Movies Schmovies

Truly frightening horror movies scare people by creating a familiar situation that the audience can relate to, putting characters in positions of vulnerability, building suspense and delivering.
There is a short list of movies people people have, from time to time, considered the most frightening:
-- Halloween: Great movie, not particularly frightening, but easily one of the most innovative horror flicks. The original Halloween was particularly good at establishing familiar surroundings and playing on common real-life fears.
-- Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Basically a more raw, visceral version of Halloween. It had the added element of being set in Texas, which is terrifying in and of itself. By pioneering the low-budget horror film, TCM is in many ways the grandfather of Blair Witch Project and, ultimately, Paranormal Activity.
-- The Blair Witch Project: This movie did many things right: it put viewers directly into a situation they could relate to, built a ton of suspense, and like Halloween, played on common fears (though not as common). But it never delivered. You don't see the witch, you don't see anything, and that's the problem. Anything from feet running past the camera to a full on witch sighting in the final frames would have made this movie great--or at least moderately satisfying. As is, it's just stupid. Ultimately, Blair Witch Project is remembered more for the hype that surrounded it and the disappointment that inevitably followed it than anything actually in the movie.
-- The Exorcist: Do you believe that the devil can and would possess the body of a 13-year-old girl? If so, then you might think that The Exorcist is deeply disturbing. If not, all you're left with is an image of the devil as a potty-mouthed 13-year-old girl whose most pronounced power is to beat a priest at the dozens.

Over the last few weeks, we've been hearing reports of a movie so scary that it has moviegoers rushing from the theater with a combination or shit, piss and vomit flowing from their various orifices. So, colostomy bags in hand, we set out to find Paranormal Activity.

First, a note on the marketing of Paranormal Activity. Regardless of the quality of the film, the marketing is a clear success. The TV campaign shows little to no footage from the movie itself, instead relying on night-vision shots of a shocked audience, and the promise that it's so frightening that it might not even be at a theater near you, unless you go to their website and "demand" it. It's all a throwback to the William Castle-era horror movies which made outlandish claims that "doctors trained in the treatment of fear will be present in the lobby during all showings." The fact that this movie went from being independently released in 2007, to topping the box office in 2009 is a success.

So after all the hype and stories of people unable to watch the end, "Paranormal Activity" had built some lofty expectations. What we got was evidence of how -- without the suspenseful music and jump cuts -- ghost stories are pretty mundane. But we'll come back to that.

We meet Micah and Katie, the young couple who make up half of the cast (and 90% of the screen time). Actually, perhaps that's unfair: Katie's cleavage spends enough time on screen that it might as well get billed on the marquee. Micah has decided that it would be fun to bring a camera into the bedroom; sounds good so far. Oh, he wants to film the ghost his girlfriend thinks has been haunting her since she was eight? Okay, we're here anyway, we may as well keep watching. The preceding paragraph accounts for the first 40 minutes of the movie.

Micah, we soon find out, is a deeply unsympathetic douchebag. Not that either character is particularly relatable, living opulently in a palatial San Diego mansion without any visible means of income. Micah claims to be a day-trader, who spent half of what he made in one day on a high quality movie camera to film the supposed paranormal events happening in the vast upstairs. He sincerely believes that filming his girlfriend's encounters will be fun, and openly taunts the demon, in hopes of capturing some cool video. He does all this despite Katie's growing fright, and the escalating intensity of the encounters. In fact, he regularly takes steps to get Katie to draw out the ghosts--which she refuses--and to ensure that the events will continue happening with greater theatricality. It's reasonably assumed that he plans to sell his footage, which may explain his repeated attempts to get Katie to have sex with him on film. One way or another, he would cash in--either on the public's fascination with lame ghost hunting videos, or on the increasingly expansive definition of "celebrity" in the term "celebrity sex tape." Katie is apparently on to his schemes, and so never sleeps in fewer than two shirts and an underwire.

Katie looks a bit like the love child of Zooey Deschanel and Rachel Dratch, and claims to be an English major. Despite a supposed literary background, the only book we ever see her reading is a "For Dummies" book with a blurred-out cover, which she treats like a textbook. Micah claims to be a day trader, though he never actually day trades anything, or appears to have any kind of job or friends outside of the house. This is probably an accurate depiction of life for a day trader. Katie has one friend, who comes over to lend a credulous ear and make bead jewelry with her (the main source of income of most English majors). A psychic who dresses like Carl Sagan rounds out the cast.

The demon joins, seemingly gladly, in an arms race of douchebaggery with Micah, escalating from stomping around the couple's stately four-bedroom Xanadu-esque pleasure dome, loudly thumping up the far too many stairs, slamming and knocking on their bedroom door, flipping lights on and off, and turning on their TV, all in the middle of the night, whenever the 3:00 a.m. freight train passes through their backyard.

As circumstances dictate, Micah is either an enthusiastic ghost hunter, or an avowed skeptic. He taunts Katie for her attempts to call in a demonologist and generally makes fun of the psychic, while he himself runs around the house experimenting with Electronic Voice Phenomena and spends his days dissecting the previous night's ghost videos like an even dopier John Madden.

"See Katie, the demon is going to send his cornerback on a zone blitz from the hallway. He's been beating our left tackle all night and when that happens you're going that leaves you vulnerable on the blind side. Boom! We need to shift our strong-side set if we're going to give you enough time in the pocket to not get possessed. The demon is going after the girl, because the only way he's going to get possession of the girls' soul is by going after the girl. What? Maybe I should sleep by the door? Yeah, I don't think that's going to help."

The movie bravely tries to eschew typical horror movie character archetypes. Our heroine, rather than being tough-as-nails and pure as the driven snow, is emotionally abused and utterly powerless. Our hero, rather than being a dashing crusader who rushes in to save his girl from mortal peril, instead always takes two steps toward rushing in to save her, then stops, returns for the camera, and meanders toward our intrepid heroine. And our psychic, who in any other film would be an endless font of information about the spirit world and how to combat its inhabitants, is more like a marriage counselor who exists primarily as a reason for the couple to relate their backstory. His only useful contribution to the story is the explanation that the haunting is due not to a ghost, but to a demon. Demons being outside his "expertise," he refers them to a Demonologist, then leaves. Later on, when it turns out his recommended Demonologist is out of the country (something he was apparently aware of), and since there are apparently no other Demonologists or Psychics or Exorcists within driving distance of San Diego, he returns. It's a short-lived return, wherein he gets really scared and runs away.

The demon and the douchebag's war of attrition continues throughout the film. The demon indecisively moves the door a few inches, so the douchebag conducts an EVP interview where he asks the Bridgekeeper's questions from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The douchebag gets a Ouija Board to communicate with the demon, so the demon spells out "Diane" then starts a fire that it looks like the planchette is hitting 88 miles per hour. The douchebag spreads baby powder on the floor so that the demon's chicken-like footprints show up, so the demon punches a portrait of the douchebag that's hanging on the wall. At that point, we decided to side with the demon.

During all this, the demon is continuing his assault on Katie, which includes such terrible torment as "making her stand staring at the bed for an hour, then making her go outside and sleep on a swing" and "pulling the sheet off her foot." If this had gone on much longer, we'd expect him to resort to drawing on her face in permanent marker and putting her hand in a dish of warm water. Perhaps she's just being haunted by the ghost of her douchebag boyfriend.

Ultimately, the demon has had enough (which shows a lot of patience, we'd had more than enough by the time the movie was half an hour over). He drags Katie out of bed and down the hall, where he bites her in the side, demonstrating (among other things) that he needs some serious dental work. Things ramp quickly up to the conclusion--and by quickly, I mean mind-numbingly slowly. Micah finally wants to leave the house and tries to convince Katie, but she strangely thinks everything is going to be fine, and (in an auto-tuned voice) says "I think I'd rather stay here, shaw-ty-ee." T-Pain would be proud.

The film ends with another bout of Katie's Ambien-induced sleep-standing-and-staring. She walks down the hall and screams, and Micah comes to her rescue. After some distant screaming and shouting, there's silence, until Micah's body is thrown against the camera by a blood-stained Katie, who crouches down to sniff at him, then looks at the camera and smiles with teeth taken from Jennifer's Body.

There are a couple of unimportant subplots we ignored, like the fire which consumed Katie's old house and the girl named Diane that this demon apparently haunted in the '60s, but if the movie didn't care enough to tie those up, then neither do we.

Did you think "Groundhog Day" was scary? If so, then maybe you'd find Paranormal Activity's habit of showing a ghost scene, then replaying the scene on Micah's computer the next morning absolutely terrifying. The rest of us realize why the trailer didn't show any scenes from the movie. The only two scenes the filmmakers could have shown would have shot their load before anyone bought a ticket, and why demand the cow when you get the milk for free. The filmmakers seemingly couldn't decide whether they wanted a shaky-cam "real footage" film like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, or a polished horror movie. Consequently, there are obvious cuts that somehow fail to interrupt the flow of scripted dialogue, and quite a bit of editing that makes one wonder who--since our principal characters are dead and missing respectively at the end--bothered to try to pare it down to a moderately dramatic narrative. Despite some kind of professional editing, a good 50% of the movie is spent on shots of two people sleeping with very little happening. The other 50% is spent on shots of two people arguing with very little happening.

By the end, "something happening" would have been a godsend. There aren't many movies that would benefit from someone in a big, fake, rubbery demon costume walking through a doorway and saying "hey, um...boo," but this is one of them. A horned devil, a creepy clown, a long-haired Japanese girl--basically any Tim Curry character would have been effective. When the footsteps were ascending the (far too many) stairs at the end, there were people in the audience who were quivering; they could have literally revealed anything and people would have screamed. Instead, they forgot the principal rule established by Blair Witch: the unseen is only scary if eventually it becomes the seen. Being a visual medium, movies require a visual payoff. Lacking that, you're left with a weak stage play, or a 1940s radio drama.

Don't get us wrong, we're glad to see a movie that values suspense over shock, but if the work of Rob Zombie and Eli Roth is waterboarding, this movie is solitary confinement. Sure, it's a different kind of torture, but it's still torture, and while it may qualify us to be Republican Presidential candidates, it's not enjoyable.

The Cold War spawned horror movies about invasions of outsiders and the threats of military science. Suburban anxiety in the '70s and '80s spawned horror movies about the dangers at home--psychos calling from inside the house, escaped mental patients on Halloween, Satanic cults everywhere. The '90s and early 2000s brought us J-horror and torture porn, an extreme dichotomy between bizarre and possibly symbolic, and bloody but mindless. Paranormal Activity is the inevitable result of a culture that supports innumerable shows like "Ghost Hunters," "Paranormal State," "A Haunting," and so forth, making mountains of ratings out of the molehills of mundane "paranormal" encounters. PA tries to skirt a line between "realistic"--inasmuch as any of these series about plumbers exploring hypnagogic hallucinations with EMF meters is realistic--and theatrical, but never commits to either one.

See, what this really shows is that, if these "real-life" hauntings were real, and if they could be documented, they'd be boring as all hell. The reason people watch shows like "A Haunting" is not (just) because of the "true" stories of ghostly encounters, but because of all the mood-setting music, dramatizations, jump-cuts and creative editing, and other elements designed to dress up otherwise boring night-vision and people telling stories. Remember, most of these events are the sort of things that reasonable people sleep through. That doesn't make for good drama or excitement.

All told, Paranormal Activity is very much the spiritual successor to The Blair Witch Project, and consequently it's a lot like the paranormal events it's meant to explore: talked about by many, scary to those inclined to believe, but in the light of day and reason, completely without scare or substance.

In two weeks, The Fourth Kind will hit theaters, apparently exchanging aliens for ghosts. It seems like it'll be four times as scary as Paranormal Activity...what's four times zero again?

Join us next time when we review the award-winning shaky-cam exploration of oft-unexplored pleasure centers, Perineal Activity. Damned if it taint the best film we've seen all year.

It has been a very long time since we've seen a movie as ridiculously, hilariously, epically awful as G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra. We scarcely know where to begin in describing it. We'd warn you about spoilers, but the movie kind of spoils itself.

Let's start with the wide view: G.I. Joe is essentially Team America played entirely straight. This makes it either the most brilliant, Kaufmanesque parody of over-the-top patriotic military porn sci-fi action films ever, or the flaming piece of crap-gilded crap that it actually is.

A little less generally, the dialogue sounds like it's trying to parody the Cheat Commandos. Again, this is either metafictional brilliance or complete ineptitude. The fact that Marlon Wayans co-stars suggests the latter. Every significant line of dialogue is either some terribly hackneyed action movie cliché, a line that was written to be used in the trailer, or both. The Baroness in particular speaks almost exclusively in movie trailer lines, while Duke is essentially reading from the "angst-ridden soldier with an unwavering sense of duty" archetype handbook.

By the way, Marlon Wayans? We shouldn't be too hard on him. He was actually one of the best actors in the film.

Let that sink in for a moment: Marlon Wayans, of White Chicks, Little Man, and Norbit, is one of the best--if not the best--actors in the movie.

We'll give you a minute to stop screaming. As with any other aspect of this movie, we could go on for pages about the bad acting, but there's one obvious place to start: Tommy Solomon Joseph Gordon-Levitt's turn as Cobra Commander. Cobra Commander should be a very difficult character to screw up. He's a cartoon supervillain who wears a mask that completely covers his face, thereby eliminating any need to emote facially. Apparently, the guy who has twice failed to get into Alex Mack's pants Gordon-Levitt thought that spending the entire movie in a mask that covered the lower half of his face was a serious hindrance to his acting abilities, so he compensated by constantly moving around and gesturing like a spastic C-3P0. Seriously, it's as though he thought he was being directed by Harold Zoid.

By the way, for being Cobra Commander, he doesn't do much commanding. In fact, he spends the vast majority of the movie allowing viewers to think he's just an updated Dr. Mindbender. If you remember Dr. Mindbender at all, you might recall that he looked something like this:

Bald, giant moustache, monocle, shirtless, cape, purple pants. And yet, between the silly latex-and-oxygen mask costume and Gordon-Levitt's hamminess, they managed to make this doctor even more ridiculous.

Running through the rest of the major actors: Channing Tatum did a good job of playing a soldier who'd experienced one too many concussions, and occasionally mistook the scenery for bubblegum; Sienna Miller certainly was present, two parts of her more than the rest; Christopher Eccleston was fairly competent; Arnold Vosloo's Zartan had the most fake, meandering accent in the movie (he's from South Africa, so maybe it's his natural accent, in which case his natural South African accent sounds like a really fake accent from some other place); and Dennis Quaid can no pretend to be superior to Randy at Quaid family gatherings.

The broad swaths of the story were actually quite promising, very much in line with some of the ridiculous schemes perpetrated by Cobra over the years. The insanely complicated plan involves Destro orchestrating a robbery of weapons he created and sold to the government, so that he can use them to destroy national monuments and attack major world capitals, all as a cover for the installation of Zartan as the President of the United States (presumably, this plot also included a forged birth certificate and a forty-year-old announcement in a Hawaiian newspaper, but those scenes were likely left for the Director's Cut). Really, that could have been cool, but as always the Devil is in the details. So, incidentally, are the shitty parts of the movie.

Let's start with Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, whose appearances feel like they were wandering in and out from a kung-fu flick filming next door. Since the rest of the movie was already a mishmash of every conceivable overused action movie trope, the filmmakers decided that they had to mine every conceivable overused kung-fu movie trope to pad out this overexposed, unnecessary subplot. Snake Eyes is another one of those characters who should be impossible to mess up: he's a badass ninja commando who doesn't talk. Naturally, the costume designers decided that the most important thing for a character who doesn't talk to have was a mouth molded into his rubber mask. This is in addition to his Joel Schumacher-esque muscular rubber outfit, which is all the rage with ninjas these days. After that, they thought it prudent to show us how Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow grew up together in Japan, because as the Star Wars prequelshave demonstrated, nothing enhances a badass character's coolness and intimidation factors quite like intimate glimpses into their awkward childhood years. Following this, the filmmakers apparently got confused about what '80s series they were reviving, and just used the old Splinter/Shredder origin instead.

Then there's the giant cliché web linking Duke, the Baroness, and Cobra Commander. See, Duke and the Baroness were engaged (before she met the Baron de Cobray. Yes, "de Cobray," a name which sounds like an obvious front for Cobra, but this is never remarked upon, and he's a witless patsy. I'd call this a red herring, but that's giving them way too much credit), and her little brother, Rex Lewis, was in Duke's unit in war-torn Waristan. He promised to take care of little Rex (a science officer, apparently those are real), which eventually amounted to sending him into a building alone during a bombing run. Naturally, Rex got blowed to smithereens, leaving Duke and pre-Baroness's relationship in shambles, and making Duke ride around on a motorcycle like he's Lorenzo Lamas.

Naturally, it turns out that Rex survived (though terribly scarred) and became the Doctor, who actually was (or later became) Cobra Commander. We don't know about you, but we're pretty sure that this origin ranks below "former used car salesman" and "disfigured snake-man from an ancient secret society in the Himalayas" origins for Cobra Commander. There aren't many names less threatening than "Lewis."

All this means that Baroness gets to make a Heel Face Turn by the end, breaking her Cobra conditioning to save Duke and yadda yadda. If you didn't see it coming by the cut-and-paste nature of the plot, then her frequent flashbacks to sweet moments with her brain-damaged fiancé were there to hammer the foreshadowing home.

As long as we're on the subject of the Baroness, it seems prudent to mention that while the movie gave just about every other character some goofy accent (or in Cobra Commander's case, three different goofy voices), they decided to take the Baroness's away. Perhaps it's because it didn't fit with her inane new backstory, or perhaps it's because they felt that they were already taxing Sienna Miller's talents (both of them) by having her traipse around the Arctic with her catsuit unzipped.

Speaking of the Arctic, it's worth mentioning that the film claims to take place "In the not too distant future" (though it's unclear if it's Next Sunday, A.D.), but the Arctic ice sheet is still ten stories thick. Take that, Al Gore!

Which brings us to the science and technology content of the movie. Now, it's a sci-fi action flick based on a cartoon, we're not expecting Apollo 13. That being said, it's fair to say that the filmmakers have learned everything they know about science from other action movies. Scarlett starts things off by telling Ripcord that she doesn't find him attractive because that would be emotional, and science can't study or quantify emotions. Straw Vulcan is absolutely right; scientists are totally unemotional, and there's no way that science can study things like emotions. Not more than ten minutes after this particular idiocy, the Joes encounter a dead Neo-Viper, from whom they need to extract some information. Thankfully, as our stoic redhead notes, the brain lives for a couple of minutes after death, so they can shove some giant spikes into the brain and find out where Cobra's headquarters is. What's that, you say? Brain death is one of the ways that we determine whether or not someone is actually dead? Well, I can't imagine that being an important thing to know.

Also, we're pretty confused as to what particle accelerators have to do with weaponizing nanobots. We're also pretty sure that the writers were pretty confused about what particle accelerators do, only having some vague notion that they spin something around. And they even got that part wrong.

The technology has some similar issues. Part of the problem is with the special effects, which often look like they come from some late-90s Saturday-morning cartoon. Consequently, the undersea dogfights, Duke and Ripcord running around in their Halo suits, and various other points of painfully obvious CGI lead the viewer to wonder why they didn't just animate the movie in the first place. But even if we excuse the animation that someone apparently did on a ColecoVision, there are some things that just don't quite make sense.

We can start with those Halo-style bionic suits, which really served no purpose except to allow Duke and Ripcord to jump around like Spider-Man and run really fast even when stopped. There were times when the suits seemed to weigh quite a bit, and there were more times when they seemed to be completely massless. Strangely enough, this largely corresponded to when the suits were real, and when they were computer animation.

For some reason, though he goes to ridiculous extremes to keep his involvement in the terror plot a secret (though slack-jawed Duke managed to implicate him with minimal mental effort--the maximum amount he could provide), Destro slaps his company's logo onto every piece of equipment in the film--including, of course, the various doomsday devices and weapons that he's sold to the villains. Now, if Bill Gates were trying to take over the world, do you think he would slap the Microsoft logo onto everything?

Okay, bad example. Point being, Destro's kind of dumb, but it's probably genetic. Turns out that he's descended from a long line of weapons dealers who got caught. We can only assume that his 17th century ancestor had engraved "M.A.R.S." into all the gunpowder barrels and crossbow bolts he was selling. As punishment, he was forced to dress as Kilroy; modern Destro got the updated punishment of looking like Max Headroom.

One other technology moment that really sticks out is during one of the underwater chase/dogfight scenes. While Duke and Baroness are escaping in their stolen Cobra vessel, her cannon runs out of...lasers. They're passing through a trench (but don't compare this battle to the Death Star or anything!), so Duke launches something out behind the craft. The mine, or whatever, separates out into several pieces, which attach to the walls of the chasm, connected by deadly laser beams like a hallway in a robbery flick. While this is effective in shredding their pursuer, one has to wonder what kind of utility such a device would have in the open ocean, where this ship would presumably be doing most of its fighting. I guess Cobra plans for everything, except inevitable betrayal.

We've touched on aspects of the direction tangentially, but it's worth mentioning that even for a cotton candy action movie, the explosions sometimes seem really random. The flashbacks were even more random, popping up every time it seemed like there might be a coherent story thread going on. Thankfully, they put those little X-Files style setting captions in the bottom of the screen when they transitioned scenes, so the viewer knew when and where each event was happening. Apparently the caption writer suffered from the same attention deficit disorder as the rest of the crew, because the captions typically lagged far behind the scene transition.

There was an obligatory training montage, set to a song that sampled "Get it On (Bang a Gong)," which really only heightened the comparison between this and "Team America." Baroness's "promise my brother will never die" line dovetails nicely with that, and one expects Dennis Quaid's "I'm-a break all the rules" speech to end with a description of how he tested Duke's loyalty through fellatio.

The movie ends triumphantly, with Destro and Cobra Commander locked in giant soup cans in Magneto's cell. Marlon Wayans' movie-long attempt at finding out if Scarlett is a natural redhead kind of peters out without resolution, but he and Duke get offered full positions on the G.I. Joe team. The team boards a plane toward their next mission, and Dennis Quaid wishes them all good luck. Then, he gets on the plane with them. I guess Joe regulations require goodbyes to be said on the ground.

We could go on and on--why would the White House farm out their security bunker to an international arms dealer, then use it after he's been exposed as part of an international terrorist plot? How did Dr. Mindbender get access to cutting-edge nanotechnology in the middle of backwards Waristan?--but we'd be here all night. To sum everything up, G.I. Joe is a terrible movie. It took some real effort to out-awful a movie about Sgt. Slaughter leading the fight against sci-fi snake people from the Himalayas, but this movie manages to suck considerably more than the original G.I. Joe film. That being said, it's not terrible the way Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was terrible. The movie was hilarious; it was a real treat to watch for people who like watching awful movies. So if you're looking to get your Joel Hodgson or Mike Nelson on, The Rise of Cobra is a nice diversion. If you'd rather save your money for good movies, then we hear better things about G-Force.

Join us next time when we review that critically-acclaimed pornographic classic, The Bi-Curious Case of Benjamin's Butthole.

It's no secret to anyone who's known me long enough that I spent the '90s without any discernable taste in music. I've accumulated a lot of shitty albums that generally gather dust in my box of shame. But since we've revived this blog, I thought it'd be fun to do a series of "music Schmusic" posts reexamining those terrible albums in a humorous and snarky fashion: you know, what the internet was made for. To start, I picked a nice low-hanging fruit, the debut album of the Spice Girls, "Spice."

Imagine my shock at discovering that, comparatively, it's not that bad. Don't get me wrong; it's not good, but after years of Britney Spears and Fergie and The Pussycat Dolls, this sounds like fucking Beethoven. There's harmonizing, and singing without pitch modulation and lyrics with subtext--anymore I feel lucky when I hear lyrics with text on Top 40 radio. By any sane metric, it's vapid pop trash to be sure, but it shows some measure of craftsmanship that's greater than what you'd hear on the pop station today. What does it say about our society that even the standards of prepackaged, manufactured soulless pop music have fallen?

All I know is that I'll take "Wannabe" over "Wind it Up" any day.

Fantastic Four has problems. Sure, it deviates from the comics, but that's the case in any adaptation. One could harp and nitpick on all the unnecessary changes, but there are sweaty fanboys for that sort of thing. We'll only be nitpicking when it's deserved.

No, Fantastic Four's problems have less to do with how close it is to the source material and more to do with internal consistency. Spoilers ahead, so read at your own risk.

*Let's get it out of the way from the start: Jessica Alba strips twice and is ostensibly naked three times. Can we say "lowest common denominator"? Sure, we get to see Kirsten Dunst's wet t-shirt contest in the Spider-Man movies, but it's during scenes where other things are happening besides THO. If Spidey had said "hey Mary Jane, are you cold?" or "oh, MJ, you have to stand in the rain without a bra! The movie depends on it!" it would be just as bad as Reed Richards' "you have to take your clothes off!" Wow, and she turns visible again at precisely the right time to catch her in her skivvies! T&A is A-OK when it contributes something to the story, or at least when it doesn't take anything away. The Jessica Alba naked scenes are trashy. Trashy takes away from the movie.

*Speaking of which, let's go over that particular sequence of events, shall we?
-Reed, Sue, and Johnny can't get past the police and crowd to help Ben.
-Sue can turn herself (but not her clothing) invisible.
-Reed realizes that Sue can turn invisible to get past the police, thus getting her close to ben. He tells her as much, and she turns invisible and strips down.

What then? Let's say she does get to Ben, what does she do? She can't turn visible again, because she's naked. Is she going to invisibly whisper in his ear that he should calm down? Thankfully, we never have to address this because of the next shot (following the convenient T&A, naturally).

-Reed, Ben, and Sue have gotten past the crowd and Sue is snapping at Reed while putting her clothes back on.

So, what purpose was served by her getting naked and invisible? Clearly the whole group was able to get through, despite the fact that two of them had to remain totally visible. If you feel the need to insert gratuitous T&A into your movie, at least work it in with subtlety, don't base a whole, internally inconsistent scene around Jessica Alba in her underwear.

*Following that scene, the group is dubbed "the Fantastic Four" by the newsmedia. Now, they've seen a rock-man lift a fire truck and a stretchy guy save one of its occupants. They've also seen some guy in a jacket huddle over a girl in an explosion, leaving both inexplicably unharmed, and a small portion of the crowd saw a woman do a striptease and stand near a half-contained explosion. Now, I'll give you that the first two are amazing, even fantastic. But who could have seen what Johnny did without being horribly burned themselves? And who could have really noticed what Sue was doing with her invisible force field? It's a bit of a stretch to say that they would have seen more than two people do fantastic things.

*"What happens to a toad when it gets struck by lightning? Same thing that happens to everything else."
--Storm, "X-Men."
"What happens when rubber is super-heated?"
"What happens when you super-cool rubber?"
--Dr. Doom, "Fantastic Four."
"Chemistry 101, Doom. What happens when you quickly cool superheated metal?"
--Mr. Fantastic, "Fantastic Four."

What happens when Marvel movies don't learn from the worst parts of previous Marvel movies? Same thing that happened to the dialogue in "Fantastic Four."

Incidentally, anyone notice that the writers were also channeling "Ghostbusters" for their dialogue?
"Johnny, go supernova."
"I thought we decided that was a bad thing"
--Reed and Johnny, crossing their streams.

*Oh, and it took three minutes to find out that the surface temperature of the sun is 5780 Kelvin. Another two minutes told me that a supernova can reach temperatures around 3 million Kelvin. Johnny's 4000K temperature might be "almost as hot as the sun," but it's nowhere near the supernova-scale that Reed warns him about. That's sloppy writing and sloppier research. I took one term of Astronomy, and that "fact" stuck out like an orange thumb with a flame hovering over it.

*Sometimes the Thing was shaking the ground with every step. Sometimes he was splitting concrete. Sometimes he was tossed out of a truck, where he landed on a van, and didn't even leave a dent in the hood. Was the continuity editor on a break during these scenes?

*"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." --Anton Chekhov.
"If you establish a to-be-killed character in a leaky garage with lots of puddles and a villain with electric powers, the villain should use the abundant water as a conduit for his electrical act of murder." --Jess, Tom and Jon on "Fantastic Four."

*Speaking of which, if you have a principal character (Ben) make a big brouhaha about how he doesn't want a costume like everyone else, don't show him in the costume-pants in the following scene without at least some explanation.

*Next time you make a Fantastic Four film, keep George Lucas away from the dialogue. "Revenge of the Sith" sounded natural and realistic by comparison. Whether it was Doctor Doom's painful wisecracks or Sue's "That was my nose. These are my lips," or Reed's "I found a gasket from space," the dialogue was almost universally terrible.

The notable exceptions were Johnny and Ben, who pulled their respective characters so well that even the sillier dialogue was believable, because they played it off with a sense of humor. Chris Evans was the perfect Human Torch, and Michael Chiklis, despite the acres of costume, gave a more believable, emotive performance than anyone else in the film.

*Which says something about Jessica "I went to the Keanu Reeves school of acting" Alba. She never really interacted with the other characters, instead choosing to play her lines as if she were reading them to the director for the first time at her screen test. Having an inconsistent, sprayed-on tan that was nearly the same color as her hair, and looking significantly younger than her kid brother didn't help her character's believability.

She also had the "Christmas Jones effect," where we have to suspend our disbelief that a very young looking woman, who never displays any particular intelligence (except when she uses technobabble to sound much smarter than Reed, ostensibly the smartest character in the movie), is a top-level geneticist.

*These costumes are made of unstable molecules, which adapt to what their wearers' bodies need. Oh, but they were also irradiated by the cosmic storm, which is why they can adapt to what our bodies need. One explanation was plenty, thanks.

*Sue, you'll be able to bend light around other objects, not just yourself. Let's not follow up on this, so we can continue to have excuses to show you naked, or show your empty floating clothes.

*Ben's organs are all completely solid! Which is good, because his liquified lung syndrome and gaseous pancreas disease were severely life-threatening, and it was really serendipitous that the cosmic storm would make his organs solid again. Oh, I meant to say that they were all rocky and stuff, but instead it came out stupid.

*Sue's force field "can't hold Dr. Doom's electricity much longer," but it can contain a "supernova" blaze for several minutes.

*Hey, what happens to hot metal when you cool it? Well, considering that the indestructible, stronger-than-diamonds organic metal alloy (just come out and say Adamantium already!) was solid before and you were moving around without any real difficulty, I'd say super-heating it and cooling it back to room temperature would probably just bring it back to the same sort of solidity that it had when it was solid before. I guess it might melt and fuse your joints, but I won't actually explain that, I'll just act like the audience should know that already. Boy, that sure wasn't much of a climax, was it?

*And here's the fanboy nitpicking, the "it was different from the comic book" stuff. Dr. Doom is a rich businessman (who also has some mostly-unexplained connection to the fictional country of Latveria), who is dating (or not, or something) Susan Storm who accompanies the titular Four on their ill-fated trip and begins turning to metal and simultaneously developing electric-based powers. As the metal claims more of his body and his company falls to pieces, he puts on a metal mask (given to him by the people of Latveria, presumably so he'll no longer have to act out those tedious facial expressions) and vows revenge on Reed Richards, who he blames for ruining him.

For those not in the know, Victor Von Doom, ruler of Latveria, was originally a vain college rival of Reed's. An experiment left his face slightly scarred, and he blamed Reed for it. He had a metal mask crafted to hide the scar, but he didn't wait until it cooled to put it on, and it left him scarred far worse than he was initially.

Now, we can understand making changes to the comic story, but those changes should serve a purpose. "Fantastic Four" tried to have Von Doom's backstory both ways, and failed miserably. Furthermore, we've seen the "millionaire businessman super-villain bent on revenge" plot before. In other Marvel movies. Norman "The Green Goblin" Osborn, his son Harry, and the Kingpin, have all walked that path before in the last several years. And, with the possible exception of the Kingpin, they've all done it better.

Doom was poorly cast (as Jon said, the villain shouldn't have the most high-pitched voice in the film), poorly scripted (why was Doom tossing around quips that would have made a Bond villain cringe? "I think I'll get a second opinion," "Call me Doom," and the aforementioned Storm-esque lines among many others), poorly costumed (why change the costume? Doom's costume is regal, this Doom is a power-hungry billionaire, why would he choose a weird trenchcoat over a kingly cape? Furthermore, if they were already making changes, why keep the emotionless mask? McMahon could have easily just done voice-overs for the character after the mask went on, and no one would have noticed. They couldn't make it animatronic and emotive, or at least rubbery and movable?) and poorly conceived (ignoring the anticlimax, the backstory was derivative, and Doom-as-metahuman was unnecessary. As Jon pointed out, the original story was probably changed because villifying vanity goes against the Hollywood grain. Better to have a clichéd villain than one who criticized Hollywood value). A superhero (or team of them) is only as interesting as the villains. Failing in their portrayal of Doom led to an overall failure of the interestingness of the film.

*And as long as we're talking about what's interesting and original, let's bring up "The Incredibles." It's a shame when a Fantastic Four rip-off does the team better than their actual movie, but that's the way it seemed to go. Pixar's masterpiece was filled with interesting uses of elastic powers, invisibility, force-fields, and super-strength, as well as a technologically-based powerless bad guy with a grudge against the principal character. Apparently trying to avoid comparison with the animated film, "F4" changed the nature of the source villain. Furthermore, Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, whose powers would make them the most obvious subjects of comparison to "The Incredibles," took a backseat to the Thing (who only did a few really interesting and original things with his strength) and the Human Torch (whose powers were only in Pixar's movie briefly). "F4" had a prime opportunity to show up Pixar, but gave it up rather than come up with interesting ways to use elastic powers and invisibility (and no, getting Jessica Alba mostly naked doesn't count as "interesting").

This is not to say that there weren't good things about the movie, far from it. On the subject of originality of powers, I would say that they really wowed me with the Human Torch. The effects were a bit sketchy at times, but they really captured the character's happy-go-lucky nature and how that would come through in his abilities. The scene of him on the slopes was very well done, and I really liked the way he left a Jonny-shaped scorch mark in the billboard. The Thing's inability to control his size and strength was done well too. The writers and director clearly put a large amount of thought into the way Ben and Johnny's powers and relationship would be portrayed. The greatest shame is how that amount of thought was omitted from considerations of Reed, Sue, and Doom. The origin was updated well, and the costumes were given a decent logical explanation (and then, a stupid explanation).

The movie wasn't bad. It was easily better than "Daredevil," and at least on-par with "Hulk," though it seems easy to say that it stands a bit taller than that one as well. The biggest problem with "F4" was all the little problems, most of which could easily have been fixed with better attention to the movie's internal continuity. The devil's in the details, and Lucifer's in the logic. Both of them were casting a dark hex over "Fantastic Four," leaving an unfortunate black spot on a summer that has seen superhero movies near-perfected by "Batman Begins."

Tune in next time when we review Clint Eastwood's classic spaghetti porno, "A Fist-full Dolores."
--Tom & Jon