Braff's gaffe
"The Last Kiss"
(2006)
Anyone who enjoyed "Scrubs" hunk Zach Braff's "Garden State" might be curious to check out this remake of an Italian picture, from a script by the guy who wrote "Million Dollar Baby," "Flags of Our Fathers" and the non-Cronenberg "Crash." (The director played the bad guy in "Ghost.") Let me tell you to banish that curiosity right now, because "The Last Kiss" is a terrible, terrible movie. Although on some level I found them amusing, I can't remember the last time I was so annoyed by a group of characters. Braff leads this cavalcade of retards as a dude about to turn thirty who knocks up his hot, loving, loyal girlfriend and gets the jitters. He hooks up with this college chick with terrible taste in sex-time music, then gets all remorseful after his lady finds out. The girlfriend finds no support from her mother, who leaves her father because she wants to hook back up with a dude with whom she had an affair years earlier. See where this is going?
Then there are the lead couple's friends. Ben Affleck's brother plays a guy who can't stop thinking about ditching his shrieking baby and shrieking wife. There's another guy who is all crazy psycho obsessive about his ex-girlfriend. Then there's this surfer party dude who sleeps around until he is shocked to discover that he has feelings for one particular woman. Every single one of the males in the movie is a whiny twit except for Zach's girlfriend's dad, who as portrayed by the typically dignified Tom Wilkinson is merely pathetically patient. The females are either doormats or selfish jerks. I typically enjoy movies about a bunch of dysfunctional narcissists being assholes to each other, but unlike dark comedies like "Your Friends & Neighbors" or "The Rules of Attraction," you're supposed to identify and sympathize with the characters in "The Last Kiss." I had a hell of a time yelling at the screen and laughing at its maudlin dialogue, but all it really did for me is impart the dubious lesson that if your pregnant girlfriend finds out you cheated on her, all you have to do is sit outside her house for three days without addressing your job, what you're going to eat or where you're going to poo, and she'll just take you back.
TODAY'S BONUS REVIEW: Last night's My Chemical Romance concert... I tried to give these guys an honest chance, and was shocked to not absolutely hate them. I'd rather kids listen to them than Nickelback or fucking Stone Sour, that's for sure.
posted by SoulReaper at 5:05 PM
2 Comments:
My Chemical Romance? Let's just be friends
3/1/07
My Chemical Romance knows who has sent them Valentines, or at least MySpace greetings. Their show at Allstate Arena in Rosemont Thursday night managed to be both self-indulgent and fan-friendly, and those fans hung on for every glitzy twist.
Bands as self-confidently sensitive - and as suddenly popular - as this New Jersey-bred quintet tend to polarize rock fans. They're the kind of band that many feel they can connect with on a zealously personal level, while their ubiquitous mugs repel virtually everyone else.
My Chemical Romance's third album, The Black Parade (Reprise), recently hit the platinum sales mark in the United States, proving if nothing else that there's still an audience for the concept album in this age of digital playlists. From its skeletal marching band imagery to its copious sonic dressing to its grave lyrical concept (the lifelong reflections of a man dying from cancer), it lets you know that it's an Important Album.
The Black Parade is the natural reaction of an act whose image-consciousness has irked critics into calling them fashionable product for undiscriminating kids: they set out to make something pensive, artsy and way over the top. Something for the ages.
Yet for all the goth, art-rock and metal affectations, My Chemical Romance is still at heart a pop-punk band. Their music is built for blasting from car stereos, for carefree friends singing along with chorus after chorus. This band hates the "emo" tag as much as any other that has ever been marked with it, but "emotional" sums up their appeal as well as anything. You can practically see their hearts pumping stage blood down their ebony sleeves.
No enemies of melodrama, My Chemical Romance certainly went all out on Thursday, performing The Black Parade in its entirety. Vocalist Gerard Way started the show portraying the album's protagonist, The Patient, laying on a hospital gurney and rising when the volume swelled. As his bandmates appeared with a flourish from behind a black curtain, opening track "The End." all but carbon-copied "In the Flesh?" – the baronial intro to Pink Floyd's The Wall.
With the jerky anthem "Dead!" it became clear that the music's outsized sentiment would overwhelm the production quirks form the record. Two more upbeat, catchy rockers followed, "This Is How I Disappear" and "The Sharpest Lives," swooning and punchy at the same time, each chorus bigger and louder than the last.
And then, the literal show stopper appeared. The audience became so deafening for the bombastic single "Welcome to the Black Parade," Way barely needed to open his mouth, and the Allstate was hardly full to capacity. Chicago-born drummer Bob Bryar tapped out the military snare intro as his drum riser revolved like a carnival carousel, displaying enough assembled percussion to satisfy three '70s prog drummers.
With its shifts from stately marching band hymn to summery punk anthem to plain old Queen worship, "Welcome" is like a "Come Sail Away" for the '00s, sure to be hollered by swaying crowds for years to come. It's the most ambitious piece on The Black Parade, and as on the album, it should have been saved for the big finish.
Instead, the set succumbed to a string of dull ballads, broken by rockabilly-tinged rave-up "House of Wolves" and "Mama," another Floyd "homage" that joined the theatrics of "The Trial" with the bounce of Balkan folk. The latter concoction was more successful than "Teenagers," an unholy, cowbell-clanging collision of hair metal and saloon sing-along.
The groove of single "Famous Last Words" closed the Parade portion on a feel-good note, the crowd once again drowning out Way for its declamatory, fist-in-the-air chorus. Five older tunes followed, bookended by their energetic breakout hit "I'm Not OK (I Promise)" and "Helena," which, with its "So long and goodnight" refrain, felt calculated to close My Chemical Romance shows with a heavily-mascaraed wink until the end of time.
After all the confetti and pyrotechnics, the spinning riser and the inflated dirigible, the band's most impressive spectacle remained how genuinely the people on the floor and in the seats connected with them. My Chemical Romance isn't as toxic as their detractors believe, and their hooks are well polished, but they still need to work on their concepts before they have a true masterpiece on their hands.
"I typically enjoy movies about a bunch of dysfunctional narcissists being assholes to each other, but unlike dark comedies like Your Friends & Neighbors or The Rules of Attraction, you're supposed to identify and sympathize with the characters in The Last Kiss."
This is exactly - and I mean, damn near word-for-word - my complaint about Here on Earth, the worst movie ever made.
I believe Al also explained his dislike of Clerks using that description.
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