Failure Bread

…In a short sentence, because I was very busy tonight watching The Usual Suspects for the first time, and coming to the following conclusions:

1)  Bryan Singer is Hollywood’s best-kept secret.

2)  Ignorance is bliss, because the mind-fuck of an ending would have been way cooler if I hadn’t already known about it.

3)  It is never a good idea to tell any Kevin Spacey character that you’re smarter than him.  Cuz you’re not.  And you just might end up finding your wife’s head in a shoebox.

Anyway, since I was short on time tonight (working late, frivolous entertainments), I’m just going to post one of my older movie reviews.   It was written a couple of years ago, almost directly after I had seen The Wicker Man (I say almost directly because I had to get into the shower as soon as I got back from the theater to scrub off the suck).  Why did I go see The Wicker Man in the first place, you ask?

Because I never learn.  Because I never.  Fucking.  Learn.  I should know by now not to trust Nicolas Cage.  I should know by now that remakes are like Mogwais*; if exposed to even one irresponsible fuck-up, they go completely evil, and the next thing you know, you’re scrubbing caked-on green entrails out of your microwave.  And most of all, I should have known, somewhere deep in my gut, that any remake that not only did not invite Christopher Lee to reprise his original role, but also recast that role as a woman, was going to be a hard-core eye-clawing fiesta.

So anyway.  Without further ado, my review of The Wicker Man.  Here’s a little spoiler: no thumbs up.

So, my Grandma came to visit for my Dad’s recent wedding, and being that she is a huge Nicolas Cage fan and that we don’t get to spend a lot of time together, we went to go see The Wicker Man.

Wow. Three words: BIG. FUCKING. MISTAKE.

In trying afterwards to describe to Rob, my mother, and my sister the horribleness of this movie, I found that words actually failed me. Which, given my loquacious nature, is a rather rare occurrence.

At first, I thought, “Holy Heaven. If I never have to think of or converse about this movie ever again, I’ll be a happy camper.” And then I realized that it was so horrible, I couldn’t just let it slide. Something had to be done. And thus, I give you my latest movie review. That’s right, Wicker Man, you re-opened my rage circuits and now V is back to break your legs, shove you into a giant piece of lawn furniture, and burn you alive in a way that defies all laws of nature!

When I sat down to write this, a few key phrases came to mind. ‘Hated it as if hating it was my job,’ for example. I realized that if I were a lazy person (tchyeah), I could simply take the review I wrote for that riveting frightfest Dark Water, change a few title and actor names, and call it a day. And since I happen to be a lazy person, I almost did just that.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that The Wicker Man was so much more than just another boring, not scary, pointless, poorly-paced, horribly-acted, make me want to stab my own eyes out bit of movie industry garbage. It was, in fact…

THE WORST MOVIE I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!

That’s right, folks, you heard it here first. The Wicker Man is the worst movie ever made. Ever. Seriously, if you took every movie that was ever wrathfully loathed in the entire history of cinema and compared it to The Wicker Man it’d still look like fucking American Beauty. That’s how bad The Wicker Man is. It makes Starship Troopers, Wrong Turn, and Cutthroat Island look like Best Picture winners.**

Now, in a place like this, where movies are taken very seriously (more seriously than real life, oftentimes), there was no way I could just let my discovery of the Worst Movie Ever Made Seriously go by unannounced.

Now you may be asking, “But, V, why was it so bad?” Good God, I wish I knew. I can’t explain what was going on in the brains of the idiots who decided this was going to be their latest project. For one thing, remakes of British cult movies rarely end up being blockbusters. For another, the crazy-coven concept is way done. All I could think while I was watching that shit was, “Dude, these bitches should hang out with those girls from The Craft. Maybe’d they’d dress better. Oh wait… Never mind.”

So anyway, the premise of this movie is that Nicolas Cage is drug-addicted cop who’s on leave because there was a tragic accident, which could not even be bothered to explode in a cool fashion, while he was on the job. He gets a letter from some girl with only one facial expression, and she wants him to go to her nutty island commune home and find her missing daughter, who was apparently kidnapped by EVERY OTHER PERSON on the island. So he gets there and the place is bonkers, and everyone is named after a plant, and the men don’t talk, and the women are all crazy bitches, and the director decided there was no way he could possibly pound the ‘THIS ISLAND IS LIKE A HIVE OF BEES!!!’ analogy too far into my head. Yeah, I got it, dude, I took tenth grade English, thanks. Anyway, so Nicolas Cage wanders around doing nothing for a few days so he can get stung by massive amounts of bees and eventually be sacrificed to the island’s pagan gods to ensure a good harvest of honey next year.

Now, my own personal beliefs aside, I can easily see a bunch of protest-happy Pagans getting their hemp underwear all twisted up by this.  Normally, my feeling on that would amount to: get the fuck over it, it’s just a movie.  Normally.  This movie, however, includes a crying Jesus that was buried away by the island’s evil sinner inhabitants.  That’s pounding the ’see what you get for not going to church every Sunday’ nail pretty hard.  It’s still just a movie and definitely not cause for rioting in the street, but I can definitely see why some people might feel just a tad insulted by the portrayal of their non-Christian, nature-based faiths as a murderous cult of ugly women who don’t use conditioner.

About a half hour into this nonsensical suckfest, I peeked over at Grandma to see if she was going to hit me with her purse for picking this movie. Guess what? That wily woman was asleep! Lucky. She missed the piece de resistance where they stuck old Nicky up in this giant man made of wicker (the wicker man, get it?) and set fire to it. Here’s the thing: they lit the bottom first, where the wicker dude’s feet were. But of course, during the dramatic, poorly scored climax, the head falls off first instead of the thing collapsing from the bottom up, as is the natural order of things. Can’t they even make a giant straw man burn down properly? Come on, if you’re going to bullshit me, I want my seven bucks back.

*Seriously, if anyone knows the plural of Mogwai, let me know.  Is it simply more-than-one-Mogwai?

**V’s Best Picture winners, not that ass-licking Academy bullshit.