THE STATE OF AMERICAN FILMMAKING

It's pretty terrible. Sucker Punch looks like just the worst piece of overwrought trash to come down the pike since Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin were producing films together. Kevin Smith's films signaled the contribution Gen-X/Gen-Y have to make to modern film, and I predicted many moons ago on my now defunct I Hate Gen-X satire website that it would only get worse as the Gen-Xers and Gen-Ys took the executive positions (through nepotism mostly, of course) at film studios. X/Y have not read much, nor understand storytelling, and thus they remake and remake classic old films and campy television shows from the 50s - 80s because they don't have any original ideas and wouldn't know how to communicate them anyway, since texting is their major method of speech and they think technological devices make them cool ... OMFGROTFL. I do look forward to seeing Hanna, but I have a feeling it will feel more like Bourne Redundancy than anything approaching an actual story with fully fleshed-out characters. The trailer already has the always good Cate Blanchett shown in a bad red wig and seeming rather campy. The poster shows there truly never is anything original in Hollywood - not even poster images. The winter scenery makes me think of terrific movies that had snow, especially Black Robe.

BATTLE LOS ANGELES - CUT-AND-PASTE-FILMMAKING

Blackhawk Down + District 9 + Cloverfield + War of the Worlds + US Military recruiting films + faint character sketches does not a good movie make. All in all Battle Los Angeles is entertaining but if you get that feeling you've seen it all before - you have. I was never much of an Aaron Eckhart fan, but he won me over in this film, since he carries nearly the whole thing on his shoulders and does a fine acting job. Think Kurt Russell in Soldier and you get how he played the part of Staff Sgt. Nance - all clench-jawed internal suffering and heart. Handheld cameras shake us through the story of a rag-tag bunch of Marines plus others picked up along the way as they battle an alien invasion from the moment the film starts. A brief flashback lightly sketches out our caricatures, er, characters, and then we're caught up to realtime and in the fight. Mix a healthy dose of cliches with a heaping helping of implausibility and you have the plot which culminates with our hero, Staff Sgt. Nanace, doin' some real "John Wayne shit" and the tide against the alien invasion is turned and the Brain Bug, er, Command center is taken out. As far as aesthetics go, pretty lame aliens, spaceships and weapons. The CGI was fine, but nothing interesting, and ships looked way too much like District 9 junkers, and the weapons were just screwy tracer-type ballistics. The aliens looked a lot like paler versions of those from Independence Day fused with flattened Robocop uniforms. This is the sort of film SyFy Channel makes three times a year.