OH COME ON

Really? REALLY?

There's talks for a sequel to World War Z?

Apparently, there are rumbles that World War Z will become a trilogy. We're not gonna get our hopes up but maybe this time they will try adapting the actual book. And if they try that, we are holding out for a twelve hour Ken Burns style PBS miniseries with low production values, faked reenactments of historical moments in the Zombie War, talking heads and history professors giving interviews, long pan shots of photographs, and a multi-tape VHS release.

Like this, but make every other soldier a zombie. Yes. Yeeeeeeeeessssssss...

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Deep Fried Molestation: Beth Hated Compliance

Compliance is about a nineteen-year-old fast food worker who is sexually abused under her manager's supervision because a guy who calls the restaraunt gets his kicks by pretending to be a police officer and urging the manager and other employees to perform a body-cavity-search-and-then-some on said fast-food worker. It is based on a true story.

You will not like Compliance at all. That is the kindest thing I can say about it.

The good news about Compliance is that it isn’t exploitative. It doesn’t enjoy or expect you to get any pleasure at all out of the sustained sexual humiliation of its starlet Dreama Walker, a grueling ordeal which takes up the majority of the film’s running time. The bad news about Compliance, then, is twofold: first, it is about the sustained sexual humiliation of Dreama Walker, and second, it is not a movie you will get any pleasure out of. In other words, this isn’t exactly a film you recommend to friends and loved ones..

That’s not to say that I would never recommend difficult movies to friends and families. I can think of dozens of once-is-enough movies I’ve passed on to others over the years, and the plain truth is that Compliance just isn’t one of those movies. Alongside the squirm-inducing imagery of Walker’s torment, this movie also features fatally inept plotting, character motivations that strain credulity, and general left-footedness in scripting and staging the events. It's impossible to make the arch of this story suspenseful or interesting. As soon as the mysterious voice on the phone starts suggesting that the manager (Ann Dowd) personally strip search her own employee instead of taking the girl to a police station, we know that this man is not a police officer. The only question that remains is 1) how long is it going to take this manager to realize that this man is not a police officer and 2) how ugly will this ordeal  will get in the meantime.

Compliance, then, is an hour and a half of watching abuse get worse and worse at the hands of increasingly gullible people. After the ruse is up, there is no more plot left to prop the story up. Everyone stands around looking shocked, there are rumors of a lawsuit, and the movie ends.

Interspersed with awful scenes of the girl's humiliations are mournful long shots of boiling deep-fat fryers and greasy sinks, as though we're supposed to be disgusted not only by sexual assault but also by the concept of fast food in general. It seems like a case of misplaced priorities, but then again, maybe I like Chick-Fil-A too much.

This movie was heartily acclaimed when it played at Sundance and I can't imagine why. Possibly because it's based on a true story and because it's a finger-wagging warning about listening to authority. I don't know. I'm gonna go get some Chick-Fil-A.

That'll make it better.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Nerd Vindication: 50 Shades Fans Are Even Worse than the Batman Set

It's been fun being a diehard Batman fan and laughing at the Ben Affleck/Batman panic. However, I already have a chip on my shoulder about  Fifty Shades of Gray (Fifty Shades is rivaled only by Twilight for brazenly spitting in the face of literature), so it's nice to see that the hard core Fifty Shades crowd is even more of a discredit to humanity than the Batman folks are.

As proof positive, I submit this Variety article wherein a group of fans have created a change.org petition (is this going to start becoming change.org's bread and butter?) to cast Matt Bomer and Alex Bledel in the leads of the 2014 movie.

I'm not going to give you the link to the petition because I'm afraid you freaks might actually sign it, but if you're so inclined to google this I promise that reading this will be the highlight of your morning. For one thing, the petition writers are apparently oblivious about the casting process and seem to think that the actors are basically Sims. Does anyone know if Bomer and Bledel are otherwise occupied with other projects? Or maybe they aren't interested in the part? Maybe they don't particularly like each other? These are actual human beings who can choose, seek out, or reject jobs for their own reasons. You can't just draft them like soldiers and make them appear in your movie.

Furthermore, it's hard to beat the extreme outrage and waxing determination these people are exhibiting as they go about the task of recasting bondage porn. Comments range from the strangely inspirational ("We can do anything, guys! Let's make our voice heard!"), the sidetracked ("Bomer was only rejected because he's gay!") to the laden with inexplicable portmanteaus ("I'm completely Graysessed!").

Apparently I had completely underestimated how badly America wanted to see Rory Gilmore tied up and spanked while delivering cheesy dialogue. Is there such thing as a cheesy dialogue fetish? That would explain a lot about Fifty Shades. Y'all are sick.

Sick, sick, sick.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

The Lead Actress in "50 Shades" Is Younger than Beth and Louise

Well, not much younger, at least. This is deeply disconcerting to us, though, as this seems to indicate that we are, in fact, now old.

Let the record show that neither Beth nor Louise has ever read Fifty Shades of Grey, except out loud to the other one, with alcohol, laughing hysterically. We fancy ourselves as rather literary ladies, even if we're old ones.

The Cronenberg Crawl: Being Stuck in Traffic With Naked Robert Pattinson Is No Fun Edition

Cosmopolis is a movie about how much it sucks to be bored, passionless, and cold, even when you’re on top of the world. That’s cool and everything, but I don’t go to the movies to not give a damn.

Robert Pattinson, not giving a damn.

Robert Pattinson is well-known for playing bloodless pillars built of strong chins and ennui. He’s mostly dead in Twilight but here he’s all dead here, so, as Billy Crystal would say, the only thing useful to be done with him at this point is to go through his pockets for loose change, not cast him in another movie. But here he is in Cosmopolis, in his limo, where he’s made a lot of money in the... money business (these movies always feature twenty-something billionaires with no discernible skills, which has me wondering why I’m writing this review in a studio apartment with no air conditioning and not from an office made of cocaine bricks). At the beginning of the movie, he declares that he needs a haircut, from a barber shop on the other side of Manhattan. Then, very slowly, in terrible traffic, he makes his way through Manhattan, interacting with a variety of odd characters, hearing in alarming little bursts that someone is trying to kill him and he is slowly losing his fortune. It’s a bad day in the money business, apparently. They talk about yen a lot in this movie but I didn’t really listen because damn, I hate math.

Robert Pattinson, still not giving a damn. 

Anyway, most of the movie takes place in Robert Pattinson’s limo, because the president is in town, a rapper has just died and the traffic is awful. Or, as this pretentious asshole of a movie puts it, “We need a haircut.” That’s Pattinson’s line. He speaks in the royal plural in this movie. Why? Because Don Delillo says so, that’s why. “You will hit traffic that speaks in quarter inches,” says Pattinson’s driver. Hang on a second -- traffic doesn’t speak. Is “speak” the word that Pattinson, Dellilo, and Cronenberg are looking for? Apparently it is, because the lines only spiral down frantically from there. I was a creative writing major in college (see preceding line about studio apartment and no air conditioning) and I heard some terrible dialogue spewed in undergrad workshops. This movie talks like the kid who wrote the worst dialogue in your fiction workshop, but only after you bought him too many drinks on the night that the other partners in his polyamorous group relationship voted him out, and several hours into his depression bender you got stuck listening him philosophize at the most overpriced bar in town bar while he tried to smoke an unlit cigarette. This movie talks like that guy. The dialogue goes nowhere, chases its tail, makes weird allusions, picks up threads, traces abstract thoughts, and abandons them quickly.

We get, for example, to see characters talk about holes. Here is the scene.

Character A: "Holes are interesting. There are books about holes."

Character B: "There are books about shit."

Is there a context in which this dialogue might be snappy and interesting? I doubt it. It definitely isn’t in this movie. And there are lines that sound smart at first listen but really aren’t, like when a character contemptuously refers to “Judeo-Christian jogging.” Judeo-Christian jogging, as opposed to -- what, secular-humanist jogging? There are lines that clip along at a brisk, breezy pace until one character utters such a dud that you have the sudden queasy sensation that the entire script stepped in a pile of dog turds.

Pattinson: “How old are you? I’m interested.”

Other guy: “How old? Forty-one.”

Pattinson: “Hm. A prime number.”

Other guy: “But not an interesting one.”

Did you hear the squish? It was a cool moment, when we see that Pattinson is so caught up in numbers that the first thing he notices about this man’s age is the fact that forty-one has no divisors. And then it’s... not an interesting prime number. Why not? What does Cronenberg have against forty-one? Is there something about forty-three I should know?

But worst of all are the characters who talk like no one you have ever met nor like anyone who has ever lived. There are dozens of examples. Pattinson’s wife calmly informs him that he “reek(s) of sexual discharge.” We learn that the “logical extension of business is murder,” which is a logic that I am not familiar with, but this is not my movie. A doctor tells us that Pattinson’s prostate is asymmetrical, which is a fact that both has massive symbolic significance and is something that every character in the movie knows and brings up repeatedly. Most obnoxious of all is a female character who monologues in what sounds like the comments on a philosophy blog if you back-translated them on Babelfish. “People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard, are melting into the texture of everyday life. Is this not true?”

The dialogue sounds like jamming knitting needles in your ears, the characters are as bloodless as slugs, people you don’t care about keep getting shot in the head, and there is an extended motif of dead rats that is apparently important but I only remembered when I rewatched the trailer. There is nothing to get worked up about in this movie. 

Not even Robert Pattinson's prostate exam.

Robert Friggin' Pattinson Didn't Care Enough to Act in Cosmpolis So Beth Didn't Care Enough To Write A Review Either

So she wrote a recipe to accompany your viewing experience instead.

Not that we actually recommend this movie.

Beth's Cosmopolis Seafood Frittata

Three medium-sized fresh swordfish steaks, fresh (available at specialty markets)

10-20 uncooked medium-sized shrimp (ideally wildcaught)

3/4 cup white truffle mushrooms

3/4 cup high quality port

2 tbsp sevruga caviar

2 tbsp Iranian saffron

3 iPhone 5s, finely chopped

1/2 cup Mercedes 196 car battery, pureed

25 used condoms, patted dry

10-15 grams cocaine (The purer the better, in my experience. I tried it once with crack and it just didn't turn out.)

3 eggs, scrambled

Lightly grease a 9x9 baking pan and layer ingredients. Top with egg mixture. Look. Look at your excess.

"Meh."

Is "Divergent" The Next Hunger Games????

Well, since every other attempt the Next Big Thing in young adult smash hits, we're gonna go out on a limb and say "no."

At any rate, there's a trailer out for Divergent and you can find it here. We're predicting that the average moviegoer will be pretty satiated on movies set in dystopian futures with strong female leads shot in a blue-gray color palate this fall, but hey, you can try.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Pirates 5 Has a Title But I'm Not Going To Tell You What It Is

Instead I am going to show you this chart about why the Pirates of the Caribbean maritime disaster franchise needs to make like Titanic and sink.

Demonstrating How the Pirate Movies Suck with Statistics



Doom, Gloom, And Godawful Book Adaptations

Oh look, a waif!

Continuing our theme of movies that we are already sure will be terrible, the trailer for The Book Thief is live. You can watch it here. The real trouble starts when the voiceovers begin.

We had similar trepidation last year about the adaptation of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, an incredibly voice-driven novel with a remarkable narrator and truly inventive flashbacks of the father (we cried for days after the Sixth Borrow chapter... we're not totally heartless). The movie trailer, however, indicated that the original story had been effectively neutered into a feel-good spin on a monumental human tragedy, which is already a pretty odious concept in our book. Apparently, the critics agreed, and Extremely Loud was panned. 

If the trailer is any indication, The Book Thief is shaping up to be an equally disappointing, toothless adaptation of the original. The darkness afforded by the book's narrator, Death himself, is completely absent in the trailer. The voiceovers indicate that the morals will be as cheesy as they are ill-defined ("Words will inspire her! Courage will guide her!") and the trailer itself pretty adeptly telegraphs the fact that this movie has nothing to brag about. Cheeck out the title card "From the studio that brought you Life of Pi," which means nothing, plus the boast that the "book was called brilliant," which says nothing about the movie itself.

In our first podcast we talked about how much we hate uplifting human interest war stories, and this looks poised to scrape the sugary bottom of the simpering barrel. We're calling it now -- this movie will be this year's universally-disliked Oscar grubber you'll find in your bargain bin at Wal-Mart next June. We're reading the book instead.

Not pictured: childlike innocence, boundless hope, and the triumph of the human spirit.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

The Cronenberg Crawl: Come for the Accents, Stay For The Bondage Edition

I hate this movie.

I generally applaud David Cronenberg’s devout love of brevity. I really do. But in order to adapt Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure into something more suitable for a jittery, distractible film audience, he’s trimmed the already-brisk original screenplay down to a starved, skeletal, ninety-seven-minute corset-ripper. So get this movie a sandwich, because this poor thing looks hungry, and get out of this movie's way, because it's in a big damn hurry.

Apparently the many minutes left out of this movie included any reason we might have for caring about the characters bickering on screen, other than the fact that the characters are important thinkers and they are bickering about important things. This is a problem because, even if what Jung, Freud, and Kiera Knightly say and do is significant according to modern historians, it doesn’t mean that what they say and do is interesting to this movie’s audience. A Dangerous Method wants to be an account of the complicated relationship between two brilliant psychiatrists and the woman who has the potential to rise to their level. Unfortunately, because the movie clips by so damn fast we get the feeling that most of the drama is taking place while we’re busy watching another character hurtle through his own arc. Thus, A Dangerous Method is not about disillusionment in academia, the strain of having a famous mentor, the birth of psychoanalysis, and sex, lies, and anti-Semitism in Victorian Europe. It’s about Michael Fassbender pretending to be Jung, Viggo Mortenson pretending to be Freud, and Kiera Knightly pretending to be Russian.

"I'M CRAZY!"

And boy, does Kiera Knightly bring her Russian A-game. She is aggressively, furiously, in-your-face Russian. She lays her accent on so thick you can barely understand what she’s saying. The good news is that for the first twenty minutes, Miss Knightly’s character is demented, so what she says isn’t particularly important. But in the next two acts she becomes a highly literate, mentally balanced academic (apparently in a couple of afternoons), so we ought to care about her thoughts, opinions, and observations. Just kidding; she plays a Jewish woman in Victorian Europe, so it’s okay with these characters if Miss Knightly talks like she’s gargling a mouthful of borscht. 

What’s more, Miss Knightly’s transformation from spastic to sane also seems to have been left on the editing room floor, because when Miss Knightly plays crazy, she plays Black Swan crazy. When we first meet her she is thrashing in puddles and yelling at no one through carriage windows. Then Michael Fassbender decides to let her analyze a word association test he did on his wife, and Knightly is cured, though unfortunately still Russian.

"I'M SOOOOO CRAZY!"

Other than that, there’s not a lot of movie to talk about. Michael Fassbender is fine and Vigo Mortenson brings his best Freud face but there really isn’t anything here to connect with or get excited about. I would say something about Vincent Cassel’s performance because he’s a well-known actor in a bit part, but I frankly forgot he was in this movie until I rewatched the trailer while writing this review. I think he’s the guy who talks Fassbender into having sex with Knightly, so we can blame him for those sequences.

Oh yeah -- Fassbender and Knightly have an affair, and there’s some rudimentary bondage and spanking scenes (which of course got top billing in the movie’s marketing) but this subplot of Knightly's and Fassbender's suppressed and explosive desires  is hardly more engaging than anything else that happens in this movie. We just don’t care about these people enough to care about their relationship. We do get to watch Fassbender spank Knightly into what looks like a hilariously telegraphed orgasm, which is apparently possible in this movie, so this scene is worth the price of popcorn if not the price of admission. This scene is particularly memorable because all the slapping and yelling caught my attention (I was too bored to think straight that this point) and got me to look up from my knitting for a couple of minutes. But then Knightly starts up talking again in her ever-loving Russian voice and I was back to being more involved with my knitting. Some more stuff happens. Jung write a letter. Jung and Freud get on a boat. Jung goes to America. Jung comes back. Knightly dies in the Holocaust. Then it's over.

"SERIOUSLY CRAZY!"

If you’re in the mood for a Cronenberg movie, you have at least a dozen other far more interesting films to choose from. There’s one where Jeff Goldbloom turns into a giant fly and one where Jeremy Irons thinks John Lone is a woman (M. Butterfly), for starters. Cronenberg pretty much canonized the concept of body horror, but it looks like costume drama chamber pieces just aren’t his game. Mortenson and Fassbender have both been in better films and Knightly has surrounded herself with better performers for so long that she’s managed to trick most people into thinking she can actually act. Given the filmography of all involved, A Dangerous Method is a a disappointing, lackluster turn, and it’s a memory I’m better off repressing. 

"Cured!"

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Ben-Hurting: A Fail of the Christ

Why, oh why, is a remake for Ben-Hur in talks?

MGM must be barren wasteland of no ideas.  I see this going one of two ways: this could have been pitched as Oscar bait, an expensive winter release with an all-star director and cast, or a summer blockbuster that uses modern technology to, erm, update all the effects of the 1959 original. 

The all-practical effects in an 18-acre set piece with 15,000 extras and live chariot racing, as seen in 1959.  BUT IMAGINE IF IT WAS ALL CGI.

 Given that MGM is currently in talks with Timur Bekmambetov, the guy who directed Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I’m guessing the latter choice.  Ben-Hur will be an unnecessary, uncalled for summer action blockbuster with a B-grade cast so they can spend more money on all the fight scenes and action sequences.

I’d like to float Liam Hemsworth for the lead.  He seems like a pretty major cinema draw.

Here’s the problem: summer blockbusters are not the cash cows they used to be.  Quite the opposite, and we’re hardly the first to notice this.  This summer, a string of over-long, 200-million-dollar-plus budget films, The Lone Ranger, Pacific Rim, White House Down, After Earth, and Elysium have all lost money.  Lone Ranger alone may lose 190 million dollars for Disney, after an insane 215 million dollar budget, and that’s the low estimate, by the way.  This bad boy clocks in at 149 minutes, a budding hallmark of the drawn-out, big-budget summer action movie.

The 1959 Ben-Hur fits the portrait of the expensive, over-long summer blockbusters of today.  At the time, it was the most expensive film ever made, with a budget of  $118 million, adjusting for inflation, and this sucker has a run time of 224 minutes. The updated Bekmambetov version will have to be long and expensive to do any justice to the original story.  But here’s the problem: A Ben-Hur update has no clear audience.  I don’t know who MGM thinks will go see this movie.  On one hand, Bekmambetov could up the violence of the action sequences and go for a PG-13 rating, drawing action-oriented audiences.  But the subtitle of this movie’s source material, the Lew Wallace novel, is, “A Tale of the Christ,” and somehow that doesn’t sound like a tagline that will bring the fan boys running.  Alternatively, Bekmambetov could keep this a family film, shoot for the PG rating, and try to attract the Evangelical dollars.  This brings to mind films like Evan Almighty, at date the most expensive comedy ever filmed and which had banked on bringing Christians to the box office, and John Carter, which didn’t specifically aim for Christian audiences but did try to pitch itself as a family action film.  Both of these films were studio disasters, losing $88 million and $200 million dollars for their respective studios.

Can you believe we’re talking in dollar amounts this insane?

I’m calling it right now: The new Ben-Hur will lose $150 million dollars.  You heard it here first. The only upshot is that if this movie fails spectacularly-- and oh, it will-- we'll never have to sit through a remake of Casablanca or Gone with the Wind.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!