Showing posts with label New Years Eve. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Years Eve. Show all posts

Friday, December 31, 2010

2011: the Horror Sequel That Can't Be Stopped

Hello, Moviesucktastic fans! This is Scott, your friendly neighborhood podcast host/film critic. With the New Year rapidly approaching, a mere number of alcohol-soaked hours away, I find myself pondering the completely arbitrary and pointlessly ritualistic changing of the calendar year, and what it means about the events that have occurred over the past twelve months. For this truly is a holiday meant for reflection and anticipation, a weighing of the past's influences and whatever the future might hold.

Normally, the changing over of the old year to the new one is represented by the iconic images of Old Man Time and Baby New Year. The white-bearded elderly soul, back bent and crippled from the trials and tribulations of his past experiences, hands off the baton of responsibility for forging through yet another year to the innocent diaper-clad newborn, and scampers off on withered legs and a crooked cane without even attempting to warn this naive cherub about the horrors that await his brief and harrowing existence.

ⓘSAW †he dirty soul ☠Part I☠Image by CornérStoné via Flickr
Being a movie fanatic, I prefer to personify the New Year by comparing it to a film that contains the essence of what the holiday represents. In this case, with the complete nightmare that this past year has become, I don't seem to be able to shake the feeling that January 1 is coming upon us with all of the harsh brutality of a Saw sequel. Just look back at the massive amounts of abject misery and mindless destruction that have occurred over the length of 2010, and ringing in the New Year raises the same levels of terror and dread as waking up strapped into some psychotic cancer patient's homicidal shop project and hearing a prerecorded message explain exactly how gruesome your impending demise is going to be.

This past year has been so screwed up, they might as well have replaced last year's Time's Square ball drop with a bicycle-riding Jigsaw puppet rolling on to every television set in America:

"Hello people. I want to play a game. This coming year, your house values will be driven down by reckless and opportunistic lending practices. Unemployment rates will hover indefinitely high while new jobs are shipped overseas, and soulless corporations alter their business models to exploit the fear of downsizing to squeeze uncompensated productivity out of their underpaid workers. As you struggle to keep your head (and mortgage) above water, your ineffectual political leaders with put on lavish shows of false concern and hollow efforts of economic restoration as your quality of life rapidly deteriorates. Live or die, the choice is yours. Actually, you have no control over it whatsoever; you're basically doomed. Have fun." 

Instead of being a time of hope and celebration, this New Year's is like surviving one horrible Jigsaw trap, with other victims viciously destroyed before your eyes while you cling tenaciously to life, only to get shoved through a time-locked door where yet another perilous struggle for survival awaits you. I'm to the point where I'd rather wake up with a spring-loaded mechanical trap strapped to my face and a key surgically implanted in my scrotum than face whatever mindless, spirit-shredding madness 2011 has in store for us. Instead of slowly descending during Dick Clark's uncomfortably humorous countdown, that giant geodesic sphere hanging over Times Square should plummet to the pavement, eject hundreds of spring loaded spikes, then tumble at full speed down Broadway like a giant spiked bowling ball of death and destruction, impaling the crushed and mutilated corpses of the helpless inebriated onlookers, rolling over the unsuspecting crowds in much the same way that 2011 will eventually bulldoze over what's left of spirits.

So, this is Scott from Moviesucktastic, wishing you a Happy New Year, a fun New Year's Eve celebration, and a quick, painless death at the hands of our destructive sociopath Baby New Year.

Game Over.   
Enhanced by Zemanta

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Schwarzenegger and the End of Days

While working on an article this morning, I was reminded of Arnold Schwarzenegger's biblical

Film poster for End of Days - Copyright 1999, ...Image via Wikipedia

apocalypse action-fest End of Days. Obviously, the need to share my feelings about the film was overwhelming.

In what was most likely an attempt for Arnold to break out of the comical role that he had portrayed in more than half of his last dozen films, his leading role in End of Days is that of a dark, brooding, depressed man who is still emotionally haunted by the death of his wife and daughter. Unfortunately, the cliche riddled film does little to shake off the stigma of redundancy by also including his character as an abrasive ex-cop who doesn't play by the rules, Satan on Earth portrayed as a suave businessman, an "end of days" scenario that involves Christmas and New Years Eve, and a race to save the world that involves plenty of gun fights and action sequences.

On a refreshing note, Gabriel Byrne gleefully refuses to break out of his rut of mundane monotone acting as he plays an earthbound Satan that displays his potential for evil by being deviously untruthful and sleeping with a woman and her daughter at the same time, criteria which would wold probably nominate at least a hundred or so current and former CEOs and politicians for the position of Ruler of Hell.

There's a lot to groan about in End of Days. It is the kind of film that unflinchingly declares its comfortableness with mediocre screenwriting at the beginning, when it has Arnold throw a slice of cold pizza in a blender for a breakfast shake to demonstrate his character's lack of predictability and adherence to convention, and the proceeds the keep the intelligence level of the film's story at a Tales from the Crypt level of sophistication and depth.

Not that one usually expects sophistication and depth from a Schwarzenegger film. But when push comes to shove, End of Days is philosophically inferior to The 6th Day, less plausible than Total Recall, and not even remotely frightening as Junior.




I dare you to deny the crappy of that.


Reblog this post [with Zemanta]