Ghosts of Mars (2001)

John Carpenter is one of those weird directors I can't determine if I like or not. On one hand, "The Thing" is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I love "Escape From L.A." in all its campy insanity. On the other hand I actually wasn't a huge fan of some of his other classics like "They Live" or even "Halloween." I think the problem with the later was that I just don't like slasher films that much. They bore me. Anyway, that's besides the point. What I'm saying is that I never know what to expect when watching a Carpenter movie for the first time, which is nice but at the same time makes watching his films a bit dicey.

"Ghosts of Mars" is widely considered as displaying Carpenter at his absolute worst, and while I went into it with an open mind, it's difficult for me to imagine him topping it in terms of badness. I mean, "The Ward" was crap, but "Ghosts of Mars" is one of those films that just kind of hurts you while you watch it. It's not an instant, excruciating pain, but it is a slow turn of a screw that keeps digging something into your back, making the sit more and more uncomfortable the longer it goes on. And by the end you're just wishing it would stop and put itself out of your misery.

The film stars Natasha Henstridge as a cop on Mars who is sent with her unit to transport a murder suspect back to town from an outlying mining colony. Her unit contains both Pam Grier and Jason Statham in one of his earlier roles, so there is a bit of star power at work. True it's also got Clea DuVall acting like she's on quaaludes dragging down the talent, but any movie that stars both Foxy Brown and Turkish has at least a little bit going for it.

Wot's 'appening wiff dem sausages, Foxy?

And then they reach the town, which is deserted sans the mutilated dead bodies hanging all over the place as if they've wandered onto the set of "Predator." Going to the jail, they meet their assignment, a man by the name of Desolation Williams (snicker) played by the Master of Scowling himself, Ice Cube. Believe it or not I have found Ice Cube to be entertaining on occasion, but this was not one of those moments. In "Ghosts of Mars" he's pretty much checked all of his limited acting talent at the door and gives a performance that you'd expect from a rapper turned actor. I don't know if he wasn't having a good time on set or something, but there's nothing to him except just being a guy who sneers a lot, shoots guns and says every line like a jock who was cast in a high school play and is really pissed about it.

Desolation and the cops are quickly accosted by a large mob of colonists who have gone insane, as we find out that spirits of alien beings have possessed them, and have been killing everything in sight. There's an interesting element to them, since once the body they're inhabiting is killed, they are free to move to another host and possess them. This means that generally speaking, killing them is a bad idea since their spirit can still get you afterwards. But then again these incorporeal beings apparently can't move through walls or doors or glass and can only move very slowly so I'm not sure how the crap that all works. The important thing to remember is that for some reason the spirits turn people into Uruk-Hai.

"Whom do you serve?"

"Sarumaaaaaaan!"

That's a fine enough setup I suppose, and it could have made for an entertaining film, but there are a number of factors at work with prevent that from happening. First and foremost is the fact that "Ghost of Mars" looks unbelievably cheap. I'm serious, you have no idea how chintzy this movie looks. I'm all for actual sets and whatnot, but not when they're done so poorly and lit so as to look like everything around the actors is made of cardboard. It's difficult to describe without you having seen it, but whenever they're outside there's no depth to anything on screen, and it looks like you're watching the characters faff about on the "Ghosts of Mars" Action Playset. Or maybe a better way to put it is that it looks like you're watching a taped production of a stage play. It's really bad.

Apart from the bad sets and the TERRIBLE CG they had going on, which are bad for even 90's CG standards, there are some truly bizarre choices that were made in the editing room which makes the entire film teeth-grindingly aggravating to watch. Nearly every single transition between scenes - NEARLY EVERY SINGLE ONE - is a dissolve fade, an edit which is normally associated with some passage of time. However the passage of time between edits in the film is sometimes as little as a couple of seconds, like when characters move from one room to another.

 Get used to this.

On top of that the film makes heavy use of using a dissolve fade when most films would simply use a normal cut within the scene itself. So you'll have situations when you're watching a character walking from one end of the room to the other via two or three of these dissolves, giving off the impression that he is fading in and out to move. I have never seen this technique used before to that extent, but I tell you I hope to never see it used like this again. It's horrendously distracting and completely asinine, and the guy who edited this film needs to be punched in the face.

And don't get me started on the chronology which is as fractured as season four of "Arrested Development." The entire story is told in flashbacks, being narrated by a person who could not possibly be relating the events to anyone considering she was not present during many of them, and the people who did experience them are all dead. So how could she be describing what they saw or did? I guess the character had a copy of the script.

You know what this movie is? This is an Uwe Boll film. I'm dead serious. This is something you'd see from Uwe Boll. And not even more recent "slightly competent" Uwe Boll. This is "Bloodrayne" or "House of The Dead" or "Alone In The Dark" here. This is amateur, cheap, lazy, cheesy, "I did this for the tax write-off" schlock. And it was made by the same guy who did "The Thing." I am saddened and stunned by that revelation.

This was just a test-run for "In The Name of The King."

This summer...in a world...where trailer cliches are king...one man...will make a stand...unlike anything you've ever seen before...

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Ghosts of Mars" is terrible. It's cheap looking, it's boring, and it's poorly acted despite having a handful of legitimate talent. About the only decent thing is the Anthrax penned soundtrack, which manages to be fairly metal. It doesn't make the movie work, but it's nice to know the band got a paycheck.

Argo (2012)

It's that time again. Time to watch the movie that won Best Picture in this year's Oscar race with judgmental eyes and a crossed-armed "impress me" attitude that will surely be a healthy way to go about it. Not that my expectations were already set against "Argo" like they were for "The Artist." This one looked like a film I could conceivably enjoy. And I was just glad "Lincoln" didn't get top honors. So at the very least, that's something. But in the back of my mind I'm eternally gritting my teeth that "Django Unchained" didn't win. Quentin needs his Best Picture statue, dammit! He's earned it more than most of the rest of these chuckle-heads getting them like candy!

What I ended up getting from "Argo" was a movie that I didn't dislike. That's about the best I can say about it. I didn't dislike it. It was okay. It was acceptable. It was the textbook definition of something that sure didn't suck. And there is no way in Heaven, Hell, The Feywild, Valhalla, Middle-Earth, Cimmeria, or the Romulan Nebula that it was a better picture than "Django Unchained." I haven't seen "Zero Dark Thirty" yet but I'm guessing it was nowhere near as good as that one, either. As it was last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that one too, the Best Picture award went to the safest choice. Boo to that mess.

On the other hand, I did like it better than "Lincoln."

"Argo" is about a not-until-recently declassified operation during the Iran hostage crisis of the early 80's. Apart from the hostages being held at the embassy, there were 6 Americans who had managed to flee during the storming of the building, and were taken in by the Canadian ambassador. There they hid for months until the CIA launched a plan so ludicrous that it had to work. The plan was to get them out by disguising them as a film crew scouting locations for a movie. Of course, to make the cover story stick, they had to do a good chunk of the work required to actually make a movie.

More airports need a scary looking bearded man leering over you in quiet judgement.

They went as far as having a script, a producer, a cast, and news events promoting it. And it is fun to watch all the attention to detail that goes on, and how all those pieces eventually come together. The most tense moments of the movie are completely reliant on those little details, as these characters who have no knowledge of the film industry are having to whip out the illustrated storyboards and posters at airport security as they're being grilled on the validity of their story, and having to describe the artistic vision of the movie that they're not making. It does make for some mild suspense.

There's also some surprisingly good humor to be found. Most of the comedy can be found in Alan Arkin and John Goodman's performances, which are admittedly top-notch. Arkin is a very typical "Jew-y" producer with the trademark dry wit and sarcasm that you'd imagine someone like that to have. One of the best bits of "Argo" has him pulling an "I don't like you and you don't like me but screw it let's do this because we're both jerks" speech on another producer to get his support for the project, and it makes for a pretty funny scene that also feels very natural. And John Goodman is again playing John Goodman, and that's awesome. He's like Jeff Bridges in that he's always the same guy, but you never get tired of him because he rocks so hard. Bryan Cranston also gets a few good ones in there too, which is also unsurprising as he's Bryan Cranston and also freaking awesome.

"Bryan, where are you going?"

"Aw ta hell with all this. I'm making meth."

It's no surprise that the most interesting bits of "Argo" are the Hollywood bits with Arkin and Goodman. I don't want to say that the Iran portions were necessarily boring, but like I'm going to bring up later, there's no suspense because you know the Americans made it out. The Hollywood stuff was classified. We don't really know how they did it or what went into it, so there's some genuine drama there. Plus when you've got Arkin and Goodman tearing it up, it's hard to care as much about Affleck and his beard on the other side of the world.

This leads into my biggest problem with "Argo," which was that there wasn't enough going on to warrant that tension the movie thinks it has. Upon reflection, not a whole lot really happened. Americans escape overrun embassy in Iran, Canadians hide them, the CIA concocts a fake movie production, Ben Affleck goes in, the plan works, they get on a plane, they leave Iran. Roll credits. Truly an epic tale that makes J.R.R Tolkien look like E.L. James.

All this is no doubt well made, and the attention to detail and time period is pretty outstanding, as the movie rather egotistically points out during a masturbatory end credit sequence comparing shots from the movie to actual photos. But when all a movie has to hang its hat on is getting little details right, there's not much to get all arrogant about. And all that tension people were saying it had basically boils down to two phone calls. That's the big climactic hurdle our heroes must overcome: Getting someone on the phone. It's not even a tense conversation. It's just that John Goodman had to pick it up in time and say "Hello, Studio 7." Aside from that his biggest challenge was getting past a nerd with a walkie talkie, which between that and dealing with an Iranian extremist proved the more challenging venture.

"No, look you guys, this movie's legit. It's about a kid and an old wizard with magical powers, but later we find out the magic is actually bacteria! They won't be able to print money fast enough."

Not helping was the fact that the ending was already known to us from the very beginning, as it's based on a true story. We know they got out. All those little details don't matter too much when you're building tension because you know they're going to be fine. Even when their cover gets blown at the last moment and there's an effort to stop them before their plane takes off, there was never a moment when I was worried for them. The minute John Goodman picked up the phone I knew they were going to be just fine, and the dash to stop them, which was the nail-biting climax of the film, was completely ineffective on me.

The problem with "Argo" is that the fluff is good, but there's no crunch, so to speak. I brought nothing away from it. It's not a movie that's going to warrant any kind of discussion afterwards. Now I don't mean that to imply that unless a film is "deep" it's without value. Plenty of my favorite films wouldn't warrant any discussion afterwards besides "Did you see that guy getting blown in half?!" That doesn't mean it's bad. That means it's entertaining for what it's trying to do. But with "Argo" I can't say that I went as far as to even think about it after it was over. It was done and out of my head. In fact it was sometimes difficult to think about it when it was happening.

At least the proposed movie featuring a guy getting blown in half would have elicited a reaction out of me. In that case it would have been excitement or a high five if someone else was in the room. But when I feel absolutely nothing about a film afterwards, I just feel like I've wasted my time. I'd honestly rather watch an epically bad movie than something bland like "Argo" or "The King's Speech" or "The Social Network" or "Lincoln" or any of the rest of the "made-to-win-Oscars" brand of film making.

Now I'm not saying Affleck is a bad director...but I'm sorry, Ben. Tommy Wiseau has you beat in the entertainment department.

And by the way, don't look up what really happened if you want to enjoy "Argo" as a factual film, because the reality of the situation was actually far less exciting. I'm not saying that a movie has to be 100% accurate to be good, after all that's why it's called "based on true events" so they can have dramatic license. It's a movie, that's fine. But when you're bored by a film and then find out later that they actually jazzed it up quite a bit for the sake of "excitement," and it's STILL dull, it's all you can do to shake your head and wonder if it was worth it.

So once again my reputation for being a complete snob and not caring much for any movie that wins Best Picture is intact. I can't call "Argo" a bad film. It's just so unmemorable. Ben Affleck may be the newest sacred cow of Hollywood, but I think we may have another George Clooney/Sean Penn on our hands with him - meaning that he's going to get way more credit than he probably deserves, simply because he is who he is. And that's a shame because I think he's pretty good. I'd hate to see it go to his head. But even if it doesn't I'm sure Tarantino will still get jipped.

Check out the trailer for "Argo." I like how they used the "Inception" BWAAAAAA to make it intense.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Argo" is a solid example of basic competence. This is a vanilla milkshake. This a vodka and tonic. There is nothing overly special about it, tasty as it may be. I can't see a single reason this deserved Best Picture. And it's not just a matter of me holding it to a higher standard than others. I would have thought the same of it had it been by anybody else, or even if it hadn't been nominated for anything. It's worth a look, but not worth any gold statue.