It took a lot of people to make a movie as multitiered in its awfulness as this one, although the lion's share of the blame goes to "director" B-Rat and "screenwriters" S-Kin and Z-Pen. X3 is a continuity-disabled blight on what has otherwise been a reasonably sharp franchise. It's dumbed-down, bloated and shoddy in a tacky-pricey Stealth way, as though no one could actually be bothered to look at the dailies or hold the entire screenplay in their head or even rent X1 and X2 before birthing this abomination. X3 is so tone-deaf and botched on every level that going into specific details would merely be punishing, besides already having been written up ad nauseam and more eloquently elsewhere. Simply put, shame on everyone for giving this sloppy mess a great opening weekend. You've validated a campaign of ugly marketing and poor creative decisions that will resonate for years to come. (Okay, one specific gripe: Why did so much of this movie remind me of the early-Eighties Disney misfire Condorman in its cheesiness? Was it the oblivious camp surging beneath the wings of the why'd-they-bother character Angel? Hmm. And that's a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg.) Grade: F
What passes for cute in your twenties is often tragic in your forties. In that respect, Jpod doesn't so much revisit Microserfs as it does rip that earlier novel off—poorly—and that's a real tragedy. Douglas Coupland clearly had a couple of good yarns in him, but over time his biting irony has calcified into bitterness and his acute bead on pop culture has lapsed into a lazy litany of hyphenated consumer references. Jpod is so disposable it should come with an expiration date. I won't even get into the author's tedious attempt at "flexing" by writing himself into the story—which I suppose is meant to operate on some level of parody but exhibits at best a deluded sense of self-awareness. Dull-de-dull-dull. On the plus side, the text is so larded with badly typeset pictographic garbage that the book may be consumed in a couple of noncommittal shittings. Oops. Sittings.
Artist: The 88. Album: Over and Over.
Memo to self: it's not 1999.
Artist: New Order. Album: Singles.
Artist: LCD Soundsystem. Album: LCD Soundsystem.
Artist: The Coral Sea. Album: Volcano and Heart.
It's difficult to fault an unpretentious disaster flick for unpretentiously delivering destructo-porn sans pesky story or character development. Poseidon is a serviceable mid-Nineties movie of the week, cementing Wolfgang Petersen's status as an expensive hack. It's coherent. It's disposable. It floats. Grade: B-
Begins pretty much the way you'd expect a Clowes-Zwigoff collabo to—loose, funny, offbeat. Then the story falls off a cliff, stumbling through a tedious murder-as-commentary-on-art subplot for what feels like several hours—in some ways recalling Cindy Sherman's ill-advised 1997 cinematic foray Office Killer (maybe that's the joke/how's that for a reference); suffice it to say, the movie never recovers. Grade: C-
While lacking the grace and economy of Brian De Palma's 1996 franchise outing, J.J. Abrams' contribution to the Impossible Mission canon is sturdy and competent enough not to beg comparison with John Woo's sloppy, florid 2000 entry. M:I:3 is essentially Alias on steroids, replete with an episodic rhythm that suggests commercial breaks but minus Jennifer Garner's unifying charisma. The set pieces are budgetarily spectacular; the emotional connective tissue, however tenuous, is nevertheless tedious. And incidentally, in case it isn't abundantly queer by now, Tom Cruise really cares about the ladies in his life, with whom he constantly has totally spontaneous, unchoreographed sex and who consistently get mixed up in his covert existence … as a spy. Got it? Good. The movie's biggest misfire is Philip Seymour Hoffman. As written, his heralded villainy is so vague and constricted by the demands of Cruise's star turn that he registers with scarcely an iota of the evil reputation that precedes him. He comes across as a churlish petty-psycopath, easily dispatched just in time for the penultimate sponsor identification. Grade: B