Freedomland & Date Movie

Hey, here's two movies I watched today. You want the short version? They suck tremendous amounts of ass. So much ass do they suck that the level of force of their suckitude could only be measured in a large, university-based physics laboratory. I think Cal Tech might have the resources, but I'm sure they're already too occupied with something about black holes or String Theory to bother figuring out just how badly Freedomland and Date Movie suck. It's a whole hell of a lot. That's all you need to know.

Okay, you want the long version? Keep reading...

Freedomland



Joe Roth's filmography reads like a felony rap sheet. A few more bad movies, he's going to make Interpol's Most Wanted list. Bad reviews just aren't enough to contain this kind of cinematic terrorism. Somebody get Scotland Yard on the motherfucker.

Egregious though his cinematic crimes may be - America's Sweethearts and Christmas with the Kranks stand out as particularly puerile - they're generally at least well-meaning, light entertainments.

His latest, Freedomland, takes on topics ranging from the horror of losing a child to the American racial divide within the framework of a police procedural. I don't know what made Uncle Joe think he could pull something complicated like this off when he can't even get a broad, silly romantic comedy with John Cusack right. It would be like the guys who made "Brokeback to the Future" taking on the King Kong sequel as their next project.

The resulting disaster isn't quite as cheap and manipulative as Crash, nor as grating, but it's still plenty insufferable. A stupid movie that fails as escapism is one thing, but a stupid movie with delusions of grandeur is an altogether different, and more obnoxious, thing entirely.

The trouble begins when deranged mother Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore) shows up babbling at an inner-city hospital, reporting that she's been carjacked in the ghetto. Something smells fishy to local cop Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson), who apparently believes that he knows everyone in the neighborhood and doesn't think any of them would carjack a nice lady like Brenda. Or something. I'm not sure. He might also be concerned that he has such an obviously made-up name. This is never addressed directly in Richard Price's script, which he adapated from his novel.

Anyway, Lorenzo eventually gets out of Brenda that her son, Cody, was in the car during the carjacking, a revelation that takes this odd case in a totally different direction. Racist white cops decide that, because of the proximity of the crime scene to the projects, the only way to find the boy will be to shut down the entire neighborhood and harrass all the local residents. Lorenzo thus slowly finds his way into the middle of a budding race war.

And I do mean slowly. Nothing much happens in Freedomland, a problem for a film presented as a compelling mystery. Brenda shows up, immediately we sense something about her story is not right and then sure enough the investigation takes a few predictable twists and turns. But Lorenzo's style of detective work basically consists of berating his sole witness repeatedly over the course of about 48 hours or so. There's no gathering of clues or leads, no searches of local neighborhoods or interrogations, no red herrings or surprising discoveries. Just Lorenzo and Brenda, wandering around the projects and the wooded areas bordering the projects, yelling about what she's hiding from him.

The actors do their jobs, I suppose, and it's not their fault that they have tons of long monologues but nothing to say. Moore, as she tends to do without careful direction, goes way over the top and spends most of the movie in hysterics. Imagine the pharmacy scene in Magnolia drawn out over the course of nearly 2 hours. And Jackson falls back on Samuel L. Jackson-ness. At any moment, you expect Lorenzo to just give up on this wacko and start fighting some airborne serpents or ranting about the Bible.

Edie Falco shows up in a pointless role as a bereaved mother who travels the country helping to solve missing child cases. Yeah, seriously...This sub-plot will give your disbelief a minimum of three weeks' suspension. These parents, all of whom have been touched in some way by a tragic kidnapping or abduction, travel around the country assisting police in finding lost kids.

Don't they have their own jobs and families? Wouldn't insurance and legal issues come into play? What the hell does this have to do with Samuel L. and his ongoing investigation? All good questions and ones I cannot answer.

What's so offensive about the whole thing isn't it inherent lack of drama or accessability, but that Roth takes the Fox News approach to racial issues. Equal time for both perspectives, regardless of whether or not it makes any sense. Sure, Roth seems to suggest, the black residents of the projects whose neighborhood is placed under siege have a valid reason to complain. But, hey, the riot cops who bash their heads in have a point as well. We shouldn't judge one of them just because he beats the hell out of a few people. So there's all these random, gratuitous scenes designed to provide a "fair and balanced" perspective.

Sure, some of the cops seem to distrust blacks inherently. But, hey, some of these black guys are just angry. And, yes, it turns out that there's no good reason for the cops to seal the entire neighborhood, but they're just concerned for the welfare of a doe-eyed child! It might seem even-handed, but it's not honest, realistically or emotionally, and therefore it doesn't work for a second. I won't go so far as to call the movie racist, but it's at best oversimplified.

Freedomland is what all movies would be like if the Nazis had won the war. Peculiar, cruel, unsatisfying pseudo-entertainments designed to turn your brain to mush, muddy your thinking and limit your abiliy to reason concerning important social issues. Can you invoke Godwin's Law in a film review?

Date Movie



Easily the worst film of the year thus far, Date Movie seems to spring from a deep-seated hatred of movies themselves. Generally, film parodies display a reverence for their source material. You don't sense from Young Frankenstein that Mel Brooks thought Universal monster movies were stupid. He loved them, and this send-up was his way of integrating his style of filmmaking - outrageous, slapstick comedy - with the classic style of James Whale.

But Date Movie, a supposed send-up of romantic comedies, has nothing but scorn and cynicism in mind for its subject matter, and life in general, really. It constantly references pop culture, but only to point out that it's lame. It includes a lot of (minor) celebrity cameos and impersonators, but seems to regard all celebrities as ridiculous, preening, talentless hillbillies. It doesn't even deign to tell its own story, merely retelling Meet the Parents and its sequel, essentially scene for scene, and mixing in other references when needed.

Most of this can be chalked up to simple laziness. I'm sure co-writer Jason Friedberg and co-writer/director Aaron Seltzer didn't have a lot of time to throw this bad boy together, particularly considering the timeliness of some of the "jokes." References include Meet the Fockers, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Paris Hilton's Carl's Jr. commercial and even King Kong, but they're not actually used as a jumping-off point for actual humor. They're just references. Sometimes, the references overlap and run into one another, into a kind of AIDS quilt of shitty filmmaking. One scene making fun of "Pimp My Ride" starts goofing on Episode III suddenly without warning. Another scene mocking Sweet Home Alabama gives way to an embarrassing, inappropriate shot of Michael Jackson attempting to molest a young boy. The effect is disorienting at best, tragic at worst.

These jokes are so old, two of them have been diagnosed with senile dementia and one broke its hip and the film's Westwood premiere. Milton Berle should sue the filmmakers for plagiarizing his "Private Joke File." Let me simply say this: At one point, a man refers to his 12-inch cock and then lifts up a chicken. Okay, let's move on. I've made my point.

Unfortunately, the problems extend well beyond sophomoric, trite comedy of the sort that Fatty Arbuckle deemed "too old-fashioned." Date Movie is just generally sour, mean-spirited and angry, and suffers from an appalling level of misanthropy. Everyone in the film is vapid and ugly and they all dislike one another intensely. Fat people and gay men are held up for particularly brutal, unfunny scorn.

As you often see in contemporary movies, homosexuality itself is a joke in Date Movie. In one scene, "star" Alyson Hanigan is given Mel Gibson's powers from What Women Want. (We know this because, in voice-over, she informs us that it's "like I'm in a bad Mel Gibson movie." Note to Mr. Seltzer...If you have to explain it, it isn't funny.) She looks at a biker whose thoughts resound in a frou-four feminine voice. I'm laughing already. But then, Hanigan makes a screwed-up face, to let us all know that gayity is, like, totally gross. And so is being fat, unless you're actually a thin actress in fat suit, in which case it's fucking hilarious.

Stranger still, Date Movie evidecnes a lot of hostility towards date movies. A Napoleon Dynamite impersonator shows up in the first scene, and overacts in the part ridiculously, as if to suggest that the character is overexposed or wasn't funny in the first place. The tone of every scene thereafter will be the same; now that we're a few days or weeks or months removed from this movie or show or commercial or song, we can recognize that it is bad and lame and was always bad and lame and uncool. That "Milkshake" song? How bogus. Britney Spears? What a used-up skank! If all entertainment's so horrible and stupid and disposable, why don't Seltzer and Friedberg do something important and significant with their lives, eh?

I hated Date Movie passionately. And if you liked Date Movie, I hate you. There, I said it.