JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Photo from the National Geographic

From Closer by Patrick Marber

Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood! Go fuck yourself!

Admittedly, I saw the movie because I expected it to be awful. In fact I wanted it to be terrible, because it’s fun to write reviews of bad movies, especially if they have legions of clueless, sensitive defenders. Now I wish it were awful, not just because it’s deathly boring, but because its core audience will probably agree with me. I am united with the 50 Shades fandom, Noooooo!

Even before the movie opened, media outlets had noted the lack of chemistry between the leads, Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan. Dakota, daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, looks very much like her dad, so if you have a Miami Vice fetish, the movie might work for you. However, she has none of her parents’ rude vitality. Okay, she’s a bit of a clod—Don Johnson as a manang—but that is the point of the book, that a plain-seeming, ordinary girl would have something that a hot billionaire cannot find elsewhere. Don’t ask me what it is, I skipped entire chapters.

Read our review at InterAksyon.com.

“Anastasia” made us think of the Prince song “Anna Stesia”, which is sexier than the entire movie we just saw. (We took out the thing that doesn’t stop playing, but you can listen to it here.)

Mila Kunis’s Jupiter in a gown designed by Michael Cinco

The reviews are so terrible, the box-office so bad (The Spongebob movie kicked its ass) that we had to see for ourselves if the Wachowskis’s Jupiter Ascending deserved such general excoriation, and we found ourselves enjoying the movie.

True, we saw it in 4DX and the constant rumbling and shaking of our seats probably made it more fun than the regular cinema experience (Will 50 Shades of Grey be available in 4DX?), and our sister’s screen saver is the Magic Mike XXL trailer so she can’t really comment on Jupiter’s aesthetic qualities. However, we were greatly entertained by the space adventures of cleaning lady Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) who, unbeknownst to herself, is the reincarnation of the queen of the universe.

With the help of disgraced space-cops Caine (Channing Tatum with prosthetic ears) and Stinger (Sean Bean, whose character we expected to get killed any instant because he is played by Sean Bean), she must face the galactic ruling family Abrasax, which has nasty plans for earth. The dynasty is represented by evil capitalists Balem (Eddie Redmayne) and Titus (Douglas Booth) who regard earthlings as a resource to be harvested and sold (Like in the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, where humans are batteries). We know they are evil because they are very pretty, fine-boned Brits, and because Eddie can only speak in a whisper-shout.

The sets are gorgeous and the action sequences are spectacular; it’s a thrilling ride, which in 4DX is literally that. We were delighted to see James D’Arcy and other cast members of the badly-treated Cloud Atlas (We assume that Hugo Weaving played all the spectators), and Terry Gilliam as a bureaucrat in a nod to Brazil.

Douglas Booth engages Mila Kunis in a beauty contest.

Why all the hate for a big, silly spectacle which does not pretend to know the meaning of life? Because the Wachowskis’s movies are expected to answer all the cosmic questions (or at least ask you to choose between a blue pill and a red pill), and because the Matrix movies were over-praised and too successful. Also it doesn’t have that “Yeah! Woo! Who’s the queen of the universe, bitch?” ending that audiences demand.

Read our column at InterAksyon.com. Meanwhile, here’s Buddy Rich.

Even Sondheim fans suspect that in the Sondheim oeuvre, Into The Woods is a charming bit of fluff with a couple of good songs—No One Is Alone became a kind of anthem in the campaign against AIDS. Nonetheless we recall it with great affection as a funny musical riff on Bruno Bettelheim’s analysis of classic fairy tales. Other than famous stars, the Disney film by Rob Marshall doesn’t add anything to the material: with all the special effects at its disposal the movie actually looks smaller than the stage version.

It is entertaining enough, Emily Blunt is lovely, and Johnny Depp is creepy—who knew he’d be in two Sondheim movies? Chris Pine is hysterical—is he doing an impression of the original James Tiberius Kirk, William Shatner? And of course your Mother Meryl is in it (Our mother is Sigourney). We know the Princes are a joke, but was it really necessary to make them look like Siegfried and Roy? And how come listening to the soundtrack makes us feel things, but watching the movie makes us yearn to scoot outside for more popcorn?

P.S. We thought something was missing, so we checked. It turns out Disney has Disneyfied the musical that was the very opposite of Disney. The deaths are not so distressing, and most of the sex has been taken out, including the Princes Charmings’s affairs with Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Neutered!