Much like the proverbial groundhog seeing its shadow and doing something or other probably involving a Bill Murray film perpetually airing on basic cable, this is the annual "it must be summertime if Flux is starting to bitch about hot weather as though he somehow thought it might not happen this year." It's been in the high 80s for a couple of days, and as usual when it's finally hot for several days in a row, I'm damn depressed. It hasn't been hot enough to bother with the A/C, but I've been sitting in front of a fan all day and sweating and wishing it were oh... November. November would be nice. Or I could just be somewhere it doesn't ever get hot. Bleh.
After trying (with limited success) to work on at least one of my myriad projects during the hot day, I kept waiting for it to get cooler so I could eat. One advantage of the hot summer is that I usually end up losing weight, simply because I never want to cook or eat anything other than like, fresh fruit. During the day, at least. What usually happens is I starve all day and come darkness/coolness I eat too much bad stuff. Tonight, for instance, I decided that I deserved a pizza after not eating but some orange juice and an apple all day. *urp*
While waiting for it to cook, I turned on the TV and while clicking around in 10:15pm, pre-SportsCenter/John Stewart show boredom I ended up hitting
Resident Evil: Apocalypse and watching the last 45 minutes. Again. I'd seen that much of the movie before, and oddly enough, on the same channel I've never watched otherwise.
Oxygen, which goes by "O" and which I always think means "The Oprah Network." It's basically a younger-skewing Lifetime Network, with nothing but women's shows, but not all the sappy soft focus Hallmark movies filled with commercials for minivans and Pampers.
I mention it since it's so weird that they have mindless bloody zombie action movies like
Resident Evil 2 on. I guess it's kind of appropriate, the film primarily stars Milla Jovinovich, who is some sort of genetically-enhanced superhuman, as she and some other disposable fools roam around the improbably-named "Raccoon City" which has been turned into a zombie wasteland by a mutagen released by the Haliburton-esque Umbrella Corporation. The plot is of course entirely irrelevant, since the movie is just a long series of nighttime action set pieces, as the two female leads kill zombies with their bare hands and occasionally guns. Throw in some evil black-suited stuntmen guards for the Umbrella Corp., scheming and nefarious scientists, random innocent bystanders/comic relief, mutant cenobites, and incompetent anti-terrorist teams, and you've got yourself a movie.
Technically.
I mean it's stuff happening on a screen, for about 90 minutes, but I don't know if it would meet any real standard as a film, since nothing in it makes any sense. There's kind of a plot, and the characters don't change names in the middle or act in totally-illogical fashion. But that being said, nothing ever follows any logic. No one would ever react the way they react, none of the physical actions are ever believable, no one's motivations or behavior matches what a real human would do under those circumstances, etc. I think you could convene a small group of sane humans, break down the film into 30 or 40 individual scenes, and discuss them, and in no more than 10% of them would anyone in your film group be able to defend the behaviors or outcomes of the events on film. It's a complete jumbled mash of random excuses to blow stuff up or kick people through walls, and while Hollywood action pictures have a long history of that,
Resident Evil 2 takes it to another, almost farcical level. It could have been a really funny movie, in the hands of a competent screenwriter/director. It's actually not that bad, I mean it's no
Robocop 3, but that's mostly because the stars are much prettier and they had a lot more money to throw at the screen. I wouldn't say I enjoyed it, but it beat professional poker, and I was watching it under ideal circumstances: with one eye while cooking/cutting/eating pizza, enjoying the cool air that came with darkness, and surfing political blogs at the same time. I can't imagine sitting through it without commercial breaks or distractions, though.
The oddest part, and put it over the edge into blog-worthy, was the fact that it was on the O network, which meant after every 6-8 minute chunk of zombie killing and explosions there were 3 minutes of commercials for home decorations, and products to put on your hair, smear on your face, or insert into your vagina. Again, they certainly beat the cheap beer, Girls Gone Wild, and "male spray perfume with a butch name that will turn women into strippers when they smell you" commercials I expect with that quality of movie on basic cable, but they are a bit discordant.
Returning to the movie, it's got about the reviews you'd expect. RT
tallied it at 19%, and since the movie's a few years old, there's
an Ebert review. He sums things up pretty well, as usual.
The movie is an utterly meaningless waste of time. There was no reason to produce it, except to make money, and there is no reason to see it, except to spend money. It is a dead zone, a film without interest, wit, imagination or even entertaining violence and special effects.
I saw
Hot Fuzz with Malaya a few days ago, and in a way Resident Evil 2 reminded me of it.
Hot Fuzz is a buddy cop comedy action pic by the guys who did
Sean of the Dead, and it's very funny and clever and unbelievably over the top. It's inventive, and has literally every action movie cliche imaginable, to the point of self-referential distraction. That's the point, of course. Sort of like
Team America, it's almost off putting the first time you see it, since you spend half the film shaking your head in an, "I can't believe they went there." sort of way. My point, if there is one, is that
Resident Evil 2 is basically a straight, non-tongue-in-cheek version of the outrageously satirical action comedies. It's odd to compare the two types of films, since I think
Resident Evil 2 could, with nothing more than slight editing and a bit of dialogue redubbing, be turned into a very funny comedy. It's already a visual self-parody, it just needs some dialogue to complete the task.
In the same way that good blogs are already far more interesting than the mainstream news articles they discuss/dissect, I can see a day in the not too distant future, as video editing and producing hardware and software get ever cheaper and easier to use, when amateurs will remix TV shows and movies into products far better and more inventive (to my demographic, at least) than they were in their original, stale, formulaic, mainstream configuration. People have been doing that already, from the
JarJar-less remix of
Episode One to
TROOPS, to the
purist edit of The Two Towers, to the approximately 500,000 AMVs on YouTube and elsewhere, with 4 or 5 minutes of scenes from an anime cut to some rock tune.
It's something to do while enduring a hot summer day, at least.
Labels: movies, summer, weather
