Review: Fool's Gold

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson, Donald Sutherland

Director: Andy Tennant

Release Date: February 8, 2008

Running time: 113 min

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Distributors: Warner Bros.


A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I were arguing about the wide-spread appeal of NASCAR. He tried to convince me that it was a legitimate sport and I gave him the stock hillbilly-infused commentary and a battery of equally stereotyped responses to his argument. This went on for a good 20 minutes. Just when he thought he had me standing there wobbly enough, he attempted to finish me off with a Fatality:

HIM: “Hey, it’s the fastest growing sport in America.”

ME: “Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s any good.”

Not believing my statement to be true, he asked me for an example. I told him to check the box office totals for any given week during the first half of the year and in an alarming amount of examples, the top movies are garbage.

HIM: “It always goes back to movies with you, doesn’t it kid?”

Waiting for the totals this week just to prove my point was worthless – I already knew the answer. Let’s just say this coming week we get to look forward to all new trailers for Fool’s Gold with an updated tagline – “#1 Movie in America”. And I can’t say I am the least bit surprised.

So what about THIS movie, you ask? Not that it matters but Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson play treasure hunters Ben and Tess Finnegan in search of the legendary 18th Century Queen’s Dowry – 40 chests of exotic treasure that was lost at sea in the 1700’s. All this while trying to salvage their marriage tested by Ben’s inability to commit to a life outside of beach bumming and treasure hunting. It is grotesquely boring and unoriginal, even by the standards of this year’s romantic comedies. So in other words, no, it really doesn’t matter. Even my own girlfriend who loves cheesy crap like this spent the better part of the movie trying to convince me that we should leave and that I could write a review having only seen the first part of the movie. We stayed, but she would have been right.

Another friend of mine and his wife had planned all week on seeing Fool’s Gold for their date night this weekend. After receiving a text message from me warning them of the travesty that lie ahead, I strongly urged them to pick something else. Knowing that this would be the perfect opportunity for him to seize the moment, I pushed for Rambo.

This morning, I was awoken by the following message from my friend’s wife:

“Your public massacre of Fool’s Gold is the reason I had to watch the bloody and cruel obliteration of women and small children for an hour and a half. I hold you responsible for tainting my mental health and what once was a friendly and romantic tradition of "date night". My sanity and marriage has been jeopardized. Hope you're pleased.”

I knew she would hate it but her husband will thank me later, so that part is funny to me. While she vowed to make all future selections for date night movies as a result of their evening, I’d like to think she is less upset at me for not recommending Fool’s Gold, but more upset at the irony behind a romantic comedy being responsible for causing this much strain on a marriage. And so close to Valentine’s Day. My response to her was obvious:

“Chick flicks inflict their own brand of punishment and should not be used so spitefully. Tell your husband he’s welcome.”

So continues my search for the first watchable romantic comedy of the year continues…

And there’s the rub.

ZERO out of ****

Review: Strange Wilderness

Starring: Steve Zahn, Allen Covert, Jonah Hill, Justin Long

Director: Fred Wolf

Release Date: February 1, 2008

Running time: 87 min

MPAA Rating: R

Distributor: Happy Madison Production

As I was walking out of seeing this movie, a group of people were in front of me talking amongst themselves as they walked out. One of them dropped a folded up piece of paper. I picked it up and tried to chase them down to hand it back to them, but I lost them in the lobby. After reading it (what, you wouldn’t?), I thought I’d share given the nature of the afternoon we just spent together.

Dear Hollywood,

I writing this letter on behalf of the group of young people you so affectionately refer to as ‘stoners’. While we appreciate your trying to speak to our demographic in recent years, I as chair person speak for the entirety of the group when I say, “enough is enough”. We are tired of being talked down to like we should expect nothing more simply because of the choice of recreation we decide to embark on.

To say ‘enough’ is not to say we don’t get it. We get that you are trying to pigeon-hole us into watching admittedly dumber movies because well, we have in the past. But we’ve sat through the last “stoners trying to save, their own ass” saga. I’m sure you, like us, no doubt understand the mathematical equation of the basic stoner comedy.

(s2+ T) x W = A

Or, two stoners plus a ridiculous task times weed equals awesomeness. But if you have a grasp these basic algorithmic concepts, then you surely understand the problems that can occur when you disrupt the flow of control within these individual statements. In computer science, a loop is a sequence of statements which is specified once but which may be carried out several times in succession. Most programming languages have constructions for repeating a loop until some condition changes. This is all well and good, but you flew too close to the sun, didn’t you? While operating under the notion of a condition-controlled loop, you tried too hard to force the idea by creating events that will run on their own; events that would eventually create an infinite loop. The only problem with that is that these loops are only designed to work until an exceptional condition such as an error arises. In other words, an event-driven program may be intended to loop forever handling events as they occur; only stopping when the process is killed by the operator. You sirs, dear operators, have killed this very process. A process that is know and understood by us, and previously held dear – the stoner movie. As a result, we are no longer interested in your product or products of similar likeness.

We will no longer become test subjects in an experiment that does not allow us to think for ourselves. We will no longer watch people of lesser intellect pass off their lack of skill as that of being “high”. While we appreciate what you are trying to do for our own sake, please allow us to respectfully spit it back at you as we have had our fill, thank you.

Not that we would ever tell anyone what to do because, you know, it goes against that whole ‘voice of a generation’ thing we have going, but a few pieces of advice: in the future, when trying to recreate the feeling of our group taking part in our recreation of choice, please do not attempt to “get one over on us” because you think we wont notice. Please do not include players from previously successful movies in your own. If they cannot produce on their own merit, then don’t insult us by assuming just because we see Farva from Super Troopers that we are going to clap and cheer and say, “oooh, far out. Look, it’s Farva!” in response. Please do not include people like Steve Zahn in you film and hope to rest lightly on the fact that he can be very funny, because he wasn’t here. At all. Jonah Hill is not funny, stop giving him work. Aside from Die Hard and those Mac commercials, Justin Long isn’t either. And as cute as it is that your characters in your movie are named after the same people that made it, the next time you all decide to make a movie, do us all this one little favor: Take the paper you were going to waste printing the script, roll it up with your favorite bud (kind or otherwise cleverly named), and smoke it. Smoke like you never smoked anything in your life. Then for the love of all that is holy in this world, we hope you fucking choke on it. Given the choice, next time I’d rewatch Norbit.

Repectfully (of course),

The Stoners

Huh? All this time I thought I was the critic. Go figure.

And there’s the rub.

ZERO out of ****

Review: The Eye

Starring: Jessica Alba, Alessandro Nivola, Parker Posey, Chloe Grace Moretz, Tamlyn Tomita

Director: David Moreau, Xavier Palud

Rated PG-13

Release date: Feb 1, 2008

I actually requested this review during a phase I like to refer to as the “sign up for movies I don’t want to see in an effort to challenge myself as a reviewer” phase. Or S.U.F.M.I.D.W.T.S.I.A.E.T.C.M.A.A.R for short. Right out of the gate, I had lowered expectations. Not bleak really, because I tried to keep an open mind, but lowered to say the least.

I suppose I shoulda known better. I shoulda seen it coming. Then I find out the movie was produced by Tom Cruise. I shoulda left after the trailer for Prom Night.

The Eye is a remake of The Pang Brothers 2002 Asian film, Jiàn Guǐ. I first heard about the original from a friend of mine who always tries to find these movies no one has ever heard of in search of the “diamond in the rough.” I never got around to seeing that film, but I can safely attest to the fact that this is not said diamond.

The most frustrating part of this movie is that the concept itself is quite interesting. Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba) is a concert violinist who has been blind for the better part of her life. She undergoes a double corneal transplant so as to have her sight restored. After the surgery, Sydney begins having visions of the dead and premonitions that she attributes to the violent nature by which the donor patient died. The idea always struck me as pretty twisted — a person seeing unexplained visions through someone else’s eyes all while being passed off as her mind simply adjusting to the concept of sight. Or better yet, just the idea of a blind person being able to see for the first time in years and having to re-acclimate themselves to an environment they have grown to not only survive in, but flourish. So the idea is fine, and there is a good story to be told somewhere in there, but even the best laid plans can flop down like a bag of hammers if it’s not executed properly. This is my problem with The Eye.

Horror movies are supposed to be entertaining. For that matter, all movies should strive to be, but horror in particular needs a little something extra. Whatever it is and whatever it sets out to be, it shouldn’t be boring. Boring movies are one thing, but boring horror is another crime altogether. First and foremost they should be scary. This can be achieved a number of different ways but tension is the vehicle I like to ride in. There is no tension in loud noises, only annoying loud noises. There is also no tension in blurry ‘shapes’ that hover around in the background and jump out of thin air; especially if you are telling the story of a person regaining their sight. Really, is that the best you’ve got is an out of focus lense and some creepy kids? I’ve seen home movies with better camera work than that, and that wasn’t on purpose. I would say tension could be created through a back story that makes us care about the characters or the situations they are in. Sadly, we are not afforded such luxuries. Instead we are treated to a poorly executed mess of a good idea with an ending that bounces somewhere between bad super hero and Jeepers Creepers. I would say textbook, but only if you were actually blind and tried to read one that wasn’t designed to allow you to understand it. Or if it were in Spanish and your eye doctor/psychoanalyst who inexplicably speaks the language fluently wasn’t there to translate for you. If that doesn’t make sense don’t worry, it doesn’t to me either and I saw the movie.

Which brings us full circle with the very beginning and the Prom Night trailer. I will not dive head-first into Lake JustbecauseyouCANremakesomethingdoesn’tmeanyouSHOULD. But I will stick a toe in to test the temperature — if you are going to remake a superior product, do it the justice of being relevant; don’t perpetuate the problem by making the same mistakes of your predecessors. And for viewer’s sake, engage us, even if only to a degree. Don’t bore everyone to tears between scares that aren’t even there to begin with.

Oh, by the way, the water in the lake is warm. Go ahead and take a swim.

And there’s the rub.

* out of ****