Two Torches (Out of Five)

In case you missed it in the zillion promos that ABC has been running, things are not happy in the new TV series Happy Town. The title is ironic.

Twelve years ago in the seemingly-bucolic town of Haplin, Minnesota, girls started vanishing — but these weren’t robberies, because all their personal possessions were left behind. The kidnappings were attributed to someone called “the magic man.”

But seven years ago, the kidnappings finally stopped. Did the magic man move away? Die? Had he accomplished whatever he set out to do?

Now the town is divided: do we forget the past and move on, or do we continue to honor the dead, because you never know — strange things could start happening again one day.

And strange things are happening again, including the murder of the local weirdo, just as a stranger (Hostel II and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Lauren German) arrives in town — a woman, Henley, who clearly has some secrets of her own.

Look, I really wanted to like this new series, which ABC is obviously pushing hard. I am as sick to death as everyone else that TV these days is made up mostly of reality TV and crime procedurals. I love the idea of a series that is a full-fledged genre show, especially horror, which has always gotten short-shrift on TV.

But like last year’s mostly-laughable Harper’s Island, Happy Town is a disappointment, at least in the pilot made available for preview by the network.

The problems are many, but it all boils down to bad writing. Everything is just a little off, and not in a Twin-Peaks-it’s-supposed-to-be-off kind of way.

Cliches abound. We’ve seen literally all the scenes of “tension” many times before, as when Henley’s mysterious landlady warns her that the third floor of her boarding house is “off-limits,” or when Henley learns the story of the magic man from a quirky local antiques dealer (Sam Neill, clearly slumming).

Sadly, the scenes of “horror” are no less cliched.

Maybe Happy Town gets better in future episodes — part of me thinks it must, because otherwise ABC wouldn’t be flogging it like they are.

In the meantime, the show will leave you feeling more annoyed than happy, and there’s nothing ironic about that.

Happy Town debuts Wednesday, April 28th, at 10 PM/9 C on ABC.

The trailer for Happy Town

Two Torches (Out of Five)

I think I’m done with mainstream American film comedies for a while. They’ve just gotten too stupid for me.

The thing is, I was actually looking forward to Hot Tub Time Machine: four guys get in a hot tub that inexplicably takes them back to 1986.

It’s brilliant in its simplicity/stupidity.

But I guess I thought there would be something more to the movie — that there’d be something subversive or ironic about it. Or maybe I just hoped that the humor in the rest of the movie would live up to the admittedly hilarious title.

It doesn’t. When the four guys go back in time and are not sure what year they’re in, they stop and ask someone: “What color is Michael Jackson?”

Yeah, that tired old joke (clearly written before Jackson’s death).

Most of the jokes are along these lines.

If I was being charitable, I could say they’re doing this deliberately, trying to recreate one of the stupid sex comedies of the 1980s. The irony is in the lack of irony.

But the truth is, I think the people who wrote and made this movie just aren’t very smart or very funny.

It must be said: the movie isn’t as horrible as other recent comedies (*cough* Year One *cough*). I smiled a few times. I liked that they didn’t even bother to explain the hot tub time machine (but, of course, then they had to muck that joke up by having an unfunny Chevy Chase appear as a “hot tub repairman,” giving way-too-obvious exposition about what not to do and how to get home).

The movie is just completely mediocre. And man, has it been done before.

I don’t mind the vomit, s**t, and piss gags. Some of that is mildly amusing here.

But do the main characters have to be, yet again, a bunch of jerky, homophobic, middle-aged male losers? And literally every single female in the movie is either the generic “girlfriend” or a total adolescent sex fantasy.

Talk about going back in time. Wow, have we been there, done that.

Is this really where American film comedy has gone?

If so, put me in a hot tub time machine to the future, because I’m bored with the present.

One and a Half Torches (Out of Five)

You may think it’s easy being a television critic, getting paid to watch television on all day.

What you’re forgetting is that I have to watch television even when it’s bad.

Even when it’s a six-hour mini-series!

And I don’t get overtime.

AMC’s remake of the classic (and wildly influential) 1960s cult TV series The Prisoner is bad.

But you’re very lucky: I slogged through all six, slowly-paced hours, precisely to tell you that you don’t have to.

The story is similar to the original: a man (The Passion of the Christ’s Jim Caviezel) wakes up in a picturesque, seemingly “perfect” small town that everyone simply calls “the village.” People don’t have names here, but numbers: the man is suddenly called Number Six. The village is overseen by Number Two, a creepy, but well-mannered old guy in a white pressed suit (Gandalf himself, Ian McKellen).

Unlike in the original series, Number Two doesn’t clearly remember his past, but he does have vague memories that he recently resigned from a secret agency. Is this pay-back?

Before long, he learns that he’s a prisoner in this town in the middle of a desert — anyone who tries to leave is consumed by a giant white globe that looks a little like the giant, marauding breast in Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask.

Soon Number Two is searching for answers. To bad it takes him so long — six moody, talky, interminable episodes — to find them.

Do the answers, when we finally learn them, make the mini-series worthwhile? Alas, no.

For some reason, we’ve entered a weird, frustrating period where entertainment companies think they can make money by remaking tried-and-true old properties rather than greenlighting all the fresh, new stories that writers are dying to tell. Apparently, this must make business sense, even if it usually makes for crappy movies and TV.

Of course, many of these original properties have great, indelible endings, but when remaking them, producers must feel like they can’t just reuse these original endings, which are often the most organic to the story, for fear that the audience will feel cheated.

So they invent new endings that technically “explain” the preceding events, but that are so complicated and/or ham-fisted that you end up just rolling your eyes. It happened with Tim Burton’s terrible remake of The Planet of the Apes and last week’s The Box.

It’s also what they do here. The ending is simultaneously way too simple – it’s the first explanation I thought of when I started watching – and way too complicated. It takes almost the whole last episode to explain.

Fun fact: Number Two’s gay son is played by Jamie Campbell Bower, who was recently cast as Wayner Royce in the pilot for HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones.

The Prisoner airs on AMC from 8 PM to 10 PM, Sunday to Tuesday.

Two Torches (Out of Five)

Can I make a confession? I was shocked by how amateurishly written this book is.

I’ve read plenty of poorly-written books in my life, but Terry Goodkind is literally one of publishing’s highest paid authors, getting multi-million-dollar book advances. It’s been years since I read any of his The Sword of Truth series, but I don’t remember the writing there being nearly this ham-fisted. Is he pulling an “Anne Rice” — becoming so successful that he’s decided that he no longer needs an editor?

Once The Law of Nines gets going (and once you get used to the awkward, pedestrian prose), Goodkind’s gifts for storytelling become slightly more apparent. But I refuse to believe this book ever would have even found a publisher, much less be on the New York Times bestseller list, if it didn’t have the words “Terry Goodkind” on the front cover.

What’s the story? A struggling artist named Alex Rahl suddenly finds himself embroiled in a family mystery involving a land-inheritance. Soon visitors from another dimension are trying to kill him, and it seems that his mother doesn’t really have dementia after all, but has been speaking the truth for years with her strange talk of “gateways” and other realms.

Soon Alex teams up with Jax, one of the inter-dimensional travelers who seems to be on his side, and they race against time to try to avoid more attacks by inter-dimensional assassins.

(Incidentally? This is a stand-alone novel which is being marketed as a “thriller” not a “fantasy,” but Jax is a visitor from the dimension of magic that Goodkind detailed in his Sword of Truth books, to the dimension of “technology” — our world — created by Richard Rahl at the end of that series.)

In addition to the sometimes painfully bad writing, I had two big problems with the novel.

First, it reads like a 500-page chase scene. I suspect this novel was written with a movie version in mind, because it reads like one. All this repetitive running would be boring even as a movie, and also it’s completely uninvolving as a book.

Second, the character of Jax made no sense to me. We read again and again, in vague terms, how stunningly beautiful she is, but I never had any sense of her as an actual person. I also never understood exactly what she knows about Alex and the central mystery. If she knows it all, as she often seems to, why doesn’t he just ask her what’s going on? Too often, she says words to the effect of: “You couldn’t possibly understand.”

But mostly I simply had a hard time getting past confusing, awkward sentences like: “The white skull and crossbones [of the flag] seemed to be straining to keep from being blown off the flapping black flag as the flatbed truck, apparently trying to beat the light, cannonballed through the intersection.”

Or mixed metaphors like this: “Swaths of ferns nodded under falling drops of water combed from the mist by the pine needles above.”

Or trite, simple-minded cliches like this: “He knew the private, lonely hell she was in. He knew because he felt the same way.”

I could go on, but I suspect you get the point.

Two Torches (Out of Five)

It’s a bad movie.

But according to Rottentomatoes.com, Where the Wild Things Are, which opens on Friday, isn’t being panned. In fact, it’s getting mixed-to-decent reviews.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to figure this out, and here’s what I’ve come up with: there are two kinds of bad movies. There are those like G-Force or Year One, which are either cliched or formulaic, or just plain incompetently made.

Where the Wild Things Are isn’t bad like that. Director Spike Jonze at least tried to make something truly different, and critics really, really like it when filmmakers do that.

Much has been made of the fact that Jonze was trying to create the sense of being a nine year-old boy — the sense of confusion, the feeling that the world doesn’t make much sense.

He succeeded in that respect. He just didn’t make a very satisfying movie, or even an effective adaptation of the children’s book on which the film is based.

Here’s the story: a lonely, ignored kid runs away to a boat to sail to a land where monsters are real. Is this all in his imagination? We know from the book that it is, but we don’t know that from the movie. It’s like the movie can’t be bothered to fill in this part of the story, not even vaguely. It’s too intent on getting us to the land of monsters so it can show us:

• A ten-minute sequence where the boy and the monsters knock down their huts.
• A ten-minute sequence where one monster takes the kid on a journey to show him his model city.
• A ten-minute sequence where the monsters have a dirt-clod fight.
• A ten-minute sequence where the monsters all build a fort.

Sure, there’s a little flurry of an interesting conflict toward the end, and Catherine O’Hara has some funny lines as one of the monsters, but otherwise, story and character and conflict barely seem to matter.

So if it doesn’t really have a plot or a story, what is Where the Wild Things Are?

Basically, it’s an impressionist film “experiment.”

I’m all for film experiments, but the thing about experiments is that they sometimes fail.

Look, I’m as sick as the next film critic that every kids’ movie has to be about saving the world or keeping some parents from getting a divorce, but even I need more than a dirt-clod fight.

Yes, yes, I get it: it’s supposed to be told from the point-of-view of a nine year-old boy, and nine year-old boys love dirt-clod fights. That’s why the movie doesn’t tell us if the land is “real” or imagined: a nine year-old boy doesn’t know the difference.

But if the movie is told from that point-of-view, why do all the monsters talk like neurotic, ironic twentysomethings?

Almost everything about this film just seemed off to me, like it was either sloppy writing or made to be deliberately obtuse.

Here’s the thing: Where the Wild Things Are is a classic children’s book about an angry kid who learns that he can control his own anger — that his anger isn’t an out-of-control “wild” monster that controls him. The book is sophisticated and definitely works on an “adult” level, but it’s so brilliant because, in its deceptive simplicity, it also works on a “kid” level.

Where the Wild Things Are, the movie, doesn’t even try to work on a “kid” level. I suspect there’s going to be a whole lot of bored kids in theaters this weekend, and a lot of pissed-off parents.

There’s a whole genre of brilliant, sophisticated, but subversive fantasy children’s movies that went on to find widespread success: Time Bandits, Toy Story, Babe, and even Beauty and the Beast, to name just a very few.

Why can these movies be appreciated by the “unthinking” masses, but also by film aficionados looking for multiple layers and deeper meanings? Because first and foremost, they take their characters, and their story, seriously.

I never felt that Where the Wild Things Are did. It seemed to me that, first and foremost, the filmmaker wanted to make a POINT about how childhood is “confusing,” to show how clever and avant garde he is — “Look, I don’t need to have a ‘plot’!” — or maybe just to show us some (admittedly) cool film imagery.

Basically, this is a movie for Spike Jonze and all his film school friends.

Which is fine for an indie or arthouse film, but this is a $80 million studio film that’s being heavily marketed to mainstream audiences.

Deceptive much?

There is definitely a small minority of folks who will love this movie, in spite of its slow pace and the non-narrative (or maybe because of it, because they like rule-breaking for rule-breaking’s sake).

And apparently many of these folks are film critics.

These folks will all say I missed the point of Where the Wild Things Are, that we’re sometimes supposed to be confused and frustrated and bored, because the character is confused and frustrated and bored. That there’s no real point because life has no real point.

Or maybe they won’t be bored at all — they’ll be satisfied by the non-plot and the ironic monsters. They’ll say to me, “The movie is pure emotion put on film.” Or, “It seems to be about nothing, but it’s really about everything!”

I can’t say these folks are wrong, because that’s their opinion. More power to ‘em.

All I can say is that I was mostly either bored or annoyed with Where the Wild Things Are, and it seemed like most of the preview audience I saw it with thought that too.

Two Torches (Out of Five)

Improvements in CGI technology have made it possible to tell stories that were literally impossible to tell a decade ago, at least in live action.

Stories like, say, a group of Guinea pigs and a mole who make up a special team of rodent FBI agents.

Here’s the thing: if you have small kids, you’ll probably have no choice but to take them to see G-Force, and they’ll probably enjoy it.

If you don’t have kids, there’s no reason to go. Trust me, this is not one of those animated movies that pretends to be for kids, but is really aimed at adults.

Basically, it’s not Up. It’s not even Monsters Vs. Aliens.

I’d say it’s Alvin on the Chipmonks, but I don’t have kids and I wasn’t reviewing fantasy movies back then, so I never saw that one.

Anyway, believe me when I say this is a movie for kids, and only kids. The plot is broad, the action is fast, and the sentiment is cheap.

What is the plot, you say? Uh, something about a mad titan of industry (Underworld’s Bill Nighy) who is attempting to destroy the world by turning house-hold appliances into Transformer-like killing machines. Meanwhile, the aforementioned “G-Force” (voiced by Nicolas Cage, Steve Buscemi, Tracy Morgan, and Penelope Cruz) try to stop him while also trying to prove that their program should not be eliminated.

That said, the movie didn’t make me angry the way some of these soul-less, by-the-numbers studio pictures do. You know what I mean? Movies like, well, Transformers?

It’s just mediocre, not offensive.

Well, not entirely. Should I bring this up? Um, okay, there are two things I found weird about the movie. I thought it was cool that the movie had some racial diversity, but boy, they sure played up the racial stereotypes. I guess it’s hard to have a rodent who’s obviously a member of a racial minority without using stereotypical inflections. But I still thought this was odd.

Second, there’s a sub-plot about the members of G-Force being “genetically altered.” They all take a lot of pride in their being “superior” to other rodents. At no point do any of the Guinea pigs say to the humans, (1) “Wait. You guys did what to our genes?!” and (2) “Well, yes, we have different genes, but that doesn’t mean we’re superior to other rodents. Because if we thought that, we’re pretty much blatant, eugenics-advocating racists, right?”

I’m thinking about this movie too much, aren’t I?

Hey, did I mention it’s also in three-D?!

Two Torches (Out of Five)

Full disclosure: I didn’t like Inkheart, the book. Yes, it’s enormously popular, a break-out world-wide hit, translated into 37 languages. But from the start, it seemed to me to be one of those children’s books that prides itself on being enormously clever, but just isn’t.

Whenever Mo, a “silvertongue,” reads aloud from a book, the characters literally come alive. Yes, yes, I get it: it’s a metaphor for how the characters in certain books can be unsettlingly “real,” and how reading books aloud can make them even more so.

From the start, I found this idea trite and annoying. But what really frustrated me with the story was that the central conceit was so riddled with logical inconsistencies: if characters from the real world traded places with those in fictional ones, why didn’t those real characters show up in the resulting books? If the Silvertongue power was so unpredictable, why wasn’t Capricorn worried about being sucked into some other book? And if Mo was so desperate to get his hands on another copy of Inkheart, the book in question, why didn’t he simply write that down on a piece of paper and read it aloud (or look it up on Amazon)?

I could go on.

Inkheart, the new movie version of the book starring Brendan Fraser, is a surprisingly faithful adaptation—although perhaps that’s not too surprising given that author Cornelia Funke is listed as one of the producers.

In other words, the movie brings to life all the logical inconsistencies of the book.

But logical inconsistencies are the least of this movie’s problems. If the characters in Inkheart, the book inside the book, are so full of life, the characters in this movie are as flat as the paper they were first written on. Plucky Meggie—an aspiring writer, naturally–is a cliché, Aunt Elinor even more so, and Mo is so passive as to be absolutely infuriating.

And don’t get me started on the plot problems, and the cheat of a way that Meggie saves the day in the end. And why the hell did Farid and Dustfinger set the castle on fire anyway?

The movie’s only worthwhile elements are its spectacular real-world European settings, and the fact that it finally offers Lord of the Ring’s Andy Serkis (Gollum) a decent live-action role (as Capricorn).

But this isn’t nearly enough to make this stinker worth sitting through.