"Point Break": Patrick Swayze and one last surf

We lost a Hollywood icon yesterday when Patrick Swayze took his last big wave after a protracted bout with pancreatic cancer. Reflecting on the long career of an actor I commonly and inexplicably confuse with Richard Gere, I couldn't help but go back to one of Swayze's cult hits that I hadn't seen until only a few months ago. After being completely blown away (no pun intended, actually) by Kathryn Bigelow's sleeper hit "The Hurt Locker", I finally felt compelled to sit down with a DVD I'd owned for years but never watched: Bigelow's inexplicably enjoyable surfer-bank-robber thriller, 1991's "Point Break".

Keanu Reeves' most impressive acting credit to date was as Ted, one of the Rhodes-scholar time travelers in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure". As Johnny Utah, an FBI agent teamed up with Gary Busey in order to take down a ring of surfing bank robbers in LA, Reeves channels his inner Ted and turns in, especially in the second half of "Point Break", one of the worst screen performances I've seen since watching a full three minutes of "Gigli". Reeves furrows his brows like nobody's business, and delivers his lines with the gravitas of Christian Bale's Batman were Batman a regular on the cover of High Times.

Swayze plays Bodhi, a charismatic surfer that takes an undercover Reeves under his wing, and, obviously, ends up being the ring leader of the bank-robbing gang under investigation. Of course, before Reeves finds out, a budding bromance blooms. When Reeves has a chance to take Bodhi out, he, in the words of the fantastic comedy "Hot Fuzz", "just fires his gun up in the air and goes 'aahhhhh'".

The absurd melodrama and ridiculous premise aside, though, there is something inherently gripping about "Point Break". In one particular scene, when everyone has figured out who everyone else is, Swayze takes Reeves skydiving. Swayze tells Reeves he packed his chute for him, and over the next minute, the other robbers all pass around their chutes in what seems to be a deadly game of shells. This awesome scene is not on the internet. I call bullshit.

It's an action-vehicle that features not one, but two, skydiving scenes, a car/foot chase that's damned entertaining, a couple of great fire-fights, and Gary Busey being a silly fat bastard to John C McGinley's bureaucratic asshole. What really drives "Point Break", and perhaps why this film has had such staying power despite it's silliness, is Patrick Swayze's charm. You REALLY grow to love Bodhi, he's just so cool! It's a major bummer when it turns out he's the bad guy that needs to be taken down.

That's, in a way, how I'll feel about Swayze's legacy - his likability overpowering some of the duds of his relatively short career (do NOT try to convince me of the artistic merits of "Red Dawn" or "Road House"). In any case, "Point Break" is a guilty pleasure, like terrorizing Whoopi Goldberg after bringing sexy back to pottery. Here's to Swayze - good luck catching your Fifty Year Wave in the Sky.

TOO MUCH: Love interest side plot

COULD HAVE USED MORE: Busey being Busey

FILM SNOB NOTE: As mentioned earlier, "Point Break" was discussed in the buddy-cop spoof "Hot Fuzz". Towards the end of the movie, they take it one step further:

IHYFM RATING: THREE out of FIVE MEHS.

IF YOU SAID THIS WAS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE, I'D THINK: your taste is either ironic, or just bad.

"Drag Me To Hell": it's heavenly!

No, I wasn't just reaching for the Gene Shalit-esqe low-hanging fruit with that terrible pun of a title. "Drag Me To Hell", Sam Raimi's return to the B-horror genre that gave him his start, was perhaps this summer's most-overlooked movie.

I'll happily admit I've long been a fan of Raimi's. Throughout high school, my buddies and I would frequently end up throwing on one of several VHS copies of "Evil Dead" late on a Friday or Saturday night. We even pooled together cash to get one of our friends a foot-tall Ash doll that played quotes from "Army of Darkness" for his birthday. Raimi returning to his genre roots after the enjoyable "Spider-Man", the excellent "Spider-Man 2", and the incredibly disappointing "Spider-Man 3" was an exciting prospect. The trailers for "Drag Me To Hell" seemed promising enough, even if they didn't make the film seem something off the beaten horror path:

And then the film opened. The aggregate Rottentomatoes reported: 92% positive critical reviews.

I was shocked. Those are "Up" numbers. "The Dark Knight" numbers.

I went out and saw it opening night.

About two months later, when it was a midnight screening at Chicago's Music Box Theater, I saw it again. And that time, I brought friends.

The movie, for what it is, is great.

The strength of "Drag Me To Hell" is not it's highly original plot, because it is not terribly original. It's the steady hand of a director that has a damned good idea of what he's doing.

"Drag Me To Hell" is funny. It's scary. It's hysterically gross. It combines all of the elements of a classic B-horror thriller that Raimi experimented with in "Evil Dead" and all but perfected in "Evil Dead 2". The scares are genuinely creepy: I couldn't tell you the last time I had a nightmare because of a movie, but damn if I didn't dream I had the tar beaten out of me by a shadow after seeing this the first time. Raimi creates a wonderfully ominous atmosphere without a lot of creepy music or CGI dead children a la "The Ring"; rather, he does it in a way that would make even Hitchcock shudder - with timing, editing, and cinematography. Raimi will give you a couple of quality surprise scares throughout, and he lets the obvious ones build maddeningly before paying off with a quick visceral jolt. And, as any fan of the Evil Dead series is familiar with, he relieves the tension with plenty of silly gross-out gags and dark comedy.

Alison Lohman (a favorite of mine since "Matchstick Men") plays a young banker eyeing an assistant manager position who chooses the wrong client, Lorna Raver, to prove to her boss she can make the tough decisions. Rather than grant an aging gypsy a third extension on her home loan, Lohman informs Raver she's getting the boot, and in return gets a nasty curse. Unless her skeptical boyfriend, the always-amusing Justin Long, and a frightened mystic, the hopefully rising star Dileep Rao, can help her break the curse, she'll be tormented for three days before, you guessed it, getting dragged to hell to burn for all of eternity.

After years and years of "Ringu" remakes and knockoffs, "Saw" sequels and knockoffs, and basically everything that's been fodder for Scary Movies 1-5, "Drag Me To Hell" is a refreshing breath of air in the horror genre. If you love a good scare and cathartic laugh, I can't imagine you'll be disappointed once "Drag Me To Hell" comes out on DVD next month. I think you'll agree, and forgive the pun, that it is heavenly horror: simple, but expertly crafted, and incredibly enjoyable.

TOO MUCH: opportunity for lame Shalit-isms

COULD HAVE USED MORE: another face-full of bugs for Lohman couldn't have hurt

FILM SNOB NOTE: One of the most effective weapons in Raimi's arsenal is the slow rotating of the camera to the right or left side - referred to as "The Dutch Angle". A few other directors that used this well? Hitchcock and Welles. Raimi also takes a cue from Tarantino and uses old-school Universal title cards at the beginning and end of the movie.

IHYFM RATING: A solid FOUR AND A HALF out of FIVE MEHS

IF YOU SAID THIS WAS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE, I'D THINK: It's a bit of an obscure choice, but at least you picked something solid. If you said "Sorority Row", I'd think you deserve to be... well, you know.

"Signs": either audiences hate Hitchcockian filmmaking, or just September 11th

Critics, for the most part, enjoyed. Audiences, for the most part, hated it.

M. Night Shyamalan had a promising debut. I, of course, am talking about his 1998 opus "Wide Awake", starring Denis Leary, Rosie O'Donnell, and Julia Stiles. Haven't seen it? Neither have I.

And then came 1999, and, according to the DVD case, the "#1 thriller of all time!", "The Sixth Sense". Audiences loved the ghost story, the twist, the cameo by New Kid on the Block Donnie Wahlberg; critics and the entertainment community loved it as well. "The Sixth Sense" was nominated for six Oscars, and although it came up short against "American Beauty", the world seemed to be Shyamalan's oyster.

His 2000 followup, "Unbreakable", didn't wow critics and audiences (this one included), but likewise was considered a decent-enough thriller with a strange twist.

Then, after a two-year hiatus, came "Signs". Critics overall responded positively. Audiences, however, despised it.

"Signs" is the story of Graham (a yet-to-be-crazy Mel Gibson), a recently retired pastor and widower who has lost his faith. Helping him raise his children Morgan (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin's first, and amazing, major film performance) is his brother Merrill (a yet-to-be-crazy Joaquin Phoenix). The movie begins with Graham waking in a muted panic - he hears his children screaming. He and his brother find them in the corn fields outside their Bucks County, PA farmhouse. In the middle of the night, a massive series of crop circles has appeared. Although they originally suspect they're the victims of local pranksters (played hysterically in one scene by Stella and The State's Michael Showalter), it quickly seems as though the cause is far more, shall we pun, alien [/ducking chair].

From the very first frame, following the opening credits with James Newton Howard's delightfully harrowing Herrmann-esqe score (below), it is clear that this is a world where something is not right.

There is something on the tip of everyone's tongue, an underlying agitation and tension that nobody in the family directly addresses. Even when we discover about the recent tragic death of the family matriarch, and before the imminent alien invasion is apparent, that uneasiness remains. Even though we're spared any melodramatic speeches from Gibson, and more importantly, the children, about how much mom is missed, they all carry the trauma in how they try to act like everything is fine. Their family, obviously, is not fine, and it becomes all the more apparent that everything in the world is far from fine. Crop circles pop up world-wide, alien craft appear, and it seems like all humanity can do is wait for complete annihilation.

The most common complaints about "Signs" are fair. Audiences criticized the marketing campaign that made "Signs" seem like the next "Independence Day", when in fact the plot is so focused on the family we spend all but two scenes on the farm, and for the most part, we don't even see the alien invaders. When we do, they aren't much to behold, which is the other big complaint. The aliens have a run-of-the-mill anatomy and rendered in a fairly mundane CGI, and the first two sightings - on the roof next to the chimney, and the stray foot in the corn field - are so muted they almost can't be seen. When I first saw this in the theater, I wouldn't have known I should be startled had it not been for the music cue. Although not a common complaint, some critics didn't care for the overall theme of the movie, namely, Graham's grappling with faith and whether or not he believes in chance, coincidence, and fate; some critics felt it was too heavy-handed and predictable. Other critics, like Christopher Smith of the renowned Bangor Daily News, didn't care for Shyamalan's acting role in the film, which seems to be the main crux of his Spinal Tap-ian review, "crap circles".

The heavy-handedness of the theme of fate, faith, and chance is certainly debatable. There are several scenes of Gibson monologue, which, in my opinion, are well-enough written, directed, and performed. Shyamalan's role of Ray Reddy, who was inadvertantly responsible for the death, has a monolgue that's slightly overdone, but happens early enough that it doesn't have too much affect on the final act. If talk about faith versus chance versus fate happens to be your type of movie, I think you're in luck. If you'd rather see Gibson jump on an in-flight saucer and beat the alien to death with a garden hoe, you're out of luck.

The alien invasion scene in particular owes a lot to Hitchcock. Most of what is happening is hidden from view, instead, we're forced to stare at a wall or a flashlight for an agonizing time while we listen to indiscernible racket. Just like in any good suspense thriller, or in one of my all-time favorites ("Jaws"), "Signs" lets our imaginations do most of the heavy lifting for us. On a whim, I threw the DVD in over the long weekend, and wondered if audiences had grown too lazy to appreciate suspense that wasn't spoon-fed. If you don't have an active imagination, I'm pretty sure you won't be predisposed to liking most of the last third of the movie.

On further reflection, though, I wondered if the poor audience reception went beyond differing expectations or the need to see ID4/Saw-style gore. I began to wonder, unironically, if people hated this movie because of September 11th.

Yep, I just said that. Please allow me to explain before you assume I'm crazy.

The flashbacks wherein Graham talks to his wife for the last time were scheduled to shoot September 12th, 2001. This was the first day of filming for the movie "Signs".

A movie about questioning faith, reason, and chance was filmed in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Watching the film seven years after its release, the confusion and shock of those events is palpable, especially in those first scenes.

Given the subject matter, I then couldn't help but wonder: was the film too dark for audiences to really connect to less than a year after September 11th? Even though it earned almost $230 million at the domestic box office, most people I've talked to don't care for the movie. I just can't accept that some questionable CGI, slower pacing, and a few lines could make people hate what is, at the core, a suspenseful claustrophobic thriller that takes cues from cinema's most accomplished directors. Perhaps if the film came out two years earlier, or seven years later, audiences would have responded differently.

TOO MUCH: bad CGI, televisions and radio telling the characters what's going on, could have used fewer dramatic pauses

COULD HAVE USED MORE: nuanced dialogue in Shyamalan's scenes and Gibson's basement monologue

FILM SNOB NOTE: This was the last of Shyamalan's movies to be well-received by critics. His subsequent films, "The Village", "Lady In The Water", and "The Happening" were received with progressively negative reviews. Also, Mark Ruffalo was originally slated for Joaquin's role, but dropped out when a (benign) brain tumor was discovered. Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto replicates his "Silence of the Lambs" style of actors looking directly into the lens.

IHYFM RATING: 3.75 out of FIVE MEHS

IF YOU SAID THIS WAS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE, I'D THINK: It's odd you didn't say "The Sixth Sense", but at least you didn't say "Lady In The Water".

Friday Film Snob Focus: Mike Judge

He's the hero of the Everyman; the Sultan of Satire. Over the past 20 years, Mike Judge has delivered some of pop culture's most revered, and smartest, social satires. This weekend, his latest, "Extract" opens in theaters. Although reviews are only lukewarm, a look at Judge's career suggests that even if it's not his best, there will still be several gems of social commentary that define the rest of his work to date.

"Beavis and Butt-head", 1993-1997 (MTV). I didn't have cable growing up, and even if I did, I'm certain my parents wouldn't have approved of the series that was a lightning rod for outraged parents and a generation of imitators too stupid to realize they were being ridiculed. I can't claim to be terribly familiar with the series, having only recently seen a few episodes, but what I have seen is at once painfully stupid while at the same time painfully satirical. The title characters are unbearably moronic, and those they encounter, though not nearly as annoying, are equally ignorant. Although it didn't get started until "Beavis and Butt-Head" was nearing the end of its run, the series is reminiscent of mob scenes from "South Park", which of course owe a lot to the precursor to both series, "The Simpsons". As one critic said, according to Wikipedia, the series reduced itself to "self-parody of their self-parody". The overall theme that continues to come to mind for this series is perhaps best summarized as one of my favorite posters from Despair.com, on the issue of meetings: "None of us is as dumb as all of us." The occasional copycat incidents unfortunately proved the series' underlying moral - willful ignorance is dangerous.

"King of the Hill" (1997-2009): Certainly the most mellow of all the Sunday night Fox animated comedies, "King of the Hill" nonetheless earns major points for being almost Seinfeldian in its explorations of the trappings of day-to-day life. Hank Hill is generally confronted with either his wife, son, or niece looking to explore or express themselves in ways that make him uncomfortable, such as his son taking a fancy to dancing with the family dog, or his wife becoming a foot model. Occasionally his oddball neighbors take the center stage, and it is ultimately up to Hank to overcome his misgivings and save the day as only a propane salesman could. Perhaps one of my favorite episodes is when Hank's beloved truck is on its last legs, and he says he's willing to only drive it 10 miles a year to get 20 more years out of it [I'm pretty sure I got that slightly wrong, let me know what it actually is in the comments]. Hank embodies the no-bull common sense and decency that we all aspire to, the occasional gullibility and stubbornness we are all prone to, and the moronic ineptitude we all inevitably succumb to.

"Office Space" (1999): Not much can be said about the cult smash hit that nails the repetition, boredom, and general insanity of cubicle life. If you haven't had the viewing pleasure, a fantastic sampling is the opening credits where our hero simply tries to get to work.



I remember first seeing this movie in early 2002 (to date myself, still in high school) and thinking it was just a really funny movie. Five years later, being a year out of college and in a job about as invigorating as working computer code at Initech, "Office Space" had a much deeper and depressing effect on my still relatively young psyche. The characters were no longer caricatures. They were my coworkers and my bosses. I had unwittingly become Peter Gibbons, stuck in a pointless job I couldn't stand. His rebellion was cathartic, if not downright heroic. Past generations had Odysseus, George Washington, and Joe DiMaggio. The hero of Generation Me is the guy that beat the hell out of the printer that always jammed, and he, like the Dark Knight, was the hero we needed, and the hero we hopefully deserved.

"Idiocracy" (2006): One of the three smartest satires* of the Bush administration was tragically dead-on-arrival: the culprit - Mike Judge's home for a decade, and the film's financier and distributor, 20th Century Fox. "Idiocracy" imagines Luke Wilson as the world's most average man who, through a mistake in a military hibernation experiment, wakes up 500 years later, and due to rampant commercialization and dysgenic reproduction by society's lowest rungs, is now the smartest man on the planet. Perhaps worried that the tale took too accurate a swing at the entertainment industry's most profitable demographic (people that paid money to see Transformers 2), Fox didn't advertise the film and released it to less than 200 screens nationwide. The film is biting, and although it loses a little steam towards the end, funny throughout, thanks to a perfectly-casted Wilson, SNL alum Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, and a hysterical Terry Crews as President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. Again, the phrase "none of us is as dumb as all of us" comes to mind throughout the film's duration. Most strikingly, though, is how frightening it is, as a show titled "Ow! My Balls!" being the most popular on television doesn't seem so far-fetched.

"Extract" (2009): I have yet to see Judge's most recent film, although I did have a chance to read it when it was being shopped around LA in 2006 following Fox taking a pass. What I read was basically "Office Space" with a midlife crisis, with Judge's typical observational satire. The film's cast consists of the capable Jason Bateman, SNL's Kristen Wiig, Spiderman's JK Simmons, Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Mila Kunis, and Ben Affleck in a role that looks as though it could be the career rebooter he was hoping Hollywoodland would be. Early reviews are only lukewarm, but for my money, I'd rather see a decent Mike Judge satire than any of the more standard offerings of which he seems so rightfully fearful.

*Wall-E and In The Loop being the other two (yes, I think In The Loop counts as Bush-era). Did I forget any?

Ed. note: After I drafted this column Wednesday night, an interview with Mike Judge and a pretty positive review of Extract popped up at The Onion's superlative AV Club. Please believe me, I'm not that shameless a plagiarizer.

"The Room": this one has a view of a spoon

I first learned of Tommy Wiseau while watching an exceptionally strange episode of "Tim and Eric: Awesome Show Great Job!" [excerpts here]. Anyone familiar with the Adult Swim show knows that in of itself is a mouthful, as the show is a parade of bizarre hit and miss non-sequitors; to say an episode is exceptionally strange is akin to saying Kate Gosselin is exceptionally crazy or the Backstreet Boys are exceptionally gay.

This particular episode of Tim and Eric centered around Tommy, who has the strangest unidentifiable accent you've ever heard, directing a skit with his signature touch. To get an idea of his signature touch, I direct you to a scene from "The Room" wherein Johnny, played by Tommy, buys his ungrateful girlfriend some flowers.

Did your brain just melt like a marshmallow peep in a microwave?

Last Saturday, I saw "The Room" for the first time on a last-minute impulse with a few friends at a midnight screening at Chicago's Music Box theater. Much like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" or LA screenings of "The Big Lebowski", viewing "The Room" requires audience participation. When you go, and you should, bring some spoons.

The real beauty of watching "The Room" is not relishing in the horrible writing, acting, and directing. The absurd misogynistic plot, about an angel of a guy who does nothing but dote on his girlfriend Lisa when he's not busy paying rent and tuition for Denny upstairs or playing football with his psychologist Peter and buddy Mark who begins to cheat with Lisa when she gets bored with Johnny, takes a back seat to the fevered audience participation.

Whether it's shouting salutations to the awkward third wheel Denny, rooting for tracking shots across the Golden Gate Bridge (it's set in San Francisco!), or throwing spoons at the screen every time a framed picture of a spoon is visible on a side table (this happens A LOT), the sense of community that comes from watching an affront to celluloid is cathartic.

The catharsis is not so much the dark joy that comes with watching an utter failure in every cinematic sense, rather, "The Room" takes you to a deeper place. The betrayal unjustly served to Johnny from seemingly every angle, and his bizarre take on how people interact, are indicative of not only someone who has suffered great heartache, but more importantly, of someone who hasn't the slightest idea how human beings interact. I have never known someone to creepily laugh at any opportunity. Never have I brushed off a friend who told me and a girlfriend they like to watch. I have never casually played football with my friends and psychologist while wearing tuxedos.

To watch "The Room" is as close to experiencing "It's A Wonderful Life" as most of us will ever get. "The Room" reminds us that no matter what the shortcomings of our lives are, we are blessed. We are not Johnny, doomed to be taken advantage of by those he cares for most. And, more importantly, we are not Tommy, who will forever be defined by the uncanny success of his colossal personal and professional failings.

TOO MUCH: Tommy Wiseau's naked pulsating ass cheeks thrusting into his costar's hip

COULD HAVE USED MORE: spoons, apple metaphors

FILM SNOB NOTE: Part of the cult success of "The Room" is owed to Ed Wood's infamous "Plan 9 From Outer Space", the sci-fi catastrophe that starred Wood's chiropractor as Bela Lugosi

IHYFM RATING: This doesn't even register on the MEH scale. A solid FIVE out of FIVE WTF's.

IF YOU SAID THIS WAS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE, I'D THINK: you're a hipster that knows how to use a spoon.

"District 9" - it's Halo lite!

So I used to work on the inside track of the movie entertainment business. So far inside the track, I was at Ground Zero of the Halo movie imploding. It was amazing that the project got as far as it did. In 2005, CAA infamously dispatched a team of Master Chiefs with script in hand and tried to start a single-day bidding war between the major studios. It didn't work. Eventually, Fox and Universal teamed up to co-finance the picture for Peter Jackson to produce and unknown director Neill Blomkamp to helm. Even though I was never able to read the script, having played all three of the Halo games, which have about as much plot coherence as a season of Twin Peaks viewed backwards, I'm sure the script was not going to be up for the Best Adapted Screenplay nod. As it often does in Hollywood, money got in the way, and Halo died a quick and painful death, like getting tagged with a plasma grenade on your junk.

ANYHOW, producer Peter Jackson said director Neill Blomkamp's debut feature was born the day that Halo died, ironic inasmuch as District 9 only cost about $30 million, and the budget for Halo could have easily topped $250, and was almost certain to be a disaster.

District 9, on the other hand, is a hit. So much of a hit, in fact, it's currently #44 in the IMDB Top 250. According to the wise masses of the internet, this film was better than Alien, M, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Chinatown, Raging Bull, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Heat, The Graduate, and Fargo.

Once again, clear proof that the masses are comprised of fucking idiots.

District 9 was a decent-enough film, some by-the-numbers action and chase sequences highlighted by Blomkamp's impressive ability to use computer graphics effectively. For anyone that has not seen them, I would recommend watching both his Halo live-action short and "Alive in Joburg", the short film that inspired District 9. Watching them, you'll get a good sense of his ability to create visceral images. At the end of both of these shorts, though, you may ask yourself what you were supposed to take from the films, and therein lies the weakness of District 9.

The first fifteen minutes or so of District 9 present a very interesting sci-fi dilemma - shipwrecked aliens in South Africa are becoming a growing nuisance. Documentary-style footage and interviews chronicle the events that led to this situation, and the parallels between the movie and Apartheid are both obvious and fascinating.

The interesting commentary stops when the conglomerate responsible for housing them in a slum in Johannesburg, Multi-National United, decides to relocate them to a settlement 25 miles outside of town. [Slate columnist Daniel Engber aptly described the name Multi-National United "lame", "obvious", and "witless"] In charge of the operation for MNU is Wikus [Engber: "an Afrikaner version of Michael Scott"] who inadvertently exposes himself to harmful alien technology, making himself quickly and bizarrely ill. Faced with the prospect of never seeing his wife again, Wikus teams up with the only alien who isn't a bloodthirsty sloth, who, for obvious reasons, is named "Chris".

Yes. The alien's name is "Chris". I'll just let that sink in for a minute. "Chris".

His name is fucking "Chris".

From here on out, the movie becomes a series of chases and battles where heads, limbs, and entire bodies comically explode like a marathon runner's blister. Wikus erratically double-crosses Chris, only to inexplicably come back in the fold and help him in the end. When all is said and done, we're not really sure what we're supposed to feel about what we've seen, and it's not a clever or purposeful ambiguity, it's the result of a movie that clearly was conceived of with a point in mind but completely fails to make it in the final product. What we're left with is a Faberge egg of a movie - ornate and expertly decorated, but ultimately hollow.

TOO MUCH: Exploding bodies, absurd plot holes, such as what the substance is and what it does to Wikus

COULD HAVE USED MORE: making a strong commentary on society, or the government, or prejudice, whichever it was that we were meant to think about

FILM SNOB NOTE: Lead actor Sharlto Copley was a producer on "Alive in Joburg"; his acting career started with a brief cameo in that short.

IHYFM RATING: TWO AND A HALFish out of FIVE MEHS.

IF YOU SAID THIS WAS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE, I'D THINK: I want to kick you in the Wikus.