The X-Files: I Want to Believe

Chris Carter, USA, 2008
1.5 out of 4 stars

I knew it wasn't going to be that good, but I just wanted to see Mulder and Scully again. Having seen it, I realize that this is what I get for making fun of all those people who unthinkingly ran out to see Harrison Ford crack the whip for one last time. Hopefully I've learned my lesson, and next time something comes out that interests me purely as a nostalgia piece, I'll wait for the rental!

The first problem is that Mulder and Scully aren't anywhere near as fun or as interesting as they should be. This is, frankly, inexcusable. David Duchovny tries his best and his character is written to be as appealing as possible, but he just looks old and worn out for most of the film. Gillian Anderson, meanwhile, has aged quite well, but Chris Carter heinously saddles her with a newfound commitment to hospital work, which leads her to deliver lines more suitable to the tiresome "nagging wife" stock character that we see in so many movies about any form of heroism. Scully may even be justified, in the "real world," in voicing these sentiments, but in a film like this, the viewer just feels resentful towards her for being a stick-in-the-mud... and later, resentful at Carter for doing that to his once-great female hero character. In fact, there are other things in the film that struck me as misogynist, not to mention aspects of xenophobia and homophobia. It made me wonder if this was always in the show, or if Carter has just gotten worse, politically speaking.

As for the plot, it's uninteresting, and without question insufficiently paranormal. As you have no doubt heard, the film is in line, structurally speaking, with the "monster of the week" format the show engaged in roughly more than half of the time (as opposed to the "mythology" episodes that advanced the conspiracy plot), but the phrase is misleading in this case, as the villains are shockingly mundane. There is also a possibly psychic, child-molesting ex-priest, but I'm sure that this wouldn't have been enough paranormality to fuel an episode of the show.

To sum up, I really don't know what Carter (or anyone who worked with him) was thinking, as there's nothing here that even has the potential to be good. Forget waiting for the rental on this one; I should have just rented some of the best episodes of the show from Netflix!

Source: Fox 35mm print
25 Jul, 5:40 PM

Reno 911!: Miami

Robert Ben Garant, USA, 2007
1.5 out of 4 stars

This is of course one of those films that defeats criticism, if only in the sense that when you say it’s bad, people who are likely to agree with you say “no duh, why did you watch that anyway?” while people who disagree with you will call you names like “elitist,” or tell you that it’s supposed to be dumb. Admittedly I am not a big fan of stupidity for its own sake, but I have found the show fairly entertaining in small doses – if you’re not familiar with it, it centers around really idiotic and obscene police officers in Reno, sort of a broad Cops parody with a strong basis in improv.

I think it’s pretty clear that there was no real chance of the material being made into a good film, as the people involved just don’t seem to have the discipline for it. One bit that really struck me was an extended sequence in which successive interactions consistently had an awkward dissolve transition as the editor had to skip over the unsuccessful improvisations the actors had probably stumbled through. I could go on about other ways in which this film was poorly thought-out or shoddily made, but the main point is that, for the most part, it was not particularly funny. The best praise I can give is that I didn’t really think that much about how bad or pointless it was until afterwards; I wasn’t really enjoying it, but neither was I angry about how bad it was (and that is saying something, with me)

Source: Charter VOD
10 Jan, 9:13 PM

X-Men: The Last Stand

Brett Ratner, USA, 2006
1.5 out of 4 stars

I talk a lot about how my expectations really color my enjoyment of a film, but it’s especially aggravating when I’m still disappointed even after I’ve lowered my expectations. While I’m aware that the previous two films weren’t exactly masterpieces, I especially enjoyed how X2 built on the sometimes-perfunctory setup of its predecessor to fully immerse the viewer in the X-universe.

This movie pretends to be a sequel to X2, but ultimately, this film builds on the bones of what came before, rather than on the solid, already established foundation. Characters are dismissed with perfunctory waves of the hand, or “revealed” to have always been the exact opposite of everything we were told before, specifically in the case of Jean Grey. The treatment of Jean invokes the worst excesses of comic books (namely, retroactive continuity or the “retcon,”) while losing whatever emotional pathos was involved in the source material.

Most egregious, however, is the finale. The X-Men rush into defend something without really explaining why it’s important, and their goals and the stakes they are playing for constantly shift. While you never quite get to the point where the story doesn’t make sense, it’s safe to say that the motivations never make sense, if only because there are no motivations; basically, everything happens for no reason. There are certainly some good action scenes, but overall it’s hard to enjoy this even as mindless action because moronic director Brett Ratner gets so bogged down in the process of pissing on all the plotlines and characters that he inherited from Bryan Singer’s vastly superior work.

Source: Fox 35mm print
26 May, 11 PM

Parineeta

Pradeep Sarkar, India, 2005
1.5 out of 4 stars

Utter shit! I’m probably really being unfair to Bollywood, but I think I need more comedy in films like this. Pure melodrama is just too much. That, and perhaps it doesn’t really work in a quiet theater (this was part of the so-called Riverside International Film Festival), and you need audience response with your friends to make it fun. Whatever the case, I found this to be much less entertaining than Mohabbatein or especially Main Hoon Na, both of which I saw last year. Even the music wasn’t as good!

Source: UTV 35mm print
18 February, 8 PM