We are three guys who go to the Pink Taco bar in West LA once a week for happy hour margaritas, then go see whatever film looks the most fun. Our names are Han, Dan and Nick (nick.locking@gmail.com).
Two weeks running, Dan has tried and failed to flake on Margarita Movie. Two weeks running, Han and I have completely ignored his pretence of not being 100% loyal to the Margarita Movie Empire. It almost feels like Dan is testing us - if he says he can’t make it and we make other plans, he will excoriate us in the fires of his wrath for not being true to the cause. Dan and I had lunch at our favourite lunch spot, BluJam, and then proceeded to the Pink Taco for some quality drinking time. We watched some of the Winter Olympics, and gazed at the beauteous cougars that were out in force in the Pink Taco that afternoon. At that point it was time for Martin Scorcese’s latest masterpiece:
Warning! HUGE SPOILERS FOLLOW!
The premise of this film is, Leonardo DiCaprio is a Federal Maahhshall and he has to go to this island asylum to find a missing patient. Batman DOES NOT FEATURE. This threw me. I don’t really understand how you can make an Arkham Asylum film and not put Batman in it. It’s kind of a gaffe. I expect Martin Scorcese is going to wake up in the middle of the night screaming any day now, yelling OH MY GOD I FORGOT TO PUT BATMAN IN THE FILM! Poor bastard.
Sir Ben Kingsley plays Jeremiah Arkham, and Max von Sidow is his second in command. They are meant to seem a bit mysterious and creepy and bonkers. They are obstructing Gilbert Grape at every turn, telling him he can’t have this or that, being creepy, et cetera. Romeo gets stuck in some very ominous windy conditions that are meant to be representative of the terrifying mysteries that lie beneath the surface of this asylum.
In a TWIST, it turns out that Leo was blind - he was BLIND THE WHOLE — no, wait. Wrong film. It turns out that Leo was an inmate at the asylum - HE WAS AN INMATE THE WHOLE TIME. All the WWII shooting-Nazis visions he has are fabrications, his wife killed his three kids because he didn’t love her enough, and he shot her. His whole mission is an elaborate roleplay set up by Sir Ben Kingsley to try and cure him of his madness. This is a hell of a twist, if you haven’t seen many films in your life. If you have seen a lot of these type of films, it becomes pretty obvious. Memento, The Machinist, Total Recall, et cetera. The trouble is, without a deeply personal twist there’s not much involvement for the main character, so you just assume that one will come along sooner or later.
The main problem the film has is that for a chilling thriller it’s not particularly chilling or thrilling. Maybe it’s just because I’m a borderline sociopath, but watching Nazis get shot and Leo wandering around Arkham Asylum does not scare me. I played the game of Arkham Asylum to completion so I was just instinctively looking in the corners for hidden Riddler trophies and wondering when Leo was going to get the next Achievement or unlock a new Challenge. The money shot of the entire film is Leo holding his three dead children in his arms and screaming NNNOOOOOOOO to the heavens. Screaming NNNOOOOOOO to the heavens has not worked in films since about 1963 so it’s about time they stopped doing it. Even the piles of frozen corpses in Dachau I didn’t find particularly affecting. Whether this is a failure of the filmmaker or an indicator that I’ll one day end up cutting prostitutes to pieces and storing their boobs in my freezer, I don’t know, but those corpses didn’t even rate a flicker on my grim-o-meter. Perhaps because I know that through the medium of videogames I have killed enough Nazis to win WWII five times over. Rest easy, holocaust victims - your score is settled.
I’m the king of ROCK, there ain’t none HIGHER, sucker MCs, should call me The SCALE Scale!
S - Story: Like… 4? I guess it’s solid enough. For the director of Goodfellas though, it’s really not very impressive. It’s not like Scorcese fell off completely, his last film was The Departed and that was pretty awesome.
C - Comedy: 1, for the bit where Leo screams NNNNOOOOOOO at the heavens with an armful of dead children.
A - Awesomeness: -10. When you make an Arkham Asylum film and leave out Batman, I really have to punish that most harshly.
L - Ladies: 2 - there’s a kind of foxy 50s-style nurse knocking about in a few scenes like a sexy Nurse Ratched.
E - Et Cetera: ANOTHER -10 FOR NO BATMAN.
-Nick
Next week: COP OUT! Maybe.
