At the Movies, 1/4/09

Do I have to watch Ben Fuckin' Lyons? I'm from Dublin! On this week's episode of At the Movies, we got the full top ten lists of both Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz. I have already commented a bit on Lyons' top ten, but a few comments about the episode follow the lists.

Lyons	Mankiewicz
10. In Bruges	10. Iron Man
9. Miracle at St. Anna	9. Happy-Go-Lucky
8. The Reader	8. Towelhead
7. Let the Right One In	7. Rocknrolla
6. Frost/Nixon	6. The Bank Job
5. The Dark Knight	5. Man on Wire
4. The Wrestler	4. Milk
3. Milk	3. The Reader
2. Slumdog Millionaire	2. Frost/Nixon
1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button	1. The Wrestler

As he is introducing his number 7 pick (Let the Right One In), Lyons says "This is the year that saw vampire culture rise to the top of pop culture, due to the Twilight phenomenon." One more time, Ben, please don't remind us about Twilight. You have done enough damage to your career from talking about that movie. No mention, of course, of your role in Twilight-gate--that you are partially complicit in the rise of the movie to the top of pop culture. Let's hope that 2009 will be a Twilight-free year for Ben Lyons--and for the rest of us.

On Slumdog Millionaire, which was his number 2 pick, Lyons says it was "the feel-good movie of the year. I usually don't like that phrase, it's usually too casually thrown around." But he'll use it anyway! Best part is, if the producers want to put his name on the top of the poster during pre-Oscar publicity (although they almost certainly will not), it can just say "The feel-good movie of the year!" - Ben Lyons, and not worry about all the rest.

Of course, our Ben would never throw out blurbs like that, would he? Let's not forget W., which he said was "One of the most important films of our generation." That wasn't good enough (although he assures us it was close) to make the top ten list. Nothing new for Lyons, he said that 300 was "One of the best films of 2007, and of the last 25 years", but that wasn't good enough for his Top Ten of 2007, either.

I cannot help but mention again Ben's unfortunate placement of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at the top of his list. He announced it as his number one by saying to Mank: "I'm a little surprised it didn't make your list, but then again, you said 'See' Beverly Hills Chihuahua." The appropriate response to this would have been "Yeah, well, you said Benjamin Button was the best movie of the year!"

Finally, there is Mank's list. He has odd taste, to say the least. Iron Man makes the list but The Dark Knight does not--and neither does Slumdog Millionaire! He was also enthusiastic about the relatively mildly reviewed Rocknrolla and Towelhead. Lyons, on the other hand, did not like the latter film, although it is not at all clear that he was even paying attention.

Next week, we are guaranteed to get the Ten Worst lists. I fear that Synecdoche, New York will make one of them, but we'll see.

Top Ten Ben Lyons moments of 2008

Obviously, this is more of a "greatest misses" than a "greatest hits" list. But let's be honest--it takes a Ben Lyons to make misses this great. Seriously, you know when you open your mouth and something stupid comes out, and you're embarrassed, and then forget about it forever? That doesn't happen with Ben. He says things on TV that are horrendously misguided and uninformed, and then we all laugh at him (not with him) in unison. And then we get bored and remember these moments and laugh our asses off all over again. That's what I mean by greatest misses--it's not easy being this unintentionally entertaining, but Ben makes it look effortless.

10. Separated by a common language: Ben says of Happy-Go-Lucky "I didn't get all the British humor." Yeah, all those Gordon Brown, Neil Kinnock and Maggie crushing the Miner's Strike references. Oh, wait a second, there was nothing like that in the movie. He just didn't get it.
    
    
9. Ben Lyons 360: No, that's not a new show on CNN sandwiched between Campbell Brown and Anderson Cooper. That's Ben advertising the new XBox 360 movie themed titles You're in the Movies and the trivia game Scene It? Box Office Smash. I wonder how high Ben actually scores on this game?
   
   
8. Ben blurbs his buddies: Every time a movie premieres with a bit-part by one of his friends, Ben can't help but to gush all over them. The examples are too many to mention, but the most notorious are Edi Gathegi in Twilight, Christopher Mintz-Plasse in Role Models and Jamie-Lynn Sigler in The Sopranos. He also held his 27th birthday with all of his "friends" just to show how cool he is. Even the "Britney Spears of Korea" showed up, although that only begs the question: why is the "real" Britney too cool for Ben?
   
   
7. Ben blurbs himself: Ben included The House Bunny on his list of the top films of the summer and didn't even have the decency to lie about the reason why. "Even though my dialogue was cut out of the film, Anna Faris was the funniest actress at the movies this summer, hands-down." Conflict of interest, anyone?
   
   
6. He'll never tell: In his review of Quantum of Solace, Ben says "We know what the Quantum of Solace is and we're not going to tell." I actually fell for this and thought it meant something. It doesn't--it just means Lyons is a fool. Quantum is the new SPECTRE and I don't think the word "solace" is ever used in the film.
   
   
5. The most unfortunate thing about Let The Right One In: “Something that’s really cool about the movie is that the director of Cloverfield, Matt Reeves, is now adapting this for American audiences. So we’re going to have this story come to theaters in the upcoming years in English.” 'Nuf said.
   
   
4. Payne in the ass: "You know what hurts a movie like Max Payne is the success of the Batman franchise. That obviously is about story and character so they think for all films of the genre it’s gotta be about story and character and this whole backstory of him losing his wife. I don’t care about that. I wanna see Max Payne shoot people. That’s all I want from a movie like this." Seriously, I am so sick of subtle themes, characters with interesting back stories, motivations, and dramatic interactions. Just blow stuff up.
   
   
3. Third times a harm: Ben gives High School Musical 3 a "Rent it" rating because that's better than seeing it at the theater and your kids are going to make you see it anyway, "Even though it may be cringe inducing for the rest of us." Ben single-handedly shows us what's wrong with the "Rent it", then continues to wield it like the blunt object that it is.
   
   
2. Twilight-gate: First Ben gains notoriety for including the trailer for Twilight as one of his 3 to See for the week--instead of recommending a movie you can actually watch--presumably to appeal to his teeny-bopper audience. Then he slams Twilight and puts Let The Right One In on his Top Ten list in order to make up for his sins. But it was too late--the damage was done and he would forever be remembered as the Twilight trailer guy.
   
   
1. Best Bond Ever!: During the Critics Roundup discussion of Bond films, Ben says "Personally, my favorite is Goldeneye 'cause that’s the first one I saw in the theater. It was the first one for Pierce Brosnan. And that was also groundbreaking outside of just movies 'cause that's when the first person action video game Bond franchise was launched which I wasted many hours of my childhood playing." No comment about whether he liked the movie.

Top five worst things to happen to Ben Lyons in 2008

In theory, Ben is not responsible for any of the below--he neither did nor said any of them. In reality, Ben is indirectly responsible for all of them.

5. The Birth of the anti-Lyons blog: First Erik Childress launches the "Ben Lyons Quote of the Week" page at Criticwatch. Later, I launch the blog that would become StopBenLyons.com. For Ben, it was all down hill from there.
   
   
4. Mank spanks Lyons: Realizing his own career and legitimacy is on the line, Ben Makiewicz takes it on himself to slam Ben after he says something stupid. First, he makes a habit of telling him to "Calm down," a feature of the show that became as prevalent as the Critics Roundup. Most recently, after Ben reviewed Bedtime Stories, Mank said "I don't know where to begin. I didn't like any part of this movie. You aren't right about any point you made in the entire review." Lyons responded by smiling for the camera.
   
   
3. Ratings plummet: According to a Los Angeles Times blog, ratings for At the Movies with Ben Lyons fell by 23%. The LA Times would not be Ben's friend this year.
   
   
2. How not to be Ben Lyons: Roger Ebert devises "Ebert's little rule book". On the surface, it appears to be a list of things critics should and should not do. In reality, it is a fairly explicit list of the worst things Ben Lyons has said and done.
   
   
1. LA Times dubs Ben "The most hated critic in America": Chris Lee's article about Ben introduced Lyons to many people who had never heard of him and reminded others why they stopped watching At the Movies. For the rest of us, it legitimized everything we have been saying about the man now sitting in the chair once occupied by Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. In 2008, millions of people got laid off even though they didn't deserve it, including many film critics. Somehow, Ben Lyons kept his job. Where is the justice in this world?

If his city screams and nobody's paying attention, will it make a noise?

The Spirit
Starring Gabriel Macht, Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes, and Scarlett Johansson
Directed by Frank Miller
Rated R

Frank Miller's The Spirit does not seem to be at all in the . . . er . . . "spirit" of Will Eisner's comic book. I found the more interesting of Eisner's stories to be those that were not really about the Spirit at all. The best stories from The Best of the Spirit are about unusual villains, ordinary guys who actually have secret desires and grudges that we would not expect by just looking at them. The Spirit himself is fairly uninteresting--it was Eisner's ability to spin a yarn and break the edges of the comic book panel, opening up the page to unique layouts that increased the medium's storytelling potential that made the comics fun to read.

Therefore, it is surprising that Miller is fairly uninterested in any of this. Granted, Miller is known for recreating old characters, including Batman in his classic The Dark Knight Returns as well as the awful All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder--where the lead character introduces himself to Robin as "the Goddamn Batman" and calls him "retarded". Frank Miller's The Spirit, unfortunately, falls more in the league of the latter comic than the former.

Miller tries to "sex up" the Spirit a bit with a superpower--Wolverine-like invulnerability--whereas the original had none. Again, it was the cleverness of the story and its telling that was the real draw to Eisner's work. But other than a unique visual style, there is little clever about the movie. I doubt there is a single thought or emotion that goes unspoken, often multiple times with cliched dialogue delivered by actors who have no investment in their one-dimensional characters.

One of the worst scenes of the movie--which was incredibly long, or at least felt that way--starts with the Spirit waking up tied to a dentist's chair. There are swastikas and pictures of Adolph Hitler on the wall, suggesting a brutal torture a la Laurence Oliver in The Marathon Man. Jackson walks out dressed in Nazi regalia--just in case you didn't realize he was evil--and delivers a dreary expositional speech about all of his evil plans, explaining to a disinterested audience the various MacGuffins that are at play in the movie. At the end of the scene, instead of an evil Nazi dental pick used to tear the Spirit's gums to pieces until he bleeds to death, we get Paz Vega in a slinky outfit with a big knife.

Of course, only one question remains afterward--what the fuck was that all about?

The rest of the movie is a mess. The dark and moody scenes we saw in the trailer with the Spirit jumping across roofs and delivering Dashiell Hammett-like lines about how his city screams and how he uses it as a weapon are few and random. These are juxtaposed against scenes with goofy comic book dialogue and bad action. I mean really bad. We're talking about Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner bad, without the intentional humor. At one point, the Octopus--Jackson's character--picks up a toilet and slams it down on the Spirit's head. "Toilet bowls are funny," he says, in case we didn't get the joke.

Near the end of the movie, Jackson pulls out two guns with four barrels each, declaring "I'm the Octopus! I have eight of everything!" That might have been more useful at the beginning, because at least we would have thought we knew why he had that name--of course, he doesn't have eight of anything else, so it doesn't really explain anything.

But what he should have said is "I have eight motherfucking barrels on these motherfucking guns!" Then the movie could at least have strived for so-bad-it's-good territory.

"My name's Benjamin Button. People call me Benjamin Button."

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett
Rated PG-13
Review by Scott Johnson

Benjamin Button is, at different times, an old man without a past and a young man without a future. What a lonely and confusing way to go through life, so ripe with opportunities for exploring how time and age distort our view of ourselves and how the world views us. It is surprising, then, that the movie does not play up this fact more in the film itself. The young Benjamin in the old man's body seems a bit naive about sex, but the old Benjamin in a young man's body just seems like a young man. This is somebody who has lived an extraordinarily lonely life and I just don't think that we get enough of a sense of that.

In fact, I think a very similar movie, minus a few clever moments, could have easily been made without the the curse of backward aging at all. Perhaps the middle-aged looking man who has an affair with Tilda Swinton could have been a naive teenager--The Reader, anyone? That would have been creepy, you might say--although certainly less creepy than the seven-year-old octogenarian who has a crush on a 5 year old. Or it could have just taken place later in his life.

Button, unfortunately, plays it safe and avoids the creepy tension screaming to burst out of this material. Remember the movie Birth, where a young boy claims to be Nicole Kidman's dead husband--that was a movie that didn't avoid the creepiness and was much the better for it.

It cannot go without saying that the photography is incredible. Pulling off a scene of Brad Pitt as a shriveled up little old man not only makes you wonder how it was filmed but makes you realize that the entire film medium is past the stage of the impossible. If you have enough money, you can put anything on film and make it believable. Better yet, mind-boggling special effects do not have to result in blowing stuff up but can be used to create unique moments of drama. Technically speaking, Button excels in this area and I suspect there are many scenes where we do not even know that it is happening.

One of the problem the movie faces, though, is that it is far too long. The writers must have been trying to give us a sense of the full scope of the man's life, but that means there is far too much meandering and waiting for something to happen. There are quite a few good moments--Pitt's affair with Tilda Swinton, for example, when we first get a sense of Benjamin as a man. But we wait too long for those to occur. In the meantime, the bitter loneliness this character must have faced is not given nearly enough play, especially at the end.

The film was written by Eric Roth, who also wrote Forrest Gump, a very similar film in many ways. This movie has less to say about history than Gump--which is fortunate--but Forrest lived through extraordinary events that he could not comprehend. It made sense that he was somewhat unaffected and just wanted to find Jenny, but it makes less sense here. Benjamin is a man of ordinary intellect and ought to learn great things out of life, but he floats through history just like Forrest.

Other elements of the earlier film seem to be echoed in in the current one--instead of Lieutenant Dan, we have Captain Mike. Instead of the feather floating through the wind (like Forrest), we get a hummingbird who appears after the death of a man with a hummingbird tattoo--and then again later. Huh? There is also something about a clock that goes backward, for no apparent reason, unless of course you did not realize that Benjamin was aging backward, which you did.

The movie itself is narrated by a character on her death bed in modern day New Orleans--just before Hurricane Katrina hits, of course. Why? "It's symbolic," the writer might say. But it is not really subtle and does not appear to shed any light on the story or the characters--other than to reinforce that a simplistic approach was taken instead of providing deeper insights into our lives and the passage of time.

These are some of the more annoying aspects and I don't want to dwell on them too much or make the film appear utterly worthless. Much of it is worthwhile--the performances are all well done and there are some fine moments. I think a very touching two hour movie could have been made out of this material--approaching Benjamin's life with broader brush strokes, showing how fleeting and momentary our lives are.

Some of that material finds its way here, but there is just not enough to justify the film's length.

Suffering fools, but not gladly

I think their meeting went something like this:

Ben: "Wow, it's so cool to meet you! Ben Lyons, At the Movies."

Sean: "Sean Connery, with a moron."

UPDATE - based on a recent episode of At the Movies, I suspect the meeting went something like this:

Sean: Hi, I'm Sean Connery.

Ben: Wow! Can you introduce me to Pierce Brosnan?

Worse than Ben Lyons - Larry King

I use to do this as a regular thing--just to keep a little perspective, I like to talk about people who are worse than Ben Lyons, or dumber than Ben Lyons, or have done something worse (or dumber) recently. After all, Ben has never killed anybody or stolen anything (unless you count disappointed advertiser money), he is just a scourge on film criticism. There is a whole world to screw up that has nothing to do with movies.

So here it is--Larry King is a fucking idiot. I am watching Larry King Live right now and he has a group of UFO guys on. At first I thought this was an Orson Welles War of the Worlds thing--set up a hoax, get people to go nuts, then admit you are just doing it all for entertainment. Hey, it's New Years Eve, why not have some fun?

No, that would make sense. Instead, in the year that gave us the most obvious and stupid Bigfoot hoax in a field full of obvious and stupid hoaxes, King falls for it all over again. This time it is aliens.

King just said, "Do you think there is a national defense plan for aliens? Sounds crazy, that's up next." Then he asks his guests "Do you think there is a plan for invasion by aliens?"

With crack journalism like this, I understand why Bush got away with invading Iraq based on faulty intelligence.

Ben's Ten

Ben Lyons posts his top ten of 2008 list in the video below on the E! web site. All in all, a pretty decent top ten list--mine would probably be about 2/3 the same and in a different order. Of the ten, I have seen all but one--Miracle at St. Anna, which got a 33% on the Tomatometer. Of the rest, the one that does not belong in the top ten--much less number one!--is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I'll have my review of that one posted tomorrow. The biggest crime, though, is that he did not include two of the best movies of the year: Synecdoche, New York, and Doubt, which he gave "Skip it" and "Rent it" ratings, respectively.

The video is below, followed by the full list in case you don't want to watch Ben.



By the way, what's up with the Mr. Rogers sweater? I was at Target the day after Christmas and saw these things and thought "Who would wear that?" Now I know . . . Sorry to go all Mr. Blackwell, you should see the crap I wear . . . Anyway, here's the list.

10. In Bruges
9. Miracle At St. Anna
8. The Reader
7. Let the Right One In
6. Frost/Nixon
5. The Dark Knight
4. The Wrestler
3. Milk
2. Slumdog Millionare
1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button