Transformers, USA, 2007

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, USA, 2009

Directed by Michael Bay

With the latest Michael Bay monstrosity, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, taking more than a billion dollars at the box office and potentially remaining the top-grossing movie of this year (please, please, prove me wrong, awards season), now would be a good time to revisit the first two, which might help explain why I have sworn off the third one, or any future editions. I hope no one thinks I’m a snob just for occasionally displaying some standard of good taste. Remember, I love The Toxic Avenger (1984) and The Lost Boys (1987), not to mention much lower quality films like The Room (2003) and Birdemic: Shock and Terror, so I’m not always too pretentious for a good time with a bad movie. 

Transformers (2007) is the somewhat enjoyable but wildly overlong story of a high school kid unfortunately named Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and his love affair with his car … I mean, Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), a sultry, sexy cheerleader who is considered out of his league until he acquires a sleek, sexy ’70s Camaro named Bumblebee (voiced by Mark Ryan). Yeah, sure, it’s the girl Sam – and most of this film’s target audience – wants to have sex with, not the car. Whatever. Anyway, despite what audiences might expect or want, and what they may have been led to believe by the film’s trailer, the first Transformers movie spends an inordinate amount of time on Sam and his “beard,” Mikaela, leaving most of the actual Transformers to be little more than comic relief in their own movie, at least until the last twenty minutes or so, when they finally get around to engaging in the patented Michael Bay orgy-of-loud-shiny-excess-action-sequence, as seen in even worse movies like Bad Boys II (2003).

Making the Autobots (they’re the good guys) comic relief might have been a good idea if they were actually funny. Instead, they are a collection of lowest common denominator cliches, with Bay and his two screenwriters, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, proving they are not too proud to mine cheap yuks from the bodily functions of chihuahuas. One of the few bright points of the film is John Turturro’s performance as Agent Simmons, an eccentric government man who gets the best moment of the film when he says, referring to Mikaela, “She’s a criminal, and criminals are hot!” Turturro delivers this line with the kind of manic intensity that made him famous in early work like Tony Bill’s Five Corners (1987), and he seems to be one of the few actors having a good time and not taking anything too seriously. By the time we reach the climactic, twenty minute battle scene, it’s hard not to be too bored and numb to care about the spectacle, which is technically impressive, to be sure.

As basically crappy as Transformers is, it is a true masterpiece of cinema compared to its sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. This one just might be the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It’s definitely the loudest, dumbest and most boring. Just painful to watch. By the end, I felt suicidal, but I was too numb to do anything about that feeling. Much has been said, quite accurately, of this film’s sexism and racism, but beyond that, I just can’t help but wonder: how can a movie this stupid be this long? How can a movie about giant alien robots fighting each other take itself so seriously? Why waste an epic length on something without a shred of decent character development or even a coherent story?

I won’t waste your time or mine trying to recount the so-called plot of this movie, especially since its three screenwriters (apparently two cooks were not enough to spoil the broth last time) can’t seem to be bothered making any of it coherent anyway. Suffice to say, there are robots, stuff blows up, and I can’t waste any more time with this franchise, even if they did add Frances McDormand, John Malkovich and Alan Tudyk to the latest installment. At eighty minutes, this would still be a terrible movie, but at 150 it is like having your psyche relentlessly bludgeoned by an exceptionally stupid sledgehammer. For some reason, Rainn Wilson also appears briefly; I love him as Dwight Schrute on The Office but he seems to only make cameos in terrible but highly successful movies (see also, Juno). This is, sadly, one of the top hundred highest-grossing films of all time; therefore, I will die in poverty.

Ezra Stead is the Head Editor for MoviesIDidn’tGet.com. Ezra is also a screenwriter, actor, filmmaker, rapper and poet who has been previously published in print and online, as well as writing, directing and acting in numerous short films and two features. A Minneapolis native, Ezra currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

For more information, please contact EzraStead@MoviesIDidntGet.com.

The Change-Up, USA, 2011

Directed by David Dobkin

At seems that at least a few times a year, movies are released that test the attention span – and maturity – of their audience. I’ll be the first to spoil the big surprise here: there’s a projectile poop scene. The review almost writes itself. Take Jason Bateman, who seems to be one of the busier actors this year, and put him with Ryan Reynolds, who seems to be one of the busiest actors in general, and put them in a Freaky Friday rehash, and you might expect some comic gold, right? Well, your head is in the right place, but your expectations might be too darn high. What we’re given instead is one of the raunchiest (for the mere sake of being raunchy) comedies I’ve seen in a long time. This makes Reynolds’ work in Van Wilder (2002) seem like The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland (1999). And that’s being kind.

As I mentioned before, yet feel the need to point out again, there’s a projectile poop scene. With no build-up. That’s how we’re told what kind of movie this is; all the intelligence of subtle comedy is thrown out the window for the chance to have a kid drop a deuce on Jason Bateman’s face from across the room. The Exorcist (1973) never seemed more watchable, right? And I’ve never longed for a Lindsay Lohan movie more than when I was watching this. Sure, the R-rating for “everything under the sun” should have given the crudeness away, but not the lack of intelligence, nor the lack of faith in its audience.

Our story begins with Dave Lockwood (Bateman) being a good guy; he’s a father of three, a dutiful husband, and an excellent lawyer on the brink of the biggest corporate merger of his career. Inexplicably, his best friend is Mitch Planko (Reynolds), a pot-smoking, lecherous, struggling actor living the life of his dreams – no life at all. Our story really only begins when Dave and Mitch go to a bar to watch a game, as they haven’t hung out in a while, which makes sense because they’re busy. Well, Dave is busy; but never mind. They go to the bar and get far more drunk then men of their age should, and Dave falls in love with Mitch’s lifestyle while he listens to Mitch go on and on about the random women he’s sleeping with, including the enigmatic Tatiana (Mircea Monroe). Sounds great, right? I’m not a saint, and I certainly understand the struggle of monogamous relationships, but Dave seems a bit more unhappy than he should. He avoids couples therapy with his wife, Jamie (Leslie Mann) and wishes instead for Mitch’s life. Mitch, for his part, wishes for Dave’s life. As they pee together. In a fountain. Drunk. In public.

This is our movie. There’s a rolling blackout, and by the time they wake up the next morning, they have gotten their wish. Dave wakes up in his home next to Jamie and has to take care of their three children while Mitch’s personality drives him, and Mitch wakes up and has to go to his first big movie role as Dave. This is the only actually funny thing in the film, as it’s a “lorno movie,” or a “light porno,” for those of us not in the business. Now, I’m only a writer, but I make a decent living doing the things I do, and as bad as I want to work in film (it’s the dream, yeah), even I wouldn’t take a “lorno.” Still, the scene is damn funny, mainly because Reynolds is a talented actor and mimic.

One more thing that drives my distaste in the story and film is that this is one of those films whose trailer contains all the funny moments. Unfortunately, the funny moments in the trailer aren’t actually in the film, so in this case, the film is not nearly as funny as its trailer. The story reaches its obvious outcome, in which everything is set right and all is well again, as Dave and Mitch each learn to appreciate the lives they have. And they pee together in a fountain, drunk in public.

Contact the author: ScottMartin@MoviesIDidntGet.com

The Rum Diary, USA, 2011

Written and Directed by Bruce Robinson

Based on the Novel The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson

To begin with, let me just say that this is a rather difficult review to write. I don’t think I saw this film under ideal circumstances. There was something missing, you see – I had not a drop of alcohol in my system. This was not accidental; with the exception of midnight movies I’ve seen many times before, I generally hate to be drunk in a movie theater, in large part due to the uncomfortable necessities of an overly full bladder. I hate to miss a moment of a film I’ve never seen due to such petty inconveniences. However, in the case of Bruce Robinson’s adaptation of the great Hunter S. Thompson’s “long lost novel” The Rum Diary (written in the early 1960s but not published until 1998), I think bringing in a flask would have been appropriate. Not to get drunk, mind you, but just a nip now and then, to take the edge off.

Of course, the characters in The Rum Diary are, by and large, not to the types of people to take the edge off of anything, and certainly not the types of drinkers to take a polite nip from a flask now and then. As in Thompson’s 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (brilliantly filmed by Terry Gilliam in 1998), the standard modus operandi of everyone here is excess. For Thompson surrogate Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) and his fellow reporters at the rundown Puerto Rican newspaper The San Juan Star, the excess mostly takes the form of severe alcoholism. For Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), the ostensible subject of Kemp’s assignment at the paper, it comes in the form of overarching greed, as he plots to continue destroying the home and livelihoods of the native Puerto Ricans in order to build more luxury hotels for wealthy tourists.

As far as actual, conventional plot goes, that’s about it. Kemp becomes embroiled in Sanderson’s shady dealings once Sanderson decides it would be a good idea to have a friendly liaison at the local newspaper and attempts to buy Kemp’s favor with expensive liquor and lavish niceties, most hilariously represented by a jewel-encrusted live turtle that wanders around his beachfront mansion. Kemp, despite his generally booze-addled state, has a sort of vague sense of integrity that won’t allow him to just cuddle up in Sanderson’s pocket; he also has a tremendous infatuation for Sanderson’s girlfriend, Chenault (Amber Heard), a strange change of pace from the apparent asexuality of Raoul Duke, the Thompson surrogate in Fear and Loathing (an older Thompson played by a much younger Depp in the film), especially compared to his attorney, Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro in the film), who had at least three demented courtships in that one (with no less than Cameron Diaz, Christina Ricci and Ellen Barkin in the film), all of which would potentially involve various criminal charges against Gonzo.

It is equally unfair and nearly impossible for me to write about this film without comparing it to Fear and Loathing, a film that was initially maligned by most critics but went on to achieve great and well-deserved cult status. Gilliam, as always, made a masterful but highly challenging film, and the entire 120 minutes of it is one long, epic hallucination. By contrast, Robinson (who already sort of made the first, unofficial British adaptation of Fear and Loathing with his 1987 directorial debut, Withnail & I) has made a much more palatable film for a mass audience, though that is still relative. Limiting its flamboyant visual flourishes to some very nice slow-motion photography and one hallucinatory sequence involving the tongue of Kemp’s cockfighting, alcoholic compatriot Sala (Michael Rispoli) that feels more like an out-of-place nod to the much better Gilliam film than anything else, the film is still a wild, incoherent ride through the depths of hooch-induced madness that will be unlikely to appeal to a mainstream audience.

There are certainly things to like about the film. The performances are solid all around, particularly Rispoli as Sala, perhaps the most genuinely likable character in the film (and a good surrogate for Del Toro’s Dr. Gonzo, who was not exactly likable, though it was an amazing performance) and the always reliable Richard Jenkins as Lotterman, the cranky editor of the Star. The flashiest performance, of course, is Giovanni Ribisi as Moburg, a shambling wreck of a drunk who is constantly being fired from the paper and occasionally lives with Sala and Kemp in a squalid apartment, but while he seems to be giving it his all, there is something inorganic and phony about the performance. He does a good job of remaining dirty and repugnant, but for me at least, he seems to be trying too hard. As for the film overall, I admit to being underwhelmed, whereas my first viewing of Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing back in ’98 was nothing if not overwhelming. To be fair, I certainly didn’t love that film right away, at least not as much as I later came to appreciate it after seeing it multiple times and reading the book a few times as well (I was only fifteen when the film came out and hadn’t yet actually read any Thompson). In both cases, perhaps a working knowledge of the original text is essential, and I have yet to read The Rum Diary, but on a single, unassisted first viewing, I must confess to some disappointment. There are many enjoyable moments, to be sure, but the rather subdued tone and utterly uninteresting romantic subplot between Kemp and Chenault add up to a lot less than the wild, chaotic abandon of Gilliam’s previous, superior Thompson adaptation.

Ezra Stead is the Head Editor for MoviesIDidn’tGet.com. Ezra is also a screenwriter, actor, filmmaker, rapper and poet who has been previously published in print and online, as well as writing, directing and acting in numerous short films and two features. A Minneapolis native, Ezra currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

For more information, please contact EzraStead@MoviesIDidntGet.com.

Dean Koontz’s Phantoms, USA, 1998

Directed by Joe Chappelle

At the suggestion of a couple of fictional gentlemen by the names of Jay and Robert, as well as one close, non-fictional friend (hint: we co-wrote this movie together: http://moviesididntget.com/2011/05/30/james-vogels-the-city/, but he did not act in this one: http://moviesididntget.com/2011/09/19/wasted-on-the-young/) who recently reminded me of their recommendation, I decided to finally check out “Affleck [being] the bomb in Phantoms.” I can only assume all three parties were being highly sarcastic; after all, one of them was played by Kevin Smith, a longtime friend of Mr. Affleck, but not necessarily someone known for his unadulterated sincerity, Jersey Girl (2004) and the jail cell speech in the third act of Clerks II (2006) excluded.

Dean Koontz’s Phantoms is awful, in that special way in which films like Lawrence Kasdan’s 2003 Stephen King adaptation Dreamcatcher are awful. Author and screenwriter Dean Koontz is often considered the poor man’s King (Koontz fans, please note: I have not actually read any of his books, I am merely recording the popular consensus as I understand it), so it is fitting that Phantoms should have so much in common with that unintentionally hilarious travesty of cinema. Unfortunately, Phantoms lacks the over-the-top craziness of Kasdan’s film, and is therefore substantially less entertaining, albeit mercifully shorter. This is not to say there is no unintentional comedy to be found, as there certainly is, but overall the film is more of a by-the-numbers bad horror movie that lacks the overreaching ambition of the amazingly insane Dreamcatcher. It also borrows heavily from far better films such as Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and John Carpenter’s The Thing (http://moviesididntget.com/2011/10/07/john-carpenters-the-thing/), which only serves to remind the viewer how truly low-rent this already mediocre film is in comparison to those classics.

Phantoms begins with two sisters, Lisa (Rose McGowan) and Jennifer Pailey (Joanna Going), on a trip to a small resort town in Colorado. When they arrive, they are surprised to find the town apparently deserted, until they begin to find various severed body parts lying around, leading them to surmise that the population has not deserted the town, but rather been messily murdered in some mysterious way. Despite rather uninspiring acting from the two leads, especially McGowan, the film is off to a pretty good start with the grisly mystery. Sheriff Bryce Hammond (Ben Affleck) soon shows up with his two deputies, Steve Shanning (Nicky Katt) and Stu Wargle (Liev Schreiber) to investigate what may have happened. After Shanning is killed in a flash of light and Wargle is attacked and apparently killed by a cheesy-looking bat-like flying creature that sucks all the flesh off his face, including his eyes and brain, in a matter of seconds, the remaining three find a note scrawled on a mirror that reads: “Dr. Timothy Flyte / The Ancient Enemy.”

Flyte turns out to be Peter O’Toole, clearly slumming for the money in a phoned-in performance as a professor turned tabloid writer who, ironically, is doing the latter because he needs the money. Layers upon layers. Anyway, Flyte provides the requisite scientific knowledge needed in order for the good guys to triumph over evil; we know he’s an expert because, when asked what exactly the amorphous monster that devoured this entire town is, he replies, “Chaos. Chaos in the flesh.” Now that’s good science! Lisa also gets a chance to opine on the nature of the monstrous threat facing them, in what must be the film’s single most unintentionally hilarious line of dialogue: “Well, it’s the devil, don’t you think, come up from hell tonight? I think he wants to dance with us.” Even in writing, that overwrought stinker makes me chuckle, but when delivered in McGowan’s flat, bored monotone, it transcends into comedic gold.

There is nothing remotely scary going on in Phantoms, unless you’ve never seen a horror film and are therefore liable to be taken in by its many cheap “gotcha” moments, all of which can be seen coming a mile away by any actual horror fan. Most of the film’s action sequences are cobbled together with annoyingly fast cuts, presumably to disguise the cheapness of its visual effects, and when we do finally get a really good glimpse of the monster, it is pretty underwhelming, to say the least. Perhaps the only real bright spot in the entire film is Schreiber’s performance as the slimy, squirmy Deputy Wargle, who we glimpse early on fondling the leg of a female corpse. He’s not particularly scary, even after being possessed by the evil “phantoms,” but it’s an effectively creepy performance, and Schreiber seems to be the only one really having any fun. It’s not infectious enough to spread to the audience, but at least someone had a reasonably good time along the way.

Ezra Stead is the Head Editor for MoviesIDidn’tGet.com. Ezra is also a screenwriter, actor, filmmaker, rapper and poet who has been previously published in print and online, as well as writing, directing and acting in numerous short films and two features. A Minneapolis native, Ezra currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

For more information, please contact EzraStead@MoviesIDidntGet.com.

The Human Centipede (First Sequence), Netherlands, 2009  

Directed by Tom Six

You know that series of movies that Lionsgate puts out, the “8 Films to Die For,” or its off-shoot “After Dark Films” series? This midnight movie wannabe sits comfortably in that zone of quality, and having seen a large handful of those films, I genuinely enjoyed two. I wish I had genuinely enjoyed this, but the lack of joy (even for his own craft) that director Tom Six (apparently that’s his actual name) injects into this experiment makes it absolutely unwatchable. I’ve no qualms with the darker side of independent horror; in fact, I consider it some of the best cinema around. It’s the creation of neo-grindhouse art that I so greatly appreciate, but at least that has some joy in it. It isn’t made solely to piss on its audience, nor is it made to make a point. Six, who seems to be channeling pre-Rampage Uwe Boll, takes what could have been a modern grindhouse masterpiece and turns it into a shock-theater piece of the worst kind: banal.

Six has stated that he loves making movies that push boundaries and that pay no mind to political correctness, so, disregarding the film’s World War II allegory, we’ll take him at his word. Here, he has crafted a film so vile, and yet so uninteresting, that he seems to not only be disregarding political correctness, but also his own mission statement to push boundaries and do something original that hasn’t been done before. The Human Centipede (First Sequence) can be down to this: two teens get tortured by a crazy man. Even more boiled down, it’s Saw (2004), but with a pinch of Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie (1984, with a remake on the horizon in 2012).

The actual plot of the film is as follows: on a road trip in Germany, two pretty young American tourists named Lindsay and Jenny (Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynne Yennie, respectively) get a flat tire. Unfortunately, making the wrong decision like most American tourists in horror films, they go wandering through the woods into someone’s front yard. Of course, that someone is the demented Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser), a retired but famous surgeon who made a career separating Siamese-twins. Honorable work. Of course, since his retirement, he snapped and now wants to put people together, rather than taking them apart. He dreams of creating a Siamese-triplet. He tried it with his dogs, but … well …. He already has the first unwilling participant, Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura), a Japanese man who has been drugged and is not happy about it.

He drugs the girls and they wake up strapped to hospital beds, next to their new Japanese room/house/body-mate. The doctor tells them that he used to be famous but he’s been retired for too long, so, to get back in the game, he’ll create a monster. First, he’ll clip their kneecaps, to keep them permanently on their hands and knees, presumably so they can’t escape. Then, he’ll slice open their cheeks, line them up in front of each other, and quite literally stitch them to each other – one girl in the back, mouth sewn to the anus of the girl in front of her, and that girl in the middle, with her mouth sewn to the anus of the man in front of her. The idea is that he’ll eat, have a bowel movement, it’ll go into the middle person’s mouth, she’ll eat it, then have a bowel movement, the girl in the back will process it, and have the final bowel movement. But first he trains them how to fetch the paper for him. Priorities.

What follows past this basic plot is just as insulting to any given viewer: the cops come, people die, and, somehow, we’re afforded room for a sequel, in which Tom Six promises to make this one look like My Little Pony? Okay. He’s just trying to egg us on at this point, right? I hope so. What I’m hoping for in a subsequent viewing is a glimmer of “tongue-in-cheek” (no pun intended) humor that maybe I just somehow missed this time. There’s no way anyone involved could have been taking this so seriously, except that Laser, who plays the German Dr. Heiter, supposedly spent the entire film’s production completely in character, a la Daniel Day-Lewis, and Six apparently went so far as to have a surgeon as a consultant so that the film would be “100% medically accurate,” a claim that has been rightly laughed at by anyone who has ever played Operation in their lifetime. It loses its reputation as “the sickest midnight movie ever made” by showing little to no violence on camera, perhaps attempting to join the ranks of Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) and the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) in the pantheon of Most Violent Movies of All Time Where We Barely See Any of the Violence Onscreen. The thing about those movies, though, is that the violence implied is frightening and still palpable. This is just stupid. Ridiculous and stupid.

The most frustrating thing about this movie, though, isn’t the three teens making up the centipede, neither of whom can act, nor is it Deiter Laser channeling the lovechild of Klaus Kinski and Tommy Wiseau, nor is it the lack of passion Six seems to have for what he’s doing. It’s that the film really does seem to have an air of self-importance, like what it’s doing is necessary, rather than just needlessly repugnant on just about every human level. The film gives what it offers, if ever so slightly, and of course it comes complete with its own drinking game: every time Laser molests something off-camera with his eyes, take a shot. So that should be a popular Halloween event. Count me out, though. I’d rather dig through my old VHS tapes from when I was a kid and watch that Marc Summers haunted mansion movie that was on Nickelodeon.

Contact the author: ScottMartin@MoviesIDidntGet.com

Starter for 10, UK / USA, 2006

Directed by Tom Vaughan

The oddest thing about a film like Starter for 10 is that it seems to be almost completely pointless until the last thirty minutes or so, and the most unfortunate thing about the project is that the first hour is almost completely alienating. This isn’t the type of film where the audience is required to root for anyone in particular, nor are we given much of a climax to look forward to. We follow a young college student in England in 1985 as he enters Bristol University and attempts to find his place and enter a quiz show club, in which one does their best to win championships on television. We follow him through bum friends, a failed and unrealistic attempt at a relationship, and a conventional attempt at knowing everything.

The good news is that James McAvoy is watchable enough to excuse most of that. The bad news is that even though McAvoy is a watchable actor, of some considerable skill, the film itself is hollow and flatter than paper. It’s peppered with calm and collected performances, but that and a bad screenplay don’t make a good movie. Make no mistake, Starter for 10 is enjoyable, albeit conventional and formulaic. However, it’s great performances from Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall, and McAvoy himself that magically make the film worth watching more than once, even if you just want to catch all the reaction shots from Cumberbatch that you might have missed the first time; as with everything else in which he appears, he’s a complete joy.

The film focuses on Brian Jackson (McAvoy) whom we first meet as a young lad watching TV quiz shows with his father (James Gaddas) and mother (Catherine Tate) over a trio of portable dinners. Obviously, being all of seven years old, Brian wants to know everything and be just like Dad, a mountain of knowledge himself. Years later, after Brian’s father dies, he attends Bristol University with the intention of honoring his father’s memory by grasping all the knowledge he can. He’s a wealth of it, without even trying it seems, but most of his character is built around the gaining of that knowledge. Part of the film’s problem is that it all seems to come so easily to Brian; there isn’t any drama there.

I remember reading in one review of the film that it’s a sort of “homage to John Hughes” and is a “coming of age story.” It is, in some ways, a coming of age story, but I have trouble seeing it as an homage to Hughes. There’s none of his magic; it’s mostly just pandering. In a film about the power of intelligence, shouldn’t the audience be treated as intelligent? We shouldn’t really be spoon-fed plot points, especially when most of them aren’t that interesting to begin with.

There are some pluses: the ’80s soundtrack is spot on, and there are a handful of performances that keep the film from drowning in its own contrived state of being. Boiled down, a film about trivia doesn’t need to be trivial. It’s important to note that the film’s story isn’t a build up to the quiz show; it’s about what happens on a daily basis if you’re Brian Jackson. I think part of the problem is that Brian Jackson isn’t someone that anyone might want to be. He’s a waifish Brit with a goofy haircut who alienates people simply by being himself. If this were a Woody Allen film, that might suffice as a character, but this isn’t, and it doesn’t.

Contact the author: ScottMartin@MoviesIDidntGet.com

The Sleeping Beauty, France, 2010

Written and Directed by Catherine Breillat

Based on the Story “Sleeping Beauty” by Charles Perrault

If ever there was a movie I didn’t get, it is Catherine Breillat’s latest, a bizarre, meandering adaptation of the classic Charles Perrault fairy tale, “Sleeping Beauty.” Perhaps it is because I have only seen one of Breillat’s previous films, the almost universally reviled but, in my opinion, underrated and fascinating Anatomy of Hell (2004), and I am therefore not entirely familiar with her sensibility, but I just couldn’t get into this one. Though it is pretty and has a distinct air of artistry about it, I found Breillat’s The Sleeping Beauty to be tedious, and somehow both opaque and obvious at the same time. Of course, it didn’t help that I was constantly reminded of similar but better films by the likes of Terry Gilliam and David Lynch, not to mention Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and especially Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992). Though they share themes such as the transcendence of time and gender, one distinct advantage Potter’s film has over Breillat’s is the stellar, engaging central performance by the great Tilda Swinton, of which none of the actors in Beauty seem capable of approaching.

The film begins in roughly the same way as the familiar fairy tale, with the birth of a princess being greeted by a curse from an evil witch, whereby the princess is doomed to prick her finger on a spindle when she reaches the age of sixteen, and then subsequently die. Sort of a preposterous fatal injury, but of course princesses are notoriously delicate. Luckily for young Anastasia (Carla Besnainou), three good witches intervene, causing the curse to be lessened to a mere hundred years’ sleep, after which she will awaken at the age of sixteen, presumably quite refreshed, but with everyone she knows and loves dead and gone. In Breillat’s version, one of the good witches also bumps the curse up to a time when Anastasia will be only six, so that she may skip the pains of childhood and puberty, and the third grants her the ability to dream while she is asleep.

What follows is that dream, in which little Anastasia wanders through a simultaneously modern and antiquated French landscape (there are castles, carriages and costumes that suggest medieval times, but at one point graffiti advertising the New Wave band Joy Division is clearly visible), meeting various strange characters who may represent some metaphorical point Breillat is striving to make with the film, but who are mostly just a dreary, pointless bunch of weirdos: a dwarf here, a boil-covered giant there, none of which seems to add up to much. Prior to her extended dream state, young Anastasia wishes that she were born a boy, as well as reading aloud a dictionary definition of “hermaphrodite,” both of which serve as rather obvious indicators of the film’s preoccupation with gender roles, though it is never quite clear why the fairy tale Breillat has chosen as her conceit serves to illuminate these issues.

Along the way, young Anastasia falls in love with a somewhat older boy named Peter (Kerian Mayan), who is subsequently led astray by the Snow Queen (Romane Portail) in an odd divergence from one fairy tale’s world into another, that of Hans Christian Andersen. In fact, a large portion of Anastasia’s dream from this point on follows Andersen’s “Snow Queen” tale, including her friendship with a young robber girl (Luna Charpentier) she meets along the way, and who endeavors to help her in her quest to find the wayward Peter. Eventually, of course, the sixteen-year-old Anastasia (now played by Julia Artamanov) wakes form her slumber, though not with the familiar kiss from her beloved; instead, she actually sleeps for the full hundred years and awakens to find Peter gone, replaced by his great-grandson Johan (David Chausse), a dead ringer for Peter himself. Somehow, she also encounters an adult version of the robber girl (now played by Rhizlaine El Cohen), who would not only be dead by now but presumably never existed in the first place, begging the question of whether the dream has ended at all.

Personally, by the end of the film, I was too bored to care about further interpreting its ambiguities, having slogged my way through a seemingly much longer 80+ minutes of narrative dead ends and almost uniformly wooden, uninteresting acting. Perhaps there are riches to be discovered here by the right viewer, but I am reminded of my perennial defense of artsy, difficult films that I love: “One person’s pretentious is another person’s brilliant.” In this particular case, I am sorry to report that I am the former person. While I think Breillat is an interesting filmmaker and I have yet to experience what I am assured are her best works (namely 1999′s Romance and 2001′s Fat Girl), I found this one too frustrating and snail-paced to bear. In case you’re wondering, the subtitle for this review is, of course, a reference to the great Chappelle’s Show and is not meant to suggest that any of the material in this film is too extreme for children (which Anatomy of Hell definitely is); there is some nudity and sex, but it is tasteful and not particularly disturbing, and the one act of onscreen violence is relatively tame as well. However, I would be surprised if children wouldn’t become extremely bored and fidgety watching it; I certainly did, and I’m a twenty-seven-year-old pretentious art-film buff.

Ezra Stead is the Head Editor for MoviesIDidn’tGet.com. Ezra is also a screenwriter, actor, filmmaker, rapper and poet who has been previously published in print and online, as well as writing, directing and acting in numerous short films and two features. A Minneapolis native, Ezra currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

For more information, please contact EzraStead@MoviesIDidntGet.com.