious disrespect for Satan's plan to maim each and every one of their pretty, hair geled heads.

For those that have not previously experienced the Destination that is increasingly inaccurately described as "Final," this is the fourth in a time-honored heritage of films that involve a bunch of hormonal teenagers who have the audacity to keep on sucking up air even after plane crashes, highway pile-ups and rogue rollercoasters. Gosh, I wish I could afford the kind of high-priced skin care products that make them so impervious to the machinations of Fate.

This forces Satan to rise out of his bone throne, made from Nazis, Visigoths and other peoples now collectively referred to as German, shoo away Mussolini from his mani and Pol Pot from his pedi and waggle his big, be-infernocioused finger at what is basically the cast of One Tree Hill and say "Oh you did-nt," head bobbing evilly. Mayhem, shortly, ensues.

What's old is new again, though, when you stop numbering your movies and start putting definite articles in front of them, and The El Finale Destination-o goes one progressive step further and makes this murderfest center around an ancient and cherished red state tradition: NASCAR. Finally, a horror movie for the Bible Belt!

You may have noticed that this particular NASCARsaster is available in THREEEEEEDEEEEEE, WHEEEEEE! But trust old man Morgster, you can save yourself the extra $3.50 and have an even better time watching all the cheap special effects that were designed to jump out of the screen, but instead fall flat on their miserable, bidimensional faces. TFD has an odd sense of self-deprecating humor, and lines like "I'm gonna enjoy these last precious moments and do what I do best: get laid!" and "That's a lot of tampons for one woman!" come out like a left field slap across the face as your legs pinwheel from gigglegasms. There's even a scene later in the movie where it attempts to kill you, the audience, and there's so much meta-scorn floating around that by the time my doppelganger's parts start decorating the theater walls all I can do is smile.

And as promised there's a great sense of class war revenge, as you won't like your teeny bopper heroes and heroines as they: play golf, have no jobs, their hair and clothes' level of trendyness increases exponentially with each scene, their cars are referred to as "custom pieces of sh*t," these same cars they decide to have completely washed after one drop of bird poo and then they decide to fly away to Paris at the drop of a hat. Whereas between my bank account and my wallet I can buy, let's see, a sandwich.

Oh how I hate thee, you GAP billboard rejects.

The thing is, even when you shave off an entire dimension on the ticket price, the movie is annoyingly short at around an hour and fifteen minutes, but hey, it has Mykelti "BubbaGumpShrimp" Williamson in it playing a stadium security guard that wears a pink bathrobe, reads Alcoholics Anonymous, makes cookies and occasionally tries to hang himself, and who are you to argue with such an Oscar-caliber performance?

Ultimately, this boils down to whether or not you have a problem rooting for the big, red horned one, and you know you don't, not really. Because someday he'll go after people you don't like and, if you're really bad and listen to lots of pop music and run over lots of turtles, he'll do the coup de grace with a player piano and a blowtorch. And you'll wanna see that, just as sure as you want to see this movie.

2.5/5 stars

Morgan McCormick is the co-host of MovieChatter. Click here to listen to an even more detailed discussion of The Final Destination.

I know I’m preaching to the choir when I point out that every week’s major release is either a remake, a sequel or an adaptation. So, you can well imagine the unbridled glee my tiny redheaded heart experienced when I heard that there was an original sci-fi movie taking place in Johannesburg, South Africa, of all places, and shot like a documentary. Cloverfield 2: Babies in the ‘Burg, here I come!

Annoyingly, they give up on their mockumentary idea a few minutes in, but hey, District 9’s apparently got fresh, piping hot carnage to serve up to my American, gun-loving, Jack Bauer-worshipping sensibilities. “Artistic cinema” is for sissies, democrats and British people anyway.  But just as the film’s starting to settle into political thriller, with maybe a sprinkling of social commentary, it goes Attention Deficit Disorder again and clutches into full horror throttle before it finally takes a pee break in Actiony Murdersville County and locks its keys in the car.

This being director Neill Blomkamp’s first…well, anything, I can understand why he might feel as if he has a big, Producer Peter Jackson chip on his shoulder.  It shows a complete lack of faith in his material and his own abilities when he can’t stay on his Focalin long enough to pick which genre he likes best.  And when your material is giant insect squid bears, you really don’t need a genre or a story, you just need to give them a SPACE GUN of some kind, point them towards a major metropolitan area and say “Humans over there: kill they ass.”

Actually, the much-touted action scenes are one of the movie’s biggest turn-offs.  Now, it should be noted that I am an extreme proponent of violence. Bullet-riddled corpses, cities leveled in flame, surface-to-air nuclear phallic symbols rushing to penetrate an enemy base. I have a disease, and Hollywood has the cure: More, More, More. But even District 9 pushes the boundaries of Jason Statham-esque psycho-killer-romper-stomper and moves into the uncomfortable world of films like Hostel and Saw, where every kill has to be an in your face goregasm of bloodsplattery and maiming. Violence is all puppy dogs and sunshine until it goes from serving the story and devolves into killing for killing’s sake. The last hour of the movie is nothing but a disconnected series of grisly shootouts punctuated by the occasional explosion of grenades or firing of the alien’s electric tornado sound cannons, which look cool, and are. But once you’ve seen one alien electric tornado sound cannon, you’ve pretty much seen ‘em all.

Causing my violence stiffy to go limp isn’t among this film’s worst sins, however.  District 9’s extremely graphic content is basically used as a crutch for even the most basic of character development.  Wikas, District 9's leading biped, is forced to go through 30 minutes of Blomkamp’s most Hellish torture porn fantasies in a cheap attempt to evoke sympathy for someone who’s basically a middle management, government schmuck with a wife and dreams of a polished, mahogany oak desk to fall asleep behind. Wikas is barely on-screen an entire How I Met Your Mother before he’s suffering horribly under the sharp scalpel of some arbitrarily evil corporation of some kind, which is as arbitrarily evil as every other corporation in every other movie ever made ever. The events themselves are tragic, but not because they’re happening to Wikas in particular. Watching anyone be horrendously mutilated while they’re forced to watch on and scream and cry and vomit and bleed would make any of us feel pity. This is taking shortcuts to developing characters by making the events as graphic and sad as possible, diluting the importance of Wikas when he can be substituted for any dumb yutz.

You’ll be looking for love in all the wrong places if you expect to feel empathy for our new alien bestest buds evar, the prawn.  Only appearing chiefly in the film’s first and last 20 minutes, the prawn are even more difficult characters to relate with in that they have almost no spoken lines, no indication of culture or tradition, and are portrayed as, alternatively, mindless drones, gun runners, carrion eaters, alcoholics, and dangerous psychotics.

Much has been said, however, by the media about how the plight of the prawns so meaningfully echoes the oppression endured by the South African people during Apartheid in the last century.

No.

Those who suffered at the hands of the National Party government lived in squalor at the point of a gun and the pen of a bureaucrat, but they made a life for themselves, they maintained a culture. They were heroes of the indomitable human spirit to just frickin’ live.

The prawn are mindless savages that eat catfood and sell giant fighting robots to voodoo-worshipping terrorists. And when we finally see these “poor, oppressed souls” magically reappear at the end of the movie, they tear a human being limb from limb, gobble him up and then go about their business. This is classic King Kong Syndrome, where the audience is asked to sympathize with a creature that can only charitably be described as a sociopath. The film’s lead prawn, Christopher, is followed around by his four year old son throughout the movie to inspire compassion for a character who’s supposed to be the prawn equivalent of a nuclear physicist (but perplexingly speaks like a second grader in his own tongue). You’ll quickly realize that there are no other prawn children in the entire movie, and so instead of creating a parallel with the suffering endured by children in real-life South Africa, the son comes off as a cheap gimmick to force a connection between ourselves and patently uninteresting characters.

If there’s more to the prawns, it was Blomkamp’s responsibility to prove it. And he went out of his way to fail completely in this regard.

Worst of all, the material isn’t challenging. You see, I’m glad we can all agree that slavery, genetic experimentation and evil, global conglomerates are SO totally not cool, but District 9 is merely whoring out truly horrific aspects of human history to pull our heart strings taut and keep our interest.

There are nice things to say about the movie, like the acting, the visuals and the uniqueness of the concept.  Yes, the performances are good, but so what? This isn’t a movie filled with Shakespearean or even Dan-Brownian-caliber dialogue, this is just people saying f*ck a lot and yelling at each other.

And yes this movie looks pretty, but when is that an accomplishment anymore?  For a ten dollar ticket price and an eight-figure movie, I’d damn well better be regularly bathing in The Gorgeous.

And yes, it’s a neat idea for a sci-fi movie.  Though, the only reason anyone ever liked sci-fi was because the absolute best, in every scene, spoke of a larger world out there. That there are things that not even Google Advanced Search can uncover. Yes, even if you turn off the adult content filter.

District 9 mentions a homeworld of some kind all of three times, because the audience couldn’t have guessed that they weren’t from Spokane, and then returns to submerging your corneas in rich pools of AB-Positive.

Covered in entrails and decrying its at best cursory relationship with modern genocide, all the while lugging the carcasses of ideas that never took off, I have to ask: Why is this movie so popular?

Morgan McCormick is the co-host of MovieChatter.  Click here to listen to an even more detailed discussion of District 9.