One Word Movie

Honey, I rebranded the kids

Sometimes when people write about films they make up a lot of new words. Like hyperkinetic. I think this means Loud and Confusing, but in a fashionable new tin. That Three Kings movie (good) was hyperkinetic, but that's OK, it's a war movie.

On the other hand, I Heart Huckabees is another load of hyperkinetic tosh from the same director (David O. Russell (but why the O? I am guessing because of David O Selznick, producer of Gone With the Wind. Or it might be his middle name is Olive)), but this time it's a movie about philosophy. In this instance that is bad. Philosophers hate entertainment and noise. Apparently the only adornment Kant had in his room was a small bust of Rousseau. See. Not even a cassette deck made out of wood. Here is another one. When philosophers use the word existentialism, they mean something to do with the writings of Sartre or Kierkegaard, or people like that. But when film-makers use the same word, it just means reeeely reeeeely clever. I Heart Huckabees has got Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlinson as a pair of existential detectives. Bad again.

It's got Jude Law in it too, but not just that, it also stars Naomi Watts - the female Jude Law. Yes, both in the same picture, like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat, BUT IN REVERSE. I truly took my life in my hands when I went to watch this film, because that radioactive horror might've been enough to melt the faces off cinema-goers, like Edam on a sunbed.

Well, it's not as bad as all that. Even Jude Law isn't as terrible as he normally is. His acting style here consists of over-articulated gurning, which is just what the part needs. And the Mark Wahlberg bits are very funny, they made me want to go out and lift a lot of weights so I could have a neck like him. But it is rather uneven, and despite the supposedly experimental structure, it still conforms to the identikit plot of man has a problem, man gets out of the problem, credits.

If it was 10% better I might've had to sit on the fence about it. But it's not. Sorry everyone, this film is unmistakably shit.

posted by Chairman Peyote @ 1:56 PM