thwartedefforts

Okay, Rush Hour 2 is decent movie, if you wanna see something that Mutie and I could have written on a slow saturday, and was apparently written from the ends to the middle. A lot of it was “let’s see how many already-heard racists jokes we can fit in” and “what kind if situtations can we put ‘em in so they can say the same phrases at different points in the movie” (because asians saying black things is funny, and blacks saying asian things is even funnier). The fight scenes that feature Chan are classic Chan, the fight scenes feature Tucker, are well, a lot of arm waving.

Yeah, whoever it was that asked who the the guy was that worked at the clothing store: WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN? Between Jeremy Piven and Saul Rubinek making minor apperances, I thought it was going to turn into a minor celebrity showcase. Admittedly the imdb entry for this movie is as thin as the plot, which is okay for the movie (as the story wasn’t the reason for this movie), but inexcusable for imdb. We get right into it, but if you hadn’t seen Rush Hour, you won’t know the background of the characters, or the reason for this film to exist, pretty much a single line at the end of Rush Hour, which will be the same reason for Rush Hour 3. Tucker has a half-dozen or so memorable lines, but apparently not so memorable that I can remember them. It features the requisite number of explosions (4), the standard “improable ass kickings” (3), the necessary uses of foreign traditional and hightech weapons (~3 and 1, respectively), gratitious tit (3) and leg shots (1), and the cheap jabs about American investigative method being superior than those used over seas (lost count, at least 3). Eddie Murphy does the funny, tough and streetwise California cop better than Tucker. The division of labor in Rush Hour 2 is much more apparent than in Rush Hour: Chan does the serious ass kicking, Tucker is comic relief. And this is how it should be. There were a number of places where Tucker’s line could have been “okay, who just kicked me”, but thankfully, they didn’t feed off Rush Hour that much. The fight scenes and the single leg shot are worth the price of admission alone. There is more movie and action than you see in the television trailers, this movie is not completely without merit.

Paid $9 (well, Mutie did). It is worth $5 if you wanna see a little more than just action, it’s worth $7 if you only wanna laugh, and it’s worth $8 if you go to a theater where they shoot people with cell phones and who are unable to pay attention enough to not have their friends state the obvious about the film all the way though.

“Hold still, Haley! We need to make 36 more casts of your body. You are squirming too much!”


An ice age in 2000 years?

A.I. Paid $9. How much it is worth requires some explaination.

If I was 45 minutes late to see it, and fell asleep about 15 minutes before the end (where I really thought it was going to end), it would have been worth $6.50 or $7. If I was 45 minutes late and fell asleep right as he gets up to go into the lab (I really really thought it was going to end here), it would have definiately been worth $7 or $7.50. As it was, this is a $4 to $4.50 movie, mostly because of an extra hour that didn’t need to be there. I kind of prefer the former, slightly longer version above, because that was the proper ending.

Spielberg takes all the responsibily for how bad the hour that shouldn’t have been there sucked. According to the credits, not only did he direct it, but he wrote the screenplay, which was based on a screen writing, which was based on a short story. The heavy piano background music, along with the 7/8 speed face shots of people looking at things with wonderment and walking on eggshells through the world, made the movie a study in Kubrickesque Style as portrayed in Eyes Wide Shut, which wasn’t completely done by Kubrick to boot! Like it’s an interpreatation of someone else’s interpretation of how it should be, and it wasn’t pure in that sense.

• The first 45 minutes could have been 10 or 15.
• The Teddy character was underused.
• The history of Gigolo Joe could have been longer, show more of his plight.
• The approach of Rue City was just plain goofy, as was the visit of Dr. Know. These same plot aspects could have been done in a way that fit in with the style of the rest of the movie (not counting the last 15 minutes).
• The movie was so long, that I know that there was narration at the beginning in the same voice as at the end, but I can’t remember anything that it said, so I can’t make the connection for the whole story.
• It should be used in writing classes as an example of what happens when you think every story needs a happy ending.
• It was a philosphical story, a spirital story. It was Spielberg’s answer to Lucas. It was not science fiction, the same way that Star Wars isn’t science fiction.

On the other hand, the visuals and effects were excellent. During the conversations in the first 45 minutes about how “real” he seemed, I wonder how they were going to make all the other mechas look “not real” or “fake”, and that was done excellently with the exact hairline and stiff complextion of Joe. The Manhattan skyline was cool. The visuals in the last 15 minutes are the only redeeming quality of that quarter hour, but they weren’t enough to make that a worthy addition to the film. The flesh fair scenes were tastefully graphic, that is, graphic enough to make you cringe (assuming you felt for the mechas), but not overdone and not gratitious.

The audio kept going out in the theather. From full THX or stereo or whatever, to a really faint mono. That was kind of annoying, but it didn’t really happen during scenes with conversation, so largely nothing lost… on the other hand, a large portion of the movie doesn’t feature important dialog/audio, so chance dictates that bad audio not happen to fall on critical parts.