Friday, June 4, 2010
Film Your Weekend at the Movies, Starring Motherfuckin Marmaduke
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 8:56 AM
- Bow down, fuckas.
Splice: Another industry movies are notoriously disinterested in portraying with accuracy: science! Or so I'm told. I don't know, I suck at science. You might think, given the Dark Castle logo in front of Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, that this is another Joel Silver paycheck-generator a la The Reaping or Gothika. But while Splice is getting a release through Warner Brothers and the Dark Castle label, it's actually a festival pickup... from the director of Cube. Cube! That kind of dumb Canadian sci-fi movie you rented that time! Or was that just me? In any case, I'm already pretty burnt out on swords, sandals, and sequels (note: I'm counting commercials for Sex and the City 2 and 4 Shrek 4 Furious as sequels to commercials for Sex and the City and Shrek the Third), so I am ready for some brainy horror that doesn't even involve said brains being consumed by zombies, unless you count the next two movies discussed here.
Killers: This Ashton Kutcher/Katherine Heigl team-up isn't getting screened for critics, and as with most movies not screened for critics, it seems like an arbitrary decision. I know we're supposed to be so media-savvy that anything not screening for the press is a disaster waiting to escape, but really, how likely is it that Killers is much worse than The Ugly Truth, also starring Heigl under the direction of Robert Luketic? True that studios rarely hide movies that they feel particularly confident in, but as I may have pointed out before, most of my worst movie-watching experiences ever have happened in press screenings (like, say, a screening for a clumsy indie like Finding Bliss, opening this Friday in Manhattan!), so I can't put much confidence in the decision to screen a movie. By the same token, I don't understand the practice of hiding middling, mediocre, or even lousy movies when there's always something worse that critics get to see. [Such as... -Ed.]
Marmaduke: This movie exists. This movie exists. This movie exists this movie exists this movie exists. Here's a synopsis: Marmaduke is a gigantic fucking dog. Actually, based on the eyeball-searing trailers, it doesn't even particularly look like the makers of Marmaduke have capitalized (!) on the inspiration (!!) for this wacky-dog movie (!!?%*#!). In the comic panels, Marmaduke is a horribly drawn wreck of a monster-dog who destroys everything he touches. In the movie, he just talks like Owen Wilson and wears sunglasses and dances, like every other CGI-lipped animal in the most horrible subgenre technology has ever wrought. Of course, this makes the Marmaduke movie actually more attractive than the comic strip, because Lee Pace and William H. Macy, no matter their need for a paycheck, do not resemble scribbles drawn with the artist's wrong hand. Then again, that crummy comic strip is mostly in black and white, and not lit like a Sugar Ray video, and in the ninety minutes that Marmaduke presumably runs, you could probably read approximately two decades' worth of Marmaduke strips, by which I mean, yes, there are multiple ways that this movie will resemble an eternity of hell.
Ondine: The L's review is less than enchanted, but you may want to see Neil Jordan's new maybe-mermaid movie entirely for Colin Farrell, because you may have noticed that Farrell has started giving excellent performances with alarming regularity.
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