April 28, 2007

• Movies tonight: 'Mac and Me,' and 'Dark Portals: The Chronicles of Vidocq.'

  So 'Mac and Me' is that ultra-cheezy mid-'80s piece of crap I linked to before, with the dance number at the McDonald's. It's a paeon to corporate sponsorship and product placement, and is unbelievably bad. It has one good moment when the aliens walk into a grocery store, but the rest is really terrible. On its own terms, not worth watching.

  But from a sociology-of-movies perspective, just fascinating. It's the sort of thing that allows you to see how there are maybe three people in Hollywood with taste, and they're the only people standing between what remains of our culture and total domination by advertising.

  It also supports my thesis that some movies exist simply to keep special effects artists in beer money. The special effects are kinda cool, and there's something wonderful about full-body full-frontal naked alien costumes in a kid's movie. I mean, it's creepy and odd and laughable. They don't have genitals, but it's just plain wrong. What makes it wonderful is that they're not computer-generated. You know they were on set, looking like that, and I like that.

  Anyway. I've talked about this too much, except to point out that the Earth family that befriends the aliens drives a Vanagon, which gets blown up at the end. Rawk! Nevertheless, it's ninety minutes I'll never have back.

  'Dark Portals: The Chronicles of Vidocq' is a hyperkinetic, over-saturated, shot-on-digital, low-budget, overdone detective story set in revolution-era France, and it's good entertainment. More gore than some might like, but unlike many dark, gory films, the gore isn't the point. Someone has murdered two noblemen by causing lightning to strike them, so it's up to detective Vidocq to solve the case.

  I guessed the bad guy immediately, but they managed to make me waver, so I guess that counts for something. The point here, though, is not to guess who's the baddie. The point is to be whisked along on a ride through Paris in the early 1800s, to visit the whorehouses, the opium dens, the orgies of the aristocrats, and the dark satanic rituals that give everlasting life. The revolution comes along none to soon, see?

  Rent it, enjoy it, and forget it exists.

  • 4:18 am
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