MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE GHOST RIDER

I've come to a conclusion. I hate Facebook. I just don't like it. I don't like the layout. I don't like the controls. I don't want to poke anyone or be poked. If I really want to play Mafia Wars I'll just put GTA IV into my Xbox 360. Farmville is World of Warcraft for people with not enough imagination and even less of a life. I already waste enough of my free time as it is and just have zero use for Facebook. I can't put my finger on exactly why it is I find Facebook utterly useless, I just know it is absolutely not not for me. I will continue to maintain my Facebook page and update it every month when a new Foyeurism is published, but if you're expecting me to hang out and social network with anyone, sorry, not happening. I made a choice a few months back between Facebook and Twitter and I now believe I chose wrong. Therefore, as much as I have tried to resist, as much as I tried to go a lifetime without ever falling into its clutches, as much as I vowed my name would never be used in the same word as "tweets", as much as I vowed I would never do it - I've gone and done it. I have joined the Twitter. I have Twitter account. Yes, the Foywonder now (gulp) tweets. Now I will begin posting my random gibberish thoughts on whatever and link you to news, reviews, trailers, or whatever I think you should read or watch in a 140 characters or less. As with Facebook, I don't plan to live on it all day or publish every little thought that pops in my head at every second. Still, as of August 1st of the year of our Lord 2010, God help me, The Foywonder twitters. You can begin following my tweets by CLICKING HERE - if you dare do so.

 

THE UNBEARABLE HEXNESS OF BENDING

 

Let's make a movie about a "shoot first, ask questions later", disfigured bounty hunter in the Wild West motivated entirely by rage-fueled vengeance against the man that burned his wife and son alive right in front of him, give him superpowers that involve resurrecting corpses and a hot hooker girlfriend, pit him against an army of racist domestic terrorists that kill everyone in their path to assembling a steampunk weapon of mass destruction they intend to use to slaughter Americans by the thousand, including the President of the United States, but keep it all PG-13 and try to camp it up a bit here and there so that we can still sell it to the family audience. Who could have ever predicted JONAH HEX would be the biggest flop of the summer?

Warner Brothers must have sensed this was a mistake which is why they reportedly slashed the budget before filming began, ran off the original writer-directors (the CRANK guys), went back and reshot a good portion of the movie, and then released the film in a 73-minute format (plus an extra 6-8 minutes of end credits) so stripped down to the bare bones it could have been retitled LARA FLYNN BOYLE.

Still hard for me to believe that I watched a Hollywood blockbuster released in the summer of 2010 that played out exactly like a failed mid-Nineties Fox Network TV movie pilot starring David Hasselhoff. Remember that wretched NICK FURY: AGENT OF SHIELD TV Fox did with Hasselhoff laughably miscast in the role? JONAH HEX easily could have been its heir apparent. Too bad Josh Brolin does a good enough job in the title role. Actually kind of disheartening that he wasn't allowed to play Jonah Hex in a better movie more true to its comic book roots. Put Hasselhoff in the role, scarface him up, and let him play the part with his trademark Hasselhoffian smirkiness and I'd bet dollars to donuts that JONAH HEX would be an instant camp classic.

Jonah Hex is a post-Civil War bounty hunter with a hideously scarred face who doesn't seem all that bothered by the hideously scarred face he acquired after being hideously scarred by an angry former Confederate General furious at Hex for killing his son for reasons that we will never fully understand thus making it hard for us to understand why this General is so hell-bent for revenge that he murders Hex's wife and son and then hideously scars his face.

Why make a movie about a vigilante with a hideously scarred face if that hideously scarred face is not a sore subject with him, not something others constantly point out to him, and does not in any way inhibit his ability to score with the hottest female in the movie? It would be like Darkman never having to hide his horrifically disfigured face because nobody ever makes reference to it and Frances McDormand can't wait for her next chance to attempt to stick her tongue into his lip-less mouth. Harvey Dent really blew it in THE DARK KNIGHT; half his face gets burnt to a crisp and he goes on a self-destructive vengeance-fueled rampage when he could have been out there getting revenge and shagging babes like James Bond. No way can anyone convince me that Harvey Dent even with a face that looked like the x-ray model of the human face my 10th grade biology teacher kept on display couldn't score a hotter woman than Maggie Gyllenhaal. Chicks dig scars, you know?

"Man, I sure do miss being able to eat corn on the cob."

Jonah Hex has been given a useless superpower. Jonah Hex in the comic had no superpowers. The producers must have been of the belief that you cannot make a movie based on a comic book crimefighter unless they have superpowers or an array of nifty gadgets and weapons, and so to hedge their bets they went and gave him both.

First, his gimmicky arsenal of weapon. Since I've read maybe two Jonah Hex comics in my entire life for all I know he really was friends with a freed slave that serves as "Q" to his James Bond and gifts him with crossbows that fire sticks of dynamite and side-mounted Gatling guns for soon-to-be deaf horses. These weapons Hex will just discard after one usage. In the case of the dynamite crossbow, he actually leaves them behind escaping the Turnbull's base. You'd think one of the bad guys would have found it and be like, "Hey, look! A crossbow that fires sticks of dynamite! This will really come in handy killing Jonah Hex and assassinating the President."

That former slave will later be shown reacting to Ulysses S. Grant's Centennial speech about freedom and American ideals as if he were listening to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, seemingly unaware that he and his young son are the only people of color in attendance and shedding a tear as if his peoples’ struggle for equality still wouldn't have another hundred-plus more years to go. To think what must have been going through that character's head as he heard such stirring words; to know that someday his great, great, great grandson could potentially become the first black President of the United States to be accused of being a reverse racist, secret Muslim, non-American, Antichrist-in-training.

Now about that useless superpower. The Crow Indians brought Jonah Hex partially back to life after the evil General Turnbull left him for dead. There’s a pop-up book animation sequence at the beginning that explains how Hex's soul exists somewhere between the living and the dead or some crap like that. For reasons only the producers understand, this left Hex with the ability to bring the dead back to life with a single touch just long enough for him to ask them redundant questions that do little or nothing to advance the plot and can inflict some extra skin rotting/burning pain on them if they don’t give him the answers he’s looking for. Think the pie man from "Pushing Daisies" mixed with Jack Bauer. The power can be handy because the dead we are told can keep tabs on all the important still living people they once knew and who better to tell you the location of the person you're seeking than one of his deceased cronies? To dumb it down further, in the world of JONAH HEX, zombies are the GPS units of the spirit world.

Okay, now that I've explained this supernatural superpower Jonah Hex has been given let's take a moment to review the two occasions he uses this power. Hex resurrects one of Turnbull's henchmen and is told by the dead man that he doesn't have a clue where Turnbull is but he can tell Hex where he can find another of Turnbull's still living associates for Hex to engage in full-contact interrogation with.

Hex will even resurrect Turnbull's dead son, his former best friend, the best friend he killed that in turn prompted Turnbull to kill his family and scar his face; the best friend that we will learn during their brief graveyard scuffle was killed by Hex after he tried to kill Hex for reasons never explained in the slightest. A ton of exposition occurs and not a single word of it contains any context those of us watching can understand because we still don’t know what actually went down between them. The writers, director, and even the actors were apparently so discombobulated that when the scene was over it somehow hadn't dawned on any of them that Hex had completely forgotten to ask his dead friend where his dad was - THE SOLE REASON HE RESURRECTED THE GUY IN THE FIRST PLACE!

Hex will make one more use of the power after killing General Turnbull to bring him back to life to kill him one more time for good measure. That final fight also features a fight-within-a-fight, intercutting between Hex and Turnbull punching each other in the bowels of an Ironclad and in a red clay dirt pit within a netherworld dreamscape. You see, as is explained earlier, when people die their lives don't actually flash before their eyes; we’re given a chance to complete unfinished business before we pass on. That means if you're obsessed with getting revenge against someone who wronged you you'll actually fight that person to the death one last time before you die even if the near death experience triggering this is you actually settling unfinished business by fighting that person to death for real. Jodorowsky called; he asked, "What the hell is this crap?"

Lilah is a hooker with a heart of gold who repeatedly makes it clear to her customers that she is no man's property, except when it comes to this hideously scarred bounty hunter whom she is for some reason madly in love with, in which case she wants nothing more than to run off with him to start a new life together elsewhere as his subservient wench. Lilah’s only contributions to JONAH HEX are: A) looking very fetching in a corset, B) never hesitating to kiss a man with half a face that looks like a wad of chewing gum you’d peel off the bottom of your shoe, and C) getting taken hostage just long enough during the climax for Hex to lay down his guns so that he doesn't kill Turnbull then and there making the 73-minute movie only 55-minutes.

If Michael Bay directed THE LEGEND OF LIZZIE BORDEN...

Between her heart of gold and the golden hue the cinematographer often bathes her in, Megan "Next stop: Hope & Faith reunion special" Fox is lucky none of the crazy gold prospectors that patronize her never tried mining her snatch. I know many guys out there would kill for the opportunity to mine Megan Fox's snatch, but in this instance I quite literally mean mining her snatch in search of gold. Why is she so frequently radiating a golden hue? Is she THE LAST DRAGON? Does she possess the power of "The Glow"?

Speaking of glowing... Magic cannonballs!

Eli Whitney went on to work for the US military developing state-of-the-art weaponry after revolutionizing industrial textiles with the invention of the cotton gin. General Turnbull even speaks of Eli Whitney as the man that started the "industrial revolution". This would be like a caveman in a prehistoric barbarian movie describing the hero as the greatest warrior of “the Stone Age". Who the first person was to coin the phrase "industrial revolution" has remained something of a mystery even to this day; I think this movie just solved that mystery.

While I'm on the subject of mysteries, the biggest question mark of JONAH HEX for me will always be, "What the heck was up with that snakeman with the acid saliva doing capoera fighting the muscular redneck for the Ultimate Fighting Championship of the Restoration?" No, really, what was up with that scene? There are a lot of unanswered questions that can probably be attributed to the gutting of the film and the reshoots but something tells me even a two-and-a-half hour director's cut would never be able to explain the existence of Killer Croc's acid spitting grandfather doing acrobatic martial arts in late 1800s South Carolina.

Okay, here’s another one. Why is a guy that talks like a leprechaun the second-in-command of an army of Southern neo-Confederates?

Hey, was that Wes Bentley with a fake beard that Turnbull keeps talking to and, if so, what was his charac... Turnbull just murdered him. Guess we'll never know. Oh, well. Let's move on.

According to JONAH HEX, Eli Whitney also invented the atomic bomb...or napalm cannonballs...or dragonballs…or some sort of glowing cannonballs? The villains are assembling Whitney's ultimate "Nation Killer" weapon, a devastating cannon that fires glowing orange cannonballs either filled with some unspecified new form of energy or powered by magic. Who can say for sure since the movie never does? The producers probably would have included a magical loom that weaves the names of criminals Jonah Hex must hunt down and a bad guy piloting a giant mechanical spider had WANTED and WILD WILD WEST not already beaten them to it.

General Turnbull is an evil ex-Confederate general still sore over losing the Civil War who faked his death in a hotel fire for no particular reason and with his band of evil ex-Confederates and an Irishman with a Mike Tyson face tattoo have begun attacking US trains and military installations in order to gather the components for Eli Whitney's superweapon which they intend to use to blow up Washington D.C. amid President Ulysses S. Grant's Fourth of July Centennial address thus somehow instantly destroying the United States of America as a nation.

John Malkovich doesn't even try to mask his disdain for the material and goes the extra mile to make General Turnbull the most lifeless screen villain since Ben Kingsley in BLOODRAYNE. Every line out of his mouth carries either a tone of resolved dejection or utter contempt to it. Was he embarrassed by all the changes made after he signed on or by the silly wig and uniform that make him look like the leader of Jerry Garcia's Lonely Hearts Club Band? Was it even Malkovich emoting on screen or did Steven Seagal find the BEING JOHN MALKOVICH hole and took over his body during the shooting of JONAH HEX?

A rare behind the scenes photo of John Malkovich confronting his agent over the JONAH HEX gig.

I know I should probably loathe JONAH HEX as much as Malkovich appeared to but I just can't. I was expecting a much worse movie than it turned out to be. That's not to say it is good by any stretch of the imagination; it's just not the abysmal bore most of the critical pans made it out to be. I'm sure the meager running time helped, as did the movie just being a forehead-slapping train wreck. Besides, any movie that features a Native American healing ceremony that ends with the mortally wounded hero barfing forth a live crow and then sitting up to angrily scream the villain's name, followed by a jump cut to him galloping off on his horse set to the sound of pumping heavy metal music can't be a total loss. I'm telling you JONAH HEX was just a Hasselhoff away from achieving cult status.

President Grant will thank Hex for saving the nation in the Oval Office by offering him the official government position of "America's Sheriff", a fictitious job title even Hex acknowledges as ridiculous. A shame he didn't accept because doing so could have set the stage for the sequel that would see America's Sheriff Jonah Hex forced to take on President Grant himself amid the Whiskey Ring scandal. The producers would no doubt attempt to spice up the action by filling whiskey bottles with the glowing substance from the cannonballs to create sub-atomic Molotov cocktails and just you wait until the shocking third-act revelation that President Grant has all this time been replaced with a remote control robot doppelganger created by a blackmailed Alexander Graham Bell (Jeremy Irons, who I'm sure can always use a few extra bucks to redecorate his castle) as part of a sinister French-Canadian master plan to destroy New York City with the world’s largest tuning fork.

Such a sequel will sadly never be. To say that JONAH HEX was dead on arrival at the box office would be a misnomer. Saying so would imply it arrived at all. The movie was about as warmly received as a truckload of illegal Mexican dayworkers at Lou Dobbs house. When the dust settled and JONAH HEX was left to fester as just another rotting carcass in the ever growing pile of botched Hollywood comic book motion pictures, where does the blame rest? According to a Warner Brothers movie exec quoted on Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood, "You don't take a handsome actor and disfigure him." Yeah, that was the problem. If only they hadn't uglied up Josh Brolin JONAH HEX would have been fine. Once again, Hollywood figures out the big picture. Lesson learned. Next!

I originally had zero intention of subjecting myself to THE LAST AIRBENDER. Never watched the cartoon, the trailer did nothing to impress me, and M. Night Shyamalan making a kung fu fantasy flick about a bald kid with a light-up arrow on his forehead using elemental powers to battle extras from a Bollywood version of LORD OF THE RINGS somehow did not intrigue me. Then came the flood of negative reviews and this flood was biblical. Word spread online of screenings where the film was loudly booed and trash thrown at the screen. I watched a video of hardcore fans of the show in costume at an LA midnight screening heaping universal scorn upon the movie. Roger Ebert hated it so much he gave it half a star, declared there weren’t enough words in the English language to fully convey what an agonizing experience it was, and became so enraged by its awfulness he ripped off that hanging bit of flesh that used to be his lower jaw and used it to horsewhip M. Night Shyamalan. This was a degree of scorn usually reserved for post-apocalyptic Kevin Costner movies. Now I had to see it for myself.

For the first 40-minutes or so I was thinking it was not as soul-crushing awful as had been ascribed. That was about the time that nature called. I don't know what that crap is they put on popcorn that they dare call butter, more like lubricant for the colon. I bet I could grease the engine of my car with whatever that yellow liquid is they call butter.

Where was I? So I'm gone 5-7 minutes at the most… Hold on. What is it about public toilets that cause people to forget everything they ever learned about potty training? Peeing on the toilet seats, not flushing, leaving the stall looking like a buffet at the Human Centipede’s house, what is it about a public bathroom that turns some people into 2-year olds all over again?

Anyway, let’s try this again. I return from, uh, liquidating my assets to realize that I have just missed out on an entire subplot. Something about the Fire Prince putting on a mask and adopting a persona called "The Blue Spirit" and using this masked alter ego as means to try and capture the Avatar. I still have no idea what it was about or what purpose it served, not that it matters since this entire subplot was introduced, played out, and never brought up again all in the time it took me to find a toilet that didn’t look like a scene from THE TOXIC AVENGER. Things only got worse from there. By the time the closing credits finally rolled after what felt like an eternity I realized the wrong children’s fantasy movie was titled THE NEVERENDING STORY.

I sympathize with all the angry, disappointed fans of THE LAST AIRBENDER animated series out there. I feel your pain. I know of your pain. I have already seen my three greatest childhood loves (Masters of the Universe, Godzilla, & G.I. Joe) made into crappy Hollywood movies. Considering new MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE and GODZILLA movies and a G.I. JOE sequel are in the works, I may live that nightmare all over again.

Aang is always the life of the party any time a rave is held in the childrens cancer ward.

I realize Shyamalan had the unenviable task of trying to cram an entire season of a richly nuanced animated series into a single 100 minute movie: character arcs, side characters, mythology, backstories, subplots, etc. That only excuses so much. I cannot recall the last time I saw a motion picture that put this much emphasis on exposition designed to explain what the heck was going on and still I had little idea what it was all about or why I was supposed to give a crap. Instead of figuring out a way to respect the source material while condensing it down to movie length, what Shyamalan has done is the equivalent of him standing atop an overstuff trash can jumping up and down desperately trying to smash it all in.

And how does he smash it all in?

Exposition!

Exposition!

Exposition!

Have the girl narrating tell us once more how this Aang kid told her how he got frozen in the ice without actually telling us the specifics of what he told you so that we still don’t know how he got frozen in the ice. Continue to have the characters talk at us, Mr. Shyamalan. Could the Fire Prince please tell us one more time how angry he is over getting banished by his father because I didn’t understand this one and only aspect of his character after the first half dozen times he reiterated it? Nobody discovers anything in this movie; all information is announced via the most tone deaf dialogue in ages. The only true airbending Shyamalan allows for is the sound of emotionally empty words to fill the air.

So much emphasis has been put on information by way of exposition, repeating that exposition, and doing so in a manner that does not allow for any of it to develop dramatically. Shyamalan renders THE LAST AIRBENDER lifeless, joyless, and completely devoid of any sense of magic or wonder.

Let me give you an example of how dialogue works in THE LAST AIRBENDER.

Hero: "I never learned how to waterbend. I need to learn how to waterbend in order to fight the Fire Nation."

Female sidekick: "Let's go to the village of the Northern Water Tribe where the waterbenders can teach you to waterbend."

Cut to the evil general reporting to the King of Fire Nation.

General: "We believe the Avatar has never learned to waterbend and intends to do so by traveling to the Northern Water Village where the influence of the Fire Nation has been unable to reach allowing them to continue to practice waterbending."

I'm paraphrasing, mind you, but it's not that far off from the truth. There's more than one occassion where a scene ends and the next character to speak practically recaps what we just watched. Exposition and repetition is what Shyamalan thinks makes for a good fantasy flick. Bad enough that you'd already swear the script was composed using a book of fantasy film MadLibs and the only words he ever inserted were some form of "airbender", "waterbender", "earthbender", "firebender", and "Avatar"; there are even whole conversations where you'd swear the characters were suffering from some strange form of Tourette syndrome that causes them to blurt out the word “avatar” at random increments.

M. Night Shyamalan must be the worst dad to play with. What must his children go through just to play toys and games with their father? I can just imagine if he was my dad playing with me with my Masters of the Universe action figures, insisting that I play with Prince Adam as an unhappy teen who only reluctantly turns into He-Man as an unwilling necessity, and I am required to interrupt my action figure adventures with narration explaining how and why my figures have gone from the top of the sofa to the floor. Skeletor was already whiny, but now he'll be super whiny and repeating the reasons why he is so whiny to other figures every few minutes to remind them that he’s justified in his whininess. I just want to imagine great adventures and let my Masters of the Universe figures play fight using their superpowers and mighty space weapons, but no - Father M. Night daddy does not understand this.

Imagine playing a game of 'Clue' with M. Night Shyamalan. Just a simple board game and he'd make it so that every time you enter a room you have to explain in great detail why you're going there and what you expect to find upon entering, and then the player next to you has to explain to the person sitting next to them what your motivation is. You just know he'd rig the game so that there's an extra character card involved in the solution. Go to reveal it was Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick - no! It was Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the library framing Professor Plum for the murder! You're like, "Dad, come on now. Your twist ending is cheating." His ego would then get bruised and he'd sulk away all offended muttering something about how he'd rather kill himself than think the way I do.

The greatest twist ending M. Night Shyamalan could possibly come up with at this point is making a movie that doesn’t make you say “That sucked!” when it's over.

What the hell happened to M. Night Shyamalan? Ten years ago he was being compared to Spielberg and Hitchcock and now the appearance of his name is greeted with heckling and jeering. To read interviews with him post-AIRBENDER he sounds completely oblivious how sullied his reputation has become. Not too surprising I suppose when you consider this is the guy that made LADY IN THE WATER, a film he claimed was based on a bedtime story he made up to tell his children, a film in which the only character that dies is a know-it-all film critic, a film in which Shyamalan cast himself as a man who has written a book so profound it will change the entire course of human history for the better and lead those opposing such change to murder him. A little axe-grinding and a Christ complex all in one fell crummy swoop.

BENDERFIELD EARTH... Sorry, I mean THE LAST AIRBENDER. I apologize for comparing THE LAST AIRBENDER to BATTLEFIELD EARTH. I actually enjoy BATTLEFIELD EARTH on a purely bad movie level. I can laugh at BATTLEFIELD EARTH. If nothing else you must admit Travolta appeared to be having some fun. Even with the worst acting seen in a theatrically released motion picture since DRAGON WARS there is no joy in Benderville. Nothing to laugh at. No fun to be had. An exhausting bore to put it politely. I would go right ahead and proclaim it by far the worst movie of the summer except we’re less than a month out from the release of the new comedy from the makers of MEET THE SPARTANS and DISASTER MOVIE so all bets are off.

Just writing about THE LAST AIRBENDER drains me mentally. Notice I've not gone into any actual details regarding the plot. If you want the plot explained to you just watch the movie. You realize it has taken me over three weeks to finish writing this review? I’ve only been able to write a paragraph or two at a time before feeling mentally drained. Can’t even bring myself to crack wise about the crummy acting or the casting of white actors as Eskimos and Asians or the epic miscasting of "Daily Show" correspondent Aasif Mandvi, punctuating his every line as if he were delivering a smarmy punchline in a stand-up comedy routine, as the evil general leading an army of fire-throwing, militaristic, steampunk Hindus in a serious-minded fantasy flick. This is a performance that only works when portraying the human villain in a Muppet Movie. If Aasif Mandvi had been cast as the evil General in JONAH HEX and Hasselhoff cast in the title role, JONAH HEX would have been one of the greatest bad movies ever made.

Even greater miscasting is Dev Patel from SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE as the banished son of the Fire Nation king trying to restore his honor by capturing the Avatar. We're supposed to believe that his father booted him from their kingdom for being a wussy. This dorky guy from SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE goes to bed every night with Frieda Pinto yet I'm supposed to believe his dad looks down upon him for not being manly enough. Have you ever taken a good hard look at Dev Patel? He looks like Bert and Ernie had a baby and yet he bagged one of the hottest women on the planet. Their real-life SLUMDOG romance is like a Bollywood version of SHE'S OUT OF YOUR LEAGUE. Patel is the luckiest bastard short of that goofy looking guy Christina Hendricks married.

Look at this side-by-side comparison and tell me Dev Patel is not the lovechild of Ernie and Bert

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE THE HAPPENING