Blue Lagoon: The Awakening - "Film" #13

You know what this world needs more of???



The Blue Lagoon!!!

Thank GOD! I had just healed my retinas from the last sequel starring Mila Jovovich; they were in need of some permanent re-scarring!



I mean, did anyone else forget her sweet virgin diaper???

Blue Lagoon: The Awakening is the touching story of Dean (aka "Holden Caulfield") and Emma (aka Molly Ringwald/The Prom Queen).

Dean is a rebel without a cause. But with a knife. That he carries in school. Because that's so cool.

And phallic.

And Lord of the Flies.

And illegal.

None of which the movie concerns itself with.

Emma is an overachiever who hates to be off-schedule. Her friends think she needs to sleep with the quarterback.

And you know what???

She really does.

But she won't, because there's a price on virginity in these things.

Long story short, they go to Trinidad on a school trip of spirit and giving. And alcohol. Somehow, they both end up on a boat raver that gets busted by the cops. As the cops yell the VERY fitting and slightly portentous "you're about to be boarded", Emma falls out of the boat, gets into a dinghy with Sk8r Boi, and the two drift off into the deep blue sea.

I'm pretty sure Thomas C. Foster would have a lot to say about this movie's use of water.

Regardless, somehow, the dinghy with two hungover kids on it makes it to an island while their teacher, played by the aged first generation Blue Lagoon "Adam" figure Christopher Atkins, finally realizes he is missing two of his students in what can only be described as the worst teachable moment ever.



I hope I never have to explain to a parent that I let her daughter get on a dinghy with Danger Boy on my watch.

"Don't be sorry. Just help us find our children."

Gah.

I'm pretty sure they don't rehire you after something like this.

That shit just would not fly.

I also hope I never need money so badly that I'll revisit a movie chain that has long since played to death the whole "return to innocence" bull that this smut purports to.



Tangent: I wonder when loin cloths are going to come back in style???

Dean and Emma, meanwhile, take to island life like two kids in a candy store.

If the candy store sold palm fronds, playful monkeys, and rogue panthers instead of candy, of course.

Here are my main ruminations/concerns upon watching this "film":

1.There is a serious dearth of loin cloth-age going on here. Even Mila got the aforementioned diaper. This version's Adam and Eve are practically clothed. What the heck, Lifetime! How are we supposed to know they're pre-fallen if they are too ashamed to be naked??? She wears either a blue bikini or blue tank top and cut offs. He is usually shirtless, which is, I think, his main function in the film. See photo:


I'm pretty sure the blue is supposed to highlight her virginity/parallel to Virgin Mary/etc. I'm also pretty sure his abs are supposed to highlight the fact that most men do not work out nearly enough to compete with the Australians.

Seriously, what do they feed them down there???

2. 

Don't worry, that's not virgin blood. Or even menstrual blood (who could forget THAT scene from Return to the Blue Lagoon!). Nay, good folks, that's motherfucking PANTHER blood.

Now, here's a good rule of thumb for all y'all: if you hear growling in a jungle, don't hunt it. Particularly if you have nothing to hunt with. Dean hears growling, then chases it down, until he catches up with a panther. Who then proceeds to chase him. Now, I don't know much about animals, but I do know this general tidbit: I don't care how cut Dean is. He cannot outrun a panther. But he almost does! until he trips on a rogue log and the panther pounces on Dean who somehow manages to get his illegal pocket knife out and kill him with one mighty stab to the panther heart.

That's right.

Little Dean gets to use his knife.

In case we missed it during all the weirdly quiet, gentile porn on the island...

He's a real man now.

3.  And what about the sex? Because they're Adam and Eve. They get to have sex with no consequences. It's a rule!

(Hey, Lifetime, it's Adam and Eve, not Emma and Dean!)

First, it feels creepily voyeuristic. But yet also masterfully tasteful. This movie may suck plot-wise but it gets an A+++ in strategic palm frond/tree branch placement. At one point, we even get to see through a little makeshift sunroof in their thatched hut of lovemaking joy. At another, a barky limb obscures the naughty bits. It's like Austin Powers without the winking.

I'm not even going to touch the fact that they engage in their premarital sexcapades because they find a crusty skeleton buried in their hut and the thought of their impending mortality creates some sort of psychological downward spiraling that culminates in Emma getting sand in her very special lady crevices. Sure, it's yet another blatant homage to the inexorable link between sex and death, but, damn.



Chester Copperpot should not inspire this much teenaged fornication.

Don't Dean and Emma know...

GOONIES NEVER SAY DIE!

Sigh.

Relax, the sex is not that graphic.

I mean, by Lifetime standards, it's Skin-a-max. But for the average viewer, it's politely untamed.

Beforehand, it's a lot of stolen glances and strutting around in varying degrees of clothed-ness. There's a lot of slow-mo involving Dean jumping and frolicking like a punch-drunk seven-year-old at the desert island gymnastics class.

But the eventual act(s) itself...very...quiet. I mean, pretty much she bites her lip and he puts his head down and we're supposed to just "know" that something magical has happened. And then they talk about how mindblowing the experience was for both of them. Before and after she does that insipid girl thing of asking him to 1. rank her performance among the mighty pantheon of his myriad sex partners and 2. tricks him into telling her all about his uber-sketchy first time with a junior in college (while he was a sophomore - which, if he didn't stay back, makes him at most SIXTEEN at that time and her well-past the age of legal adulthood) and 3. confesses that she gave him her most special chaste treasure.

He is, as all boys are in these things, overjoyed at how fortuitously things worked out for him in the virginity department while she is relieved to have someone pre-trained take care of all that awkward deflowering.

Just how God intended.

4. "Honey, we need to talk..."



After several vanilla sex scenes (and, yeah, Christian Grey, THIS is vanilla), we get a scene where pretty, perfect Emma starts vomiting.

Dean: Do you think it's the fish?
Us: No, Dean. We do not think it's the fish.
Emma: Maybe, it did smell a little funny.
Dean: Do you think you could...you know? Be pregnant?
Us: Yes, Dean. We do think it's a VirginBirthMiracleIslandBaby!
Emma: NOOOOOO. I am NOT pregnant.
Dean: Good. Because I have the emotional maturity of a toddler. Sure I have very handy knowledge about the appropriate berries to eat and not eat, but fatherhood? Man, that some heavy shit!
Us: Couldn't have said it better ourselves, Dean!
Emma: I want kids someday. With you. Maybe.
Dean: Me too, Emma-kins. Me too.
Us: Vomit!

And then she's not pregnant!!!

WTF, people!

The last time two young, good-looking kids had that much sex and DIDN'T get pregnant, this happened:



I guess Jenny was right, Oliver. Love means never having to say you're sorry you didn't know how to fasten a makeshift condom out of jellyfish skin.

Seriously, Lifetime. You of all people should know the importance of having tangible repercussions for this type of behavior! Now every teen who gets stranded on a desert island with her local resident bad boy is going to have non-stop sex for days and find themselves woefully unprepared to give birth in a sandpit! We should be getting ready to watch a very special episode of I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant: Island Edition, not heaving a collective sigh of relief at their blameless (babyless) wild abandonment.

5. What happened to Denise Richards's face?


None of the adults in this film have understood the concept of "growing older gracefully"...Denise's character has clearly had her lips and nose done. Her husband had hair three shades too dark. And you already know how I feel about the Atkins diet.

Sadness.

6. "WHAT ABOUT PROM, BLAINE???"


I hope I'm spoiling this for you: Dean and Emma get rescued. That's why she couldn't get pregnant. Paradise island babies/tangible symbols of hope for an unruined future can only exist ON THE ISLAND. Didn't we learn anything from Lost??? If they're going to get off the island intact, an impending baby turns their story into an episode of Teen Mom and that's a whole other TV movie right there. So, they get rescued and escape the shackles of an 18+ year commitment.

Score.

And, predictably, life off the island is not as idyllic for these two sex fiends. Emma returns to her life of popularity and overscheduling. Dean becomes once more otherwise ignored. Despite his efforts to keep their thang going strong, the two drift apart like two dinghies in the night.

Until prom.

Prom is magical. It's when ugly ducking little sisters who are not named Ducky get to go to prom with the prettiest girl in whole world and then get dragged off to dance by a non-Kristy Swanson "hipster boy" thus leaving the more attractive date unattended and ready for some rekindling.

And the good friends who once thought "Hot Steven" would be the ideal bedroom/prom/life date are all now rooting for the former freaky loser boy and the prom queen to get their romance on.

In the rain.

While her friends watch on (because he still doesn't have any), shit-eating grins plastered to their smarmy little faces.

Yes, sir!

7. The Green Flash/Light


Hey, Dean...Gatsby also believed in the green light...the orgastic future (that's WAY different from your orgasmic one). Stop using played out metaphors for the American Dream and the power of hope and nostalgia in your Lifetime movie, please!

Wait, did we talk about Dean's mother???

The movie attempts to flesh out Dean's character (because, let's face it, a 12 pack set of abs does not a troubled past make!) by giving him a sordid backstory involving his dead mother, that he may or may not have accidentally killed in a poorly timed game of "Warp Speed!".

Or something.

And what, you might ask, does every boy stranded on an island with a half naked hot chick think about constantly?



His mother.

She is the green flash, the guardian angel, the creepy overlord of Dean's emotions, and the catalyst for sexual exploration.

It's so very wrong indeed.

8. "Should we feel guilty?"


Yes.

I mean, that is SORT of the whole point here, right, Genesis fans?

Again...

Sigh.

This movie gave me sand in weird places.

Or crabs. I can't tell which.

Look, if I could leave you with one wish for this movie, it's this: watch this movie for the people in the background who clearly think NO ONE is watching them.

They are the true makers of music, the real dreamers of dreams.

Thor - Film #12

Remember when Natalie Portman won an Oscar???



Yeah, it wasn't for this movie.

In fact, I spent the better part of the movie wondering exactly what Natalie Portman did with her Oscar during principle filming...you know, because of the shame and phoning-it-in. But then I figured she probably filmed it before she won the Oscar and I felt much better.

Also, Chris Hemsworth's abs helped ease any lingering anxiety I felt over Portman's dearth of talent manifesting itself so blatantly in the role of an..ahem...astrophysicist.



There, don't we all feel better now?

I figure that Kenneth Branagh's Thor (yeah, I just typed that) is a Faustian attempt to reconcile human understanding through science to its dirty skank mistress mythology. Of course, in that reading, Branagh is Faust, which makes TOTAL sense because of the ego and necromancy and the cheating on Emma Thompson, which I still haven't forgiven him for even if she did totally marry up but then lose major points for naming her child "Gaia" or "MoonGoddess" or something.

Wait, what was I talking about?

Oh, right...Thor.

Anyways, Thor is your average, overblown superhero movie, except instead of a wimpy, anemic vegan in a spidey-suit, we get, you know, Abs Hemsworth who actually looks like he actually could be a superhero.

I mean, I thought Vincent D'Onofrio did a pretty good impression in Adventures in Babysitting, but that barely holds a candle to this effort.

See:



Vs.



I mean, come on! In comparison, poor D'Onofrio comes across like a butch trucker named Barbie who pumps steroids and eats sixteen eggs a day for breakfast so she can't taste the hormone supplements.

And that's with Hemworth's shirt on!

Look, I'm a sucker for Norse mythology, I really am, but this film misses the boat on several accounts.

First, Loki, who is reduced to a sniveling second child here (and, yeah, I can say that because I too am a sniveling second child, and someday, I too want to ruin the best day of my sister's life by inviting frosty blue gatecrashers to her big girl hammer party).

Loki was one of my favorites in the myths...you know, the oft-tortured demi-god jotunn halfbreed trickster of fun, but, here, well, he's like the obnoxious genetics experiment of Nicholas Cage, Alan Cumming, and Robert Smith.

Gone horribly, horribly wrong.




He should be off menacing Baldar with some mistletoe, not scheming to exile his brother so that he can save his father's life from the more sinister Frost Giants while Daddy-Odin catches some supernaturally-induced Z's in his Rainbow Brite-star-sprinkled-generated hyperbaric chamber sanctioned solely for the exclusive use of Norse Gods during their inconvenient nap cycles.

And he certainly shouldn't be off writing quasi-erotic elegiac poems of mourning to some pretty little Goth jotunn, which is what he looks like he's doing through 79% of the film.

GAH!

And what about the other Big Bad, the not-so-elusive Frost Giants, who emerge like a creepy combination of Jack Frost and any random Na'vi Avatar. I can't believe at no point in the film did ANYONE, not even pre-Portman-love-spelled Thor, yell, "Stay Frosty!" to anyone about anything at any point!

Oh, the injustice!




Oh, and then, there's the Rainbow Bridge. Now, I've already thrown in my gratuitous Rainbow Brite reference, but, damn. I know the Rainbow Bridge is actually authentic to the mythology, but, whenever anyone mentioned having to traverse it, all I could think of was this:



And that does not inspire world-ending fear.

Or, maybe more accurately, it does, but not in the desired way.

I took it as a bad sign when, within moments of Abs Hemsworth's Asgardian entrance, I could safely predict the entire plot of the film (which, in case you missed it, is basically "Hubris-addled Muscle-Man needs to learn a lesson in humility by being banished to Earth where he can learn how to order coffee effectively AND the true value of love, friendship, and honor, sometimes while shirtless") - and, as my sister warned, if you don't pay attention to the first segment in Asgard, you might as well go home and reread 50 Shades of Grey or something because it's probably not going to happen for you.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a BAD film (it wasn't a GOOD film, either, I'm not saying that, but it could have been so much worse than it was and I actually kind of liked that cute Thor fella). I just didn't see anything particularly new or interesting therein.

You feel me?

And what's up with the cast?

I mean, aside from Portman, because you already know my feelings about that one. We also have Sir Anthony "One-Eye" Hopkins as Odin, Rene Russo as Frigga, and Stellan Skarsgard as "The Beave."

What's up with that???

I mean, don't get me wrong, if I were Rene Russo, I'd love to get paid to wear gold lame and have Chris Hemsworth shoot me dirty winks for an afternoon, but what's Hopkins's excuse? Was it the pirate patch?



Because you know when the director yelled "Cut!" that Sir Anthony was bitching his little British mouth off about the hunk of spray-painted gold metal lodged in his eye hole.

And don't even get me started on Skarsgard, whose greatest contributions here are three-fold:

1. The drinking scene (which is the funniest bit in the movie)

2. To lend a sense of Nordic authenticity to a Marvel Comic hero whose backstory is so deeply entrenched in the myths of his people

and, of course...

3. Alexander Skarsgard, who, in case you don't read my reviews often, looks like this:


Of course, he's not in this movie, so there is that.

I'll be honest, I didn't pay what I would call particularly close attention to this film. In fact, I couldn't tell you any of these characters' names:


As far as I'm concerned, their names are Gimli, Xena, Tiny Thor Beard Jr., and Jet Li.

But, hey, you don't read my reviews for their accuracy.

And, look, I didn't even make one crude phallic joke about the Hammer...because it goes totally without saying...



the hammer is his penis.

All for One and One for Money (The Three Musketeers - Movie #4)

my latest film is an homage to the french pulp writer alexandre dumas's seminal classic "the three musketeers" - the touching tale of how four men rid their country of conniving ladies, weak politicos, and overreaching cardinals.

or something.

here is the movie poster:

yes, orlando bloom totally insisted that his face get total precedence in this film's poster. and, yes, i'm going to use the word "film" here VERY loosely.

instead of reviewing this film, perhaps we could play a rollicking game of "count the gratuitous phallic symbols" on its poster instead and call it a day?

no?

pity.

here's the long and short of it: it's a kitschy "pirates of the caribbean"/"kill bill"/"goonies" spin on the classic tale of swordfightin' and womanizin'. athos is sad, aramis is a smoothsmoothie of a priest, and porthos is a bulldog masquerading as a pirate. d'artagnan has cockiness issues, daddy issues, and unsatisfied urges. he gets into duels with all the musketeers on the same day! which, if you've read the book OR seen the charlie sheen/kiefer sutherland/oliver platt/chris o'donnell version of the film, you already knew was coming. hijinx ensue.

i guess i just didn't get the point. i mean, i could see redoing the movie, if, perhaps, you were going to take it in a different direction. but nope. it was virtually a cliched hackjob of every other film in this genre. i'm fairly certain approximately 77% of the dialogue was ripped from other films (including the aforementioned charlie sheen opus). because you can't really pick apart this film's "art", the most logical course of reviewing would here seem to be to give awards. so, let's do this thing!

worst wig: d'artagnan - hands down his hair piece is the least sexy thing about this film. i thought chris o'donnell's 80s streisand wig from the disney musketeers movie was bad, but this, this was awful. he looked like liz lemon after she gets that talk show and cuts her hair. so bad.

scene stealer: the porkchop who played planchet. loved him.

most gratuitous use of a wife: paul w.s. anderson...dude, we get it. you married milla jovovich. but guess what? we've been over her since about 1998. stick a fork in her, she's done.

most likely to be mistaken as orlando bloom: luke evans. if you watch these things for eye candy, watch for this kid. he's like a moody, misanthropic orlando bloom, before bloom became the king of campy scenery chewing.

best bouffant: orlando bloom - hey, he had to win something. if not our hearts, well, then, something else. here's his hair really speaks for itself. maybe once he stops letting himself get typecast as a swashbuckling flamboyant pirate prince, he can go play an elf again or something.

saddest acceptance of a part/best voice: matthew macfadyen - this guy has so much potential and it's squandered here in a film that just blows the shofar. he should be reading chekov on tapes, lulling us to sleep with that deep, resonate voice. not spewing half-witted lines about having a woman to keep you warm at night being the most super-specialest thing ever about life.

most abused use of CGI: AIRSHIPS!!! WTF! no need. i'm sure mythbusters is already on this one, so i'll move on.

most blatant anachronism: this was a toss up for me between the mistakenly long life of james I (he was dead by the film's proposed setting date) and the hall of mirrors being alive, well, and functioning during the reign of louis xiii. there's some confusion regarding the completion of notre dame, but i'll magnanimously let that slide for more egregious errors.

most pathetic plea for a sequel/worst plot device resolution: the last scene. 'nuff said. although christoph waltz's richlieu being able to keep calm and carry on with no consequences also lacked satisfaction as well. there was no "gotchya!" here. just some lame dancing and the ominous hint of more mediocrity to come.

seriously, there were several scenes where the actors just gave looks to the camera as if to say "hey, it's a paycheck!" or "it's your fault for watching this shit!"...it went beyond a sly wink to the audience. it was a cheeky rebuff for wasting our time.

still, if you're looking for fluff, i suppose it could have been worse. it could have been longer.