Two More That Suck

The Island


Mr. & Mrs. Smith

As I may have mentioned before, I now give a DVD 20 minutes before I turn it off. Too many movies suck to waste my life sitting through. I also started leaving Broadway shows during intermission about three years ago, and that is also very liberating. The first time was the hardest but the thought of sitting through another 60 minutes of insipid drivel (The Graduate with Kathleen Turner) in an uncomfortable seat did it and it felt great.

Anyway, 20 minute, that's all a movie gets. If movies are now being made for people with extremely short attention spans, they have succeeded in creating an audience with high expectations. If it wasn't for teenagers with nothing to do on Friday and Saturday nights and parents and grandparents at Saturday and Sunday matinees, the feature business would crawl up and die.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith---Vacuous. Kind of like "War of the Roses" meets "True Lies" while trying to be a screwball 30s comedy. Angelina Jolie is some hot charismatic shit--Probably the only real movie star we have today, and all I can say is Jennifer Aniston never had a chance. Her big leery boyfriend Vince Vaughn shows up in the movie, too, which is creepily incestuous. All we needed was Laura Dern or Billy Bob or Gwyneth to complicate matters further. Brad Pitt speaks like he has marbles in his mouth and is not even really very attractive and owes his entire career to his abs's appearance in "Thelma & Louise."

The Island---Trying to be "Logan's Run," "Coma," "The Matrix," even, but digresses into a Michael Bay cacaphony of explosives. What a waste. But a triumph of product placement. Full Disclosure: I actually watched an hour of this before I gave up because I like the genre and I was hoping for at least a flash of originality but everything had been done before, and better. And what good is Ewan if he doesn't show his dick, lol.

Dark Water---You know what? I like Jennifer Connelly but I could not even attempt to watch this, it is going back to Netflix, sight unseen.

Happily, there were no Nicole Kidman movies in the mix this week. I find her animatronic face lends an air of artifice to everything she appears in.

How many free passes do these people get, by the way? Back in the day, a flop or two in a row and you were over. But we are stuck with a seemingly endless supply of Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Aniston movies.

Film actors and actresses should all be digitalized.