Do not, under any circumstances, go see the movie Knowing. It’s the new Nicolas Cage movie, which in many circles is enough to put you off seeing it, but it is seriously bad. Really and truly. Awful. Awful awful awful.

Under no circumstances.

SMH reviewed it as ‘sinfully awful’, which is probably kind. [video link].

Let me explain. Kristy and I are part of ClubInk, as subscribers to FilmInk magazine. This means that we get a double pass to the movie of the month, which tends to be an advance screening somewhere. It’s a great thing to join up to, as we’ve seen a lot of movies we otherwise wouldn’t have gone to: Persepolis, Run Fatboy Run, Away From Her, Blindness, and a bunch more.

Presumably the idea is that film buffs are the types that subscribe to the magazine and get these tickets. They go see the movie before it is widely released, talk about it to their friends, who respect their opinion because they’re film buffs, and the movie gets an extra tier of word-of-mouth marketing.

This time, that strategy backfired a little.

Last night, Chris and I went to see Knowing (a ‘gnostic parable‘). It is almost unspeakably bad. From the little non-sensical details, to the relentlessly wooden characters, to the plot that starts out as slightly promising, gets quickly stupid, and ends up as a disaster.

There are three redeeming moments in the film, all of them spectacular action sequences:

• a plane crash
• a subway accident
• the final destruction of the earth [still looking for a link]

That’s right – they’re on youtube, so you can watch them there. I repeat: do not see this movie.
(A quick note about the above youtube links: some of the destruction is pretty graphic. The squeamish amongst you: consider yourselves warned.)

If you’re still thinking that it might be a good idea to go see this movie, allow me to reveal all the relevant plot points. This movie is meant to be a thriller, so knowing what happens means you don’t need to see it, right? Here we go:

• Time capsule buried 50 years ago, containing pictures of the future by school kids.
• Time capsule dug up in the present day.
• Nic Cage’s kid gets page full of numbers, not a pretty picture.
• Hero of story (Nic Cage’s character) figures out numbers are prophecy, detailing every major disaster: date, location, and number killed.
• Kid starts hearing strange whispering, and seeing ghost-like strange men.
• 2 major disasters happen, as predicted by list.
• Next disaster on the list is the total destruction of earth by a massive solar super-flare (Nic Cage happens to be an astrophysics professor). Number dead this time round: EE (Everyone Else).
• Nic Cage & Rose Byrne and their respective son & daughter travel to the home of the woman who wrote the original prophecy.
• Aliens come to greet them, and take away the son & daughter to start over again.
• Yep, aliens.
• I was really hoping it wasn’t going to be aliens, but then they went and showed up.
• They come down in this big spinny spiky UFO thing.
• Boy and girl are given a rabbit each, and taken off to a different planet, which looks remarkably like Middle Earth/the Garden of Eden/New Zealand. I assume they’re meant to learn from the rabbits.
• The sun blows up, and everyone on earth dies.
• Seriously.

Add to that some creepiness in the characterisation, a truckload of ham-fisted religious symbolism, and (admittedly good in places) special effects.

This movie is the worst thing I’ve seen since Daredevil. Which we stopped after 25 minutes and broke the DVD in half.

Don’t see it.

Are we clear?

More info is on the side:

I’m pretty sure that phrase is famous for being a little more … colourful.

UPDATE: Now running for president! You can support the campaign.

[*] Warning – if you click on this link an obnoxious flash site will load, demanding your immediate attention. It’s probably not worth it.↩

The linked video has a bunch of technical image-manipulation terms, but is still quite watchable.

And awesome.

Absolutely brilliant.

Although quite brutal at points, this is a truly remarkable movie. The characterisation is deep and engaging, the story is wonderfully told, the scenery and cinematography is nothing short of breathtaking, and the director felt no compulsion to jam it full of stuff it didn’t need.

It’s not often you hear silence in movies at the cinema. At points I felt I was watching a foreign film (whose directors are not afraid of silence, but can at points let things drag far too much). The scope of the landscape was simply fantastic.

As I said, there are a couple of violent parts which are not really for the faint-hearted. As modern movies go they aren’t all that terrible, but the shock of something like that happening amongst these characters that you really care about, in a world where such a thing is both everyday and alien, is really part of the craft of the film. You will care when the title-scene happens.

You should see this film.

The official movie site will give you a taste of the feel of the movie, but don’t stop there. Watch this movie. It’s the best I’ve seen in a long time.

Kristy and I just watched the movie Hot Fuzz. Absolutely awesome.

Part Bad Boys/Point Break, part romantic comedy, part The Bill, part spaghetti western, part mockumentary, it’s a cop action movie set in a quaint town in the British countryside.

Fantastic. Watch it.

We saw Transformers the other day. Now I used to be a fan – I had an Optimus Prime toy as a kid (and a bunch of others). Transformers were really, really cool. The movie, however, was awful.

It set me up to be bad. Very early on in the movie the Defence Secretary was talking to a roomful of ‘signal analysis experts’. Oh-oh. That’s what I am. That’s my field.

Whenever movies delve into anything that I happen to have some level of expertise in it’s bad news, since they invariably get it wrong, distort the possibilities, and just generally make a bit of a hash of it. Computer interfaces, for example – who has a desktop like that? Take Enemy of the State for example: US satellite cameras apparently have infinite resolution, as they can keep zooming in indefinitely. And wall-mounted surveillance cameras can move around a room to look at the other side of a person. What possibilities! Such technology! (Incidentally, this is why I really dislike Dan Brown – the two areas he writes his page-turners on are religion and science, specifically Christianity and technology. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he gets it wrong.)

Luckily, apart from a stupid line about the government needing to move their signal analysis from ‘Fourier transfers to quantum calculation’, there was little cringe-worthy techno-fiction. What was cringe-worthy was the dialogue. There were a number of set pieces where characters would discuss what they already knew to be true, in order to inform the audience. For example, a group of transformers at one stage talked about their collective history, for no other reason than to inform the audience. Scriptwriters – find another way of communicating that information! People don’t talk like that, informing their colleagues of what they already know as basic truths. It’s entirely unnatural and very contrived.

I think my basic problem is that I don’t like to be treated like an idiot as an audience member. I don’t need big signposts pointing to who the good guys and the bad guys are (for transformers it’s easy – blue eyes good, red eyes bad). It was laid on pretty thick in places – the bad secret service agents all drove up in big black cars, so that you knew they were bad. At one point, if you hadn’t yet been convinced that the main baddie-transformer Megatron was truly what he appeared to be, he transformed into a plane and flew through a multi-storey tower-like building. He flew through a building! Unbelievable.

The action sequences and CGI were, however, nothing short of astounding. The transformer models were incredible, and watching them go from car/truck/helicopter/etc. to giant robot was very nifty indeed. That’s why it’s such a shame that the dialogue and bad editing let it down. Long slapstick scenes could have (and should have) been cut, if only to make way for the action. That’s why we’re seeing it after all.

After all of that, here’s one light note about the movie to finish on: I read a great little article recently about the guys who did all the computer graphics work for the film. The production company offered to send down model samples so the designers could work their magic, but being the massive computer geeks they were they declined the offer – between them they had all of the transformer toys from childhood. Nice.