# data[].attributes.headline
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead men tell no tales

# data[].attributes.subject
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead men tell no tales

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Given the sorry fate of other projects derived from Disney theme-park attractions - The Country Bears (2002), The Haunted Mansion (2003) - it's astonishing that the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise should have remained financially seaworthy through four passable-to-indifferent features. With Pirates 5 (subtitled Dead Men Tell No Tales in the US, and Salazar's Revenge in a number of other countries) the cracks in the hull become unignorable.

Orlando Bloom has pleaded for reduced participation, handing his sextant to on-screen offspring Brenton Thwaites; Skins alumna Kaya Scodelario inherits Keira Knightley's corsets. The series, in other words, has entered its Muppet Babies or Scrappy-Doo phase, with all the pop-cultural heft that implies.

There's fresher blood behind the camera, too, not entirely unwelcome after the avant garde tedium of Gore Verbinski's three-hour send-off At World's End and Rob Marshall's by-the-numbers On Stranger Tides. Norwegians Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, fresh from the Oscar-nominated Kon-Tiki, are keener than their predecessors to spend time at sea - some consolation to anybody wondering how interested this series really is in pirating - and toss much of the ballast that clogged previous instalments overboard. Dead Men Tell No Tales moves at a faster rate of knots than any Pirates film; trouble is, nothing has really been added. It's the same soggy ride, set to a marginally preferable speed.
Kaya Scodelario: 'Nine times out of 10, my character is with a guy twice my age'
Of plot, there is literally a ghost of an idea: to have Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow - washed up on St Martin, with his beloved boat the Black Pearl cleverly secreted inside a bottle - tempted back out on to the waves after the resurfacing of one Salazar, a decomposing Spaniard whom Sparrow previously sent to a watery grave. Javier Bardem brings an air of mouldering chorizo to this guest-villain role, but the screenplay doesn't develop the enmity so much as jetski around it, stirring up noisy turbulence - doubtless sensing that the fanbase isn't here for intricate yarn-spinning, rather the long-awaited/shruggingly tolerated return of Cap'n Jack.

Depp duly does what Depp does in these films - he swaggers, he rolls those kohl-heavy Keith Richards eyes, he leers at his younger female co-star - but this franchise has always been about delivering pantomimic nonsense, and lots of it. So it is that Golshifteh Farahani (who starred in last year's Paterson) is bald with rank teeth as a conniving witch; so it is Paul McCartney momentarily shows up as Sparrow's scouse uncle. After Becks in King Arthur, it's not the season's worst celeb cameo - rather sweetly, Macca strolls on, tells a joke, and walks off, thumbs semi-aloft - but this isn't A Hard Day's Night so much as A Very Easy Paycheque.

Viewer value-for-money proves more debatable. The Pirates series hasn't delivered a memorable set piece since Dead Man's Chest 's oversized waterwheel, and time and again this plumps for distraction over consequence, flooding the screen with images that attain scale - like the ship that rears up on its haunches in readiness for attack - but not much meaning. The much-trailed zombie shark sequence comes to feel like watching somebody playing a tie-in video game.

Maybe the franchise's success lies in the bountiful downtime it offers beleaguered consumers: even with the wind in its sails here, long stretches of fruitless exposition invite one to have a pee, text a friend, make funeral arrangements, whatever. The rock'n'roll irreverence Pirates once claimed to have freighted into multiplexes has now long since drifted over the horizon.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
pirates of the caribbean: dead men tell no tales (aka salazar's revenge)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales review - Cap'n Jack's panto's back

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Given the sorry fate of other projects derived from Disney theme-park attractions - The Country Bears (2002), The Haunted Mansion (2003) - it's astonishing that the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise should have remained financially seaworthy through four passable-to-indifferent features.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You know a franchise is in trouble when Joel Schumacher is sniping at Batman fans on the Internet. The director's ongoing brouhaha with local webrunner Harry Knowles is vastly more entertaining than the film itself, though. By its own merits, Batman & Robin fails to engage the spirit of Batman, Robin, or decent marketing in general, and instead ends up as a limp, excruciatingly shallow knockoff that leaves viewers cringing at the unavoidable one-liners that make up the better part of the script. Really, how many times can one stand to hear Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze telling the Cloaked One to "Chill"? Storywise, Akiva Goldsman's script seeks to expand on the dynamics of the duo by incorporating a rift in the form of Thurman's slinky Poison Ivy, a chemically altered botanist with a lethal kiss. When she pits the two crusaders against each other, sparks and libidos fly, but only briefly. The conceit -- one of the few interesting things in the film -- is never fully explored, and dies a lonely death halfway through what seems to be a very long movie. Silverstone, as Alfred the butler's renegade niece (aka Batgirl), is another new addition to the ongoing storyline, but Schumacher, oddly, makes little use of her, preferring instead to pit her against costumed motorcycle gangs in set-ups straight out of Walter Hill's The Warriors. Schwarzenegger is entertaining as Mr. Freeze, a semi-mad scientist clad in some seriously bulky thermal underwear; Freeze's overriding motivation -- to cure his sick wife at any cost -- gives him a more noble air than most of the Caped Crusader's villains, but Goldsman's script gives the villain little to do but cough up endless one-liners that become laughably bad laughably fast. You can feel Schwarzenegger the comic actor struggling to get around the decrepit lines, but it's no use; there's nothing for him to do here but kill and quip, and even the killing gets tiresome quickly. As the series' third incarnation of Bob Kane's Dark Knight, Clooney is passable, but only just. He's got the jaw for it, certainly, but when Goldsman's script forces Bruce Wayne to speak of the necessity of a loving family and the joys of the ties that bind, you can almost hear the actor giggle. That's too bad, because Wayne/Batman's grisly, poignant familial issues are at the heart of the Batman story, and could do with a bit of examining (just not by Clooney). It's only as an exercise in set design that Batman & Robin succeeds, though it's all so over the top that it's more of an exercise in what not to do than anything else. Schumacher has chosen to light his film with outlandishly garish neons and brilliant blues and pinks, which unfortunately make this look more like some ridiculous Batman on Ice escapade than anything else. It's all too much too often, a smorgasbord of boredom, a cavalcade of crap. (And, hey, enough with the nipples on the Batsuits already, okay? Geez...)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You know a franchise is in trouble when Joel Schumacher is sniping at Batman fans on the Internet. The director's ongoing brouhaha with local webrunner Harry Knowles is vastly more entertaining than the film itself, though.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In a telling example of how bad things can happen to creative people, the prosecution presents The Last Thing He Wanted. How does a director as stellar as Dee Rees ( Mudbound, Pariah) go so thunderously wrong adapting a 1996 novel by the great Joan Didion, with a cast headed by Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, and Willem Dafoe? Here's Exhibit A.

Incoherence courses through this Netflix Original, a 1980s-set political thriller that Rees wrote with Marco Villalobos. Anne Hathaway - her natural luminosity dimmed down to zero - plays Elena McMahon, a D.C. journalist who's been told to stop reporting on the Reagan-era scandal she's been covering, about U.S. funding of the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua. Her new assignment at the fictional Atlantic Post (a less timid Didion named the real Washington Post) is to report on the president's 1984 re-election campaign. "Some real things have happened lately," says Elena in voice-over. "I want to know why." Good luck with that, sister.

Instead, the film sends Elena globe-trotting around Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Los Angeles, and Miami, for reasons that remain murky. There's something about her gunrunning, dementia-plagued daddy, Richard (Willem Dafoe), who needs her to help him pull off one last job that takes her back to the - wait for it - Contras. Things get worse when Elena encounters Treat Morrison, a shady diplomat, played by Ben Affleck as if a stick had been permanently placed up his ass. For obscure reasons, none having to do with sexual chemistry, Elena hops into bed with Treat. For his part, the bureaucrat looks far more aroused eating pie with Secretary of State George Schultz (Julian Gamble).

Amid such confusing, incoherent doings, the divorced Elena phones her unhappy daughter at boarding school, takes a job as a maid at a resort run by an ex-pat played by Toby Jones, and seeks guidance from fellow journalist Alma (Rosie Perez). If she could help us negotiate this movie, we'd all be in her debt as well. It's not as if Didion ever held the hands of readers to get them through the thickets of her biting prose. But the author's provocative look at the moral crisis of a reporter who gets personally caught up in the story she's covering had the advantage of a central theme. The movie settles for a series of baffling loose ends. In the novel, Didion mercilessly exposed the hollow core of American democracy. On film, The Last Thing He Wanted settles for just being hollow. It's the last thing any of us wanted.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'The Last Thing He Wanted' Review: How Not to Film a Literary Thriller

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a telling example of how bad things can happen to creative people, the prosecution presents The Last Thing He Wanted. How does a director as stellar as Dee Rees ( Mudbound, Pariah) go so thunderously wrong adapting a 1996 novel by the great Joan Didion, with a cast headed by Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, and Willem Dafoe?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Any serious bad movie watcher knows that the films that are very famous for being bad generally aren't really the worst of the worst. Like, Plan 9 from Outer Space? Helpless and very stupid, but it's got its charms - it's not even the worst Ed Wood movie. The subjects of Mystery Science Theater 3000? A good third of them aren't even genuinely "bad" let alone "the worst", and probably not more than a half-dozen of the films featured on that show are actually as soul-scraping as all that. No, if you want to find the really truly world-class terrible movies, you have to go spelunking, past the points that healthy, normal people would dare to go, or even know that you can go.

I bring this up first to agree with myself: Battlefield Earth, probably the most infamous movie of the last 25 years, is not actually as bad as its reputation. Once you've crawled through the toxic ash of Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, I don't know if you can even honestly say that it's the worst wide-release film of the 2000s. And yet, I still find myself moved to say that yes, this probably does deserve to be called the worst movie of its generation. The difference is that Battlefield Earth cost quite a lot of money: $73 million officially, and while that number was legally found to have been cooked, it was still a costly A-picture, positioned as one of Warner Bros.' tentpoles for the 2000 summer season (along with The Perfect Storm). Anybody can make an astonishingly shitty movie with no resources and talent: it takes some particularly offensive ineptitude to make something as flagrantly awful as Battlefield Earth as a full-fledged studio project. The only films in the last quarter of a century that I can think of to even challenge it as the most jaw-dropping waste of money on something genuinely, blitheringly incompetent is 2004's , and perhaps 2020's ; and even those aren't quite as bad at fundamentals as this is. Whatever else you can say, they both know how to use a spirit level.

Battlefield Earth tells us very quickly how far to lower our expectations: about six seconds after the studio logos are done, when ultra-cheesy neon-green text that scrolls out to tell us that the film is A Saga of the Year 3000, and then about ten seconds later similar text provides the detailed exposition that "Man is an endangered species". But hell, sometimes movies make bad text choices, right? Fuck, uses Papyrus, and it's the most over-the-top spectacular spend-all-the-money movie in history. And yes, those ten seconds in-between the squirrelly titles also include an establishing shot of the Colorado Rockies that are shown for a brief flash as a photo negative, and Christ knows what that's about, but sometimes movies open with flourishes of style. So let's just chalk it up to that. "Style". We can still hold out hope for a whole minute yet. Admittedly, during that minute, specifically at the 1:17 mark, we get our very first canted angle:

And that's not, like the worst canted angle. There will, in fact, be several dozen worse canted angles in this very movie. It's bad - the weight of the composition is all fucked, and actor Sabine Karsenti (in the role of "Chrissy") should at the very least be left of center, even if director Roger Christian and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens steadfastly refused to do anything about that enormous gulf of empty sky thrown off by how she and all the textured rock are bunched up in the same part of the frame. And it stands out as a weird fucking shot, and once you know the film, it feels laden with foreboding: I haven't counted, so I don't know if Battlefield Earth has more canted shots than level shots, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least if that was the case. And if you use something that dramatic and pointed so indiscriminately, you have not just robbed it of all its power, you make yourself look like an colossal jackass whose fascination with "coolness" has all of the intellectual weight of a magpie tugging at a bit of tinsel, or a baby gazing rapturously at keys jangling.

Still, it's just a canted angle, we can still hold out our swiftly-diminishing hope that, okay, it's not going to be good, but maybe it will merely be bland. I mean, yeah, it's a film that would think nothing of cutting directly from this shot:

To this shot:

But okay, formally speaking, that cut isn't forbidden. It's a tight medium shot cutting to a loose close-up, which is pushing it, and it really sucks a lot that Karsenti takes up basically the exact same screen real-estate in both frames, so it feels like a really defective graphic match, but it doesn't break any rules. It's just ugly and completely unnecessary, in that the cut neither gives us new information nor emphasises anything. But if a student turned in that cut, back when I was teaching editing to undergraduates, I wouldn't take points off for it. So we can still cling to the belief that there might be something salvageable for a good half-minute yet - a half minute in which there are more canted angles ("more" numerically, and "more" in that they are even further off level), and another couple instances of too much cutting between functionally identical shots (one of a man on a horse sliding down a hill, one of the same man processing bad news as Chrissy puts her hand out to comfort him). But the time for dry-heaving hasn't started yet.

That comes with the film's third line of dialogue.

The film's first two lines of dialogue aren't treasures: the man, whose name I think we never do hear spoken aloud in the whole movie, but as the credits will proudly tell us, he has been given the extraordinary handle of "Johnnie Goodboy Tyler" (Barry Pepper, whose two years as a promising new actor in the wake of Saving Private Ryan were basically shot in the face by this movie), tells Chrissy, "This is all the medicine I could find," and she replies, "I'm sorry, the gods took your father in the night." Which is pretty blunt exposition, and makes her feel like an NPC in a video game, but that's kind of what she is.

At any rate, Johnnie Goodboy Tyler is of course unhappy to hear this, and so the third line of dialogue in the movie, bless its heart, the one that finally kills of any and all optimism that we might be sitting down for something broadly functional and in any way enjoyable, well, the third line of dialogue in Battlefield Earth is a slow-motion "noooooooo!" That's hard to make work under the best of circumstances, but before we know literally anything about these people besides the fact that Johnnie Goodboy Tyler's father has just died? It's part and parcel of the insane canted angle thing: Battlefield Earth has absolutely no clue how to modulate. It is a movie that goes for the biggest gesture 100% of the time - there's also plenty more slow-motion to come, on top of everything - and therefore has nothing left in reserve by, say, the second scene. Anyway, this the point where one gives up hope: exactly two minutes, to the second, into the movie. 40 of those seconds were studio logos.

The film itself is a vague parable about Scientology: it is based on the 1982 novel by Scientology founder/mediocre science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard (with a screenplay credited to Corey Mandell and J.D. Shapiro, the latter of whom has distanced himself far, far away from the finished product), and was willed into existence by star John Travolta, the second-most famous celebrity Scientologist. Herein, man has been driven to the point of endangerment by a race of tall aliens named Psychlos - from the planet Psychlo, which must be either very convenient or very confusing - whose most alien characteristic is that they have dreadlocks, and six clawed fingers on their right hands, but only five on their left. These sixth fingers are immobile latex, so whenever a Psychlo makes a fist or does really anything else with their right hand, the bottom finger stays pointing up, like they are at an Edwardian tea party, the daintiest motherfuckers in the galaxy. The Psychlos have come to mine all of Earth's gold, and after 1000 years, have not gotten very far; it doesn't help that they can't go basically anywhere without running into enough radiation to explode their very delicate breathing gas, and so they live in a large dome surrounding what used to be Denver.

Terl (Travolta), the head of Psychlo security, has just gotten the hideous news that, owing to his enemies at The Home Office (Psychlo society is apparently one large corporation, which I imagine Hubbard meant to make them ultra-capitalists, though it's kind of more like ultra-Communism), he will be kept on the hideous planet Earth, with its blue skies and green plants - yep, it's that kind of writing - for another "fifty cycles". With endless options for renewal, a Psychlo threat that Christian wants to emphasise as so horrifying to Terl that he puts on an echo effect and loops it, so we hear it as something like "Endless options for renewEndless options for renewEndless options for renewal". Psychlo language is very heavy in business jargon, incidentally; a good Battlefield Earth drinking game would be to take a sip every time a character says "leverage". If you take very, very tiny sips, you might even live to see the end of the movie, though that hardly seems like an appropriate goal.

Anyway, Terl is so pissed off that he decides to run a super-illegal side operation to get some gold for himself, send it back to Psychlo, and buy off the right bureaucrats to get himself back home. The problem is, the richest vein he knows about that the highers-ups don't is deep in territory that is especially hostile to Psychlos, so he needs some particularly smart humans - "man-animals", in another phrase for your drinking game, though even with tiny sips, this and "leverage" together would put you in a coma by the 45-minute mark. The dialogue in Battlefield Earth is extraordinarily bad across the board, but the Psychlo terms are where it really sings. "You are out of your skull bone if you think that I am going to write on the report 'shot by man-animal' as the cause of the death unless I see it!" is a line that Travolta attacks with the hambone relish of a thousand Vincent Prices, and he can still just barely make it work.

Also, it's never "rat-animal" nor "dog-animal", so what the fuck.

I was saying, Terl needs the cleverest man-animal to mine the gold, and it just so happens that Johnnie Goodboy Tyler, having fled his people's mountain village in despair, and been caught by the Psychlo patrols, who found him in the remains of a shopping mall that looks to be in surprisingly good shape, given that it's 1000 years old. He tried to escape by crashing through, like, a half-dozen glass panels. In slow-motion. Anyway, Terl's airtight plan is to put Johnnie Goodboy Tyler into the Psychlo's "learn all the information in the universe" machine, to give him the technical know-how to operate the mining equipment; instead, he become a super-genius who can train an entire squadron of humans who have regressed to caveman status how to fly Harrier jets - that still operate fine after 1000 years, you just need to knock the quarter-inch of dust off them - so they can get into a dogfight in the Psychlo dome, while also warping a nuclear weapon back to Psychlo to destroy the entire planet. Terl's intelligence, meanwhile, goes so far as assuming that raw rat is a human's favorite food, after watching Johnnie Goodboy Tyler eat one rather than starve to death.

20 years later, I remain undecided whether the writing or the filmmaking is the greater disaster. The writing puts up an irresistible fight. The entire plot hinges on the villain being the most spectacular idiot conceivable, and also on the entirety of Washington, D.C. being almost entirely intact - and still on a fully-functioning power grid! - 1000 years after man became an endangered species. The dialogue includes gem after gem after gem: the village elder sagely tells Chrissy, waiting for Johnnie Goodboy Tyler to come back and save them all, "Hope is an admirable quality, but foolish isn't". Several humans, a millennium after the last baked good was eaten, suggest that Johnnie Goodboy Tyler's plan is a "piece of cake", a catchphrase that the film thinks so highly of that it allows one of the characters who has gotten the most screentime, which basically means he has the most character development, to quietly whisper it to himself, mournfully, before deliberately killing himself to stop the Psychlos. And as I said, there's no end to the delirious sci-fi gobbledygook that the aliens are required to say. "I am going to make you as happy as a baby Psychlo on a straight diet of kerbango," is one of the most torturous lines, delivered by a Psychlo prostitute with a gross CGI tongue, played by Travolta's wife Kelly Preston. But I am partial to the idiotic, weirdly bowdlerised Psychlo cursing as when Terl, knocking his head on a low doorjamb, screams "Crap-lousy ceiling!"

Oh, it's a bad script, all right. But it's also such a hideously-made thing! The rat-a-tat editing and canted angles I have mentioned; I have not, however, talked about the addition to using screen wipes between scenes. But not just any wipes! These are wipes that start at the middle and go to the left and right, like curtains opening. It is the stupidest shit. I am fond of recalling the film's DVD case, which couldn't find a more enthusiastic critical pullquote to put on the back than "Great scene transitions!", which I've always found extra-hilarious because the scene transitions are, in fact, terrible.

The acting, of course, is hopeless, and was never going to be any better; still, watching Barry Pepper pounce around like a pantomime spider-monkey while mocking the villagers' fear of demons gives us an early sign of just how far away from anything reasonably human the cast is going to be going, and Travolta's lip-smacking villain turn seals the deal. Weirdly, the film has one genuinely great performance: Forest Whitaker is on hand to play Terl's assistant, Ker, and he has somehow come to the conclusion that the way to survive this is by taking it extremely seriously, and playing the part of an inept Machievellian whose greed and venality drives him to try at every turn to outsmart his boss as a complex character of conflicting motives. It's quite a sight, almost more garish as a direct result of how jarring it is compared to everything else in the movie than another dopey melodramatic baddie would be. God knows what Whitaker thought he was up to, or why he felt this would help him survive the movie, but it sure as hell is something.

Anyway, you have a disaster of a screenplay meeting dreadfully overdone and under-thought filmmaking, plus $40+ million of crappy CGI and elaborately cheesy sets, and that gives you Battlefield Earth: a most polished, grandiose sci-fi epic that also feels like it was made by giddy teens in the basement of a local factory. It earns every little bit of its infamy, but it's also one of the most hilarious bad movies I have ever seen, largely because of how grandly messy its ambitions are compared to how wildly ill-judged every single one of its choices is. And also because Travolta looks like a Rastafarian Conehead with metal boogers hanging a foot down from his nose, to be sure. It is a gift that keeps on giving, Battlefield Earth, one of the worst movies I have seen the most times (enough that I've lost the count, but this was for sure my fifth viewing, at least), and have probably pushed on more bad movie-curious people than anything this side of . There really is nothing else like it: many films are bad in the same way, but none so comprehensively, nor at such remarkable scale.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Any serious bad movie watcher knows that the films that are very famous for being bad generally aren't really the worst of the worst. Like, Plan 9 from Outer Space? Helpless and very stupid, but it's got its charms - it's not even the worst Ed Wood movie.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It would be fun not to know that Baz Luhrmann's new movie is an adaptation, not to have read the book that it's an adaptation of, not to bother comparing the movie to its source or evaluating its fidelity to or imaginative reinterpretation of the novel, but simply to watch "The Great Gatsby" as a movie that brings some notable actors together in a sumptuously-realized Jazz Age extravaganza to tell a tumble of good stories-of a lost love fleetingly recaptured, a couple of marriages unhinged, a crime unsolved, lives violently lost, a fledgling romance dissolved, the disillusionment of a New York newcomer, and, overall, of the end of a time of fabled exuberance-by way of vividly conceived characters and finely rhetorical dialogue. It wouldn't make the resulting movie any better, but it would at least make for a source of wonder that an early-twenty-first-century screenwriter could offer up such a rich lode of material, regardless of the use made of it.

Yet, unlike the "Quixote" of Pierre Menard-the latter-day word-for-word recreation of the novel that, Borges joked, would be an even greater act of imagination than is Cervantes's account of his contemporary world-Fitzgerald's "Gatsby" would still be a greater achievement than that of Luhrmann and his co-writer, Craig Pearce, for the same reason that the novel became widely acclaimed and popular decades after its own time. "The Great Gatsby," which was published in 1925, is a work of brilliant, fine-tuned clairvoyance-it sounded the death knell for a generation that was still alive. Beside the book's intrinsically romantic qualities (and a doomed romance is often even more popularly romantic than one that works out), it reveals how Prohibition-which became the law of the land in 1919-infected the American character and offers a dim view of the financial markets that foreshadows the 1929 crash. The book is a cautionary tale that was offered to readers who, at the time, sought no caution. In the retrospective post-Depression view, however, "The Great Gatsby" all made perfect sense, its iridescent beauty and poetic fancy appearing as no more than a bright and floating bubble that, as everyone knew, had catastrophically burst. It's easy to be cautionary after things go to hell; Fitzgerald saw, and warned of, hell breaking through the collective illusion of paradise.

The filmmakers' most audacious creation is a framing story that renders the book's predictive power explicit: that of Nick Carraway, who, in December, 1929, checks into a clinic to get off alcohol and to get over an apparent breakdown (or what Fitzgerald, writing about his own mental and physical crisis in 1936, called his "Crack Up"). In the clinic, Nick is induced by his doctor to delve into his past-by means of writing-and, supplied with a typewriter, he undertakes a retrospective view of his life as it led to his collapse and begins it with the first words of "The Great Gatsby," which, as he writes the words, becomes the story that's shown on screen. The framing device sets the movie explicitly in the context of the burst Wall Street bubble and the nation's collective breakdown, the economic collapse as well as the rampant gangsterism that was a mere sanguinary trickle in the novel's 1922 setting but which, by the late twenties, became a world-famous bloodletting. (Fascinatingly, the 1949 film of the novel updates the action to 1928 and sets it explicitly in the milieu of gangland murders and the Wall Street boom-time "gravy train"-and also establishes Nick Carraway as a former aspiring writer.)

The conceit of Nick Carraway as the stand-in for Fitzgerald may not be quite exact, though. Famously, Fitzgerald himself had lost an early but great love due to his own poverty and then, soon thereafter and quickly, made a big pile of money-but let Fitzgerald tell the story, as he did in 1936, in the autobiographical essay "Handle with Care" (the sequel to the title essay of the book "The Crack-Up"):

It was one of those tragic loves doomed for lack of money, and one day the girl closed it out on the basis of common sense. During a long summer of despair I wrote a novel instead of letters, so it came out all right, but it came out all right for a different person. The man with the jingle of money in his pocket who married the girl a year later would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class-not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smouldering hatred of a peasant. In the years since then I have never been able to stop wondering where my friends' money came from, nor to stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them my girl.

In other words, Fitzgerald had been in love with Ginevra King, who instead married a wealthy young man. Soon thereafter, Fitzgerald, a successful writer, married Zelda Sayre. Nick Carraway may have learned where his friends' money came from and headed back to the Midwest (so did Fitzgerald, in the summer of 1919, where he wrote "This Side of Paradise"), but Fitzgerald returned to New York with "the jingle of money in his pocket" and became a Gatsby-like overnight grandee of wild parties.

Fitzgerald's literary and personal conception of the aphrodisiac power of money, though, was remote to two of the most important writers of the day-D. H. Lawrence, and Fitzgerald's friend Ernest Hemingway, whose prime themes are virility and vitality, the physical energy and mental discipline which carry a sexual charge. In effect, they wrote of the higher animal prowling around the edges of a society and making incursions; Fitzgerald, however, wrote of society, remained an insider, and his view of social gamesmanship and the finely-calibrated inflections and higher frequencies with which insiders speak to each other-and the forceful desires that those glittering games both conceal and express-is the essence of his poetic vision of the world, the charm of his despair.

The problem with Luhrmann's film is that it's under the top. For all of its lurching and gyrating party scenes, for all the inflated pomp of the Gatsby palace and the Buchanan mansion, for all the colorful clothing and elaborate personal styling, Luhrmann takes none of it seriously, and makes none of it look remotely alluring, enticing, fun. His whizzing 3-D cinematography offers lots of motion but no seduction; his parties are turbulent and raucous without being promising, without holding out the allure of magical encounters. They're in the story, of course, those encounters-there's no story without them-but Luhrmann, a man of his times, has no patience for mystery, no sense of true and brazen immodesty. He may have spent a lot of money to put his grandiose vision of the novel onto the screen, but he seems to be apologizing for it in advance. There was something in that most profligate night life, in the obscenely indulgent expenditures of the rich on destructive amusements for themselves and their friends and the hangers-on, that had a diabolical appeal to Fitzgerald-but it has none for Luhrmann, and the movie offers none.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"The Great Gatsby": Try Again, Old Sport

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It would be fun not to know that Baz Luhrmann's new movie is an adaptation, not to have read the book that it's an adaptation of, not to bother comparing the movie to its source or evaluating its fidelity to or imaginative reinterpretation of the novel, but simply to watch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In King Lear, William Shakespeare has the exiled Edgar remind us that "the worst is not / So long as we can say 'this is the worst.'" Allow me to paraphrase that for our current situation: the worst is not, so long as we can say "Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 was only five years in the future."

But man oh man, that is the only standard by which 1999's Baby Geniuses looks even the teeny-tiniest bit acceptable as a work of cinema, an object produced by human beings, or anything that a loving God would permit to exist.* Aesthetically and morally, I can hardly name a more viscerally repugnant family film from the 1990s, though the decade's direct-to-video children's cinema is a malarial bog into which I have thus far avoided sinking.

The film starts with a robust "what if?" - what if all human babies, prior to the acquisition of language, possessed all available knowledge and had the ability to communicate with every other human baby? The answer provided by the five writers - including the film's director Bob Clark, whose decline from his great highs in the 1970s and early '80s became irreversible here, I think - is that the babies would speak unusually well-formed, articulate jokes to each other about filling their diapers. And these are the ultra-smart laboratory babies being experimented on by Dr. Elena Kinder (Kathleen Turner) and Dr. Heep (Christopher Lloyd) in the underground bunker below the headquarters of BabyCo, the extraordinarily successful baby goods manufacturer that Kinder uses as the legitimate face of her insane experiments. What those experiments are meant to yield is a bit fuzzy - learning the baby language, I suppose, and thence learning the babies' secrets of the universe, but again, since we only hear them talking about things like shitting and eating, I think that Kinder would find it not worth the effort. Some geniuses.

The particulars of the story hinge on Sly and Whit (triplets Leo, Myles, and Gerry Fitzgerald), twins who were separated at birth by Kinder as part of a control group; we learn about this in a bit of exposition that is especially grueling, since it's not just the usual "hello, let me tell you something we both already know", but Heep specifically asking a computer to tell him things he already knows. Sly is the smartest of all the baby geniuses, while Whit lives with Kinder's niece, Robin (Kim Cattrall) and her husband, Dan (Peter MacNicol), who run a daycare, I think. Dan also has been exploring the universal baby language in an amateur capacity, and has gotten farther along than Kinder with her high-tech facility, so that also makes it seem like Kinder's plan needed some more time in the oven. Anyway, Sly keeps escaping, and eventually manages to end up in the same mall as Whit; the two accidentally swap places, and the scene is set for Dan to learn all about Kinder's nefarious plots, whatever they are, specifically. It involves opening a theme park, but I think that's about funding the research, not controlling the world, or whatever.

The obscurity of the story notwithstanding, the horror of Baby Geniuses lies not in its asinine concept, but the repulsive execution of that concept. To make the babies talk, the filmmakers hit upon an elaborate new use of morphing technology: recording their infant stars babbling, collect as many mouth-shapes as possible, digitally stitching those shapes into words, and painting the completed mouth animation onto the children's faces. Basically a much more cumbersome, multi-step version of the "make LBJ talk" bit from Forrest Gump. It looks thoroughly horrible in most cases, and unlike in Superbabies, which shaped the dialogue around the baby actors' movements, here there's no real relationship between what we're hearing and what we're seeing, so the dialogue seems to be drifting in from somewhere far away from the world of the film.

This is the second uncanniest, most disgusting thing that the babies to. The most uncanny thing comes when Sly finds his way into a Baby Gap for a quick bit of product placement, and to put on some clothes. This results in a short dress-up montage - not so short that it can't fit in both Taco's "Puttin' on the Ritz" and the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" on the soundtrack - during which Sly is played by a CGI animated body with a photorealistic scan of the Fitzgerald brothers' head perched atop it; the body moves with boneless fluidity that matches nothing else that any character does anywhere in the film.

Speaking of Sly's quest for clothing: during this same part of the film, he crawls into a baby carriage to ask if he can have the clothes being worn by its occupant, a baby girl. She cracks a few jokes about how he hasn't even taken her to dinner yet, and as he leaves the carriage (now in her dress, she shouts after him "Call me". Whether this scene is enough to make Baby Geniuseses as repulsive as its sequel's decision to make its villain a carbon copy of Josef Mengele, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

At any rate, the film is plenty repulsive, and for more reasons than its sexual banter between toddlers. The endless array of garbage sitcom jokes emerging from the hideously-animated mouths of babes is part of it, of course; so are the dreadful comic side characters played by Dom DeLuise, Ruby Dee, and Kyle Howard, as well as the fact that Kathleen Turner is involved in this at all.

On top of all of this, it's also barbarically ugly, with cinematographer Stephen M. Katz overrelying on extreme wide angle lenses - at first this is just to make the villains look uglier, then it's to present a kind of baby's-eye-view distortion, and eventually it doesn't seem to serve any function at all; it's just something the film does, occasionally. As though the CGI baby wasn't horrible enough, so every other person needed to look horrible as well.

All of which is to say: Baby Geniuses is a revolting motion picture. Not just bad; it instills a sense of furious loathing in the viewer, a deep ontological wrongness that demands we reject the hideous talking baby-creatures as well as the plodding and meaningless narrative containing them. It's a move betting everything on us finding it "cute", only to offer a vision of "cuteness" simultaneously so dumb and grotesque as to be even worse than if it was tying to be cynical, or satiric, or I don't know what. It is not so bottomlessly vile as Superbabies, so I guess it has that going for it; but even if I probably wouldn't call it the single worst, most appalling film of the 1990s, it's certainly in the conversation.

*Of course, the two theatrical Baby Geniuses pictures are part of that most awesome and terrible of genres, movies that prove that God exists and He hates us.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In King Lear , William Shakespeare has the exiled Edgar remind us that the worst is not / So long as we can say 'this is the worst.' Allow me to paraphrase that for our current situation: the worst is not, so long as we can say <a href=https:...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In ''Evolution,'' Ivan Reitman's scattershot sci-fi comedy, Orlando Jones and David Duchovny play community college science instructors who happen upon an alien life-form that threatens to take over the world. A meteor has crashed into the Arizona desert. Examining the blue-green slime that oozes from beneath its surface (''It's a rock that bleeds!''), Mr. Duchovny's character, a disgraced former Pentagon biologist named Ira Kane, discovers a colony of squirming star-shaped amoebas. These quickly mutate into more complex microorganisms, and then into computer-animated flatworms, insects, slimy lizards and angry primates.

The movie itself evolves in reverse, starting life as a moderately clever grab bag of high-concept noodling and half-witty badinage before descending into the primordial ooze of explosions and elaborate lower-intestinal gags. Mr. Duchovny and Mr. Jones make an amusing pair. Their interracial shtick is reminiscent of that of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in movies like ''Silver Streak'' and ''Stir Crazy,'' but with the ragged anxiety of the late 70's smoothed over by the referential pop-culture cool of the present day.

Mr. Duchovny works hard to show some range beyond Agent Mulder's morbid intensity while still poking fun at his ''X-Files'' pedigree. ''No government,'' Ira snaps when Harry suggests alerting the federal authorities about their discovery. ''I know how those people operate.'' In his first scenes, Mr. Duchovny, who was a Ph.D. candidate in literature before becoming an alien tracker for the Fox network, captures the easygoing cynicism of the second-rate academic with frightening accuracy. Virtually everyone in his class gets an A, except for two obese brothers whose identical papers, titled ''Cells Are Bad,'' earn them C-minuses.

But compared with Harry, Ira is Jonas Salk. Mr. Jones, best known as the demented pitchman for 7-Up, has quick timing and effortless improvisational flair, as well as an absolute, and in this case welcome, disregard for consistencies of character. Mr. Duchovny is constrained by a silly back story involving his mishandling of a Pentagon-sponsored anthrax vaccine (the laughs never stop!) and a love interest (played, for no good reason, by Julianne Moore); Mr. Jones is free to mug and gangle to his heart's content.

''I've seen this movie,'' he says as an alien bug crawls around inside his protective suit. ''The black dude dies first.'' No, but he is subject to some fairly gross indignities: the bug must be extracted from his nether regions with forceps. Later, as payback, he administers a dandruff-shampoo enema to the shopping-mall-size mass of protoplasm that threatens civilization as we know it.

Unfortunately, civilization as we know it -- that is, the highly evolved state of being that can find no better use for its biological advantages than the production of movies like this one -- triumphs in the end. That dandruff shampoo appears to be a clever product placement, a moment that the rest of the movie, for all its ickily impressive digital flora and fauna and its cast of good sports, rarely lives up to.

Seann William Scott, in the designated-doofus (or David Arquette) role of a hapless aspiring firefighter, has some moments of slack-jawed charm. Ms. Moore falls down a lot and bumps into things. She's sexy, she's a scientist, she's clumsy; comic invention of this caliber makes you sorry the writers' strike never happened. From time to time an actor -- usually Mr. Duchovny, Mr. Jones or Ted Levine, who plays a Pentagon heavy -- will send up a tired action-movie or television-show commonplace: ''Let's do this!'' ''It's payback time!'' ''Be careful out there!'' But the spoofing of movie clichés has become a cliché in its own right, and beneath the hyperactivity of ''Evolution'' is an abiding laziness.

In a Darwinian universe, this is a dangerous thing. The biggest frustration in ''Evolution'' is that it squanders an interesting premise. The aliens evolve so quickly, compressing hundreds of millions of years into a few short days, that you can't help wondering what they will look like when they turn into us. But we never get past the angry apes.

Maybe in ''Evolution II'' the process of natural selection will be allowed to proceed further, and we can witness the full flowering of superior life-forms -- or at least see whether they have it in them to make better movies than this one.

''Evolution'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some profanity and the usual gross-out humor.

EVOLUTION

Directed by Ivan Reitman; written by David Diamond, David Weissman and Don Jakoby, based on a story by Mr. Jakoby; director of photography, Michael Chapman; edited by Sheldon Kahn and Wendy Greene Bricmont; music by John Powell; production designer, J. Michael Riva; produced by Mr. Reitman, Daniel Goldberg and Joe Medjuck; released by DreamWorks. Running time: 103 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: David Duchovny (Ira), Julianne Moore (Allison), Orlando Jones (Harry), Seann William Scott (Wayne) and Ted Levine (Dr. Woodman).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
FILM REVIEW; It's Big, It's Bad, It's Mutating Protoplasm (Published 2001)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The profusion of digitally animated critters — garish bugs, flying lizards, berserk primates — and the good humor of the gifted cast cannot save this pointless comedy from sinking into the primordial ooze of uninspired dumbness.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
FILM REVIEW

''Flawlessly unfunny'' is how Janet Maslin described Bob Clark's 1999 ''Baby Geniuses'' in The New York Times, an opinion echoed by many if not most reviewers across the country. The film currently stands at No. 7 on the list of most reviled movies as compiled by the authoritative Metacritic.com.

And yet it has spawned a sequel, ''Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2,'' which is opening nationally today. Also directed by Mr. Clark, it seems likely to enter the Metacritic.com register at an even higher number, perhaps threatening to displace the legendary Pauly Shore vehicle, ''Bio-Dome,'' at the top of the list.

Not that ''Superbabies'' bears all that much resemblance to the first film. Gone are Kathleen Turner and Christopher Lloyd as an evil children's psychiatrist and her assistant.

Villainy toward the infant class now comes from Jon Voight, descending to the depths of his 37-year-career to play Bill Biscane, a media mogul who seems at once to be a caricature of Ted Turner and a Nazi storm trooper (complete with a Sergeant Schultz accent). It is the diabolical Biscane's plot to enslave all of America's infants by sending mind-control signals out through his children's television programming. The problem with this plan is that it is already in effect and endorsed by the F.C.C. It is called commercials.

Biscane's arch nemesis is a Superbaby, and perhaps a Baby Genius as well, who goes by the name of Kahuna and looks to be in the 7- or 8-year-old range, a little old for a baby, but this is not a film overly concerned with details. Played by the triplets Leo, Myles and Gerry Fitzgerald, Kahuna is a James Bondish figure who seems to have been borrowed from ''Spy Kids,'' arriving complete with a turbo-powered stroller that also converts into a kiddie-sized helicopter.

Kahuna enlists the help of four younger children, the pride of the BobbinsWorld nursery school, operated by Scott Baio and Vanessa Angel, two veteran actors who have spent the last few years in projects almost as embarrassing as this one. The lovable infants include one brave-hearted male (Michael and Max Iles), one intellectual with a Jewish name (Jordan and Jared Scheideman), one African-American boy who is praised for his bounciness (Joshua and Maxwell Lockhart) and a plucky girl with a Hispanic name (Maia and Keana Bastidas) who looks eerily like Christina Ricci and often sounds like her in the jokey dialogue the infants are supposedly speaking.

Thanks to the not very special effects, the babies are shown in mortal combat with the adults, delivering kung fu haymakers and poking fingers in eyes in the culturally resonant manner of the Three Stooges. (Mr. Clark underlines the parallel by using the Stooges' music cue.) This is not so much ''Look Who's Talking'' as ''Look Who's Walloping.''

''Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2'' is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested) for cartoon violence and crude humor.

SUPERBABIES

Baby Geniuses 2

Directed by Bob Clark; written by Gregory Poppen, based on a story by Steven Paul; director of photography, Maher Maleh; edited by Stan Cole; music by Helmut Zerlett and Paul Zaza; production designer, Deren P. Abram; produced by Mr. Paul; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 90 minutes. This film is rated PG.

WITH: Jon Voight (Bill Biscane), Scott Baio (Stan Bobbins), Vanessa Angel (Jean Bobbins), Justin Chatwin (Zack), Peter Wingfield (Crowe), Skyler Shaye (Kylie), Leo, Gerry and Myles Fitzgerald (Kahuna), Thomas Kretschmann (Roscoe), Michael and Max Iles (Archie), Jordan and Jared Scheideman (Finkleman), Maia and Keana Bastidas (Rosita), Joshua and and Maxwell Lockhart (Alex) and Garry Chalk (Police Captain).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
FILM REVIEW; With Kung Fu Babies, Who Needs to Call The Marines? (Published 2004)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
FILM REVIEW ''Flawlessly unfunny'' is how Janet Maslin described Bob Clark's 1999 ''Baby Geniuses'' in The New York Times, an opinion echoed by many if not most reviewers across the country. The film currently stands at No. 7 on the list of most reviled movies as compiled by the authoritative Metacritic.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After warring against the Romans abroad, King Arthur (Richard Short) returns to Britain to find his throne-warming son Modred (Joel Phillimore) has turned against him, with plans to broker a deal with the invading Saxons and marry the queen, Guinevere (Stella Stocker), against her will. Arthur must battle his own insecurities, gather his knights and reclaim Excalibur before he can hope to retake Camelot.

By Dan Jolin | Posted 14 Jul 2020

There's a lot you can do with Arthurian myth, from the gory opera of Excalibur, to the faux-historical grit of Antoine Fuqua's 2004 King Arthur, to Guy Ritchie's bizarre mix of high fantasy and geezer swagger in his 2017 misfire of the same name. Arthur & Merlin feels like a blend of all three, though was made on a budget that we suspect wouldn't have covered Ritchie's lunch expenses, and lacks the vision, wit or inventiveness to rise above its limitations.

Lore-wise, it's a meaningless hotchpotch of a story which doesn't know where to start (Arthur and Lancelot, already old buddies, find Guinevere in a cave), isn't sure how to end (with a lacklustre scrap in a barely furnished throne room) and struggles to join all the sketchy dots that lie in-between. The device of Arthur's foreign adventures - fighting the Romans, oddly - and his weak, royal snideness of a son wrecking the country while he's away is more reminiscent of the Robin Hood legend's take on Richard I and Prince John. Meanwhile, details like Arthur's loss of Excalibur, or the root of his loss of faith in his ability to rule - apparently crucial to this version of the character - are never explored.

As the bushy-bearded monarch, Richard Short (from TV's Mary Kills People) wrestles manfully with the thin material, but there is an air of perpetual constipation to his performance. You feel less inclined to sympathise with him than wish he'd take some laxatives.

For the most part, the film is a matter of Short and his rag-tag gaggle of scowling, hard-nut knights stomping around the same bit of Welsh woodland and barking in cod Olde English, while Merlin (played by Richard Brake, aka Joe Chill from Batman Begins) pops up in two scenes - with a literal "pop", weirdly, the second time - to talk bollocks for a few minutes before trotting off to wherever it is useless wizards like to hang out. Why this title character does so little is just one of the film's many frustrating mysteries, characteristic of the entire endeavour's ultimate pointlessness. To quote another take on Arthurian myth to which this film bears some (unintentional) resemblance: "Let's not go to Camelot. 'Tis a silly place."

A forgettable fantasy cheapie whose gruff earnestness feels hollow thanks to the unforgiveable thinness of its story and the weakness of its grip on its source material. Oh, and a note to whoever came up with the title: neither Arthur nor Merlin are knights of Camelot...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After warring against the Romans abroad, King Arthur (Richard Short) returns to Britain to find his throne-warming son Modred (Joel Phillimore) has turned against him, with plans to broker a deal with the invading Saxons and marry the queen, Guinevere (Stella Stocker), against her will.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Empty, Sanitized Intimacy of “Call Me by Your Name”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In Luca Guadagnino’s new film about the love affair between two young men, the director displays no real interest in the characters, only in the story.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Distinctly amateurish kung-fu kicks and delightful rubber-suited dinosaur antics can't quite disguise the fact that Steere is a filmmaker who knows what he's doing."

If the title doesn't make it clear to you at the outset what sort of film this is, you'll get the idea five minutes in when our hero, shy young priest Doug Jones (Greg Cohan), emerges from church to greet his parents, the camera cuts away for a moment, and then we see the words VFX - exploding car appear on the screen. The Velocipastor is as cheap and cheerful as they come - so much so that it would seem rude to give it more than one star - but it's a film that absolutely knows what it's doing at every stage, and if you approach it in the right spirit, it will show you a good time.

Nothing here is wasted. That missing explosion marks the tragic death of Doug's parents, setting up a mystery we will return to later on - but in the meantime, he must deal with his grief. "Go where you don't expect God to follow. If you find Him there, you'll know He's real," says his mentor Father Stewart (played by writer/director Brendan Steere). So he goes to China, where he encounters a dying woman who gives him a warning he can't understand, receives a strange relic and accidentally cuts himself on it. Weeks later, back home in the US, he finds himself haunted by strange dreams. It takes sex worker Carol (Alyssa Kempinski), who happens to be walking through the woods one night, to discover what's going on and confront him with the shocking truth: after dark he's turning into a velociraptor and munching on bad guys.

It might seem that life as a dinosaur and life as a man of the cloth are mutually incompatible, but Carol doesn't see it that way. What if he were to stop simply warning people about evil and actually do something about it? she suggests. Think of all the good they could do with the aid of his sharp teeth and deadly claws! Pretty soon he's set out on a religiously-inspired killing spree, but there soon prove to be more hazards to this lifestyle than simply being late to church in the mornings. The last of an ancient line of dragon warriors, he's attracted the attention of a secret ninja cult who are using drug smuggling to engineer a twisted theological plot of their own. Doug may be the only one who can stop them - if they don't get to him first.

Distinctly amateurish kung-fu kicks and delightful rubber-suited dinosaur antics can't quite disguise the fact that Steere is a filmmaker who knows what he's doing. The deliberate damage he did to the finished film to get that grindhouse look doesn't entirely obscure its competent framing and occasional bit of visual cleverness. Chan and Kempinski, meanwhile, play it absolutely straight and put their hearts into it, making it much more watchable than the average film of this type. It's surprisingly easy to stick with for 75 minutes and it packs in a lot of laughs. Thought it may not have much hope of winning awards, if you're just looking for something to enjoy with your friends on a drunken night in, it's a great choice.

Reviewed on: 21 Jan 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If the title doesn't make it clear to you at the outset what sort of film this is, you'll get the idea five minutes in when our hero, shy young priest Doug Jones (Greg Cohan), emerges from church to greet his parents, the camera cuts away for a moment, and then we see the words VFX - exploding car appear on the screen.

# data[].attributes.headline
Whiplash- A Jazz movie that has nothing to do with Jazz

# data[].attributes.subject
Whiplash- A Jazz movie that has nothing to do with Jazz

# data[].attributes.body
Emma

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"There are no two words in the English language more harmful than good job," declares Terence Fletcher, the viciously demanding jazz instructor in Damien Chazelle's . This sentiment doesn't seem to have registered with critics, though, because Whiplash is one of the best-reviewed films of 2014. The lobby poster is chockablock with glowing blurbs and studded with the sort of gerunds that make publicists tremble: exhilarating . . . astounding . . . electrifying. Rotten Tomatoes (for whatever it's worth) assigns the movie a positive score of 97 percent. "Even if you couldn't care less about jazz drumming . . . Whiplash is a thrill to watch," raves Dana Stevens in Slate. Chris Nashawaty echoes this sentiment in Entertainment Weekly: "You don't have to be a jazz fan for Whiplash to zap you. . . . If you can appreciate the sight of two totally dialed-in performers simmering until they boil over, that's enough. And P.S., that's pretty much the definition of jazz."

That's not my definition of jazz, and in fact people who love the music may find Whiplash faintly offensive. Tracking the conflict between Fletcher-the sadistic, screaming, superhumanly precise conductor of a big band at a prestigious New York conservatory-and a dedicated, play-till-your-hands-bleed drumming student, Whiplash has less in common with the great jazz dramas (Robert Altman's Kansas City, Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight) than with a much more plentiful cultural commodity, the inspirational sports drama. In fact, one reason critics are going bananas for Whiplash may be that it transplants the rousing mechanisms of the sports drama to the world of conservatory music, providing highbrow cover for writers who might otherwise blanch at its macho formula of noble masochism and glorious self-realization.

I'll give them one thing, though: Whiplash offers a towering performance by J.K. Simmons, one of the great character actors of the day. With his bald head, icy blue eyes, sonorous voice, and withering sarcasm, Simmons first caught my attention almost 20 years ago when he played a scary, formidably intelligent white supremacist on the NBC drama Homicide: Life on the Street. Recurring roles on Oz and Law & Order followed, and over the years Simmons has appeared in movies by the Coen brothers (The Ladykillers, Burn After Reading) and Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking, , Up in the Air), as well as the first Spider-Man franchise (as the roaring J. Jonah Jameson). He's one of those insurance-policy actors who elevates whatever he's in, with the result that he never quits working but seldom gets the parts he deserves.

Terence Fletcher is the exception, a giant, Oscar-grabbing role, and the scenes of him terrorizing his students are as gripping as the basic training sequences in Full Metal Jacket. Fletcher rules by insult, and his instruction is rife with racist, sexist, and homophobic put-downs. ("That is not your boyfriend's dick," he advises one of the reed players.) During a class break, he gently quizzes Andrew (Miles Teller), a first-year student intent on becoming the next Buddy Rich, about his family-his mother left when he was a child, his father wanted to be a writer but now teaches high school English-and then, back in class, uses this personal information to humiliate Andrew in front of the others. The cowed students stare at the floor during Fletcher's tirades, which sometimes cross over into physical abuse: when Andrew has trouble with the tempo of a number, Fletcher gets in his face, counts "one, two, three, four," and slaps him across the cheek just off the four count, over and over, bellowing, "Was I rushing or dragging?"

For Fletcher, jazz is a duel to the death, and he encourages a cutthroat environment. When he recruits Andrew, the young drummer begins as an understudy and page turner for Carl (Nate Lang), the core player, but after Carl fumbles at a competition, Fletcher promotes Andrew to the lead spot. This triumph is short-lived, however; almost immediately, Fletcher finds an even younger student, Ryan (Austin Stowell), to position as usurper to the drum throne. Finally he pits all three of them against each other, banishing everyone else from the classroom and endlessly rotating the drummers until one of them can execute a fiendishly fast double-time swing rhythm. This torture session goes on for hours until Andrew finally wins; the sequence is undeniably compelling, but it seems to have been lifted from Hoosiers or any of a hundred other movies about a coach whipping his team into shape.

Andrew is the perfect sucker for Fletcher's raw aggression and be-all-you-can-be rhetoric. He practices relentlessly, layering bandages over his bloody blisters, and though his kindhearted father (Paul Reiser) urges him to maintain some perspective, Andrew soon begins to adopt Fletcher's stance of arrogant superiority. At Thanksgiving dinner he brags to his relatives about his status as the youngest student in Fletcher's advanced studio band and mocks his cousins for their modest athletic achievements. He strikes up a relationship with Nicole (Melissa Benoist), a young student at a nearby university, but can barely conceal his smugness when she admits she can't decide on a major. Eventually he summons her to a coffee shop and breaks off the romance, coldly explaining that he can't let anything get in the way of his quest for musical immortality.

But for all the emphasis on jazz (and all the swaggering big-band numbers by Justin Hurwitz), Whiplash isn't really a jazz-oriented movie. We've all heard about the legendary after-hours "cutting contests" in which the great players soloed back and forth, trying to smoke each other. But if you've ever played in any kind of improvisational group, you know that the key to making it work is listening to your fellow players, not trying to vanquish them. The jazz musicians I know may be incredibly exacting like Fletcher, but the good ones also understand that generosity and camaraderie are integral to a great ensemble, and that the easiest way to ruin a number is to let it turn into an ego competition, with every player disinterestedly marking time until the spotlight comes to him.

What Whiplash ultimately champions isn't really musicianship but empty, grandstanding virtuosity. Under Fletcher's tutelage, Andrew never learns anything about nuance or dynamics; as designated by Chazelle, the measures of his artistic accomplishment are strictly speed and ferocity. The movie ends with Andrew executing one of those horrible, endless jerk-off solos that give jazz a bad name, though it's presented as the ultimate victory. It's a moment of technical perfection in an art form whose magic lies in its occasional flaws. Louis Armstrong, a jazz musician of some repute, was so poorly schooled that he never learned how to form a proper embouchure (which is why he had that awful circular groove in his upper lip until the day he died). Some of his greatest solos from the 20s and 30s have their bum notes, because he was always trying something new, but no one can fault the feeling he put into them. To be one of the greats, you have to run the risk of being no good at all.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Whiplash: A jazz movie that has nothing to do with jazz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"There are no two words in the English language more harmful than good job," declares Terence Fletcher, the viciously demanding jazz instructor in Damien Chazelle's . This sentiment doesn't seem to have registered with critics, though, because Whiplash is one of the best-reviewed films of 2014.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Out of print for more than 30 years, now available for the first time as an eBook, this is the controversial story of John Wooden's first 25 years and first 8 NCAA Championships as UCLA Head Basketball Coach. Notre Dame Coach Digger Phelps said, "I used this book as an inspiration for the biggest win of my career when we ended UCLA's all-time 88-game winning streak in 1974."

Compiled with more than 40 hours of interviews with Coach Wooden, learn about the man behind the coach. Click the Book to read the players telling their stories in their own words. This is the book that UCLA Athletic Director J.D. Morgan tried to ban.

Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information.

Bratz: The Movie (0/10) by Tony Medley I've gone to movies about teenaged girls before with extremely low expectation. Mean Girls (2004) and Legally Blonde (2001) come to mind. I came out of both thoroughly enchanted. Producer Avi Arad decided to make a film based on the popular chic fashion dolls BRATZ™. He got Sean McNamara to direct and Susan Estelle Jansen to write (there are also "story by" credits, which indicates some problems with the script. Believe me, those problems are evident. Unable to come up with an original story, they have given a new name to derivitivity by stealing with impunity from both Mean Girls andLegally Blonde. Unfortunately, while both of the latter were overflowing with talent (Mean Girls was written by Tina Fey, directed by Mark Waters, and starred Rachel McAdams, Lindsay Lohan, and Fey;Legally Blonde starred Oscar®-winning actress Reese Witherspoon and Luke Wilson), this has a bunch of basically unknowns who, off their performances here, are likely to remain so; although, to be fair, the material with which they were forced to work was dismal. They auditioned 5,000 girls to portray the politically correct, ethnically diverse, fashion dolls (the dolls themselves have been controversial because they present blatantly sexual clothes like navel-bearing tops and very short skirts to very little, impressionable girls). To make the movie palatable to parents, these types of clothes have been modified or eliminated. Apparently the dress-up dolls have names. Four of them, Yasmin (Nathalia Ramos), Jade (Janel Parrish), Sasha (Logan Browning) and Cloe (Skyler Shaye) appear in this film. We are told at the outset that they have been BFF (Best Friends Forever; a sappy appellation that is a true indication of what's to come). Because they are entering Carry Nation High School, the film tells how their new environment affects them and their friendship. The witch in the broth is student body president Meredith Baxter Dimly (Chelsea Staub), who is a direct steal of Witherspoon's character in Legally Blonde in that she constantly carries a silly little dog with her everywhere she goes. High school must be very different from my time if we are to believe this movie. Dimly is Student Body President when the girls arrive. She is still Student Body President two years later. When I was in high school the Student Body President was always a senior. Dimly is aided and abetted by her father, Principal Berkman (Jon Voight), who is, well, the Principal of the school. What follows is predictable, if not entertaining or funny. Sure, this is intended as a satire about frivolous girls on the cusp of being teenagers, but satires require talent. There is no hint of talent in this movie, except for the beautiful color and some of the music. But it is a targeted audience they are after, ergo the sound track and commercial tie-ins with Skechers shoes and MTV. Unless you're in the target, a little girl between the ages of 6 and 10, if this isn't the most mind-numbingly idiotic movie made this century, it gives others something to shoot at. July 30, 2007

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Out of print for more than 30 years, now available for the first time as an eBook, this is the controversial story of John Wooden's first 25 years and first 8 NCAA Championships as UCLA Head Basketball Coach.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The blockbuster to end all blockbusters, 1997's Titanic, directed by James Cameron was for many years the highest grossing movie in box office history. Setting off a chain reaction that would infect everything from pop culture to the antique market, Titanic is considered by many to be one of the best and most romantic movies of all time. I on the other hand loath Titanic for its sappy, sentimental story which left me rolling my eyes at the end of the movie.

Why People Absolutely Adore Titanic...

Titanic was released in cinemas a few days before Christmas in 1997 and would go onto make $2.187 billion dollars at the box office. Yes, I just wrote billion. I know I still can't believe it either. Titanic was made for $200 million and for many years would be included in the Guinness Book of World Records as the highest grossing movie of all time. Today, that record is held by another mediocre movie with a weak story, Avatar, which made Cameron a billionaire two times over. He's why I don't believe in karma.

Titanic has an 88% critic's score on Rotten Tomatoes and an audience score of 69%, which means audiences obviously don't care about Titanic as much as the critics did. While I think the audience score is also too high, I will say that it's a better reflection on the longevity of this movie. Other than its box office success, not many people I've spoken to feel that Titanic holds up over time and I personally never thought it was any good to begin with.

Why I Hate Titanic...

I was 14 years old at the time Titanic came out and wasn't able to see Titanic in the cinemas until a few weeks after it's released. Why not? Every theatre was sold out for several days in advance. This was back before the internet, when people actually went out to see movies and selling out multiple showings of one movie wasn't as uncommon like it is today.

When I finally saw Titanic, I was beyond disappointed. In fact, I've been forced to see this movie many times in recent years and every single time I feel nothing but disappointment. A big complain about Titanic has to do with the "history" in the movie. Since everyone knows that the ship goes down... Oh sorry, spoiler alerts for those who don't know this historical fact... Cameron wrote in one of the most forced love stories I've ever seen on film. Yes, the ship hits an iceberg but the crew actually saw the iceberg minutes before the Titanic went down. However, for some reason the ship didn't change course and therefore, the most devastating part of the film wasn't even accurate. Up time that point, Cameron spent over 2 hours, and did I mention this film is 195 minutes long, setting up a sappy love story. Then in the end, Jack didn't even have to die because there was plenty of room for him to lie next to Rose on that board.

Titanic is basically about forbidden love and one we've seen that done better about a hundreds times before. I mean, really? You have a movie about one of those most tragic and horrifying ship wrecks in modern history and we have to spend most of the run time with two teenagers from different worlds who are trapped in a forbidden love story? Come on, Cameron! You gave us Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, remember?

In the end, Titanic is not only THE MOST OVERRATED MOVIE EVER MADE, it's also A TERRIBLE MOVIE.

Probably the only good thing to come out of this movie, other than making James Cameron unnecessarily rich, was that owners of titanic memorabilia/artifacts found their values skyrocket in price. That's about it though...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The blockbuster to end all blockbusters, 1997's Titanic, directed by James Cameron was for many years the highest grossing movie in box office history. Setting off a chain reaction that would infect everything from pop culture to the antique market, Titanic is considered by many to be one of the best and most romantic movies of all time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
So bad even Satan has taken himself off the credits, I actually wanted to give this half a star but my review template will only allow a minimum of one star. So, I can only assume the developers have never seen Shark Exorcist.

I wasn't sure what Shark Exorcist would be about and to be honest I'm no clearer now. There's a nun (Christy Moritz) who likes stabbing people to death then smearing their blood on her face, her visage a picture of ecstasy, like me finally learning how to contour from a YouTube video (I haven't actually worked out how to contour yet, but trust me I will).

There are several young women sunbathing in their bikinis or writhing on the ground, possessed by a demonic presence. And a giant shark with glowing eyes, so terrifying that all its victims start struggling and disappearing beneath the waves before it actually swims anywhere near them.

And there's some terrible acting, of the kind that makes me want to go back through all my one-star reviews and add another star simply by virtue of them not being Shark Exorcist.

But I'm actually amazed that any film ever gets completed, considering how much is involved, so I'm not here to diss movies for the hell of it. Shark movies that mash-up murderous Great Whites with other genres are a sub-genre in their own right now, and to be fair apart from the Sharknado series, which boasts some names we recognise and decent production values, one of the virtues of these films is that they are cheap and silly, and star no-one that you've ever heard of. So I could actually have forgiven the lack of decent acting if the story had made any sense. But I genuinely had no idea what was going on.

Still, it has some things to commend it. I liked a couple of the women's outfits. And the fake Tubular Bells-esque music that starts playing whenever anything demonic happens which was quite often. Oh, and shark attack central Paris Landing, which is apparently a real place but is also the perfect p0rn name.

"The world has betrayed me so the world will taste my vengeance" says that nun, who has apparently killed lots of small children. The authorities are after her, but a young woman finds her first, accuses her and is stabbed to death for her trouble before being thrown into the sea. But that nun's habit is a clever disguise, as actually Sister Blair is a servant of Satan, and summons an avenger: a shark with glowing eyes, who then hangs around for a whole year before anything much else happens.

12 months on, three friends are headed for the lake to chill out. There are no lifeguards at Paris Landing, so while long-haired blonde Lauren (Madison Carney) and long-haired brunette Emily (Channing Dodson) top up their tans, Ali (Angela Kerecz) - long-haired blonde, grumpy and with boyfriend troubles - goes for a swim and is attacked by that shark. She survives and her stay in hospital is short as she is "miraculously healed", but something is different once she is released.

Once a self-obsessed teen who looks great in a bikini, now she's a possessed teen who looks great in a bikini. She's got no scar, and keeps having baths. Oh and her teeth are all funny. But men are simple creatures, and they manage to overlook these things as she lures them to their watery doom.

Then there's red-haired paranormal investigator Nancy Chase (Roni Jonah), who, as news gets out about all the attacks at Paris Landing, tries to commune with the spirits of those people killed. She does this by writhing around on the ground moaning, like me when someone spoileredfor me two days before the UK release. Her nemesis, red-haired Brianna Bennett (Kirstin Vanhooser) from TV show Ghost Fakers also pops up.

As do EVEN MORE long-haired blonde women, two of whom have to go into the water as part of a Sorority initiation and I'm not really sure what happened to them but it involved screaming, probably mine, as I finally lost the will to live.

Plus Father Michael (Bobby Kerecz), a hot priest in his long black robe, like Father Ralph de Bricassart in The Thorn Birds (what is it about getting your 40s - you can remember stuff like this from 1983 but not that you were meant to be getting your nails done 10 minutes ago).

I can't actually tell you what else happens as I got confused with all the young women in bikinis with long blonde hair, who were impossible to understand before the shark attacks (that's not a criticism, I am 46 and wouldn't expect to have a clue what a teen is going on about, which is basically as it should be, in a sort of Circle Of Life way) and even more incomprehensible after.

But I can tell you there are more attacks, and possessions, an exorcism of someone tied really quite loosely to a tree, and of course, like all the best (and in this case worst) films, self-sacrifice.

Shark Exorcist is mercifully short at 71 minutes, I'll say that for it. Though there is a very lengthy mid-credits scene, involving an aquarium gift shop. Sadly I didn't see all of it though, as my DVD gave up at that point, possibly in protest. Don't worry DVD player, it'll be a worthy four-hour historical drama next time!
Buy or rent Shark Exorcist on Amazon Video or DVD from Amazon UK Buy Shark Exorcist on DVD from Amazon.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
So bad even Satan has taken himself off the credits, I actually wanted to give this half a star but my review template will only allow a minimum of one star. So, I can only assume the developers have never seen Shark Exorcist. I wasn't sure what Shark Exorcist would be about and to be...

# data[].attributes.body
It's a radio review but still very good. The reason Kermodian rants have become so well known is because if his ability to find the line between poking fun and bringing up serious issues with the film. I don't think many people claim that this franchise is anything more than a money making scheme, but Kermode sees beyond that and mainly finds issue with the films narrative incoherence. There are lots of bad films out there that are still fun and watchable because at least they sort of make sense - this isn't the case here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mark Kermode reviews Pirates of the Caribbean 2

# data[].attributes.body
On a boat. A big, slow boat.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
June 13, 1997
Web posted at: 9:57 p.m. EDT (0157 GMT)

By Movie Reviewer Carol Buckland

The original "Speed" was a surprise smash. It was a Grade-B action flick that unexpectedly clicked with audiences thanks to a suspenseful, cleverly streamlined story, sharp direction, and some offbeat romantic chemistry.

While the sequel is bigger in just about every way, it's definitely not better.

Spunky Annie (Sandra Bullock) has parted from her previous "Speed" hero and is now in a relationship with a hunky cop named Alex (Jason Patric). Although they've been going together for seven months, Annie is under the impression her new boyfriend has a nice job with the beach patrol. She discovers at the conclusion of a clumsy action sequence that Jack is actually a gung-ho member of a SWAT team. She's contemplating dumping the dude when he whips out tickets for a luxury cruise and invites her to go away with him so they can get to know each other.

Annie and Alex embark on a dream vacation that quickly turns into a seagoing nightmare. One of their fellow travelers just happens to be a computer genius (Willem Dafoe) who is seriously pissed off about a major health insurance problem and is out to -- what else? -- wreak havoc and reap revenge.

Or may he's out to reap havoc and wreak revenge. The formulaic script by Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson -- which includes genre cliches such as an endangered little doggie -- isn't very clear when it comes to motivations or characterizations. Suffice to say, the guy is a cyber-psycho and it's up to Annie and Alex to thwart his evil scheme.

Well, actually, the bulk of the thwarting falls to Alex. While Annie has a few feisty moments, she basically stands around waiting and worrying until it's time for her to be kidnapped by the maniacal villain.

This is a bummer, considering how integral Annie was to saving the day in the first "Speed."

Bullock -- looking considerably more glam than she did in the original -- remains an appealing on-screen presence. Her work's starting to get a tad self-consciousness, though; she should start looking for some new schtick.

Patric is very easy on the eyes, but he seems awfully morose. The adrenaline-junkie joy that this kind of character needs never comes through.

Dafoe begins his underwritten role at a high pitch and quickly goes way, way over the top. He's embarrassing to watch, particularly once he shifts into total Fruit Loop mode.

Jan De Bont's direction is very broad. His constant camera movement induces a cinematic version of seasickness after a while. Ridiculous though a lot of the stuff in the original "Speed" was, De Bont gave it a gritty, grounded-in-reality feel. Most of his work in this sequel is action-flick fantasy.

"Speed 2: Cruise Control" is likely to sail to a big box-office take in its first weekend, but it's not really worth sinking your time and money into. This movie is more floundering than fun.

"Speed 2: Cruise Control" is rated PG-13. The violence is cartoony, with minimal on-screen gore. There's a sprinkling of profanity, some yucky stuff involving leeches and an insultingly calculated handicapped-child-in-jeopardy sequence. The romantic mush between Bullock and Patric has little sizzle.

Related site:
Note: Page will open in a new browser window
External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.

© 1997 Cable News Network, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Speed 2: Stop the ship, I want to get off!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
June 13, 1997 Web posted at: 9:57 p.m. EDT (0157 GMT) By Movie Reviewer Carol Buckland The original "Speed" was a surprise smash. It was a Grade-B action flick that unexpectedly clicked with audiences thanks to a suspenseful, cleverly streamlined story, sharp direction, and some offbeat romantic chemistry.