Wednesday Night Movies! Part 1...

Part 1 of 52 in a series that will almost certainly not get as far as part 52.

Hello! It’s been a long time. Can’t be fucked to get into exactly why, but it’s mostly to do with facebook and twitter – my attention span is now somewhere in the region of 5-600 characters and anything longer just sort of pe..m nem mhn

But I have a new project, of sorts. For those of you who don’t know me (and if you don’t, why the hell are you here you zany crone?) I have a regular appointment with a bunch of friends that, historically speaking, used to be our ‘poker night’. Even when we weren’t in the mood for playing poker, we’d still all hang out and either watch vids, play vid gms, or generally get drunk and talk bollocks. asically, so long as there were friends and beer, it was worth hanging out once a week whatever we did.

Gradually, the “poker games” part of our “poker night” got fewer and farther between – mostly due to the departure of our founding member, who selfishly fell in love and moved away – and we’re currently down to about 4 or 5 games a year. But anyhow; we still have our regular “not poker” night – and we've even evolved a pretty solid structure to it...

• Arrive, say hello, put beer in fridge
• Watch the latest Zero Punctuation video
• Argue over whether to order Curry, Chinese, Kebab or Pizza
• Argue over who is going to call and place the order
• Argue over who is going to fetch cutlery and answer the door
• Order the food.
• Agree on a film to watch over dinner
• Realise we don’t have that film
• Argue over a list of about 10 films we do have readily downloaded
• Grumpily settle for a film we all vaguely want to watch / don't mind watching.
  

We've even evolved a system to expedite the first 5 items – it’s the last 4 that are generally the sticking points. For some reason, we can all agree on movies we like, but when it comes to movies we love it’s almost guaranteed someone else in the group will hate it. An odd dynamic. So – we’ve created a system: we sat and made a list of 52 movies - a year’s worth – that meets the following criteria…

…at least one of us hasn’t seen it

… it gets a “second” vote from someone who has (the one exception being Citizen Kane which none of us has seen)

…gets no ‘veto’ votes (everybody has one they can use. I used mine on 'sunshine', because I've seen it twice and it depresses me something rotten)

So I’ve decided to review all 52 films. Why? Because I quite like writing, is why, I get encouraged to do it, and this is a decent excuse/resource to write something regular, without it being an overwhelming task. Besides – if you’ve not seen the movies we're watching, you might want to check them out on my say-so, thus benefitting a tiny subsection of humanity (debatably).

So – without further rambling – the review!

This week: Waterworld! (my exclamation mark)

With Kevin Costner and Dennis Hopper

Is it worth seeing?

Heh. Heheheh. No, not really. But “Yeah, kinda” at the same time. If you’re old enough to remember this film coming out, you might remember that it was both one of the most expensive movies of all time (they built an absolutely MASSIVE pool to film a lot of it in, and those giant floating sets, customised boats and jetski’s) can’t have been cheap) AND one of the biggest box-office losses of all time.

It did make it’s money back eventually, strictly speaking, but most because the movie did inexplicably well in Brazil, where apparently it is one of their Top 10 films of all time.* Maybe the dialogue works better in Portugese, or something.

Unfortunately – this movie reeks of ‘populist interference’ and tried to combine the serious with the silly. On the one hand, it gives attention to the ramifications our current lifestyle on future generations; a world where everyone lives on boats and pontoons, where most people have never seen something as simple as paper, or a mirror, a world where people fight to survive and find food and water in depressing post-apocalyptia. On the other hand, they combined all this with the costume style, action scenes and dialogue from the movie “Hook”. Even Dennis Hopper as the bad Captain is missing an eye.

Most of the dialogue, the setup and resolutions of most scenes, are as cheesy as hell, as well as containing the most unconvincing, unthreatening monologue I’ve ever heard delivered by a 6 year old. The delivery was competent (for a six year old), the writing was awful.

But I quite like the movie all the same. The action scenes are fun, and pretty well choreographed. I like almost anything set in post-apocalyptic societies, where toughness, exploration, weapons, friendship and community are all but essential to survival. I even like the ending, even though thematically it’s been ‘done before’. And as well as laughing at it in a few places, there are even a couple of intentional laughs along the way too.

My main like about it? The general mood. That’s it, really. My main problem with it? The fact that, when Costner throws a flare out in front of him so he can see the ocean floor better, it continues in an unrealistic forward trajectory and apparently has no regard for friction. Grr. Made me mad.

Right – that’ll do for now. Hope you’ve decided by now whether or not to see it for yourself. I’m not going to force you one way or another.

*Source: my mum, who apparently read a moratorium for the movie a year after it’s release in some broadsheet or other.