Bad June

Trash I saw in June. As is typical of blockbuster season, there's really quite a bit of rubbish in theatres - a good number of them sequels.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
The trilogy that has no reason to exist comes to a feeble conclusion in the installment with the shortest title! When the first one made piles and piles of money, the producers scrambled to announce not one, but two sequels that would (gasp!) be shot together. Since it was based on a fucking Disney ride and hence had no inherent plot, it was a wonder that the first Pirates turned out watchable. But now there was nothing left for the sequels to draw upon. Having written a bona-fide hit, the writers, bloated with delusions of grandeur, envisioned grand mythologies for their pirating world. As a result, the sequels have lots of scenes of pure exposition, delivered in a really fucking boring way. This might have been acceptable had the stuff been set up in prior movies, but they haven't, and at this point in time, it's too much to ask that we sit there and buy this shit wholesale. Quite frankly, the exposition and backstories are things that we don't give a fuck about. We want to see some badass pirates doing their fucking badass piratey shit, and there's far too little of that to justify us paying money for this convoluted, overblown mess.

Black Snake Moan
How I hated this movie! It seems to want to be a sleazy exploitation flick, but Craig Brewer obviously doesn't have the same panache as Tarantino, and his sensibilities are strictly middlebrow and even wholesome. Well, the parts that aren't misogynistic as hell anyway. I'd love to see what Tarantino could do with such a juicy premise, for Brewer just wastes it all by going for a moralizing message, preaching that all a wild nympho needs to mend her ways is some good ol' tough love from a father figure. There's only one scene which I liked, when Christina Ricci jumps the bones of a young kid that's probably the funniest bit in the whole mess. Oh, and did I mention that this movie's horribly misogynistic?

鬼啊! 鬼啊! (Men in White)
I don't like to use a word so many times in a single post, but I can't help it; "mess" is the most apt word to describe this movie. A bunch of skits tied together by the flimsiest of plots (but not in a good way, not like, say, Borat), it's relentlessly shrill and the slapstick is hopelessly unfunny. That, and every character fucking grates. It's not that there aren't moments where I chuckled, it's just that ultimately in the grand scheme of things they were few and far between, and I was far more annoyed than amused. What the hell is Kelvin Tong doing?

Infamous
It's not that this long-overdue-on-our-shores film is bad. It's not, it's just rather mediocre and maudlin. While Capote was dark and biting, Infamous seems content to throw a bunch of one-liners (they're funny one-liners though) around and take a more sentimental approach - not that this is necessarily worse, but it makes everything settle into a blahness that is very forgettable. Daniel Craig is great though, and shows that he's a real actor and not just an action figure (but I already know that; I saw The Mother), and Sandra Bullock also displays her acting chops, disappearing into the supporting role of Harper Lee. The movie has good intentions, but most of the time that isn't enough to make a good film.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
The best thing I can say about this is that it doesn't suck quite as hard as the first one did. The Silver Surfer wasn't all that hot, and the action, while improved, still lacks a punch. It's all so generic and cookie-cutter that I really don't have any feelings about it at all. While this may pay the bills for him, Chris Evans is far more watchable in fare like Sunshine or Cellular. And does anyone else feel that Doctor Doom is horribly miscast?

刺青 (Spider Lilies)
Another movie I hated! Wow, this month has some real stinkers. Anyway, it's wannabe-arty, wannabe-edgy, wannabe-tragic - and none of it works. The cast is complete rubbish, especially Rainie Yang as an erotic chatroom girl that's completely non-erotic (no wonder she's on the verge of getting fired) and annoying as hell, and her paramour, a female tattoo artist who's nothing more than a cardboard cutout. Pretentious lines are spouted by one-dimensional angst-filled characters while looking at some distant point for dramatic effect. Traumatic childhoods are the root cause for every problem they have. There's some shit about spider-lily tattoos and ominous symbolic shots of the same fucking flowers by a ditch somewhere. And it all amounts to a huge waste of time. By the way, the title actually means "Tattoo" and not "Spider Lilies".