fine whine

I realize I'm a little late to the party in bashing Jumper, but I felt (uncharacteristically as of late) like writing, and hadn't dissed the movie thoroughly enough when last I mentioned it. It's not a good movie.

When I described it to my friend yesterday I detailed the first twenty minutes being passable, if not faithful to the book, and those twenty minutes being let down by the ensuing hour or so of crap.

I should point out that I have not recently read the book sharing a title and a few moments with this movie, but I recall liking it enough to be unhappy this movie is so bad. I can't remember it in enough detail to really criticize the film for accuracy, but from what I do recall, and what reviewers have written, there's not much left of the original idea.

Spoilers abound ahead - for the last few of you who ever intend to watch the movie despite my warnings (Don't watch it!) you may want to look elsewhere*

The movie begins with what is probably a common occurrence for the protagonist, David (played by some kid other than Hayden Christensen): he's trying to give a cute girl a snow globe, and a bully thwarts his plan and humiliates him. The globe gets chucked onto a frozen river, through the ice of which David soon plunges. Panic ensues, but nobody could anticipate what happens next: swept along by the river current under the otherwise intact ice, he doesn't drown but finds himself (and a large puddle) suddenly appearing amidst the stacks of his local library. Several books (shelves worth of them, really) are likely destroyed, in what can only be seen as a literal attack on literature, namely the source novel.

In that one scene (or perhaps the later one where he drops an entire house on said library) pretty much every suspicion I had about what the movie's producers thought should be done with Gould's novel should've been confirmed, but I kept going.

And it only got worse. Sam Jackson appears, stabbing some random flickering kid (another jumper?!) in a jungle somewhere. And he's got white hair, which I could see as an unsubtle nod to the fake albino antagonist of The Da Vinci code, which I have neither seen nor read. Regardless, from that point on the movie is more or less a cliched chase action movie.

Now, there's the element of the chase to the novel, too, but it's surrounded by the story of a kid coming to grips with learning to use his power, and to become a well-rounded, decent human being at the same time.

The movie dispenses with the former in a quick montage, and never gets around to doing the latter. David, as played by Hayden Christensen, is a brooding, spoiled brat who finds fit to steal lots of money, but leave childishly-scrawled IOUs in the vaults, to pay for all the toys with which he fills his massive apartment. Davy in the book preferred a cave out west along with the amenities of his childhood house, but the idea of a lair like that only shows up in the movie when we find Griffin, another jumper (and star of Gould's tie-in prequel) who has apparently taken over a small cavern system based on how much space he seems to have.

Key to several plot points is a new jumping mechanic in the movie: so-called "jump scars", a residue left after a jump that allows other jumpers, and Sam Jackson with advanced technology, to follow the first jumper around. Why the screenwriter found fit to add that, and the whole Paladin/jumper war, and all the rest is beyond me inasmuch as the book was pretty good on its own without any of those elements. Davy in the novel also grows up considerably over the arc of the book, whereas even late in the film David's talking about comic books and whining and overall acting like a petulant toddler.

There was a sequel to the book (Reflex) that tends to get shelved with the grown up books (not in Young Adult as Jumper, and it's a good read. From what I've heard a sequel to the movie is also planned, and as David, after half-befriending, teaming up with, fighting, and abandoning Griffin and marooning Sam Jackson somewhere out west, gets the girl and learns the shocking truth about his mother, stands, girl in arm and wistful gaze in his eyes looking vacant at the end, such is not an impossible thing. But it's going to need to be a lot better for me to consider watching it. And re-casting David wouldn't hurt.

* Which, frankly, is sound advice ("look elsewhere") to those people when faced with the movie, but I suppose I'm repeating myself. Don't watch it!

I've long had something of a mental list of actors whose movies I'd check out more or less just because they were in it, not on any other merit (or at least I'd look for no further motivation). Sometimes such an approach has worked out for me, and sometimes it hasn't*.

Recently, though, I think I'm starting to develop a second list of actors who I don't like, whose movies I check out despite starring or being prominent in them. Top of the list, now that I've watched Jumper would be Hayden Christensen. I have other objections to the movie, but his turn as the main character was definitely not something I liked.

But that's just one movie. It's not like I've watched others he's also starred in recently, right? Except for the otherwise quite good Shattered Glass, again in which I could not stand him. The only way to tell if it was his character or Hayden himself I despised would be to remake the film, but everybody else did so well in it that doing so would be a great disservice to all.

Speaking of disservice to all, a rant about the lackluster acting of Hayden Christensen would not be complete without at least a mention of his take on pre-Darth Vader Anakin Skywalker in the latter two prequels to the Star Wars trilogy, through which he broods, mumbles, smolders and whines, but is greatly overshadowed for awfulness by the films themselves.

So of the four movies mentioned here, a mere one of them was even worth seeing despite him, and then, only just so. So why do I even try?

* Take, for example, John Cusack. Stephen King's 1408 would not probably have been a movie I'd readily check out, other than John (and to an almost insignificant degree, Sam Jackson) is in it. But it was enjoyable enough. Not so, on the other hand, was Identity**, or the overrated Grifters. I'm in the middle of the road on Martian child, and will readily admit to only watching it for Cusack, not the premise. And I won't watch it again, I'd say.

** Which brings to mind another, less prolific (at least, as far as I have seen) actor whose work also would prompt addition to a list of actors I don't like: Pruitt Taylor Vince. Not long ago I watched The Legend of 1900 in which he figures quite prominently, and, well, there's no nice way to say it but to see the guys is distracting. He has a condition called nystagmus which means his eyes move involuntarily. Which means when they show his face in closeup, his eyes are darting all over while he's talking and acting and whatnot. I suppose that says something about my character, to let such an insignificant detail overshadow what could well be some fine acting, but that, and my less-than-great appreciation for jazz, sunk that movie for me. Vince has been in many a film I've seen, some passable (Constantine and Nurse Betty) and others not so great (S1m0ne), but the only other one in which he's at all memorable to me is Identity, in which his nystagmus doesn't really work against him - it's just a bad movie.

Today I finished watching the fiftieth Indian* movie I've seen. It was called Tarzaan: the wonder car (imdb) and there's a very good chance you'll never watch it, so I'll tell you what it's about. Anybody not wanting the story spoiled should skip past the blockquotes below.

It's about a kid who likes cars - designing them, driving them, fixing them and putting them together. We see in the beginning scenes that his father designed cars too, creating one so advanced that the mere royalties from selling the design should have set him and his family for life. The story takes a sad turn almost immediately as the designer is cheated, and then killed, by the corrupt partners of a major car-maker who intend to bury the innovative design forever. Nothing stays buried forever, though, and we find that our protagonist discovers the car his father was killed driving, and decides to rebuild it. He's got a few factors in his favor - he's got the determination that comes from being teased by the popular kids, a girlfriend who supports him whole-heartedly, a job as a mechanic with a boss who's willing to pay him to work on his pet projects on company time, and he's a mechanical wizard.

After a long montage he's almost finished with the rebuilt car, which looks nothing at all like it did before. The only piece he couldn't find or fix was the fuel pump, but overnight the existing one supernaturally fixes itself... spooky. The next day he drives it to school and it becomes the object of envy for all the students, especially the ones who bullied him. Later that night, while he sleeps, the car, apparently driving itself, tracks them down, and beats them up in a pretty humiliating fashion. They of course do not know that he's not at the wheel, and begin treating him considerably better from then on (after recuperating from their injuries, of course).

Faring less well are the partners who killed his dad - one by one they are hunted down by the car which can not only drive itself, but also can completely repair itself too. The last one turns out to be the father of our protagonist's fiancee, and the climactic battle on land and sea (the car can fly, submerge in water, and float) reveals the driving force to be the spirit of his father. He walks off into the light, and the car never drives itself again.

The father, it should be mentioned, christened his car "Tarzan" as a child, and the name stuck over the years as he hung a figurine of Tarzan (from Disney's animated version, oddly enough) from the rear view mirror.

Some might call it a rip-off of Christine, or perhaps The Wraith, but it's those things and so much more. It could well be the strangest Bollywood movie I've seen so far, but it's by far not the worst. Now that I've seen a good number of them, I think I can pretty well say that.

By now you may be wondering why I've done this. Early this year I happened to watch a horrible Hindi movie entitled Dhund (imdb), though the title "The Fog" figured prominently on the cover. I'd not found many promising movies to borrow from the library that day, and happened to stumble across this one in the foreign languages section.

It was the worst movie I'd watched in a long time, no matter what the language. I was surprised that fog only figured into a scene and a song (I'd heard Bollywood movies included songs and dance, sometimes jarringly, throughout the film) and the plot was much closer to any of the I (still) know what you did last summer films. Except that it was much, much worse.

As a connoisseur of bad films, though, I saw some potential and began to do some research. Namely I talked to any Indian people I could find about the films they liked. The consensus was unanimous - it was an awful movie. I then watched one better - Dus - and started off on a long list of other, much better, Bollywood and Hindi movies.

So now I've seen fifty of them, including one I watched without any subtitles (borrowed VCD), and another that had been dubbed into German (pirate download). Now that one may be a contender for the worst one I'd seen, more conceptually than anything, as it was a remake (in name only) of Fight club, I kid you not.

But that's enough for now. I've got both versions of Don to watch - that's at least six hours of film. Maybe I'll write about them too.

* It's probably safe to call them 'Bollywood' movies, though I might argue against that on one or two.

Despite having joined a fair number of the social networking sites*, I don't really do much on them other than upload a photo or two, identify some "favorite" music and movies, and connect with one or two people (often the same one or two on every site) and then I let my profile languish, logging in very occasionally to check the notifications that don't show up in my email.

The flavor of the month this month is Facebook (see my profile) and I must admit, it's a pretty clean, usable site that blows Myspace (see my profile) out of the water for ease of use, visual appearance, and third-party expandibility.

It's no wonder there has already been a mass migration from the latter to the former.

One of the applications Facebook supports comes from movie rating site Flixster which I had already joined some time ago, played with, and hadn't returned-the interface is slow, rating movies en masse is not simple, and not enough people used it at the time. I connected to a new Flixster account (see it here) and started rating movies again**.

Tired of that, I clicked over to the "never ending quiz" which had drawn Rebecca in, several months ago. It's worse than I remember. More than half of the questions concern Nicole Kidman and Moulin Rouge or Alan Rickman and the Harry Potter films, none of which I've yet seen. Other questions are poorly written, with no capitalization, poor grammar, and misspellings galore.

But what bothered me the most was the True/False questions. Without a single exception every one was always "true".

The questions, I should point out, are all user-submitted, and there are quite possibly millions of them. I'm basing that "every one" statement there on the thirty or so that I encountered so far.

So I started writing my own True/False questions, and (unsurprisingly), making them False. It's a much bigger challenge, fabricating believable movie trivia, than it is to merely copy an item from the Internet Movie Database's extensive trivia archive.

So far I've written eight of these questions (and seven other multiple choice questions) and I'm proud to say that the quiz-takers (who number more than a thousand as of today) have only been correct at most a third of the time. You can see the complete list of questions I've written here. I admit I bookmarked the link and have checked it a few times just to see how I'm doing, and the numbers amuse me.

One example? As of right now, only nineteen of 1,133 people guessed that I'd made this up: "While filming Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey performed weekly comedy shows in Los Angeles, in character, as Andy Kaufman."

As a kid I greatly enjoyed the game Balderdash, though I didn't get many chances to play it.

Anyway, to the quiz. As my questions began appearing for the other people (they're supposedly random) and I kept answering others, I began to see other new questions that were also false, though none (I say this humbly) as convincing as mine.

Now I can play the quiz and know that some of the True/False questions may actually require some thought after all. Frankly, though, I think I'm enjoying writing them more than answering the other ones.

* I'd link the complete list, but based on what I saw from upscoop and pipl, I can't even remember all of the ones I've joined. A halfway-comprehensive list can be found on my about page.

** I was a bit inconsistent - apparently I'm only 84% compatible with myself.

... or rather, lack of content.

First, let me be the last to wish everybody a Happy New Year 2007*. I never intended to let the entirety of January pass without writing anything at all, but the fact that I'm actually writing this on February second would show that exactly that has happened.

I didn't have any drafts started for the month, at least not in my software.

This is not to say that nothing interesting has happened; only that writing about it isn't atop my to-do list anymore. Coincidentally, neither is beating up the denizens of Azeroth - I'm almost completely weaned from the World of Warcraft, too.

But enough about things virtual and insignificant.

It's been a big month for our daughter, too. Just last week Natalya started attending daily day care, and Jessica's gone back to work. Our day-to-day routines continue to evolve - I now wake up more than twenty minutes before I leave as it is my responsibility to feed (and sometimes re-clothe) Natalya. I think I'm going to assemble a DVD or two of TV episodes to watch in the morning as I feed her, since my initial experiments into holding a baby, a bottle, and a Playstation 2 controller have been less than successful.

I haven't added many new photos of her to my gallery recently, and in fact haven't taken as many either. But I do have a few to upload, and have no intentions of stopping taking pictures anytime soon.

So then you ask, other than not taking pictures of my daughter, what have I been doing these last several weeks?

At work I've been spending a considerable chunk of my time doing workshops that are not exactly in the scope of my day-to-day responsibilities. My day-to-day responsibilities have not exactly shrunken to accomodate these added demands, however, and as such have had some extra workload issues.

As such, I've been borrowing a laptop at night. A laptop which, I have discovered, gets better wireless reception than any of the ones I've tried before in my house. In fact I am able to piggyback onto the wireless network of one of my neighbors across the street, as long as I stick to the front rooms of our house, particularly near the windows. I've entertained the notion of trying to figure out exactly which house houses the router to which I connect, but haven't tried very hard so far. I have, however, finally seen the first season of Arrested development and the first two of NBC's The Office, and I must say, they're quite funny.

Of course both shows would be perfect feeding-time entertainment, but this idea has only occurred to me after I've already watched them, before I was consistently feeding Natalya every morning. I suppose I could always re-watch them, of course.

As ever, though, watching TV shows is the merest fraction of the time my TV is on; I'm watching movies at pretty much my usual pace. Unusual, however, are the movies themselves: I've begun watching Bollywood movies. Though I haven't made it through ten of them, I (arbitrarily) decided to watch 50 Hindi movies by 2008, though I may need to revise that goal to 'movies from India' to better cover the non-Bollywood films (i.e. ones not in Hindi). Even from the few I've seen I have much about them to write, and hope to get around to doing that soon, since I've been bouncing the ideas around in my head for quite some time.

At the risk of promising almost nothing and still failing, I'm not going to make any promises or resolutions about posting more.

And any rumors that this post is timed to match yet another threadless sale are, well, nonexistent until now, and entirely untrue. They are, in fact, doing another sale, however this time around to save $5 per shirt you need to buy two of the same, for you and ostensibly for your sweetheart. This is also your chance to stock up on duplicates, I suppose.

Whenever Jessica and I inadvertantly wear the same color shirt I'm tempted to change clothes - I'm not sure I'd be interested in wearing the same (trendy, hipster approved) shirt as her. So it goes.

* Or may I be one of the first to wish a Happy New Year of the Boar? Chinese New Year is rapidly approaching - it won't be 4704 much longer!

Yesterday I made mention of watching a movie, and surprisingly I'm going to mention it again. I use the word 'surprisingly' because it came from Adam Sandler and company (a Happy Madison film) and yet I found bits of it to be rather a bit better than I expected.

As far as news on the baby front, we had something of a rough night in the hospital, but Jessica covered that far better than I could, so click that if you wish, and I'll go back to discussing films.

Well, movies at least. "Film" may be aiming too high for a movie with Rob Schneider in it, since its own sights are set so low.

I've seen more than my fair share of the Happy Madison oeuvre, and I think the movies can be divided into two camps*: the movies that saddle a simple, decent story with goofy characters, meaningless side plots, in-jokes, bad accents and painful cameos and Rob Schneider; and the ones with everything I just listed but the simple, decent story.

So I make no bones about it: there are many, many things to dislike about this movie, and only four or five of them pertain to Rob Schneider and his hammy 'acting' and accent.

Several other of the bit players have roles that must have taken a good two or three brain cells a second or two to create. Sean Astin has fallen far to go from playing sturdy, dependable Sam the hobbit to Doug the lisping bodybuilder. Dan Aykroyd has done better and done worse, but I didn't stick around for enough of the credits for the animal cruelty disclaimer to see how the other whales were treated. I suspect more time was spent finding good trained dolphins, a walrus and a penguin than was spent on re-writes and dialogue coaching.

But enough about the negatives. Deep down at its core, this movie hinges around an intriguing, if not simple and convoluted idea. A capsule description probably doesn't sound too bad: A former playboy finds himself loving a sweet, damaged woman he must reintroduce himself to every day.

Even in executive summary form it doesn't sound so bad: Drew Barrymore plays a woman unable to form any memories lasting longer than a day because of a tragic accident. Adam Sandler plays a commitment-phobic marine veterinarian who finds himself smitten with her, and wants to add himself into the routine her father, brother and some friends have created to insulate her from her painful past and present. Despite the obvious difficulties, they fall in love, until she decides she's keeping him from his future by continually re-living her present.

Not so bad, eh? I actually found myself wondering, around the one hour mark, how they'd meet the critical romantic comedy requirement of "boy loses girl" but that is handily explained with a rather significant plot point that nobody found fit to mention beforehand. It's cumbersome and halfway predictable, but the story more or less makes up for it in the end.

Whether this is the contribution of first-time writer George Wing or an effort Adam and his chums have made is up in the air - I'll be looking forward to future movies George pens (like the upcoming Outsourced) more than I will the next Happy Madison product.

But is it worth slogging through all of the dreck to find the good bits? Would I have felt so sentimental if I weren't watching it with my new baby daughter laying asleep on my chest? Would I have enjoyed it more if I weren't so worn out and tired?

Possibly not. This matters not.

I have had an idea, though. What should be done in cases like these? Is there a way to throw out the bad and improve the good?

Of course there is: remake!

Why wait a decade or more to revisit this movie and freshen it up?

After all, nobody blinks when two blockbusters appear in theaters hinging around the same plot, the same action-packed set pieces. Why wonder if the second film just takes a little bit longer?

Perhaps this is a cause for the French to take up. Hollywood has a long history of remaking their films romantic, comedic and otherwise; why not do one the other way?

Or maybe Bollywood will take up the challenge. For all I know, they already have.

* I checked to make sure: Punch drunk love was not a Happy Madison production.

Nor was The wedding singer, but probably only because the company was formed to make (the first) Deuce Bigalow.