They’ve fought aliens and evil empires. They’ve found themselves trapped in societies that favored men. They’ve gotten down to business to defeat the Huns. These are the woman warriors of fiction who thrill us, make us cheer, and inspire us to attain even a fraction of their fortitude.
In quick succession I watched a geisha with a chainsaw for a mouth, a house with arms and legs stomping around a city sending CGI geysers of blood spewing from skyscrapers, and a man being stabbed in the eyes with shrimp tempura. Either all of this would happen in the first five minutes of the film and the rest would be an awkward, ham-handed meditation on technology, or all of that was cut and the entire film would be an awkward, ham-handed meditation on technology. But in I dove, unaware of the sheer brilliance and unbridled filmic excellence I was about to experience by watching Robo-Geisha.
For those of you at home who did not hear last year’s installment, Justin Bieber is a 16-year-old pop sensation beloved by young girls across America; his music touches many a Tiger Beat reader’s soul, and will probably change the world somehow, like that book M. Night Shyamalan was writing in Lady in the Water. And as befits a sixteen-year-old who burst onto the scene late last year with hit singles and an inexplicable power to incite stampedes of preteens in shopping malls and deluges of missives on Twitter calling a girl nasty names for not liking his music, he is going to be the star of a 3-D film that tells his life story.
I think the movies I love the most are the ones that pleasantly surprise me with how well they worked: Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and now Kick-Ass.
Lady Gaga makes a sandwich, and then Beyonce and Lady Gaga kill everyone in a diner for no apparent reason. Then they dance. To sum up: think all the works of Quentin Tarantino on enough acid to kill a large mammal, with a sprinkling of manga and 80s kitsch aesthetic.
I’m the sort of person who can once in a while find a strange sort of beauty in a truly brainless action movie that’s aware of how stupid it is. This elevates ordinary crappy popcorn flicks from being just crappy popcorn flicks into the Promised Land of So Bad It’s Good. Clash of the Titans, against all odds, is not even So Bad It’s Good.
Say what you will about Aaron Carter, but his songs had a touch of ingenuity in the subject matter; whereas Bieber prefers to stay in the safe zone of chaste white-boy love, Carter dared to tackle tougher issues, like his vivid dream-become-real in which he beats Shaquille O’Neal in a game of pickup basketball.
If you are ever That Guy, that everyman somewhere in the middle between the valiant Hero and the sinister Evil Overlord, you need to know how to Genre Savvy your way to being alive at the end of the film. Thus, I present to you the Movie Character Survival Guide.
Dear Paranoid Morality Parent-Types, We’re sorry for making a movie that had mild adult themes that made the movie scary/violent/vaguely sexual. Here’s a sequel that sanitizes everything and tones down the scary villain or replaces hir with someone who’s undeveloped and lame.
Remember when you were a kid and you’d play The Sims and you’d use cheat codes to take out the ladders in the pool or set the kitchen on fire? Think that type of video game sociopathy but enacted on a global scale.
So why am I watching such a terrible movie? One single reason. This quote: “NO! NOT THE BEEEEEEES AAAARGH MY EYES AAAAARRRRRGH”. The history of film has birthed iconic quotes like “we’ll always have Paris” or “you ain’t heard nothing yet”. The Wicker Man continues this legacy with “NOT THE BEES”.