Independancefield: District Aliens of the Matrix;

Skyline once again had the Aficionados split. One was worried it might be good, not blog post worthy. The other was ready to blog the shit out of it. As you can obviously tell, the original was an idiot to doubt himself.

District 9 Skyline opens with a scene we can only assume is meant to build suspense. It’s a pity that the trailer and posters revealed more than you need to know to realize exactly what is going on. As the blue light shines through, a chick springs from the bed and throws up. Obviously this un-natural blue light is the exact same as the orange tinge that the sun casts so she has nothing to worry about. The scene ends with some dude we don’t even give a fuck about disappearing, I WONDER WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM!

The movie flashes its own namesake and proceeds to be original by flashing back 15 hours.  Why it does this leaves us puzzled. The balls story line that follows adds nothing to the movie once shit goes down. Yeah Rowdy, hit that! wants Eric Balfour to come to L.A to help his career, which is obviously struggling as he only owns one penthouse. Obviously he knew about this is advanced, that’s why he’s being asked now, in front of his girlfriend without mentioning it before. At least, that’s the retard logic she takes as she storms off and won’t listen to reason. This continues throughout the movie as she tries to validate her continuing consumption of oxygen.

Once the terrible set up is out of the way, we get to relive the opening scene, except we see it from one room over! I fucking love when I get to watch the same scene from a slightly different angle which provides me with no extra information. Balfour ends up copping a blast of this light, which leads to Dawn of the Dead Skyline borrowing heavily from the zombie genre with its totally-not-like-a-zombie-bite symptoms.

After shit goes down, Yeah Rowdy, hit that! and Balfour decides to see what the fuck is up, through ingenious measures. They go to the roof and decide to look at the blue light which they just witnessed fuck shit up. The movie should end right here, with stupidity like that I don’t understand how the plot could continue. After reporting back to the others and showing them the blue light sucking thousands of people into the ship, Yeah Rowdy, hit that! proclaims “I got this”. He reload his 9mm and sets out saving the world by visiting some 90 year old dude and asking to borrow his car. Words cannot describe how ridiculous this is.

It’s here the movie touches on something we think could have been done a lot better. One of the girls goes through the camera and notices that Yeah Rowdy, hit that! is cheating on his wife. We’d have preferred if the entire back story was done with this. After a big night of drinking, they don’t quite remember what’s what and the pictures help tell the story ala the ending of The Hangover.

Despite a glimpse of genius, the group decides that these aliens must be the ones from Signs, so they decide to set sail. They make it all of 2 meters of out the building before Yeah Rowdy, hit that! is killed. That dude from Dexter makes his grand entrance, saving their lives as they run to hide back in the room they just decided to get the fuck out of. On the way back, everyone decides they should state exactly what should be done at every road they face. That dude from Dexter is trying to open the door, ‘OPEN THE DOOR’ one of the screams. That dude from Dexter goes around a corner, ‘GET AROUND THE CORNER’ the other yells. We get in the situation people might actually do that, but any attempt at the characters being believable up until this point has been taboo and it seems really strange that this is where they decide to do it.

After making it back to the room, someone lights up a smoke. Obviously the pregnant chick, who hasn’t told anyone, is outraged by this and starts a fight. Out of all the things to argue over in the middle of an alien invasion, this is where she draws the line. She should seriously put a gun in her mouth because her raising a kid, even in this post-invasion world, could only spell doom for the human race. This continues into a repeat of the argument before about whether they should stay or go. Suddenly the chick that is pregnant is right because some guy who they just met agrees with her.  It’s people like this who are the reason we’re being invaded by aliens.

The writers ran out of juice here and Independence Day must have been playing in the office as the army decides to rock up with planes. One launches a nuke at what we can only assume is the mother ship and it amazingly works. Directly copying the scene would have been too much. The ship crashes into the ground and everyone cheers. The aliens are de- OH WHAT THE FUCK, THE SHIP HIT BY A NUKE AND BLOWN INTO A BAJILLION PIECES IS NOW RECONSTRUCTING ITSELF BY MAGIC? We get they are super advanced, but seriously. There’s only so much bullshit we can swallow.

The writers were still out of ideas, so the monster from Cloverfield makes its appearance. It goes around stomping shit and bashing the building until the robots from The Matrix turn up to clear them out. It seems the last 30 minutes of the movie was just ripped out of other sci-fi alien movies and placed in as if no one would notice. It’s not even subtle, you could title the movie “Cloverfield 2” and people would believe it. We now come to the most ridiculous scene in the movie. The robot from The Matrix had them cornered on the roof, after being hit by a car and surviving. Balfours girlfriend gets an axe cuts its brain out, but this doesn’t kill it. What does? Balfour goes all hulk on its ass and punches it in the head about 5 times. And it drops dead. If only they knew that the aliens one weakness was a punch to the head, they could have avoided all of this!

The ending of the movie has us praying that it’s all a hallucination caused by looking into the light for too long, it’s too retarded to even mention.  This might be the worst ending to a blog ever, but it pales in comparison to the topic.

And that’s how Skyline Frankenstein’d every movie known to man. Tell your friends!

The last cut is the deepest;

The last movie in the Saw series had one half of the Aficionados excited and the other wondering why he was going to leave his house. By the end of the movie, one was outraged and the other having his views on the Saw series validated.

The action starts brutally with the first public trap in Saw history. It involves three people were either one or two people could survive. It ended in glorious bloodshed, guts flying everywhere, people covered in blood all while allowing people to take revenge on those who fucked them around. The opening scene is strong and really sets the tone for the rest of the film. Sadly, the film cannot keep the intensity of this scene and quickly resorts to its old bag of tricks.

The first warning sign of this is the scene that deals with the politics of Saw. It’s like “The Phantom Menace” packed into 5 minutes. What’s worse than that? This forms the subplot of the movie. We're not even fucking joking.  It’s basically Saw 3, but he actually likes the people he’s trying to save, which really limits the reactions and emotions the traps could invoke. Saw 3 played on the characters morality and actually tested him. It made him God and showed him what power was.

Saw VII ignores all of this and decides that a douchebag trying to save the people who helped him make a dime will evoke more emotion. From the very start, you hate him and everyone who associates with him. As the traps progress, one dies, he cries. The next dies, he cries. The third dies, he cries. Combine this with the weakest traps in Saw and you have yourself the worst subplot in history. The whole thing could be taken out of the movie and it wouldn’t change a thing. 

The sub plot also defies everything Saw is about. His wife is placed in some form of trap and is pulled closer to death with each of his many failures. Why she chose to be with him in the first place amazes me. He was a deadbeat with no job before lying about being in a Saw trap and his vagina must get in the way of everything. As mentioned, his failures result in her death. She couldn’t do anything to save herself nor had she done anything wrong.  It breaks everything about the Saw mythology, how the writers got away with I don’t even know.

Keeping in mind that this monstrosity keeps popping up every 15 minutes, you get to the main plot. There isn’t really much to say about it. It’s a continuation from the previous Saws, with one major flaw. It’s acted out by the worst character in the Saw universe. We're guessing Gibson is fresh out of the academy, making him the best candidate to handle the Jigsaw case. He makes some of the stupidest decisions, yet can figure out the most cryptic clue using only the most retarded logic I have seen to date. Knowing Hoffman, an ex-detective, is trying to kill Jill, he places her in a safe house. Luckily for him, only police know where safe houses are and Hoffman wasn’t one of those. After realizing how stupid he was, he moves Jill to a holding cell at the station and proceeds to name her “Crazy” instead of “Jill”.

He goes on to do a great Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day, which obviously leads him to Jigsaws hideout in this movie, which just happens to be at the location of the main plots trap. I can only assume it was his fatuousness that decided that in this massive warehouse, they should only keep to the one room the trap was in as there couldn’t possibly be anything in any of the other rooms.

It seems that the writers weren’t content with one retarded character, which brings us to Jill and the stupidest piece of cinema I have seen this year.  Somehow finding out Jill has been placed in a holding cell, Hoffman sneaks in by hiding in a body bag from one of his own traps, the one set at the aforementioned warehouse. This in and of its own is enough for us to call bullshit, but it gets worse. After killing three policemen in their own building and placing a gun on the table, right in front of Jill, he proceeds to walk up to her, leaving him open to attack.

Amazingly so, she conceals a sharp object and stabs him in the neck before making her getaway. Obviously she grabs the gun and shoots Hoffman BUT OH WAIT, SHE’S TURNED INTO A FUCKING PACIFIST IN THE LAST 10 SECONDS AS SHE RUNS AWAY DEFENCELESS. Her parents must be related or something because stupidity like that only exists in the deep south. She runs past the gun on the table and two dead policemen, both who have guns on them and decides to hide in a corner. It’s this dumbassery that leads to her death and, luckily, her removal from the gene pool. You'd think this ends the scene, but apparently they only had three people in this police station as Hoffman just walks out with no opposition.  

One saving grace is the film could be seen as one of the greatest supporters of a greener world. Nearly everything in the movie is re-used bar two traps. We’re surprised that Jigsaw didn’t magic himself back into the story. Who knows, he might have been one of the two masked people who helped Gordon kidnap Hoffman in the end, shit, Amanda was probably the other. The film tries to come full circle, but it makes little sense. Hoffman is locked in the room the first Saw movie took place in but that’s not where the Jigsaw phenomenon started, merely where we came in. Not only that, but he’s just left there to die with no further explanation as the credits roll. What the fuck kind of ending is that?

The final nail in Saw VII's coffin is the 3D. As much as people complain about 3D and we generally loathe it ourselves, they didn’t do ANYTHING interesting with it at all. There is one trap of note, where a girl is going to have metal spikes slowly pushed into her eyes and throat. The camera shows this from her perspective, but are those spikes in 3D? Fuck no, they spent all their budget on making that fog outside stand out, adding to that depth of field like you wouldn’t believe. This use of 3D is why nobody enjoys it and it should be thrown out. Unless you’re going to make your mediocre film great, ala Avatar, fuck off. No one wants you ruining their perfectly bad movie more.

And that’s how Saw VII cut the series to shreds. Tell your friends!

Paint the town Red;

Going into Bruce-fucking-Willis' new movie, Red, we were both looking forward to another action packed adventure. Throw in John Malkovich and Morgan Freeman and the stage is set for a comic book adaptation that might be worth mentioning.  Or so they say.

The first half an hour of the movie confirmed our expectations. Guns, bitches and non-existent bling thrown in with some over the top action had us squirming in our seats for more. The movie opens in a house, where we conferred that if it didn't blow up we'd be horribly disappointed. The next best thing happened, whereby house was destroyed by gunfire, leaving Bruce-fucking-Willis to clean up the bad guys and walk away as all good action heroes do, with the house falling to pieces behind him. The movie proceeded to employ one of the best car chase scenes ever devised. Being chased by Karl Urban, Bruce puts the car into a slide, opens the door and steps out, pumping a whole clip into Karl's car as his own car whips around behind him, barely missing his legs. Masterfully choreographed and beautifully executed, it left us begging for more.

It is here that the movie, and theatregoers, cut us down. The introduction of John Malkovich's character had us concerned. He's the perfect actor to play a crazy-crazy guy, who thought the government were doing experiments on the general public when they were actually slipping him LSD for 10 years, but the audience reaction to his idiosyncrasies was painful. He carries around a stuffed pig, that certainly does not contain weapons, which prompted to one particular person in the audience to loudly pronounce "OINK OINK!" and laugh for a good 20 seconds at his own joke. Every time this pig made an appearance, it would be a repeat of that exact joke. Malkovich tried to restore the peace, prompting a couple of great actions scenes, including using a gun as a baseball bat to hit a grenade back to the pitcher and shooting an RPG in mid-air to eviscerate the perpetrator, but all hope was lost by the general dumbassery of the audience, loudly repeating what had just happened on the screen.

"Oh WOW, he just hit the grenade back at the guy who threw it!"

Really? Did he now? I didn't see, as I came to see this movie with the intention of watching with my eyes shut and relying on audience members such as your self to inform me of the action taking place on the screen. It's a wonder these people remember to breath without saying it out loud.

After that disappointing sequence, it was Helen Mirren's turn to destroy our faith in the movie. As our first post suggested, she is the pinnacle of our hatred for this movie. She employs the "Betty White" method of acting, whereby she continues to act as if she were 30 years younger, which is meant to pass for humour these days. She ultimately fails, not being able to convince us that she is still the bad ass she was in her hay-day. She is responsible for the most ridiculous series of events in the film. During the climax point of Act 3, she is inevitably shot. Obviously the one bullet she didn't notice at first makes her useless and she urges Malkovich to go on ahead without her. She then stumbles around for the next 10 minutes, hopelessly bleeding out until she gets to a gate that she can't open. It looks like the end of this pathetic character, that is until the Russian who instigated the action in Act 3 suddenly appears again, with the key to the gate. Obviously she can now push through her injuries and escape. Are you fucking kidding us? I don't even understand how that concept passed the proof reading, let alone conceived in the first place.

Content with creating sequences that are downright unbelievable, the writers again provided us with a scene that made us think "WHY? JUST WHY?". The cast enter a house, to deal some business. Naturally Helen Mirren and the love interest Mary-Louise Parker stay outside to watch their backs and have some "Girl time". Mirren threatens to kill Parker if she hurts Willis. This only adds to the end of movie rage, but lets not jump the gun. Eventually, shit goes down and the FBI move in the and surround the house. Of course, surround the house means they come from EVERYWHERE EXCEPT WHERE MIRREN/PARKER ARE CAMPED OUT AND THE BACK DOOR. Obviously the FBI didn't expect anyone to do something so cliché and it was bumped off the pre-mission brief. This prompts a scene which still confuses us. They are in the house of an arms dealer, but can't find ONE bulletproof vest, leading Freeman to sacrifice himself by having Mirren shoot him to confuse the FBI, giving them just enough time to escape out the back door.

You would think that's the end of the hate, but the writers weren't done ruining the movie quite yet, they also decided to destroy action scenes with their attempt at humour. Urban has a great scene where he runs down a car on foot, leaps onto it, then onto the limo in which Willis is escaping, but they can't have him stopped now, so instead of having Urban roll off the limo like a man or simply miss the jump, they have him slide down the back window, his face pressed up against it telling them to stop the car. You better believe the audience members above repeated this scene out loud and laughed till their heart's content.

This leaves us with the finale and our beef with Parker. At the start of the film, she's outraged when Willis does the vacuuming in her apartment, to the point where she throws a vase at him. She is then nearly killed, tied up and gagged, threatened to be killed by Mirren, who then proceeds to kill Freeman only minutes later and locked up by the CIA, but decides that at the end of the movie, she should hang around with the women who has no issue killing friends and threatened to kil lher, a guy who had been on acid for 10 years and can "smell" a government agent and a neat freak who likes to vacuum. What the fuck kind of thought process leads you to that decision? You're outraged at someone cleaning up after you, but someone says they'll kill you and they're your best friend? There's a scene earlier in the film where Parker is trying to give lip to the interrogator by saying Willis will eat him for lunch. It's delivered with no punch or venom and left us thinking they missed a golden opportunity to reference Happy Gilmore and proving that she is nothing like these people she's going to follow around the country and would be considered dead weight by them. Of course that isn't a happy ending so Willis and Co decide to take the girl with no combat training at all on their next mission without a second thought of the implications.

And that's how Red sparked our motivation for this blog. Stay tuned and tell your friends!

To all the girls I've loved before;

As with all great ideas, this was spawned from the late night ramblings we all enjoy. With the abuse being "let fly" as they say, even the most stern of directors would have crumbled to hear his film spoken of in such a manner. When you pour your heart and soul into something, it can only be torn asunder when your strong female lead is drawn back to a Betty White impersonator without the "Betty White". As we sat there, describing the different ways both Betty White and Helen Mirren are destroying their own name and the futures of other ageing actresses, we looked back on the other things we had torn to shreds. Proud of our efforts and saddened by the fact we had no one to share them with, we decided to put it out there the only way kids growing up post 1990 know how, the internet. So spawned the Aficionados of Inference, ridiculing those asking for it and sometimes those who just need it.