katmarsen Reviews

Bulletproof Monk (2003)

A Real (Stinky) Gem!

[3/10 · 7 September 2008]

This movie has it all!

Wire-Fu! Nazis! Monkey-attacks to the face! Stifler!!! (?!) Magical Subway Unscrew-the-Screw Kung-Fu! Ball-Hungry Subway Bodybuilder Gangs! Racial Cleansing! Genocide! Too Cheap to Crash a Helicopter! Crazy Monk BSDM! Russian Mafia Princesses! With Semtex, No Less! Nazis-- With Jedi Mind Tricks-- That Bite! Statue Homicide! Oh YEAH!

If you believe hard enough, you can fly, or alternatively, turn this pile of crap into a diamond. Personally I loved it: I haven't seen a movie this humorously bad since Dante's Peak. If it was re-shot with paper cutouts I probably would have mistaken it for South Park.

Downside: you'll have to watch The Replacement Killers three times in a row before you'll take Chow Yun-Fat seriously again.

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2005)

Unfunny, uninteresting, uncreative, unfinished.

[2/10 · 7 April 2007]

An unfunny comedian is sent to India to figure out what makes Muslims laugh, and then produce a 500-page report about it. He fails, having only bad ventriloquism in his toolbox, and comes up with a 6-page report.

You'll be looking for the comedy certainly, and not finding it. So then you'll be looking for some sort of subtle satire, but you'll barely find that. So then you'll start thinking maybe it'll at least be educational, but, sadly, no, the producer of this movie is as whiny, uninspired, and ignorant as his main character.

So finally, you'll be looking for a plot. And you'll be disappointed again... several possible tangents are passed by and then the movie ends. I don't think I'll even remember writing this review.

Ocean's Twelve (2004)

The Ultimate Heist Movie-- *I* was Robbed!

[2/10 · 11 December 2004]

SPOILER!! Terrible camera work, horrible writing, non-existent plot, and numerous plot wholes. Wonderful acting! Except for Julia Roberts. Who poorly plays someone who is impersonating Julia Roberts, poorly. Catherine Zeta Jones is adorable in this movie.

During the movie, we repeatedly zoom in, on each of the twelve (!) characters. Twelve is too many, even for a classic like 12 Angry Men. And the problem is, we tediously zoom in on the characters, when all of them are in the same room, doing the same thing.

Yep, Clooney's eating. Yep, Pitt's eating. Yep, the "Jew" is eating. Yep, the geek is eating. Yep, the bodybuilder's eating. Yep, Mr. Sensitive is eating. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep--Yep. Yep. Phew! This happens at least three other times in the movie. Yep, they're all sitting in cars, bored. Yep, they're all getting arrested, frightened. Yep, they're all being led out of a jail, depressed.

But it wasn't until I was home that I realized how badly they'd "got" me on this one. This is a heist movie, right? That's what I went to see, right? But when I walked in and set my car keys in the change jar, only then I realized: NOTHING WAS ACTUALLY STOLEN IN THIS MOVIE! That's right. It's a heist movie, where nothing gets stolen. Oh, they try. They go to try and steal some boring document or something, from some guy's house (whatever), and it turns out it's already been stolen. 20 minutes of my life, wasted. Then they try to steal some egg from some museum (YAWN!), and they screw that up and get arrested.

Then we see how some fairy french guy stole the egg even before they did, and we get all the joy of "Entrapment", except this time the person inside the tight catsuit dancing around the fake lasers is... an ugly skinny french guy. Um.

But it turns out he didn't actually steal the egg either. Actually, our heroes stole the egg, LOOOONG ago, in another movie entirely, which would have been a GREAT movie to watch, had they made that movie.

Instead we see a 30 second clip in black-and-white about how they robbed some college student of his back-pack. You heard me... the daring caper, the ultimate heist-- the buildup of this 2 and a half hours of utter boring crap-- is them stealing a back-pack from a college student, by creatively getting into a fight over baseball teams and distracting him, and replacing his back-pack with an identical back-pack? What??

Ugh. I'm telling you, this was so bad, I didn't even realize just how bad it was-- just how badly I'd been robbed-- until I got home.

The Haunting (1999)

Pathetic and boring

[3/10 · 7 November 2004]

The problem with this movie is it doesn't know what it wants to be. It starts out like The Others, really slow, almost creepy (but not quite). Then throws that idea out and becomes a slow-paced and impotent thriller. Then away with that one; now it's a sap-fest.

Whatever, this movie is lame. The effects are kinda goofy, totally ruin what little movie there would have been. Sadly, an episode of Charmed will stimulate your brain more than this load did.

I gotta say tho, Catherine Zeta Jones is sure fun to look at. She's more convincing hawking cellular phones than she is in the movie. And is it me or is Lili Taylor really attractive in a jump-out-and-say-boo kind of way. I mean, I keep thinking she's not that attractive, but then I keep staring at her. I think I've convinced myself she's kinda ugly, then realize she turns me on. Wtf. Avoid this movie, it's a snore fest.