One-sentence reviews – Page 8

The Monuments Men (George Clooney 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about The Monuments Men (2014), George Clooney’s oddly uninvolving war movie about the unit attempting to retrieve the masterpieces of European art stolen by Nazis before they fall into the filthy red paws of the Soviet army sweeping into Germany from the east, is the long comedy sequence – cut from the cinematic release but now available as a DVD extra – in which Bill Murray and John Goodman, mangling Gallic vowels in abominable stage French accents, disappear off on a side mission in a valiant effort to recover Van Klomp’s The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies…

Transcendence (Wally Pfister 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Transcendence (2014) is not the sub-Kubrickian but nonetheless quite fascinating commutative editing, which results in a film with only half a dozen scenes dispersed among its 105-minute stream of images replacing one another with no memory of what appeared before each of them and no necessary connection to what appears after each of them, nor is it the the moment when you begin to imagine an alternative version in which Rebecca Hall’s character was played by Miranda Hart, nor the moment when you begin to imagine Johnny Depp’s character was played by an actor and resembled a character, nor the bit when you start aching for the AI, having hooked itself up to the internets, to come across an online copy of Colossus: The Forbin Project and become depressed or The Lawnmower Man and become really depressed or Demon Seed and start building something really nasty in the basement, nor is it the end credit which says ‘A WALLY PFISTER FILM’ when even then surely they must have know it was really a case of ‘THE WALLY PFISTER FILM’, no, the very best thing about Transcendence is the bit right near the end when the soldier played by Cole Hauser exclaims ‘it didn’t kill anyone’, which was basically my complaint, too…

I, Frankenstein (Stuart Beattie 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about I, Frankenstein (2014) is not (the German) Victor Frankenstein’s misbegotten scheme two centuries ago in Ingolstadt (Germany) to add an extra layer of security to the details of his reanimation process by writing his journal in English so no one could read it, but that very kindly, just over halfway through the movie, Aaron Eckhart takes the time to reassure the viewer that ‘whatever happens, it ends tonight’, which was frankly a relief…

X-Men: Days of Future Past (Bryan Singer 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), the sequel to 2011’s queer classic X-Men: First Class aka Brokeback Mutant, is not its inability to work out what to do with female superheroes who aren’t blue and naked – Storm has two whole lines of dialogue, which might be more than Blink does, and one brief meteorological dabble; Rogue, for all that Anna Paquin comes seventh in the credits, gets a two-second wordless cameo; and Kitty Pryde has the clunkiest, most thankless line of exposition in a film full of clunky, thankless and repetitive exposition because if it’s too hard I won’t understand it, and then gets to spend the next two hours kneeling down trying not to stroke Wolverine’s sideburns – nor is it Professor Xavier’s claim that the ‘greatest of powers’ is ‘hope’, when clearly he means ‘cliché’, nor is it that given the opportunity to transport Wolverinator, the huge jackass, back in time to change one thing that will in turn change everything they send him to strut around 1970s New York like some kind of white Shaft rather than to the script conference that set this humdrummery rolling (where he could have killed everyone with impunity because we would never have known this universe containing this dreary mess of a film ever existed – would you like me to exposition that for you a couple of times, or are you keeping up all by yourself?), but the fact that the film is so leaden and uninvolving that nothing, nothing at all, can distract you from coming up with an amusing alternative title for it … although, in a truly damning indictment of just how exhausting work has been the last couple of weeks, the best I, the actual (god’s honest truth) coiner of Brokeback Mutant, could come up with was the half-assed X-Men: Days of Farty Pasta … and in an equally devastating indictment of Fox’s apparent collusion in undermining the one genuinely lucrative Marvel property to which Disney does not own the film rights, it turns out that getting to call this tiresome piece of crap Days of Farty Pasta is actually the very best thing about it…

Brick Mansions (Camille Delamarre 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Brick Mansions (2014) is not that it has a piece of good old-fashioned Jean-Claude Van Damme-style hasty exposition about the origins of Lino to explain why someone with a French accent lives in a Detroit ghetto (and then dubs David Belle badly anyway), nor that a film so vastly inferior to its source, Banlieue 13 (2004), has the audacity to insist that ‘different methods can produce the same result’, but that it helped answer a question posed by the old episode of Orange is the New Black I saw just before it – yes, it is actually possible for something to be more depressing than a Tori Amos tribute band…

Caché (Michael Haneke 2005)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Caché (2005) is not the rather effortless manner in which Michael Haneke matches his filmmaking style to the tedious self-regard of his bourgeois protagonists, but the fact that I did not have to pay a penny to watch it since some bloke, never found out who exactly, just left a copy in a supermarket carrier bag on the doorstep…

RoboCop (José Padilha 2014)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about RoboCop (2014) is not its astonishing commitment to the lipogrammatic principles of the Oulipo group, going far beyond Georges Perec, for example, who wrote the 300-page novel La Disparition (1969) without using the letter ‘e’, in order to gather together the few surviving remains of a franchise blown apart by lame film sequels, not to mention insipid live-action and animated television incarnations, and from them to build a whole new 117-minute film without using the letters ‘wit’, ‘intelligence’ or ‘decent action choreography’; no, the very best thing is that in the tagline at the top of the poster, very first word, they spelt ‘cinema’ wrong…

Bait (Kimble Rendall 2012)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Bait (2012) – the film in which a bunch of young Aussies, most of whom, according to a half-assed imdb search, seem to be stuntmen from Neighbours (!), and that bloke who used to be in Charmed (not the pudding-faced one, the other one) get stranded in a flooded post-tsunami supermarket along with a couple of great white sharks – is the sequence in which one of the kids constructs a shark cage cum body armour out of shopping trolleys and baskets so he can make his way underwater to do something or other (to be honest, I’d stopped paying attention and couldn’t be bothered to rewind it) only to find that his makeshift airtube is too short and he must spit it out in order to reach that little bit further and do that thing, whatever it was, only to then find, when he swims to the surface to breathe in the gap between the water and the ceiling, that the shopping basket over his head is too big and so he drowns, which the film tries to make noble and tragic, and to be honest you would need a heart of stone not to wet yourself laughing….

Big Ass Spider! (Mike Mendez 2013)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Big Ass Spider! is not, as you might assume, its title, which, like Eight Legged Freaks (2002), no film could possibly live up to, nor is it the pleasure of seeing Lombardo Boyar, playing the offensively-written comedy ethnic sidekick, steal every scene he is in, because sadly that is not really much of an accomplishment, nor is it the unexpected Lloyd Kaufman cameo, no, the very best thing about Big Ass Spider! is that they seem to have brought it in on time and budget, more or less, I guess…

American Hustle (David O Russell 2013)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about American Hustle (2013) is its teasing revelation that the whole Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy thing was merely laying the groundwork for Christian Bale to perform the most remarkable yet of his many physical transformations, of which the drastic weight loss for The Machinist (2004) and Rescue Dawn (2006) are the most renowned but which hardly presage and count as nought compared to his metamorphosis into Adam West…