My Top Ten Guilty Pleasure Films

My first top ten list on this blog! Are you excited? I sure am. I'm sick with Angina, and at points have a hard time sitting upright. At least I have a lot of time to make up for not seeing any films in two weeks.

I've seen a lot of different takes on the concept of a "guilty pleasure", so I'm going to clarify what I mean by it before we go into the list: my guilty pleasures are things that I unironically enjoy, but I'm intellectually aware that they're shit. Stuff that I can't deny loving, but which makes me feel like a tasteless bozo for liking at all. In comparison, Dungeons and Dragons (2000) is my favourite bad film of all time, but I enjoy it for its shittiness, and therefore have no reason to feel guilty about it. So camp classics won't appear on this list.

But without further ado, let's get this party started. It's time for the ten worst pieces of shit that I like for no adequate reason...

"Special Edition" does not, in fact
mean that this box contains the
good cut of the movie.

#10 -The Theatrical Cut of Kingdom of Heaven:


That is to say, the version you've most probably seen. The Director's Cut is three hours and ten minutes, and contains whole subplots that were cut by executives from the film. However, we're not here to talk about that awesome movie. We're here to talk about silly, stupid Theatrical Kingdom of Heaven, disowned by Ridley Scott himself.

I'm a sucker for historical action movies. I'm an avid history geek myself (though I tend to focus too much on the awesome parts instead of the boring parts, which is why I'm far from a perfect history student). Gladiator was my favourite movie ever when I was twelve (yeah, I cried at the ending). Then came along Kingdom of Heaven. It's a movie about how Legolas becomes a crusader and somehow becomes a master swordsman after one lesson. Then the princess of Jerusalem falls in love with him and they boink each other out of wedlock, and a bunch of stuff happens and he's like: "Dudes! Religion is the cause of all this suffering! You should all be secular humanists like I am! This is totally befitting to a story about the 12th century!"

The complete and utter raping of medieval history to make a political statement is excused in the director's cut by having actual interesting character arcs and giving it all increased weight by showing more of what the characters are going through. The theatrical cut removed a lot of scenes that were important to understanding who Legolas is and what drives him, but it didn't take away those where Legolas is like: "I don't see a difference between the Muslim prayer and our prayer."

And yeah, I eat this shit up. It's such a completely goofy no-brainer story with great costumes and sets and Jeremy Irons and Ed Norton and huge action scenes. Also, two actors from Game of Thrones are in it (Jaime Lannister is the Sheriff who tries to arrest Balian early on in the movie, and Jorah Mormont is King Richard the Lionheart).



#9, #8 and #7: The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy:

I think these movies get way more shit than they deserve. Still, I've got to admit... not terribly good. They're confused about which demographic they want to sell themselves to (especially Episode 1), have piss-poor cinematography outside of action scenes (especially Episode 3) and horrible story-choking subplots (especially Episode 2). A lot of the hate toward them is from entitled nerds who won't accept anything less than the golden image they've constructed in their mind of the nostalgic Star Wars of ages past.


I was nine years old when Episode 1 came out, and I saw it in the cinema with my big brother. It's my first memory of going to the movies. Can't help but have a fondness for that. Yeah, I'm just as guilty of nostalgia as the people I just spoke of. Though I've at least grown out of blindly defending the prequels.

They aren't bad movies, but they do have a lot of flaws I'm way more willing to tolerate than I should be.



#6: Alien Resurrection:

My father insists that this is the best Alien movie ever. I...  disagree. It's a complete mess, because the scriptwriter wanted to make it a satire of the whole franchise, the director was aiming for a really sick Cronenberg-style body horror film (the human-alien hybrid at the end was a hermaphrodite with visible genitalia of both genders until they were edited out in post-production), and the executives once again stepped on the whole project and demanded that it be a straightforward action flick.

The only real saving grace is that they managed to get Sigourney Weaver into the film. Also, Ron Perlman at his dullest. Yay! After the aliens break free, it's a sci-fi dungeon crawl: the heroes go one room forward, they fight some aliens, one of them dies, repeat ad infinitum. Maybe it's because I watched it so many times as a kid, but I like it. This was the first time that all the clichés of the franchise clicked into place and created the formula that writers have still been unable to escape. Here's to hoping Prometheus will give me no cause for guilt.



#5: National Treasure (2): The Book of Mysteries:

I feel no guilt for liking the first National Treasure movie. It's a cool little adventure hunt with Nicolas Cage... admittedly not at his most enjoyable. It had the "we have to steal the Declaration of Independence" thing that they could advertise without spoiling half the movie, because that was only the first step toward the treasure. I really like that, because I hate trailers giving away too much. The ending was kind of bleh, but it would have been fine if they'd left it at that. It did have Sean Bean, though, in one of his extremely rare roles where he doesn't die.

Book of Mysteries is a model example of what I like to call "a lazy, goddamn sequel". The (really bad) love subplot? Brought back to square one in between movies. All that money they made? It got stolen away by the taxman! All that fame they got? The villain is slandering them! Seriously, every aspect of the script is written to make sure that it starts with no real kind of continuity to the last movie, aside from a couple of offhand mentions, because the writer didn't want to make an excuse for why a bunch of happily married billionaires are going on a treasure hunt.

Even within itself, the sequel makes no sense. Does the villain really need Nicolas Cage's treasure-hunting wits so much that he's willing to launch a huge mudslinging campaign against one of his ancestors and telling him that the only way to disprove the accusations is to find the treasure? Do Nicolas Cage and his dad really care so much for their ancestor's good name that they're willing to go to all these lengths to clean it? It's idiotic, but I kinda prefer it to Temple of Doom.

Unlike Temple of Doom, it has Nicolas Cage acting like a drunk Brit. No George Lucas movie will ever top that.



#4: Alien 3:

Yes, more Alien. This was David Fincher's first movie. Boy, has he come a long way. Though interestingly enough, you can see some of his later trademarks this early, such as the effective use of weather for mood purposes. The production of the film was a complete mess, with directors and scripts being exchanged every other day. In one version of the film, Ripley was going to crash-land on a forest planet populated by Space Monks instead of crash-landing in a junk planet populated by Space Prisoners.

But anyways. It's a shitty movie where almost nothing happens. The characters spend most of the film talking about nonsense, and when the Alien does start killing inmates, we don't know anything about their personalities and have no real reason to care for them. Well, except for one of the first victims, Ripley's love interest... wait, is that Charles Dance? Holy shit, Charles Dance is in this movie! He used to be so young, once.

But anyways, I can't help but have an affection for this shit. By all logic, I should be bored out of my mind by two hours of admiring good cinematography and cool sets, but I guess I just have a weak spot for Alien.

By the way, isn't it just ironic that by the time they released this film on DVD, David Fincher had gotten so famous he could just refuse to participate in making an extended cut? They only brought him into the movie in the first place because he was a newbie and they'd run out of famous people to ask for.



#3: Alien vs. Predator: Reqiuem:

Now we're starting to reach the bottom of the barrel.  Yeah, another Alien movie, this one infinitely worse than the previous two. The first Alien vs. Predator was merely lame and formulaic. Its sequel is gut-wrenchingly bad. It does the worst possible thing an Alien, Predator or Alien vs. Predator movie could do: it takes place in modern Earth, in a completely mundane location, and has the trappings of a teen slasher movie.

Ridley Scott's Alien isn't really in the top of my favourite films of all time, but it did teach us one really important lesson: If you want your alien horror movie to have any kind of dignity, you have to base it in space, because "alien menace terrorises the countryside" is such a 50s genre that no one will take it seriously. AVP2 disregards the wisdom of RIDLEY FUCKING SCOTT and has the movie be about this teenage boy who has a crush on this girl but there's this bully who throws his keys into the sewer and he has a brother who just got back from the prison and then the girl invites him for a late-night swim and does a striptease and OMIGODALIENS!

Oh, and there's a predator in there too.

I have no freaking idea why I like this film. When I saw it for the first time in the cinema, I somehow managed to convince myself it was good. It gets extra points for somehow tricking me into that conclusion. Even when I watched it for a second time, I was like: "Well... it wasn't that good, but I still liked it..."



#2: The Patriot:

So yeah, The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, is Braveheart, except about the United Statesian War of Independence. It's not nearly as bad a movie as AVP2, but it goes higher on my list because I usually loathe patriotic shit like this. Especially when it's a Yank circle-jerk (ironically directed by a German and starring an Aussie). It couldn't be a worse whitewash of history, or a worse libel toward Brits everywhere, if they gave Jason Isaacs horns!

But goddammit, it's one of my favourites. I'm a sucker for stories where an underdog faction wins a war through guerrilla means, and goddammit, The Patriot delivers! Even the dumbass, creepy love subplot between the protagonist and his sister-in-law somehow manages to have some kind of emotional resonance on me, and when Heath Ledger dies (uh... Heath Ledger's character dies), I can only say: "It's on now!"



#1: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children:

Over an hour of buildup to one big fight scene, where nobody else except Cloud gets to contribute, and Sephiroth has been reduced to this kind of dumb brute whose only real purpose is to make his gay crush kneel before him. Characters who died in the game are brought back with little to no explanation, the protagonist is an emo bitch, only one cool location from the source material is featured, and most of the original locations are dull gray and brown.

That's Advent Children for you. Me? I love it. If you hate it, I can totally see why. FF7 isn't even near to being my favourite game in the franchise, and I don't have any kind of special attachment to these characters, so that seeing them in a movie would make it all worth to me. There's some some kind of inexplicable appeal in this film for me. There's nothing more shameful for me than liking shit like this without even being able to explain how.

And then there's Advent Children Complete, which makes the movie a third of an hour longer. Of those twenty minutes, exactly one is anything worthwhile. Most of it is crap about Denzel, that freaking annoying orphan boy who's even more emo than Cloud. And somehow, I've managed to convince myself that the extended version is better than the regular cut.

I should have higher standards than this.

The Avengers

The huge crossover film which the Marvel movie continuity has been building up to, The Avengers is a Joss Whedon blockbuster about Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) teaming up to fight Thor's evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who is poised to take over Earth. However, "teaming up" is easier said that done, and Director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has to do a lot of managing to keep the team from tearing itself apart before Loki and his allies from another dimension can.

Finally, we get a movie that depicts superhero comics accurately: you need to know the central characters and premises of about half a dozen different stories to understand anything that's going on. Yay!

I was kind of wary about this film because of two things: The trailers mostly focused on a huge metropolitan battle that was cut so that it looked like it was taken right out of Transformers 3, as well as Robert Downey Jr. doing his thing, which I feel is starting to get old. Well, screw marketing, because once again it has done a great job at making a good movie look bad. Not only is that action scene they hyped way better when you don't have to butcher it to keep the invading army from appearing on screen, but they picked the worst jokes in the movie for their adverts. Not only does Downey get a lot of good lines, but everyone does. There's a surprising lot of comedy, and every character gets to crack jokes, not just the clown.

Thor and Captain America both had pacing as their biggest issue. Cap had way too little stuff happen in between his becoming a superhero and the final battle. Thor took its sweet time starting, and then had way too much build-up to a way too small climax. Avengers gets this just right. We already know these characters, there's no need to establish them any more. Let's just start off with the crisis presenting itself, then get the characters together, and then see what we can make happen with them. I'll admit I was getting worried about a quarter way in that the movie is going to suffer from having too many subplots, but thankfully most of them are resolved by the way the final action climax hits home. The movie is two hours and a third, but it accomplishes so much that you'll swear there's no way they fit all that in one hundred and forty minutes.

The performances are really good. I never saw Ed Norton's Hulk for comparison, but Mark Ruffalo is a fantastic Bruce Banner. He has the body language of a person who's trying really hard to keep themselves in check. All the returning cast keep up the high quality up, but to my surprise the standout star of the film was Tom Hiddleston. I was kind of indifferent toward Loki in Thor, because he was way too obviously evil but they tried to play him as this tragic character. Here, he's past being sympathetic, so Hiddleston gets to be a straight-up villain, and it works greatly. He does his slimy villain speeches, he addresses the people he wants to rule, he gets arrogant and he gets furious. It's just a really good basic evil villain, who is still kept fresh with expert writing.

The action is really well-done. All the characters get to shine, and their individual superpowers are used well together and never conveniently discarded to fit a scene better. The big battle scenes flow well, and you can keep track of where everyone is and what they're doing. There's this really great sweeping battle shot that I can't really describe to you all: it has to be seen to be believed. I think that Loki's evil army allies are maybe a little bit too... Stormtroopery, though at least unlike Stormtroopers, they don't get taken down by teddy bears (who would be the New York police department in this allegory, I guess).

The 3D was... okay, I guess. There was one scene early on where I had trouble telling what was happening because it was so dark, but other than that I was never bothered. There were a couple of cool 3D shots, mostly having to do with Hawkeye's crazy arrow skills, but I doubt you'll be missing much if you see it in regular 2D.

Overall, it's just a damn good film, with a tightly packed and well-crafted plot, lots of interesting and memorable characters, some good humour, great action and superhero goodness. Dark Knight Rising has to work its ass off to surpass this for the best superhero film of the summer.

The Cabin in the Woods

This is gonna be a tough one to review, because I honestly don't want to spoil anything. I went into this movie without so much as having seen a trailer. I knew from other sources that it's a Joss Whedon film, that twists are a huge part of it, and that it's about a cabin in the woods. Honestly, I think it benefited me to go in blind. If you have seen the trailers, you can probably tell whether you'll like it or not. If you haven't, please don't watch them.

You know, I think I have to confess right here and now that I this is the first Joss Whedon product I've seen. Well, aside from the ones he co-wrote (Titan A.E., Speed, Captain America) or originally wrote but had his script basically rewritten entirely (Alien Resurrection). I have a bunch of friends who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer religiously, though, so... whatever.

So, Cabin in the Woods is about five teenagers (played by Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz and Jesse Williams) who go to the countryside for a camping trip. While there, they awaken something evil, which tries to kill them... but all is not as it seems.

Yeah, that's all you're going to get from me.

As you might have guessed, Cabin is a parody of horror films. It even becomes a satire at points. However, its particular brand of satire never has the characters be meta-aware. Scary movies are never mentioned in the film, and the heroes never say "This is like a crappy horror movie!" only to have the film follow the conventions anyhow. I can see why some people have criticised it for being less clever than it thinks it is, but I really liked the humour here, and the third act is so completely out of control, I'm not sure if it's awesome in a hilarious or badass way.

The actors all do a great job, though Kranz's take on "the stoner" is especially memorable. I think that the other character pool, whose existence is a spoiler, is a little bit too excessive. They could have done it with fewer people there, but it's not really a flaw that hurts the overall product much. The special effects are fantastic. There are a few too many jump scares, in my opinion. If you're going to assault and destroy one overused convention from modern horror, then please kill jump scares.

Anyways, I think it's a fine, fine film. I dunno if I can call it game-changing, visionary or masterful, but I really liked it. Please keep this pace up, Joss Whedon, as The Avengers gets nearer and nearer.