Basic Instinct 2 (2006)

This movie belongs here marginally. But even so, here is where it belongs. Do you know what really, REALLY bugs me about this movie? The fact that it really could have had been an awesome MILF-Thriller.
First and foremost I can’t help but saying that this movie marks the most monumentally outrageous, non-chemistry couple of all times. Sharon Stone (Catherine Tramell – quite like the overconfident young diabolic bombshell from Hell, from Basic Instinct) and David Morrissey (Dr. Glass – cold, tasteless and transparent as his classy, glass office) are otherworldly remote from each other. The possible casting failure of Morrissey is just fairly considerable (no news from him since then. Bummer.) Like two actors, in two different movies, which are Basic Instinct and this flick that didn’t turn out so well – not even in the consuming US box office. The main stars don’t meet on screen, don’t meet artistically, don’t meet as figures, don’t really meet in attitude, don’t meet when they meet, don’t meet when they speak and worst of all – they don’t meet when they fuck. I mean I have heard and I knew that “Antithesis bears Attraction” but this seems like the destruction and disproval of all I had heard and known.
All the amazing material from the first BI, now can be considered a tearful case of disappearance investigated by the CSI. All the hands-on magic and suspense, all the talent and ideas of the BI1 set of contributors (Verhoeven, Goldsmith, Eszterhas) are absent, if not awkwardly overlooked. Someone has to teach all these – rather capable of course – Michael Caton-Jones directors, that a sequel owes to be something further and better, not just something suchlike or totally dislocated from the original, with the always easy excuse of the “director’s personal view and vision”
It is not easy to ignore Sharon Stone but it’s not hard to notice the fake, hyper-bitchy, over-sexiness that she pulls through all way long in this painfully slow and nerveless film. No murderous confidence, no authentic manipulations, not that cold iron will, not really interested in psy-machinations anymore and with no useful help from the writers. In some scenes she shines, but mostly she just acts moistly, like the plastic, pathetic, loveless middle aged used-up executive whore from Catwoman, ready to succumb to drugs, alcohol and smokes, just to forget her past, present and future. Why not? Because, the supposedly deep psychological backbone of the script, may be sometimes catchy, but not good enough to support Killer Stone, or anyone else.
The whole script is a mediocre mess of improbable and aimless spins and turns, ups and downs (after fourteen years, we didn’t even get to see any of the other, the most wanted “ups and downs”) without really grasping the viewers’ eye and needed anxiety of a dark and dirty mystery film. It is the usual made-up illusion of an open-ended and thoroughly full of branches and interpretations plot, where there is no such thing available.
Supporting turns by David Thewlis and Charlotte Rampling, waste these fine actors on talky exposition scenes and cliché-heavy posturing, without adding all that a great colour in this blunt, dull and cloudy atmosphere of the movie.
Don't watch this film for carnal thrills and spills - there are none noteworthy and what there is, well, it is pretty lame, unintentionally funny and all that clumsy.
If Stone Cold Vanity partially inspired Sharon Stone to remake her powerful, domineering image with this movie, you must be stone called crazy to believe that any face, shot, margin, shade, resource and aspect of this movie is not centred on her. Frankly, she doesn’t seem to appreciate it all that much and the result is that everything else in this movie suffers more or less.
Basically, follow your instinct and see where the movie will lead you, but don’t make the mistake expecting some cult-status wet, overshadowed, urban and long lost Verhoevenian paradise.

You Got Served (2004)

Back in the old days we had the martial art competition b-movies usually ending up in one on one showdown. Interesting, even if not original, after the first hundred times. The trend of crowdie dance competition movies that followed, put the 00s era one step closer to boredom and repetitiveness, and without the interesting mentors that marked the aforementioned genre.
Everyone has a small part in the crazy dance floor: Blob-made story of street glory, teen-tin-seem script writers with MTV life experience and lower than average sex life expectancy, ghetto with no innuendo, breaking-ma-nerves brake dancers, high school chicks one step from total bitching even if they try pretty hard not to show it, street wise-assness, sub-zero amateur performances, show off moves with heavy continuity and direction issues, romance from the can, good fellas gone bad, kingpins, macho niggas, milk-white pricks and all the gangsta clichés from da hood parading in the most mediocre, light, tasteless and odorless fashion. I mean, I usually get terribly bored in such movies, but actually the genre has showcases that demonstrate real dancing fever and dark back alley social colors like Dangerous Minds, Save the Last Dance 1 & 2 and much more. This is just way less than enough, even for the passionate fans of dance and dancers alike. Not even a colourful dance video clip and certainly a bad basket case of a movie, You Got Served gets the viewer served in every single line and scene.
“Who’s bad”?
Well, this one – but in a really bad way.

Anaconda (1997)

I admit that initially the trailer led me to pretty high action expectations, but fortunately I was saved by an unmistakable rule of a thumb, before going to feed the “snake” with eight euros: no matter what, when the main actors of a movie are not actors at all, you know you are heading to a dead end in the jungle. Here is a slithering example of casting disaster. Along with the usual bait is Jennifer Lopez, who is just the cute face of the vogue that goes well with any dish – something like a Coke with a great ass – and as for Ice Cube, I think that sugar cubes have a sweeter impact and act a lot better. Owen Wilson doesn’t act that silly yet – so he is irrelevant, Eric Stoltz is asleep in the whole movie – well so much of this lucky bastard – and Jon Voight is the prick that everybody suspected he would be – maybe the only non-void and interesting figure along with the Danny Trejo appearance.If you think that you will witness breathtaking action and eye-popping special effects, you have just been snake-charmed by something long and gruesome that isn’t even close to a snake. An anaconda couldn’t and wouldn’t ever push its luck that far, stalk certain targets with such determination or storm in a bolt-action chase. Actually its top-speed crawl is slower than any healthy man’s pacing. Plain and simple – what we have here is just an unusually – even for Hollywood – blown out of proportions movie demonization of an animal, that contrary to the first Jaws – for example – it is all the way the opposite to ANY cinematic achievement. The three (one movie-two tv) sequels that emerged right out of the Big Bad B Bog are just hilariously despicable.Please, don’t let boredom constrict you.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

After the first Transformers movie – although feeling CGI filled and fulfilled – I practiced the apparel act of wisdom and roguery to download a really good copy of this one. Riskless beat careless big time, this time!

I was already aware of director Michael Bay's tendency of making mindless popcorn props with huge explosions, scantily-clad women, and awful cheesy dialogue. What’s so bad after all in cashing in a rather great action resume including Pearl Harbor, Armageddon and most of all the Rock? But experience has taught us that when we lay back for “what’s so bad after all", here comes the worse to end all in a digital hurricane of the most ridiculous campy, poorly-written and poorly-directed piece of crap to come out this year. Where the special effects mark a cinematic achievement and blow your senses sky high, every other single aspect and little detail of this movie is a handful of shame slapping you scene after scene.The writing is so unbelievable and unbelievably stupid; you almost have to see it to believe it. A one-day human endeavour no more than four months old – it mentions Obama and the swine flu (!!!) – hastily keeping the production’s pacing. We are not talking about comic, unrealistic or just badly written and executed. We are talking about immense falsehood to the extreme unluckiness of the offended. It's truly amazing that near the “climax” the film manages to shove aside the one interesting dilemma in favour of more stupid exposition: The evil robot demands that the humans turn over Shia Labeouf, and the world responds by trying to catch Shia. Nobody has any luck until the oompah-loompah in Egypt stops his car and some detective, sitting for absolutely no reason in the corner of a shady room under an old fan, notices him. Right from the very beginning, improbabilities swarming the viewer’s brain, risen right from the murkiest tomb of stupidity and irrelevance. Reading this review so far, you‘ve just spent a lot more time considering the plot problems than anyone in the movie. For some reason the time-filler soldiers and Shia Labeouf himself never even consider the possibility of following the robot's decree, and for some reason the rest of the world and the time-filler slimy guy instantly go along with it.The bottom-of-the-barrel clichés and outrageous stereotypes grind you in every line like a milestone. Reading over the screenplay, you would think it was some terrible Transformers fan faction written by a retarded, choke-full of puberty issues goblinoid from Arkanso hills. The dialogue is drop-dead HORRIBLE. This would be a great movie if it was targeted to ten year olds at best, but the overt sexual references and language suggest an older demographic. Maybe it's because Bay is trying to please a wide range of people, and maybe that's why we have jokes made about Transformer Testicles (!!!) and there's a scene where a miniature transformer (with a Jersey accent much less) tries to hump Megan Fox's leg. The cheap laughs seem like an extraordinary nightmare that has no end, becoming cheaper and cheaper as the movie rolls, terminating to absolute mental zero. I honestly would not have been surprised to see a transformer fart in this film, or maybe a scene where a transformer gets high or fucking a space apple pie. Extreme hilariousness acts properly as self-defeating purpose. But don't worry, because there are plenty of scenes – like – of Sam's mother accidentally getting high at college and proceeding to follow the overacting formula of physical humour. Then there are Skids and Mudflap - two Decepticons who can't read, speak in "jive," act like gangster-wannabes, and fight a lot. One of them even has a gold tooth (I am not stoned guys, neither I’m making this up!). And this is the “idea” of the whole film as a crime record against intelligence and originality, already popping up in the prequel: an alien self deployed robo-race that actually doesn’t have any alien or mechanic disposition at all. They all imitate the worse, most blatant and kitsch stereotypes of the multicultural humanity, through the eyes of the below average billybob teenager. The robot characters just suck. They're boring and talk in clichéd voices that pretty much tell you everything you need to know about them (the snivelling, weak bad guy; the menacing bad guy; the solemn good guy; the comic relief twins, etc). Their faces look awful, and they're all completely devoid of personalities and thus impossible to empathize; cheer for or against. They're just CGI blobs, feeling more like fucked up caricatures of humans and animals, than metal at all. Pathetic excuses of sci-fi, assaulting pathetic viewers, who desperately long for a juicy Megan Fox ass burger – a wishful thought that never really comes to pass satisfyingly in this sequel. Every time she's on camera she looks like a makeup crew just touched her up. She has no interesting dialog, no quirks or traits worth mentioning, and does nothing but pose. She may be stunningly gorgeous but interestingly this film leaves you too stunned by stupidity to care enough. Well boys, I’ll be the first to embrace Jennifer’s Body, but regarding Transformers 2, the last sucker may close the door firmly behind him.This disaster is also insanely long, at a running time of 2.5 hours. This probably could have been avoided if there wasn't so much slow motion footage of people running, and running, and running and leaping yet to ground and continue the race against all reasonable action odds. The problem isn't with the quality of the visual effects, strictly-speaking. The gigantic robots and elaborate explosions are all convincing, but the camera never pauses long enough to give us a good chance to take a look or reflect on the characters. The entirety of this movie consists of boring humans we don't care about running from explosions caused by boring robots we don't care about. I could politely state that the visual effects overwhelm the story, but to say so would imply that the film has an existing story to begin with. Yes, I know that the evil robots want to blow up the sun yadda yadda yadda but it's inarguably a paper-thin premise. I would say that the visual effects overwhelm the characters, but then I run into the same problem. The actors themselves act happily hopeless in such a thunderous mess. Clowns with a 200.000.000 dollar crown. Yes, Shia Labeouf does his best, but he's given nothing to do aside from running around and fulfilling the action hero role in the most shamelessly generic romance in recent memory. The human soldiers receive so little to do that I wonder what they're even doing in the movie at all. Their weapons and efforts are hilariously useless, and the movie has to go to the trouble of inserting the aforementioned slimy guy just to give the commander an antagonist to humiliate. The action scenes, while sharpened by Bay’s trademark ever-moving eye, are lost into the sand and scrap chaos. Someone though that “confusing” means “complex” and “diffused” means “detailed”. The robot mumbo-jumbo-commercial-gorillas are so “un-metallic” dexterous and over-articulated that you can't tell what is happening since it's so fast and blurry, you can't figure out for sure.

This year’s Transformers are not “more than it meets the eye”. They bit some eye candy but in the long run are less than the last robo-freak’s childish micro-minimum demands. A flash bang, degrading cinematic experience that utterly transforms you into something bitter.