Studio Hive

SPLICE: The fifty-first way to leave your lover.

Please read no further if you intend to see Splice, which I cannot under any circumstances advise you to do. Actually, I'm not sure I can advise you to read further, either.

Livvy and Caesar and I were at loose ends during a family visit up home a couple weeks back, and in an effort to make up for the spiritual wounds endured by seeing Macgruber (our bad), we thought we'd take a gander at Splice, because it had Brody and Polley and del Toro and it was getting curiously good reviews and despite our initial interest being nil thanks to a shitty trailer, we went.

What we got was psychic assault. I've never had an experience quite like this in a movie theater, and as soon as I got in the car I called Doug (it was one in the morning) and narrated the entire plot to him between tears and peals of hysterical giggles. It is the regret of our summer that 'Box was not with us that night, but we bullied him into seeing it for himself, ALL ALONE, and here is his review, entitled "OH NO NO NO".

What it does not do is tell you what actually happens. None of the reviews we were scrolling through at dinner did, which is where we ourselves ran into trouble, so as a public service, here's why we were so rattled as we staggered out of Wynnsong on a nondescript Friday night:

"Don't love the ocean too much. It doesn't love you back."

There's no way to shape the events of last night into a cohesive narrative, and it's not like the movie had one, either, so what the hell: Here follows an unembellished account of my MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS evening.

Transformers 2

I was actually in the best possible frame of mind to live through this one. I saw it in IMAX at the science museum in Birmingham, where they were having a 21+ barbecue party with plenty of beer and caffeine and after-hours hopping around from exhibit to exhibit. (So much hopping that we were the last ones in the theater and had to fold ourselves into the second row and stare straight up the whole time.) We were all getting comfortably contorted right about the time it dawns that the piped-in music is a series of classic rock songs performed on a solo xylophone. You haven't known true bliss until you've heard a couple hundred rednecks belting along to "Livin' On A Prayer", accompanied by some dude on a marimba or some damn thing (and led in song by guess who).

I took almost nothing away of the actual film, which I'm pretty sure means some sort of coping mechanism kicked in around the time the hotter-than-Megan-Fox evil girl's TAIL came out, leaving me blissfully unaware to just remember a lovely evening of science and drankin' and clapping for buddies in Digital Domain.

Almost nothing except the evil Alien-looking robot who is suddenly and inexplicably and unnecessarily the big boss evil robot in place of Megatron calling baby Decepticons "hatchlings". That one stuck. Transformers 2: This summer, Robots. Lay. Eggs.

The Dark Knight

BATMAN SPOILERS BATMAN SPOILERS TURN AWAY BATMAN SPOILERS BACK BACK BACK BATMAN SPOILERS BATMAN SPOILERS TURN AWAY BATMAN SPOILERS BACK BACK BACK BATMAN SPOILERS BATMAN SPOILERS TURN AWAY BATMAN SPOILERS BACK BACK BACK BATMAN SPOILERS BATMAN SPOILERS TURN AWAY BATMAN SPOILERS BACK BACK BACK BATMAN SPOILERS BATMAN SPOILERS TURN AWAY BATMAN SPOILERS BACK BACK BACK

....Still here? OK.

I was mad as a wet ham for the middle third of this movie. I fell for it. I fell for the left hand with the handkerchief and missed the winks and completely believed they'd killed off Gordon, even though I wondered why they only showed him for a split second on the dais. I totally bought it and spent the next 45 minutes angrily writing this post in my head and then he popped up and I was too busy clapping and hollering to even be (that) mad at myself for playing right into Nolan's hands.

Because he had me. He had me at the pencil trick. Christian Bale's mask voice is getting distracting and no one involved has figured out how to edit a fight scene yet, but I was hooked and all his, early. And everything else works in its way: Alfred's backstory. Ledger's mugging (not not not overrated). A palette tweaked with what I guess are nods to the central villain, with more reds and yellows than we got their first time out. Gary Oldman carrying epochal lines like the naming of Two-Face; name two other actors who could handle this much of this movie without trying to make every word Mean Something. And could Katie Holmes wear this without looking like she raided Tom's closet?

I do wonder where they'll go from here, and who thought it made more sense to kill off Dent now rather than to set up a third film with him as the big bad. But at this point, can I do anything but trust implicitly? I never read the comics. My background with this franchise is rooted entirely in the films and the after-school cartoons. I approach Batman from a pure cinema angle, and my knees haven't wavered like that walking out of a theater in a long, long time. What a summer for movies.

Indiana Jones and the Title That is as Long as this Movie is Unnecessary

Pop quiz:

Q) What universally reviled and mocked line of dialogue from Star Wars: Episode I is REPEATED in the fourth Indiana Jones movie? The answer may repulse you!

A) Yup, it's "toxic dart", parading around in the guise of, "Those darts are poison!" WHO WOULD SHOOT UNPOISONED DARTS? Crystal Skull tried its best to shake loose any remaining affections for the franchise when Harrison Ford said "nucular", but that took it home with a bullet. Or a dart.

Bonus question!

Q) As you know, in 2004 George Lucas rejected an Indy 4 script by Frank Darabont, a draft that Steven Spielberg called the best script since Raiders. Name the other Actual Goddamn Writer who wrote a draft for the fourth film and whose presence was sorely missed in the final product:

• M. Night Shyamalan
• Stephen Gaghan
• Tom Fucking Stoppard
• All of the above

A) All of the above.

I saw this in the Dome, in geek heaven, packed in with the rest of the target audience, and I've never heard such unenthusiastic reactions to high-end fanboy bait. There was whistling and hollering and clapping as the LucasFilm logo appeared for the first time...and maybe eight people clapping at the end.

It's not a bad movie. There's a car chase AND a sword fight at the same time. It's above all a gorgeous stylistic exercise, with excellent sound design and a palette that dances awfully close to three-strip Technicolor--but we knew that could be done. They can execute these shots in their sleep, and seemed quite content with Crystal Skull to do just that. The picture moves like clockwork, and plays just as mechanically. Shouldn't we expect more than mise-en-scene from Spielberg and Lucas after all this time?

Iron Man

The thing is, I love Tony Stark. I've loved him since I was a shorty. As a tomboy growing up around a national defense complex, nothing was cooler to me than making things blow up rill good, and Tony, he was the best. And I saw the trailer and knew Marvel had taken production of Iron Man all on their own and heard the murmurs that no, wait, this one works, it really works, but I stayed away. From the posters, the production stills, Metacritic, all of it. I wasn't ready to get my hopes up, not by Tony, particularly when Tony would be inhabited by one of my favorite actors of all time.

I dashed from work on Friday night with a bunch of post house geeks in tow to line up on the Promenade and see what they'd come up with. I mocked Jon Favreau's body of work on the sidewalk outside the Mann Criterion. And two hours later, bouncing in my seat like I'd snorted Pixie Stix, cheering for our buddies in the credits (The Orphanage & Pixel Liberation Front, holla!), staring open-mouthed in silent they did not they did not they DID glee at Nick Fury's cameo, I wondered aloud: Is it that hard to make a comic book movie that doesn't suck? To hire a good writer? To commit the time and resources to utterly seamless VFX? WHERE IN THE HELL HAVE THESE GUYS BEEN?

The next day I made up for my radio silence. I pored over review after review, trying to find the sequence of keystrokes that could capture the elation, the recognition I saw on face after face as Tony did everything he was supposed to, just the way it was supposed to happen, the impulse to keep turning around in the theater to make sure it wasn't just me. And then I found the AICN review that said watching this movie is "like freebasing Pop-Tarts". And that about covers it.

Marvel did it. The impossible. They made a summer blockbuster deserving of the title and the money, and they did it hand-in-hand with their source material. They hit it over the wall, and I can't see how they'd ever put their properties in the hands of a studio after this.

Transformers

Seriously, man, What The Hell??

This wasn't supposed to be hard for you. Robots. Transformers is a movie about GIANT FUCKING ROBOTS FROM OUTER SPACE. THAT FIGHT. You are the Maria Callas of blowing shit up, sir. You've aligned yourself with Digital Domain to ensure that when they do, it looks wicked cool. You have every resource at your disposal, and you have my CHILDHOOD in your hands, and this is the best you could do??

A few moments of welling patriotism aside (see previous entry), I felt one single stir of emotion the entire two and a half hours, at my first glimpse of Optimus Prime. (This had nothing to do with you. It's Optimus Motherfucking Prime.) Every smile was a smile of recognition (I do thank you for shooting the climactic battle scene in my new neighborhood), not of discovery or wonder. Every chuckle was a chuckle of exasperation--whether at the dialogue, the poorly applied false eyelashes on the female lead, or at wondering if the point of Transformers is to TRANSFORM, why you chose to spend to little time on it. And imagine my surprise when, in the midst of imagining an ad campaign for MOUNTAIN DEW: THE MOVIE to pass the time, an Actual Mountain Dew machine turns into a robot.

Shame on you, sir. Again.