So, Max Payne

I belong to the club known as the Give Mark Wahlberg More Worthwhile Roles Club, so I wandered into “Max Payne” with expectations set on medium.

I’ve never played the video game, and everyone that I went to has played the video game, so there was a lot of leaning over and going “I cannot BELIEVE they could f*ck this up” going on.

All in all, though, I had a decent time. I bet that most people seeing this movie will have a decent time, if they just sit back, relax, and watch shit blow up.

The tragic family montages appear to be spliced in from some old Vin Diesel debacle (not that I actually saw that debacle, but I imagine that it was a bit like this), but I enjoyed the occasional weirdness of this picture. I just wish there had been more of it. You know, enough to fill a film.

The beginning is great, fabulous, even; it made me think of Neil Gaiman and “American Gods.” The perpetual gloom hanging over the picture never quite lifts, it’s all wet snow and dark rooms, and I rather liked that.

Overall, it felt like there was a darker, stranger picture underneath the layers piled on top. It really came alive during the tattoo parlour, a quiet scene where nothing much happens, but which also happens to be my favourite one.

The villain isn’t particularly convincing and he gets lost amid all of the special effects fireworks and you never think much of him. His requisite villian speech isn’t bad, it simply should have been delivered by a different actor altogether. The idea of a man finally taking charge of his life by basically turning into a monster is an intriguing one – too bad that in “Max Payne” this idea is executed with all the grace and splendour of babboons during mating season.

Meanwhile, Mark Wahlberg just doesn’t get to do much. And the sad thing is, I’m sure this role wasn’t particularly easy. There’s lots of work involved in such a role, regardless of whether or not it translates the way you want it to on the screen.

Wahlberg’s a great actor. I don’t care what the haters say. He can do more with a whisper than others do with a full-fledged fit.

Olga Kurylenko is pretty sweet too. She takes a role that’s as old as the movies – the doomed “slut” figure – and brightens it up through mischief. Maybe I’m just a sucker for satin slip-dresses and f*ck-me boots, but I liked her.

Mila Kunis fared much worse, but she had no material to work with. She might as well have been T-X in “Rise of the Machines.” Her eyeliner had more presence than she did, but, once again, I blame the script.

I have a dozen more complaints, but once again must go back to the fact that I had fun watching this movie. I settled into a rhythm and just went with it. It reminded me of being a kid again, and of being righteous, and wanting to fix the world, or, at least, a life.

I know it’s juvenile sensibilities are going to get slammed, and perhaps rightly so, but I damn near reveled in them.

To the Mothers

Kim recently wrote about the side of motherhood that no one really talks about, and what a soldier you have to be to endure it.

There isn’t a Mother’s Day card out there that says: “Thanks, mom! You love me even though they had to sew up your vajayjay up after I came out of it! You love me even though your boobs drooped after you breastfed me! You love me even though I gave you stretchmarks and hemorrhoids and post-partum depression!”

We gloss over what really happens to women during pregnancy and childbirth – not only because the reality can be pretty damn scary, but also because so many people just don’t want admit how badass mothers really are. It clashes horribly with their idea of baking cookies. For others, it just clashes horribly with their idea of how women giving birth is terribly anti-feminist and dainty and sparkly and whatever. Both groups suck.

We’re all f*cked… But either Joe Sapien or Shia LaBeouf will save the day

OK, so Renee’s piece on the economic crisis pretty much spoke to me on the most fundamental level imaginable. I’m one of those supposedly middle class people – with enormous negative assets (student debt), a degree that doesn’t matter (English + Russian Lit), and not much of a safety net. So this piece? Had me shaking. At least I’m abroad for now, I thought. At least I can afford healthcare over here. Now what about everyone else? Jay-sus.

How do we solve this thing? Well, we either execute Joe Sapien’s’ New Deal (it utilizes a little something called a “thunderbutt!”). Or else we just get Shia LaBeouf to defeat the crisis with a combination of knife-flicks and boyish charm.

Either than that, I’m all out of ideas.

Got a Bit of Hank Moody In Me

picture from criticsrant.com

Not in the way you’re thinking, you degenerate.

Showtime series “‘Californication,” responsible for the second Golden Globe of David Duchovny’s career (if you have to ask what the first one was for, just… OK, you’re reading the wrong blog. OK?), basically suggests that half of LA is comprised of naked or nearly-naked women whose greatest ambition in life is to know writer Hank Moody biblically.

Hot male nudity is pretty much nonexistent on “Californication” (though we were recently treated to a flash of some unappealing aging rock star ass at a jail urinal – awesome!), although we are told, repeatedly, that the nearby celestial spheres and pretty much the entire galactic core rotates around the fabled entity known as the cock, which makes me kind of wish they’d just go ahead and show more of it.

This show is not a hard sell for a country used to female nudity and squicked by male nudity, though. And in many ways, “Californication” is already refreshing merely for daring to suggest that the ladies like to get laid… especially by wealthy, powerful men who may willingly or unwillingly advance their careers. We’ve yet to see a wealthy, powerful woman advancing anyone else’s career – and my guess is that when we do, she will be an awful shrew in need of serious, hardcore taming. I’m kind of hoping that I am going to be proven wrong on this one, though.

There’s a surprisingly touching quality to “Californication” – and I don’t just mean that when it comes to libertine Hank doting on his daughter or gallantly fighting off the advances of every beautiful woman in his zipcode in order to remain faithful to his One True Wuuuv – there’s something about the sadness and awkwardness of daily life that the show gets precisely right. The idea that women are creatures with their own sad and awkward stories, stories that do not cross them out of the narrative, is integral to the show’s weird charm: a beautiful woman puking during sex, or a call-girl making a sarcastic remark about who she wanted to be when she grows up, or a situation involving a run on tampons at the local store. These incidents are portrayed without contempt or breast-beating dwaaama.

But I don’t watch the show because “omigod I can totally relate to these chicks” or even because “David Duchovny is sexxay” (he is, but that’s not the point). I watch it because I KNOW Hank Moody. I have seen Hank Moody: mostly in the mirror, particularly in a mirror as it is roughly at four a.m. (everyone knows that mirrors change with the time on your watch).

Like Hank, I believe in love, not the greeting card kind of love, but the love that’s part chivalric and part Spice Channel. Like Hank, I also tend to make an ass of myself. Social injustice makes me want to go around punching people in the crotch, and romantic disappointment turns me into a quivering mess. I tend to be a diplomat, until a couple of my unassailable moral standards are pissed upon, at which point I start baring my little teeth and going for people’s ankles. I’m the sort of person who is capable of saying “I love men” to a disgruntled shop clerk. I need a rock in my life, someone who imbues my daily comings and goings with meaning, and shoulders me with the kind of responsibility that allows me to stay fettered to the surface of the Earth – and I have found it in Boyfriend (and am in no hurry to get married, hah). I also write things.

I’m not celebrated or hot, and guys do not suggestively proffer popsicles to me in public, and I don’t really want them to either. I do see the potential of a similar show with a female protagonist; unless it goes off the rails and becomes a tragic cautionary tale with lots of brooding montages. Until then, I’ve pretty much accepted the fact that I will be Hank Moody when I grow up.

It’s disturbing. Also, exhilirating. I’ve got no idea where this show will go next, or whether or not it will crash and burn like the “X-Files” did toward the end, but until all of the chips are down I’ve at least got an avatar that doesn’t come equipped with a set of boobs I must first get over envying before going on to enjoy the character.

OK, it’s not that simple.

Or maybe it is that simple.

I’m not sure.

This show also makes me wonder if David Duchovny is channeling his inner Beckett, plus a whole lot of glamour and conversation on come-stains (perhaps despite, and not because of, Beckett’s lack of interest in realism):

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.