Three things that suck about The Hangover Part II (2011)

Most movies have their problems. This film had three lawsuits filed against it. One very public one (artist S Victor Whitmill sued Warners over copyright infringement for putting the facial tattoo she designed for Mike Tyson on the character played by Ed Helms), one very hidden one (Ed Helms’ stunt double, Scott McLean, sued Warners after a stunt went awry leaving him with physical and brain injuries. Adding insult to some pretty substantial injuries, his family complained that the footage from the stunt was still utilised for the film’s trailer), and one frivolous get-over-yourself one (aspiring screenwriter Michael Alan Rubin claims the entire plot for the film was lifted from his real life experiences and that his character in the film, played by Ed Helms, defamed him).

Riding high on an ambiguous fondness for the first film, The Hangover Part II went on to gross half a billion dollars, including $9 of mine. Once they paid out all the litigants, they should still have about $9 left over. Here’s why I want my money back:

It’s mean

Director Todd Phillips felt he did such a good job in directing the original that he felt he could take over the reign in writing the second one. He brought in Craig Mazin, who’s contributions to cinema include Scary Movie 3 & 4 and the 1997 flop Rocket Man, and Scot Armstrong, who unleashed the Starsky & Hutch movie upon an unsuspecting public, and was the creative brains behind Road Trip and The Heartbreak Kid. A quick slice of any of their films demonstrates a lack of any real wit, and while the first film was a bumbling and stumbling well-meaning adventure in Sin City, the second one is cruel, racist, homophobic, transphobic, elitist, superior, dumb, self-absorbed and self-serving. Bromance films shouldn't have you rooting for their wives to leave these jerks. Bradley Cooper’s hissy fit and storm out over not getting to throw a bachelor party was the stuff of a thirteen year-old girl. I would say the writers wrote down to the audience, but a look at their CVs suggests there’s no evidence that they’ve ever been able to write up.

It gets meaner. And stupider.

So let me get this straight –you’re possessive and moronic wedding guest spiked marshmallows that lead to a drug-fuelled rampage that culminated in my son the medical student and professional cello player losing a finger, pretty much crushing a career in either, and then run a speedboat into my wedding guests and returned my much-loved son with a career-crushing injury that nobody has addressed and you’re about to marry my only daughter with the sperm of a Bangkok transgender hooker in you, and you think that a half-assed speech about being part of a wolfpack is enough for you to get off the hook? Well, welcome to the family, son.

Part Two my ass

The Godfather can have a Part 2. So can Star Wars. The Hangover? At best it should have been ‘Another Hangover’, or the slightly more accurate, given the plot of the film, ‘The Same Hangover You Saw Two Years Ago, Only Not As Funny This Time’.

Catcher in the Drive

Ryan Gosling’s new film Drive is taking a bit of a battering, with the studio being sued for producing a trailer that doesn’t accurately reflect the film. Sarah Deming, a woman who more than likely lives with her 14 cats, is suing the film’s distributor, FilmDistrict, alleging that the trailer promotes the film as “very similar to the Fast and Furious, or similar, series of movies. Drive bore very little similarity to a chase, or race action film… having very little driving in the motion picture.”

So rather than being sued for plagiarism, the film is being sued for not being like every other piece of Vin Diesel action-crapped blockbuster out at the multiplex. With Driver having grossed over $55 million worldwide, she’s looking for a decent settlement, with her legal eagles announcing she wants her $9 ticket refunded. I wish I was making this up.

Sarah Deming isn’t the only loon that this film seems to have resonated with. Brandon Kelly of California, who may not live with 14 cats but more than likely talks to Elvis, was equally as moved by Ryan Gosling’s performance.

“I was inspired by the movie Drive. As soon as the film ended, I thought to myself, I have to do something courageous and epic’.”

So he threw a hot dog at Tiger Woods. Yep, just pitched a hot dog onto the green while Tiger Woods was trying to putt. Then lay down on the ground with his hands behind his head and waited to be arrested.

If only John Lennon had been so lucky.

Three things that suck about X-Men First Class (2011)

Prequel opportunity

Much like Marvel Comics themselves, the brains trust behind X-Men First Class wrongly assumed that there was more than a passing interest in looking backwards. While certainly the foundation for the series, Magneto and Professor X are probably the least interesting characters in the comics – more figureheads than action figures, and despite the producer’s best efforts, focussing on their budding bromance and eventual spat was hardly the same as watching Anakin Skywalker turn to the Dark Side of the Force. Readers have spent 35 years listening to their diametrically opposed visions for Mutantkind, and the film doesn’t explore that any more than the first three films already did. It was a lot like reading the original Stan Lee comics – clunky dialogue, cheesy powers, staggeringly oversimplified plot.

Causing Havok

Rather than actually revisiting the comics and its histories, the characters in the film are a lucky dip of the X-Leftovers, and almost exclusively taken out of context. It’s almost as if Marvel said to them ‘Hey, these are the 128 characters that were in the X-Men at one point or another – which ones do you want to play with?’ And with little regard to histories or popularity, the producers simply took a stab in the dark, and the result is uneven and messy. With the exception of Magneto and Mystique, not a single one of the characters in this film have ever had their own spin-off comic book series, which best demonstrates how little interest fans have in them.

Dud villains

The X-Men franchise seems to be the only one that rehashes its villain. Despite a plethora of super-cool bad-guys, all three of the first films showed the X-Men clashing with Magneto. X-Men First Class was given the prime opportunity to introduce another of the X-Men’s classic villains – Mr Sinister, Apocalypse, Sentinels, the Brood – but instead they cast a watered down version of the Hellfire Club to tackle Professor X’s watered down version of Hogwarts. The wimped out on a chance to create a new iconic cinematic villain, instead choosing to throw some work to an otherwise unemployable Kevin Bacon.

The Wizard of WTF?

Almost everyone attached to the production of The Wizard of Oz recalled fond memories of the children’s story. Then MGM replaced them with people who could make a movie. It took three years, four directors and 14 screenwriters to translate Frank L Baum’s novel (1900) to the screen (1939), and while it’s hardly original to cry foul at a Hollywood bastardization of an obscure story, the lengths the studio went to sanitise and justify the magical land of Oz was a slap in the face to the half dozen people who had actually read it (or one of its 32 sequels). Not to mention the guy who wrote it.

Prefacing this film with a finely-fonted tribute to remaining faithful to the story was the only fanciful element of the movie. So concerned where the studio heads by the magical elements of the book that MGM circulated a brief outlining rational explanations for the existence of Oz and its inhabitants. The Scarecrow, for example, was merely so stupid, he could only find gainful employment as a scarecrow. The Tinman was merely a heartless bastard who was encased in tin as a form of punishment. Only in the film version is there an implication that the entire adventure was simply a dream, and it was a casting decision to re-use the farm yokels for their roles in Oz, none of whom appear in the original book.

So how far does the film stray from the original story? Here’s a look at what was taken out, and why.

Dorothy Dearest

Precocious, sulky, spiteful, and prone to the odd tantrum, the original novelisation of the six year-old Dorothy is rarely concerned with her travelling companions. At one point or another, they’re all left high and dry (literally, in the case of the Scarecrow, who’s abandoned on a log in the middle of a stream) with little more than a “Gee, I’m kinda gonna miss him.” She’s also a lot less repent about killing the Wicked Witch of the East with her house, and actually steals her silver shoes (not ruby slippers), which inexplicably appear on the kitchen table of her fallen home.

Stone the Crows

The Scarecrows new brains don’t arrive via a nifty diploma but through a combination of bran and pins and needles, the latter two exuding from his head every time he’s in deep thought. There’s a lot less hugging in the book as a result.

The Tin Woodman

The Tinman was once a man of flesh and bone until the Wicked Witch of the East, on instruction from his future mother-in-law (he was engaged to a Munchkin), enchanted his axe, and he began cutting off his limbs. He kept going until he planted one straight through his torso, and ultimately took off his own head. A tinsmith managed to reassemble him in a body of tin, but neglected to include a heart (or a brain, for that matter, but, as he tells the Scarecrow, “having tried them both, I should much rather have a heart.”)

Though bumbling and fairly ineffectual in the film, he’s a blood-thirsty, axe-wielding psychopath in the original novel, lopping the heads off 40 wolves, chopping a wildcat in half, cutting the limbs from the grumpy apple trees, and destroying a makeshift bridge to destroy to Kalidahs (creatures with the bodies of bears and the heads of tigers), ensuring that they’re “dashed to pieces on the sharp rocks at the bottom.”

In fact, the Tinman takes a swipe at practically anything they come across, often with questionable morality (the wildcat, for example, was merely chasing a field mouse, and it’s not like the field mouse was a mate or famous or something).

Lion About Bein’ A Coward

There’s no actual evidence of the Lion acting cowardly in the entire story. Not once does he cower, tremble, or get teary. After a while, you assume that Cowardly was just his first name.

The Not-So Emerald City

The emerald city is actually grey. The Great & Powerful Oz forces all its inhabitants to wear green tinted glasses to give everything an emerald glow.

The Wicked Witch of the West

The Wicked Witch of the West doesn’t actually turn up in the book until the Wizard instructs Dorothy to kill her. Yes, kill her. While the crusty old Wizard of the film charges Dorothy & Co with the task of collecting the Witch’s broomstick (and her death is both accidental and incidental), the Wizard of the book blatantly instructs Dorothy to take her out.

Sending the six year-old to the Haunted Forrest, she ultimately destroys the Witch in much the same manner as the film, only instead of clipping her with the O2 overflow from dousing the burning Scarecrow, she actually gets pissed at the Witch for making her do chores around the castle (and stealing back one of her stolen shoes), and she petulantly throws a bucket of water at her.

The Tinman and Scarecrow don’t even attempt to rescue her. She stumbles upon them later wearing the Magical Bonnet which allows her to control the winged Monkeys.

Three things that suck about Friends With Benefits (2011)

4X + Y chromosome

Most Romantic Comedies are based on a very specific formula, giving the female lead 80% of the screen time since women make up 80% of the audience (with 12% made up of gay guys, and the remaining 8% made up of guys who dragged their girlfriends to see the new Transformers movie and now it’s this or shoe shopping). While it was a great change of pace that Justin Timberlake got equal screen time, given that he’s good looking with a good body and has a brilliant job and a lot of money and a really cool apartment, asking the audience to empathise with him is a little like asking the guy who just sold you a copy of The Big issue to empathise with the guy who won $159 million dollars but has never really understood love. People who look like Justin Timberlake usually play second fiddle to an over-worked Jennifer Lopez or a neurotic Katie Heigl and are usually played for about 12 minutes by Chris Evans or Ryan Reynolds.

Thinking we’re inside the joke

The screenwriters know we know we’re watching a Romantic Comedy, so in order to avoid the clichés, it mocks them first so that when the clichés show up, we sit there thinking ‘oh, it’s so funny, it’s like a movie’. It is a movie, you tool! You can’t make fun of the conventions and then apply them and think you’re being cool and self-referential. You’re actually just cheating the audience of an original idea.

The poster is very rude

Look what they’re doing with their hands! That is so inappropriate on the side of a bus.

Auto-completely inappropriate

‘The Renovators’ attempt to plug yet another sponsor misfired on Friday night, when the auto-complete on the Yellow Pages phone application produced the following  (if you click on the pic, you can see it better):

I didn’t know you could find that on the Yellow Pages.

Three things that suck about Green Lantern (2011)

Green Lantern's power is stupid

Using just his imagination, and uttering the Green Lantern nursery rhyme, Hal Jordan can create anything he wants out of solid energy. It’s like one of those movies where the small boy’s love makes the bunny real, only slightly more nauseating. The ring is purportedly the greatest power in the universe, and so with the great power comes great opportunity to be stupid about it. He saves a falling helicopter with a Hot Wheels racetrack and takes aim at a giant smoke monster with something from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Didn't we see all this already when Jim Carey donned The Mask?

The other Green Lanterns are lame

The two and half thousand other Green Lanterns all seem to come from Octopus-world or bird-world or bee-world. It seems that every other planet is made up of critters out of a David Attenborough documentary, and they all tend to talk using an American screenwriter’s vernacular (“This is Combat Training 101,” boasts an alien, who’s totally up to speed on the American college educational standards).

Rome burns

With great power comes great procrastination. Thousands of people die while Hal Jordan is explaining to his girlfriend that thousands of people will die if he doesn’t go fight the CGI that’s killing thousands of people and one day those people, who number in the thousand, will be grateful that he showed up in time to save the bus driver and no one else because he was too busy talking about it and ohmygod will you just get in there already? Heroes act, villains make lengthy speeches.