Day One Hundred and Ninety-seven - Assassination of a High School President, "Feels occasionally like Rushmore, but is more like Gossip Girl"

St.Donovan's is a hotbed of white privilege and it's up to Bobby Funke to get to the seedy underbelly and root out the cancer in pure journalistic brilliance a la Woodward and Bernstein.

Or so he would like to think.

I think that Assassination of a High School President would very much like to be Rushmore in terms of satire and attention to detail and Election when it comes to taking down spoiled, WASPy metrosexuals that seem to be the norm of this generation's zeitgeist.

With Funke the would be whisleblower to a grand conspiracy of lies, embezzlement, drugs, sex, and even attempted murder, the film does its best to portray both the popular elite and burnout delinquents as cut from the exact same nihilistic narcissism. The only thing that seems to separate the two subsets is a will to power that the student council blithely operates with and "the usual suspects" don't seem to care about.

It's easy to both like and hate this film. There's lots in the way of cinematography and color design that really makes me happy with their art director, but none of the oomph in the script that I would want to go with it.

The quirky asides and misdirects that should win me over feel tacked on and more than a bit pretentious. Like when one of the burnouts plays around in the background while Funke is on the phone. It would be a brilliantly funny thing in a Wes Anderson pic, but here it's just unnecessary and distracting.

And the film can get so random at times... like when the patch-girl get's seduced by another of the burnies. It's so superfluous and only might have something to do with what's going on elsewhere.

Might.

Despite it's shortcomings (Bruce Willis being one of them), AoaHSP is actually a pretty interesting satire on prep school life. Not exactly a diatribe on high school in general, it nevertheless has quite a bit to say about teens in the upper middle crust.

I found it particularly hilarious (and pointed) when Funke tracks down an old buddy in a public school which is much more noticeably Black and Hispanic in population and much less fashionable. Sure, everyone's in uniform at the private school, but they also have a crap ton more product in their hair and have drunken, drugged out parties, and (aside from a few tokens) are very, very white. It's a subtle but quite poignant message about the dividing line of privilege.

I'm not exactly thrilled with Mischa Barton's (or anyone's, really) performance... as she stares blank-eyed for the grand majority of the film, but it's an interesting piece.

It just never goes beyond the base "good" to become something better.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day One Hundred and Ninety-five - The Expendables 2, "Oh, look at all the CGI blood, tanks, and helicoptors!"

The first Expendables was enough in my book... but, obviously, they made enough that a second was in the cards, grabbing aging stars and macho men alike for a treatise maximus of gun porn where bad guys die by the dozens and the only friendly casualty is the new kid who telegraphed his exit by giving a cliche life goal, two days from retirement.

Ugh.

Seriously, it's movies like this that make me sad for the state of the film industry.

With absolutely no characterization or development aside from "*grunt* Stallone SMASH," The Expendables 2 is just a series of poorly conceived action set-pieces strung together where the good guys have dead-eye aim and the bad guys can't hit the broadside of a barn. I was literally expecting JCVD's team of eurotrash mercenaries to show up at some point in black painted Stormtrooper armor, their aim was so terrible.

Not only that, though, but the big name cameos are there strictly so one-liners from movies past... actually DECENT movies past... can be bounced off each other without the slightest bit of irony.

I mean, seriously? "Yippie-kai-yay?" "I'll be back?" "Terminated?" It's not even cute.

I also hate the way the lower tier buff dudes of the crew, Randy Couture and Terry Crews are relegated to the background. At the very least, Crews has a lot more chops than the film gives him credit for, instead saving a lot of the filler time for walking meat-slab Dolph Lundgren. I would much rather see the former on The Newsroom than the latter with JCVD in whichever incarnation of Universal Soldier they manage to find investors to bilk for.

Methinks the icing on the poison-filled cake for me was when Chuck Norris swaggered on into the picture to save the day in the middle of the second act only to swagger back out after spouting a few internet jokes. Of course he shows up again for the climax, but why spoil a perfectly horrendous movie by sticking to its own establish continuity ("He works alone..." 'cept when he doesn't wanna.)?

The Expendables 2 is definitely a paycheck movie for the copious action stars that fill its ranks, but not so much for the CGI artists in charge of everything from blood spatter to actual vehicles. When you make a feature like this, you shouldn't have effects that look like they belong in whatever Shark Vs. movie that SyFy puts out every week.

If you're looking for any sort of quality... stay far, far away from The Expendables 2. If, on the other hand, your sole purpose for being is to see god-mode matches of Modern Warfare play out, it's probably right up your alley... and I'll just have no respect for you, then.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~