Shattered Politics #92: White House Down (dir by Roland Emmerich)

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

To say that the 2012 film White House Down is stupid is probably unnecessary. After all, the film was directed by Roland Emmerich and Emmerich specializes in making stupid films.

And, in many ways, White House Down is prototypical Emmerich film, a long and self-important collection of mayhem and heavy-handed pontification. In the case of this film, liberal President Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) is pushing for a treaty that will magically bring about world police. Naturally, a bunch of evil right-wingers (including characters played, somewhat inevitably, by James Woods and Richard Jenkins) don’t want world peace so they hire a bunch of mercenaries who attack the White House. It’s all a part of a plot to force Sawyer to launch a nuclear attack on Iran because … well, why not? Fortunately, aspiring secret service agent (and kick-ass combat veteran) John Cale (Channing Tatum) is there to work with the President and save the country.

And, since Emmerich is from the bigger is always better school of filmmaking, many familiar landmarks are blown up and it takes the film well over two hours to tell its simplistic story. To be honest, if your action movie can’t get the job done in under two hours, then you’re going to have problems. Once a viewer has spent two hours watching one movie, it’s inevitable that he or she will start to question the film’s logic. If the film’s clever enough, all lapses and inconsistencies can be forgiving. If the film is White House Down, it’s a lot less easy to be forgiving.

Of course, from a political point of view, Emmerich tries to have it both ways. For anti-government types like me, it’s always fun to watch Washington D.C. blow up. For those on the right, White House Down presents a situation that can only be solved by heroes with guns. And, of course, Democrats can view White House Down as wish fulfillment, an alternative timeline where Barack Obama actually is as sincere and effective as they wish him to be.

In fact, if anything saves White House Down, it’s the chemistry between Foxx and Tatum. Wisely, neither one of them appears to be taking the film that seriously and both of them seem to be having a lot of fun blowing things up. Channing Tatum, in particular, deserves some sort of award. How many bad films have been made tolerable by Tatum’s willingness to laugh at himself? I’ve lost count but White House Down definitely benefits from his presence. He and Foxx make Emmerich’s style of filmmaking as tolerable as it will ever be.

Shattered Politics #66: The List (dir by Sylvain Guy)

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“No one pays $15,000 for a back rub.” — Words of wisdom from The List (2000)

Oh my God.

Listen, I have seen some truly terrible films before but very few were as bad as the 2000 thriller The List. The List is not just bad. Instead, it’s bad on a level that very few films manage to reach. It’s almost as bad as April Rain and that’s pretty bad.

(It’s also currently available on Netflix, just in case anyone wants to take the risk.)

The film opens with a lingerie-clad woman (Madchen Amick) reading the U.S. Constitution to a fat, naked, middle-aged man. We discover that he’s a judge when she calls him, “your honor.”

“I am no longer your honor,” the naked fat guy says, “I am your dishonor. And, as for the founding fathers, fuck them.”

Uhmmm…okay.

Anyway, then the police come rushing into the room and arrest both the woman and the judge. It turns out that the woman is Gabrielle Mitchell (Madchen Amick), a prostitute who is exclusively used by the rich and powerful. She has a list of her clients, one of whom happens to be the governor of New York state.

Despite the best efforts of her over-the-top pimp Dom Roselli (Roc LaFortune), Gabrielle is convicted and sentenced to prison. Hoping to get a few years taken off of her sentence, Gabrielle testifies at the judge’s trial. She hands the list over to yet another judge, Andrew Miller (Ryan O’Neal).

Andrew, who is conservative and very religious, has recently been nominated to the state supreme court. However, now that he has the list, he find himself being threatened by shadowy figures, one of whom tries to stuff a cow’s tongue down his throat. Or something like that. I’m not really sure what was going on in that scene and dammit, I’m not going to waste any more of my life trying to figure it out.

Meanwhile, Gabrielle’s associates are also being murdered. Written in blood near every body: Snitching Pigs Die!

So, if a bunch of community theater actors got together with a film school drop out and attempted to make a film out of a script written by a 16 year-old with authority issues, the end result would look a lot like The List. When Andrew holds a press conference, there are about 6 reporters present and only two of them get to ask questions. When the bad guys all meet to discuss what should be done about Gabrielle, they appear to be sitting in a community college study room. When a character is found dead, it’s obvious that some crew members got a little bit enthusiastic about splashing red paint all over the set. The actors may trip over their lines and they may seem frequently confused by what their saying but, obviously, this was one of those films were second takes were considered to be too expensive.

Did I mention that Ben Gazzara is in this thing? Because he so is! I can’t being to imagine what path could have led Gazzara from co-starring in Anatomy of a Murder to appearing in something like The List but, let it be said that he actually gives a pretty good performance. Or, at the very least, he does the best with what he’s been given.

Ryan O’Neal on the other hand…

O’Neal wanders through the film, watching the action through bloodshot eyes and defiantly refusing to show the slightest hint of emotion or interest. It’s an interesting idea actually, casting an actor who appears to be perpetually hung over in the role of a straight-laced, moralistic judge.

Usually, I make excuses for films that were obviously filmed with next to no budget but seriously, The List could have been made for Avatar money and it would still suck. I’m sad to say that it doesn’t even manage to raise to the level of being so bad that it’s good.

Instead, it’s just bad.

But, in case you’re into that, it is on Netflix.

Horror Review: The Colony (dir. by Jeff Renfroe)

Posted on October 6, 2013 by Arleigh

“You’re going to need every bullet.”

The Colony was this little-seen horror film that came out in early 2013. From the trailers shown it looked like it was going to be a decent looking post-apocalyptic, scifi-horror that looked to evoke the sort of icy desolation and paranoia that Carpenter’s The Thing did so perfectly. Under Canadian-filmmaker Jeff Renfroe’s command the film’s high, lofty horror goals didn’t exactly come to fruition.

The film itself wasn’t awful by any stretch of the imagination, but it does suffer a lot from having it look like it was one of those mid-2000 SyFy film productions. At times some of the sequences even looked like it was copied off from one of those the SyFy “New Ice Age” disaster flicks starring Dean Cain. Yet, there’s some genuine tense moments in The Colony that should make this film a look-see if there’s nothing else to see.

Yes, the film is about the planet going through a sort of artificially-created Ice Age due to weather tampering. It’s a story that could’ve been lifted from early Twilight Zone episodes. Humanity barely survives inside spread out colonies using former factories and government bunkers. These colonies don’t just have the danger or dwindling supplies, simple diseases and the cold weather to deal with, but as we soon find out there’s now a new danger that’s much closer to home.

The Colony’s ad campaign and trailers have focused on it’s two American stars in Laurence Fishburne and Bill Paxton to sell the film. Both actors do some workman-like performances which helps anchor the ensemble cast’s performance. It’s the cast’s performances that elevates The Colony above it’s SyFy counterparts and one of it’s few saving graces. The other being the filmmakers’ success in creating a sense of freezing isolation through the use of arctic-like location shoots and some very well-done CGI icy landscapes.

The horror part of the film comes from the so-called “other” survivors who have adjusted to the scarcity of food by turning on the only abundant source of nourishment left in a world where there are no more growing things. Yes, The Colony tries to revive that old horror staple of the late 70’s and early 80’s which we know of as the cannibal-subgenre.

Cannibal films never truly went away but they remained mostly in the very outer fringes of the horror scene. They tended to be quite awful affairs that went for extreme shocks to bring in the horror crowd, but that only works when there’s a semblance of a narrative to explain things. With The Colony the film does a good enough job to try and explain why some have turned to a diet of the so-called other “white meat”. To add a new wrinkle to these feral antagonists the filmmakers they decided to update them for the modern audiences by giving them free-running skills that makes them seem more than human once they enter the screen. If the film has any sort of lesson to impart it could be that eating “long pig” might just give one parkour-like abilities.

The Colony definitely tried to be one of those scifi-horror that wanted to elevate itself to something beyond it’s grindhouse and exploitation roots, but it’s trying to be somethng it wasn’t meant to be that became it’s biggest flaw. The set-up of an Ice Age created by man is a time-tested story and the reintroduction of the cannibal thread to the film’s storyline was ripe for a grandg uignol-like production that could’ve been done using practical effects. But the filmmakers tried to mimic the CGI-smorgasbord of the Roland Emmerich-style, but they just barely distinguished themselves from what amounted to be an enhanced SyFy-production.

It’s a film that has enough entertaining moments, but overall it was a nice try that that just failed short of it’s goals.