Jonah Hex

As is befitting its mangled protagonist, Jonah Hex is the cinematic equivalent of the winner of one of those Ugliest Dog competitions. It is a film that has slipped in and out of development hell so many times that it knows more about damnation than its half-dead hero, and my favorite tidbit on its Wikipedia page reads that the film is "very loosely based" on the original DC comic book of the same name. Subject to rewrites, multiple crew changes and, ultimately, pure indifference, Jonah Hex achieves a ludicrousness of execution so hysterical that you'll spend at least a portion of the time in the theater waiting for Nicolas Cage to make an appearance.

Originally set to be directed by that dastardly duo, Neveldine and Taylor, the insane team behind the Crank movies, Jonah Hex fell apart once when producers, purportedly under the guidance of star Josh Brolin, decided not to hire the action anarchists. The crew did, however, keep Neveldine & Taylor's screenplay, effectively firing the only two people who could possibly have shot the thing. Perhaps reasoning that only someone with experience in animation could handle the cartoony nature of the pair's writing -- a not altogether stupid line of thought -- producers Akiva Goldsman and Andrew Lazar brought Pixar, Fox and Blue Sky employee Jimmy Hayward, whose biggest previous credit was co-directing Horton Hears a Who!, to helm the picture.

What results is a catastrophic mash-up of audiovisual styles, mixing hillbilly, heavy metal, supernatural and Western tropes into the weirdest rip-off of The Outlaw Josey Wales you ever did see. There is always a certain joy in watching a film that does not play by the rules, that does not even seem to own a copy of the rulebook, but Jonah Hex contains all the transgressions present in Neveldine & Taylor's other works without the sense of self-awareness that they bring to those films; sketchy and vague as the pair's supposed satiric elements are, they at least give the impression that they know what they're doing deep down. With someone else trying to make heads or tails of their material, however, it's a miracle a film emerged at all, and I suppose it's not all that shocking that Wild Wild West as scored by the prog-sludge metal band Mastodon was the product.

Expository dialogue gets a bad rap, and Jonah Hex shows why, playing most of the first 5-10 minutes of an 81-minute movie (including credits) with either a voiceover narration or hysterically stilted lines spoken by characters on-screen. We see the titular hero (Brolin), a Confederate officer whose crisis of conscious led to the death of his friend, the son of his commanding officer, General Turnbull (John Malkovich), being tortured by the general. Turnbull murders Hex's family in retribution and brands Hex's face with his initials. Abruptly, the film cuts to animation -- why do so many comic movies use panel-like animation now? We know that these films are based on comic books -- jumping over the development of strange, supernatural powers and Hex's evolution into a bounty hunter as Brolin delivers the voiceover in the same slurred mumble he uses elsewhere due to the prosthetic makeup of Hex's facial scarring. By the time Hex growls, "This here's my story" when the film finally gets moving, he's told us so much we feel like the damn thing's halfway over.

It only gets worse from there. Hex's weaponry occasionally broaches steampunk territory, with horse-mounted Gatling guns and crossbow pistols that fling sticks of dynamite in an oddly straight path (no, seriously), all of which are provided by Reconstruction-era Q-substitute Smith (Lance Reddick), a freeman. (Smith lets us know that Hex's Confederate ties are not a source of contention, taking the time in the middle of conversation to randomly insert a comment that he knew Hex "ain't never believe in slavery.") For the most part, however, Hex uses traditional weapons. After all, it's weird enough that he can revive dead people by touching them.

That's what makes Jonah Hex loop around from terrible to hilarious: this is not a film that satisfies itself with merely killing someone once. No, bring 'em back for Round Two! Hex brings corpses back to life to interrogate them, yet this act of temporary resurrection for some reason causes the flesh of the reanimated being to burn and disintegrate. Once he's gotten what he needs, Hex kills them again. Matching the double-death scenario in sheer lunacy is the apparent need for no place shown on-screen to be left unexploded, and the almost casual way that Hex starts a fire in some places almost as if checking off an item on a to-do list shows where all of the film's $50 million dollar budget went.

No, wait, it gets even better. In some woefully misguided attempt to give this picture relevance, Turnbull is made into an anarchic anti-government wingnut, whom his Mexican slaves call "El Terrorista." I briefly wondered if this idea would have been expanded into a clearer slam against those good ol' boys who continue to wave their Confederate flags around and still claim to be ardent patriots, then I remembered what film I was watching. Turnbull decides to take down the country on the Fourth of July by building a secret "Nation Killer" weapon designed by Eli Whitney -- pause for dialogue about Whitney's history as the inventor of the cotton gin and father of the American Industrial Revolution -- to bring down Washington D.C. Did I mention that Will Arnett shows up as a Union soldier sporting a mustache and his deep "Michael!" voice from Arrested Development, and everyone acts if we're meant to take him seriously?

Oh, but I'll stop simply listing all the absurdities, much as I could entertain myself to no end pointing them all out. Jonah Hex, with its 73 non-credits minutes, has a lack of clear direction despite its clear revenge narrative. Most characters exist for no real reason, such as Michael Fassbender's Irish henchman named who-cares, made up in a tattoo that stretches out of his clothes and up his neck so that we might identify him among the other nondescript thugs flanking Turnbull. Both Malkovich and Brolin are slumming it, though Malkovich, who always figures out when he's on the set of something that will turn out to be a piece of garbage, goes into Maximum Malk Mode and may be the only person here playing the drama for comedy intentionally.

And Megan Fox, poor Megan Fox. I've waffled so often on how I feel about her that I just do not know what to make of her. Placed in the role of the tough prostitute/love interest Lilah, a name Brolin amusingly cannot say with his prosthetic disfigurement, for the same reason she found herself in the Transformers movies, Fox merely has to sit about and look pretty, occasionally kicking some butt so that she might look pretty whilst kicking butt. Her character serves nearly no purpose save the inevitable damsel scenario, and even those who trip over their tongues at the sight of Fox will be wondering why the hell the action breaks to jump back to her brothel room where little of consequence happens.

Despite it all, Jonah Hex reaches such a memorable level of badness, and is so mercifully short, that I enjoyed myself far more than I did any of the other summer action movies so far. There were clearly some high intentions in this film, as evidenced in its sly references, from lifting the giant cannon on the train from Buster Keaton's classic The General to the glow of the suitcase contents in Pulp Fiction -- maybe that "QT" Turnbull branded Hex with has a secondary meaning? -- and the talent involved, but something went horribly, laughably wrong. It figures that I should have this reaction, perfectly balanced between dislike of the film's clear failure and enjoyment of the ensuing train wreck, with a movie written by Neveldine & Taylor, whose Crank: High Voltage engendered a fair stronger iteration of the same reaction. Jonah Hex is as stupid as a film made by smart people can be, but if I laughed, even in a way that that the filmmakers did not intend, then who am I to pan it? Oh, indulge me for a moment as I break my promise to stop listing the inanities for one final tidbit: when Turnbull rides up the Potomac with his super-cannon, the viewfinder that targets Washington uses not crosshairs or the like but an actual outline of the Capitol building, presumably so his ignorant ex-Confederate subordinates know which building to aim at. Magnificent.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Remember that old gag in the movies where the hero dropped a huge bell on the villain and then struck it to deafen the foe inside? As a child, I always wondered if that really worked, especially since the bell was on the ground and therefore wouldn’t really be given to reverberation. Sadly, I didn’t grow up near a cathedral, so I never got to satiate my curiosity. Well, now I know, because I’ve seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a a loud, stupid and even louder disasterpiece as dizzyingly frantic as it is devastatingly boring.

You can tell from the get-go that continuity doesn’t play a large role in the Transformers universe: Bumblebee fixed his voice in the last film, but it’s not working here; the robots are hiding, even though they tore apart Los Angeles. Now the Autobots work with the U.S. government and answer to the President. Apparently no other country can ask anything of the aliens, except for a few British soldiers, because at least they speak English. That's God's language! It's what Bible is written in and everything. And the aliens continue hide in bright neon cars, which is extremely helpful in their covert ops to flush out remaining Decepticons.

Plot-wise, you better buckle up. The first “Transformers” suffered from a needlessly convoluted story, but this takes the cake: apparently the robots have been on Earth since the dawn of man and they built the pyramids to hide their weaponry. This is all explained in turgid patches of exposition. Why are the pyramids seemingly the one thing in the Bible that everyone's always willing to change? You know, the one thing with actual physical proof; clearly it was made by aliens, not Jewish slaves. Oh, and the Decepticons want to kill our sun. Not our sun, Decepticons! That’s where we get our light and heatness! Who will the moon talk to?

Obviously, this film is for children, but it’s simply insulting. Furthermore, I wouldn’t recommend taking a child to this film, because it’s filled with swearing and endless non-veiled innuendo. This is a film about toys, for Pete’s sake. Now, I am of the generation that grew up with Ren & Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life, so I know a thing or two about innuendo in children’s programming. But at least that was buried; Transformers 2 is a barrage of leg humping, pot brownies and – I’m not kidding – robot testicles.

Worst of all are the racist caricatures of two Autobots named Mudflap and Skids. The last film featured a jive-talking Autobot (they even called him “Jazz”) who existed to be not only the first Autobot to die but the only one to die. This is worse: the pair not only speak like stereotypical ill-educated black people but are illiterate and actually have a simian appearance. One of them sports a gold tooth. There are Asian and Arab stereotypes here and there but these two are downright appalling, yet they got the biggest laughs of the film. Apparently, space racism (spacism?) is hilarious.

Not that the women fare any better. In Michael Bay's world, the women don't get to be funny, unless they're having a nervous breakdown concerning their children leaving home or stuffed with pot (at which point they act nothing like a stoned person). No, they just have to stand there and look pretty, or at least what Bay thinks is pretty. Megan Fox's dialogue consists of a few atrocious sentences of flirting subsequently replaced by shrieking "SAM!!" in a terrified voice. Bay just plays her up for eye candy, but he does everything in his power to make her look plastic and creepy. In a film where one human is revealed to be a Transformer, I kept waiting for Fox's character to be thus exposed, though I suppose it would lack an iota of surprise.

LaBeouf himself is unmemorable; I think that Spielberg could turn him into the next Tom Hanks yet (at least in terms of an everyman quality; he certainly doesn't have Hanks' range and charisma), but the kid needs to pick his roles more carefully. He gives an admirable go of trying to play this nonsense with a straight face as everyone around him plays the fool. Speaking of which, let's just not even mention how much scenery John Turturro is chewing. Nor is it any use, I imagine, to point out that the same man who was in Do the Right Thing, the greatest commentary on race of the last 20 years, here works in a deli run by his Jewish harpy of a mother. I think he just might be the titular Fallen.

Now, I know what the fanboys are about thinking right about now: “Hey, man, I just like to shut off my brain to see a move. Sorry it’s not La Dolce Vita.” Such nonsense says more about that person than it ever does about a film. Second, Transformers 2 is the first film that will shut your brain down for you: its four (!) editors cannot keep a single moment of action from being disorienting, and every fight is nothing more than a mesh of unidentifiable fluorescent metal as the humans run from explosions in slow-motion. These action scenes are big and flashy, but they’re so damn confusing you have to wait until it’s all over to figure out what happened. And why do the just punch each other when they all sport missile launchers and heavy cannons? The only time you have any sense of clarity is when each side is firing at the other with some distance between them.

A more levelheaded person might suggest that I not expect so much from a film based on toys, which is an apt observation. But this film is nothing more than a string of advertisements and product placements for all the companies who bankrolled it. I fear that I incur the snide eye-rolling of the Internet by calling this the worst film I've ever seen, but which would you rather watch: a movie with such abysmal production values that it becomes bizarrely hilarious, or a morally bankrupt, artistically corrupt celebration of the very worst ideals that America has embodied over the last eight years, of fascism, isolationism and flag-wavering superiority? With a second act that drags like molasses and an utter lack of thematic exploration, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an 80-minute movie crammed into two and a half hours. Michael Bay didn’t bring the Transformers to life; he made a $200 million adaptation of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

In the late ’90s, a snarky British gossip rag journalist named Toby Young found himself working at Vanity Fair, mainly because its editor-in-chief, Graydon Carter, saw a lot of himself in the young man. What followed was a five-year tenure that could generously be described as disastrous, during which he wore inappropriate clothing, vomited on people, desperately tried to get any woman he could and sent a strippergram to work on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day.

Eventually Carter’s nostalgia gave way to the realization that he was paying someone who only typed 3,000 words over the course of years that managed to make it past the editors and censors, and sent Young back to England. Upon his return, Young penned the memoir sourced for the film. Indeed, many of the events of the book make it into the film, albeit toned down even for an “R” rating. The names have all been changed to protect identities, with even Toby being renamed Sidney, though you’d assume he’d have no problem with his identity being used.

He shows up at the office of Sharps editor Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges) wearing a crude T-shirt and gets assigned to captioning photos — a necessity in a magazine, but hardly worth importing someone from England for. As the son of a baron (or lord, in the film version), Young has his credit cards printed with “Hon” for Honorable in front of his name to impress women, but can’t stop embarrassing himself long enough to ever mention it.

The more Sidney immerses himself into the celebrity scene (or tries to, at least), the more he learns the sordid truth about the shallowness of its stars and the twisted relationship between their agents and the magazines. The big publicist is Eleanor Johnson (Gillian Anderson), who ensures all her clients get positive print from Sharps. Young rebels at the notion of pampering a host of untalented celebrities and ends up annoying everyone from Harding to his immediate supervisor, Allison (Kirsten Dunst).

The problem with the transition is that Sidney loses his teeth. Played by the lovely Simon Pegg in the latest of his woeful miscasts in American films, he comes off as a charmer who nobly takes a stand against bowing to the demands of Eleanor, but makes nothing but mistakes. He often spits food on the rich and famous inadvertently, gets slapped a lot and even accidentally kills a dog.

In real life, Toby Young displayed the classic stalker mentality of desperately wanting to be in the limelight of the famous and to simultaneously tear it down. The more he discovered about the vapidity of the celebrity scene, the more he placed himself into a level of post-irony normally reserved for Andy Kaufman, self-destructing in some poorly thought out scheme of revolution.

Here, he’s simply an inept fool. The best and only glimpse we get of Young’s style in the film comes when he chats with an pretentious, overrated, Tarantino-ripoff director and cheerfully insists that “Con Air” is the greatest film of all time to get a rise out of him. The most infuriating thing about this adaptation is that moments like these are cast aside in favor of the lame insertion of a hackneyed love story.

The only friend Young has is Allison, but he longs for the beautiful, but vacant Sophie Maes (Megan Fox). I never really understood the fuss over Fox, as, depending on the camera angle in “Transformers,” she looked different and strange. If I learned nothing else from this film (and I didn’t), it’s that Michael Bay truly is a terrible director, because she actually looks like a human here. She also turns in a surprisingly solid comedic performance and holds her own against Pegg, albeit only because the film so thoroughly neuters him.

Of course, he eventually realizes who’s really stuck by him; yadda yadda yadda, you know how it will end, and it derails what was meant to be a scathing indictment of tabloid/fashion/pop culture journalism on a level “The Devil Wears Prada” does not even begin to approach. The acting is uniformly excellent, except for Dunst, who is at her usual loathsome “abilities.” Even Pegg gets laughs despite being far too charming to play Young.

However, in cutting down Toby’s exploits to ensure at least some teenagers could get in, it also removes the bile, and indeed the humor, from the story. What we’re left with is a clumsy, by-the-numbers romantic comedy with only occasional flashes of journalistic satire. Actually, it seeks to be a comedic parody of Federico Fellini's masterpiece La Dolce Vita; at one point Allison even cites it as her favorite film, and the finale takes place at a lawn screening of the classic. Yes, it's that kind of film.