SPEED 2 Month 2015 Day 5: The Rim Shot

Let’s not say I don’t do anything for this month of extreme ecstasy in anger. Two days have passed by where I barely swore, cursed the life of certain people or screamed in rage. That is now over as I swallowed all my natural instincts to watch a movie just for this web log. Just for today. Just for a good, fired up discussion of what makes a good movie and what makes a bad one. Today I compare to the illustrious king of the shitheap SPEED 2, Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 bank-breaker, PACIFIC RIM. 

 

I’ll get two things out of the way first. I watched this movie for the first time at some point after it was released on Blu-ray disc and gradually began to grow an intense dislike of it as it progressed. I may have had too-high hopes for it, as many of my friends and contemporaries that watched it in the theatre either loved it or were very fond of it in certain ways, imploring people to see it, since it was not sparking much heat at the box office. Also, John “Speed 2” Amenta likes PACIFIC RIM, making this a doubly fun mudsling for me today.

I will admit that PACIFIC RIM fits a strange bill when it comes to comparing it to SPEED 2. It’s not completely vilified in film circles (regardless of The Amenta View, SPEED 2 is that 99 and 44/100ths percent out of 100 shit, statistically) and it’s its own story. Even so, it had an inflated budget and slid out of interest quickly, just like SPEED 2. Similar to A.I. and INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, this overpriced clunker pushed a lot of my anger buttons. I had never intended to waste the time watching it again. I guess breaking an ankle does a lot of good when it comes to watching shit films for review – and for SPEED 2 Month. Yes, to watch this movie and feel like I wasn’t wasting precious time elsewhere, I had to break an ankle. Fuck you, del Toro, for that.

PACIFIC RIM is a giant comic book, for those of you that are unaware. Del Toro had a good idea of doing a massive action movie in a similar vein to the Godzilla flicks of ages gone by, while not having anything to do with the big, green lizard itself. It was ostentatious, it was bold, it was a big risk for the Warner Brothers Studio and it fell as flat as a cow pie in a pasture. The plot, in short, follows a military program of giant robots created to fight off just as giant monsters that have been appearing through a rift at the bottom of the Pacific Sea floor, attacking various coastlines with progressively ardent aggression. The robots are piloted by tandem soldiers, sharing the powerful system load of these massive machines. Within a few years, the monsters destroy most of the robots; the governments get scared and try to wall off every coastline, while the last of the robots try to destroy the rift at the bottom of the ocean. It’s a fairly cut-and-dry plot for a cheesy action movie, or at least a cartoon. Except, it fucking sucks flattened pasture cow pie.

When I was a teen, I watched a cartoon (or anime) called TRANZOR Z. While the story followed giant robots bashing other giant robots, there are so many similar features of the show that are in PACIFIC RIM, it was all I could do to wonder where the Aphrodite X robot with her tit missiles was. When a movie reminds me so much of a cartoon (AVATAR) that I’d rather watch the cartoon, you aren’t helping yourself.

PACIFIC RIM is filled with more fucking cliché’s than a bad satire. If this movie was supposed to be satire, it missed the mark by a wide margin. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t even topical. It’s just boring, unless you’ve never watched a movie before, just woke up out of a coma or were kidnapped by aliens for a few generations. It’s got the daddy issue characters. It’s got daddy not wanting the heroine to serve because it’s a risk. It’s got the cocky “other guy” and the requisite fight between the hero and him. It’s got the old hero that comes out of retirement to sacrifice himself. It’s got the “big speech” moment. It’s got too fucking many to count! I gave up after the rousing speech, really. I’m sure I missed a few on purpose.

Idris Elba, a fine actor, plays a major part in the film. He was so bad he felt he had to shout almost all of his lines. Scenes where he’s face to face with the hero? Shouting. Even his whispers sounded like shouts. In truth, many of the lines are shouted by the rest of the cast, too. Is that the making of a Guillermo del Toro film? Everyone needs to shout most of their lines? I’ll have to watch the Hellboy movies again to see if that’s so.

The dialogue in this movie is so rancid it makes you cringe every time a line is shouted at you. There has to be thousands of feet of outtakes of these actors saying their lines and stopping mid-sentence because they can’t make themselves say them. The patter between characters is even worse, seeming as if it were trying to channel much better films, like ALIENS. Sorry Guillermo, watching BLACK SHEEP SQUADRON on the Rerun Network isn’t dialogue research. Get away from the desk, stop listening to your Rosetta Stone discs and turn the fucking lights on.

I understand that the movie had a budget of 190 million dollars. It makes sense, considering the sheer amount of CGI and SFX work that was needed to make this stinker. What I don’t understand is what happened between making it and releasing it. The film is so lighted so poorly you can barely make out who is saying what and when, or what’s happening during the incredibly slow and boring action sequences. Top that with most of the battles happening in water and you’ve got a great way to make it look like the director and producers spent the 190 million but likely pocketed the majority for their increasing coke habit. If it was done in slow motion it might have seemed like something was happening rather than the piss-poor scenes of the tandem pilots walking their giant machines out into the ocean to battle wacky invaders from another dimension.

I get that this movie is trying to be something that it’s not. It wants so bad to be a live action anime tale that it forgets to stop trying. It stumbles and fumbles through from disconnected scene to scene hoping that the big flashing light in the corner captures and entrances you enough for you to not notice there isn’t enough lit up to see what’s going on. I can’t say it’s plagiarized, but I can say that it took so many cues from other stories and movies that you can’t help but notice, unless you’re incredibly drunk. Well, even that won’t help you; you’d have to be passed out to not notice.

I really, really wanted to like this flick. One of my favorite comic artists of all time, Guy Davis, designed a large number of the giant monsters for del Toro to use. As I watched it for the second time, it’s hard for me to say that he didn’t create them all, his fingerprints are so noticeable. If you think I don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re more than welcome to go read any of the B.P.R.D. comics from Dark Horse he worked on to see what I mean. You’ll get more bang for your buck out of those anyway; they’re extremely good and worth every single penny that isn’t part of a 190 million dollar budget. Speaking of the B.P.R.D, which is part of the Hellboy tales, Ron Perlman, who plays Hellboy in both features, appears in PACIFIC RIM as well. Because of this and the Guy Davis work, the movie can’t come close to beating SPEED 2 as the worst piece of shit on screen. It’s still an unwatchable, eye-gouging, hair pulling film, but it isn’t nearly as bad as all that. I don’t know what happy juice was in Amenta’s water when he saw either of these movies, but he’s got something to answer for now that I had to watch the fucking thing a second time.

I wonder if they made the giant robots to be a 2 pilot system so they could show they were spending some of that 190 million on actors? That might explain the dumb reason for all the technobabble that drags the movie down for the first thirty minutes.

While typing this up, I listened to the latest From the Hip release, where PACIFIC RIM was discussed in detail. You may find it an additional bit of fun to accent Day 5 of SPEED 2 Month. You may also find it irritating, which I would enjoy greatly. You lovers of PACIFIC RIM can suck it, for all I care. The movie is more leaden than any tall ship anchor. Go watch giant robot or kaiju anime if you want a better story with better action and better lighting. Also, you should probably watch this video from Screen Junkies. It’s their Honest Trailer for PACIFIC RIM, and it’s a laugh fest.

I also want it known I spelled Guillermo six different ways before spellcheck, and I didn’t care at any point.

Other subheadings for Day 5 were: The Rim Job, Rimmed, I’ve Been Rimmed Again, Dirty Sanchez.

SPEED 2 Month 2015 Day 4: Bollocks

In all the years I’ve spent pushing my vendetta against SPEED 2, I have rarely given Sandra Bullock much guff for getting involved with this picture. I do recall much being played out in the “Entertainment Press” at the time, partly because she wasn’t all that willing to do it without Keanu Reeves. He refused and she seemed to get pressured into making this turkey with no real thought to consequences. I’m sure I could find quotes as to how little she wanted to do it before being signed, but really, who cares. What’s done is done and let the sack of doorknobs hit hard as they may.

Ms. Bullock made her film debut in 1987, playing a role in HANGMEN, alongside such esteemed actors as Jake LaMotta. If anyone saw this movie, please let me know. I’ve never had the pleasure. Between then and 1993, she meandered through television, telefilm and a few stinkers that were probably never released to the silver screen. She struck the eye of many a fanboy and critic alike in the Sylvester Stallone/Wesley Snipes action mashup, DEMOLITION MAN. She was cute, perky and could deliver a line. She got really lucky with SPEED in ’94, the surprise hit of the summer. She got pretty busy at this point, doing a large number of flicks in a short period of time. Some were good and made good money (WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING and THE NET) while others… well, let’s take a look at those.

Anyone remember LOVE POTION #9? No? Too bad, it didn’t suck completely. It wasn’t good by any means, but what do you expect for a movie that made more money as a VHS rental than at the box office. It was also made before Sandra Bullock was a household name, so I don’t really hold this in the same regard as a 160 million dollar waste of expense. Post-SPEED and pre-SPEED 2, she co-starred in TWO IF BY SEA with Dennis Leary, who was trying to break away from his embittered comedy act and feed his family. TWO IF BY SEA was again, not a terribly bad movie. It also seemed to find an audience in rentals where it didn’t at the theatre. I think it was the mismatch of these two that did this movie injustice rather than the bizarre plot. Feel like a night of Bullock misfires that won’t melt your brain? Put in LOVE POTION #9, TWO IF BY SEA and the 2000 runaway snoozer, 28 DAYS, where she plays a drunk thrown into rehab. If it weren’t for supporting cast members in 28 DAYS, it might be just enough to be used as a sleep aid.

In ’98 she co-starred (again) in PRACTICAL MAGIC, a really girly flick with Nicole Kidman. I’m not sure if studios thought that she wasn’t good enough to hold a movie by herself or that they thought more than one star would bring in more money at this point in her career. PRACTICAL MAGIC was no flop, but it was no hit either, making critics question her “star power”. I wouldn’t have said that with this movie, which holds no interest at all for me. Bullock and Kidman play sisters that are also witches and apothecaries. Yeah. Guess which one was the “bad witch”? When THE CRAFT came out in ’96, everyone had to do something with witches, to the chagrin of the 700 CLUB viewers and donation junkies. PRACTICAL MAGIC was the flip side of THE CRAFT, in some ways. Since no movie ever gets Wicca or witches or magic ever done right, I’ll move on to something more interesting before someone throws another curse on me.

While investigating Sandra Bullocks’ career, I discovered two things. One, she had co-starred in a 1999 movie with the incredibly wooden Ben Affleck. Two, she had three movies released in 2000, one I had never even heard of, much less seen. To not have seen her debut film is one thing, but not to know about a movie with Liam Neeson and Oliver Platt as the headliners? Odd. The Affleck mess I’ve seen; it’s called FORCES OF NATURE. The less said about it the better, because it reeked worse than the week-old hamburger in my fridge. Ben Affleck… he’s just so bad! I mean, if I have to, I’ll watch it again for this month if a copy still exists somewhere. It’s not GIGLI bad, but I had put it out of my mind so much I had to read the synopsis to remember it… and try not to scream out in the library. FORCES OF NATURE is sort of a ‘comedy of errors’ with no laughs. Its PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES with no charm, spark or intelligence. Tack on a romance to anchor the whole story and you’ve got yourself a real bomb. It’s not as bad as SPEED 2 largely due to the supporting cast, but it was just about as big of a flop. GUN SHY I never heard of – have you? Neeson. Platt. The resonant movie voiceover just kills with those two names, no? If it weren’t for MISS CONGENIALITY, the third film of her 2000 releases, I think studios would have started to blacklist her. Not that MISS CONGENIALITY was great stuff, but it made money and that’s really what matters to them at the end of the day.

Over all, as I look at her entire career, she has very few duds. Sure, a lot of them are not great, thought inducing material, but they’re popcorn entertainment at the very least. I couldn’t find another clunker on the list until THE PROPOSAL of 2009. I didn’t hate this movie when I watched it but it did not break new ground. It felt like a rewrite of WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING set in Washington State. It also co-stars Ryan Reynolds who looks to be Sandra Bullocks’ 20 year junior. It was a strange film of an even stranger romance and if you haven’t seen it, I can’t really recommend it. I wouldn’t even put it in the same realm as the trio of her movies I listed earlier for a night of Bullock. She does have quite a few films of the last ten years I have not seen yet, so maybe there might be another nearly as bad as SPEED 2 or FORCE OF NATURE. Your suggestions are welcome.

Prepare yourselves for a volatile day 5 as I visit a specific Guillermo Del Toro movie of recent vintage. It’s going to make the interwebs blush.

For more movie vitriol, head on over to From the Hip and listen to the latest podcast where host Vinnie, myself and John “Speed 2” Amenta discuss terrible, terrible films we’ve seen.

SPEED 2 Month 2015 Day 3: Lost in the Land of the Lost of the Lost Land of the…

Day 2 of SPEED 2 Month covered a strange movie called A.I: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Strange in its history, its tale and the sheer amount of people that actually find it a likable piece of entertainment. The same day I watched A.I, I chose to temper it with another movie I had extreme reservations about, the 2009 remake of the 1970’s era kid’s television program, LAND OF THE LOST. 

For some reason I’m hearing lots of chuckling in my head. I wonder why.

LAND OF THE LOST the film is sort of a Will Ferrell vehicle, so those that don’t like his particular style of acting likely gave this forgotten, quirky flick a decidedly wide pass. Before I get too deep into the movie, I want to bring up what it’s based on, the television series of the same title.

When I was a lad, Saturday morning was still all the rage to watch the best shows and cartoons. Yes, there were live-action shows then, too. LAND OF THE LOST was one, where a park ranger and his kids get “accidentally” sent to a land that is part prehistoric, inhabited with dinosaurs, and part alien, with walking, talking lizard people called Sleestaks. The program was the brainchild of the Sid and Marty Krofft studio, which had been putting all sorts of mind bending kids shows on various networks since the sixties. As a kid, you ignored the tiny budget because you were having so much fun watching it. Or, as in my case, freaked out by the Sleestaks so much you can’t help but watch anyway. The show does not hold up at all, outside of the basic premise, but man, it was entertaining as a yout.

Returning to the movie, it’s hard to consider that it’s anything other than a satire of the original series rather than a remake or even homage. It isn’t just because Will Ferrell is the star, or that Danny McBride, likely best known for his recent role in the HBO series EASTBOUND AND DOWN, backs him up. It’s the sheer cheek and skewed humor that puts a whole different spin on the fairly overused plot.

So if you can swallow Will Ferrell playing a paleontologist that believes some form of time travel is possible, you can probably accept the first 20 or so minutes of this flick, which will carry you into the next 80-odd until the end. It’s completely silly and stupid but in a satirical way and not mean spirited. Will Ferrell is himself, really and not working very hard here, but if you enjoyed some of his real stinkers like SEMI-PRO, this is probably going to be a winner for you.

In brief, because the plot is about as thin as a sheet of paper, Ferrell and his sort-of assistant and groupie, actress Anna Friel, are transported to a parallel world with a “theme park” owner played by Danny McBride. In this weird world they lose the device that transported them and have to locate it, saving a monkey-boy named Cha-ka on the way. I won’t even mention the poor kid playing Cha-ka, it’s such a demeaning role. Also, I don’t care to. Regardless, the quartet tries to locate the machine, running afoul of the Sleestaks and an intelligent Tyrannosaurus Rex along the way. They find the machine, save the world from the Sleestaks and leave Danny McBride behind to give a reason for a sequel… or not. Also there is a small story device using Matt Lauer that actually had me laughing out loud, which I really didn’t expect, so there is that. Is it a dumb movie? O, hell yes. Is it better than SPEED 2? O, hell yes. Here’s why.

SPEED 2 took a concept that won on many different counts and completely destroyed it, ensuring that no more sequels would ever get made in the (ahem) franchise. LAND OF THE LOST took a largely forgotten television show aimed at kids, reformatted it for the now-grown up kids that watched it and satirized it. Fans of the original (however many there might actually be) likely either got that it was satire and enjoyed some of it or outright hated it. I would assume that most just ignored it, considering the lack of box office receipts, but that doesn’t matter here. Will Ferrell does his Will Ferrell shtick, hitting with some laughs, missing with most, and still getting a modicum of entertainment value. Anna Friel… well, she was there. Danny McBride makes the most of the movie, mostly making fun of Will Ferrell’s character, while ramping up the entertainment factor. Stealing the whole shebang is the intelligent Tyrannosaurus Rex, bending anything done with them since JURASSIC PARK and twisting any other thoughts of the dino for the entire future. I really don’t want to give away the fun I got out of Mr. T-rex, I want to see how many people have the guts to sit and watch LAND OF THE LOST and prove me wrong. Yes, beating out SPEED 2 for creativity is a completely CGI T-rex with no lines. And Danny McBride.

LAND OF THE LOST had a budget of 100 million dollars, surprisingly. It probably could have been made for the entire budget of both seasons of the tv series. It raked in a total of 69.5 million, most of which was here in the States. For the studio it was likely produced to be a loss-leader and write-off. Honestly, the most tragic thing of the movie is the budget. Why make a stinker like this for that much money when it easily could have been done for much, much less and get the exact same output? Tell me why, I implore you.

Jan de Bont should watch LAND OF THE LOST and learn something about proprietary budgets and the use of things like Leonard Nimoy, who voiced one of the Sleestaks. Because, if Leonard Nimoy does work on a film, it automatically trumps SPEED 2 for greatness.

Day 4 SPEED 2 Month takes a look at the movies of Sandra Bullock, good and otherwise.

SPEED 2 Month 2015 Day 2: Artificially Incurred

In 1969, Brian Aldiss, an English author of science fiction published a short story called “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long”. This story inspired famed film director Stanley Kubrick to opt the story for a movie sometime in the early 1970’s. While I won’t go into the intense minutiae of the Kubrick history of this option, let it be known that he himself handed the project off to his younger contemporary, Steven Spielberg, in the mid-1990’s. This project developed into the bloated budget A.I: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

To be fair, I like Stanley Kubrick. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is one of the highest points of filmmaking, as well as a pinnacle of the science fiction genre. I also like Steven Spielberg at times. What the hell either of them was thinking in the adaptation of the source material is so questionable it could make a summer-long racket on the insipid 500 QUESTIONS game show on NBC.

A.I. is supposed to follow the story of a robot child played by ever-so-cute Haley Joel Osment, who made things cuter on shows like MURPHY BROWN and THUNDER ALLEY before whispering his way through M. Night Shyamalan flicks. It’s sort of a depressing story to begin with, as the parents try to replace their living child with the robot, which has been programmed to “love”. Things just get creepy and weird from there, as the mother contends with the creepy and weird robot kid who sidles a lot. I mean, even Elaine Benes gave her sidler a pack of Tic-Tacs ™ to keep from being surprised – they can’t do that to a fucking robot? Creepy and weird kid robot continues that tactic until one day, after a foul incident where creepy and weird kid robot nearly kills the real son, who’d made a miraculous recovery from the iron lung with no explanation. I am honestly having a hard time recapping this shitstorm of a movie, so bear with me if I purposely jump a scene or five.

Mom, in a fit of creepy and weird love for her robot son, drops the creepy and weird robot in the middle of the forest instead of having him ground up into base parts after the foul incident. She abandons him with a robot toy called “Teddy”, a walking, talking futuristic Teddy Ruxpin ™, of sorts. Quickly to recap this: MOM ABANDONS ROBOT SON IN THE WOODS. Out of love, of course! It’s a heart-wrenching scene of utter banality that hearkens to tossing a garbage bag out of the window of a moving car. 

 (aren't they just cuuuuuute?)

Moving on, creepy and weird robot kid and his robot teddy bear companion go on a search for the “Blue Fairy”, a fable told to him at some point earlier in this already wretched celluloid mess that you hope might save what you’ve already come to hate. (Or I did, at least – let me tell you I’m personally glad I didn’t shill out my hard earned cash for this!) The search for “Blue Fairy” takes creepy/weird robot and Teddy through all sorts of fun adventures through homeless robots, robot hunters, robot arena fights and smelting pools and finally, to Jude Law playing a sex robot. Just so you’re aware, it wasn’t a big stretch for Mr. Law in this role. I think Ed Asner could have pulled this role off, it was so easy. Sex robot takes creepy/weird kid robot to see some animated silliness voiced by the late, great Robin Williams. This animated coin-op Q&A machine has more to it than the entire movie, but it’s just a plot point to push the anemic story forward to the (and I’m not giving anything away here) wholly unsatisfying conclusion.

Robot sex toy steals a flying police car/helicopter thing and he and creepy/weird robot kid and Teddy go to flooded NYC to find out some really dumb things about the reason creepy/weird robot kid was made in the first place. So basically, creepy weird kid meets his maker, the woefully undeserving of this role William Hurt, and after a freak out, flies the police car/helicopter to the bottom of flooded NYC – oh, didn’t you know? The flying police car is a submarine, too. He then pilots over to sunken underwater Coney Island, finds a statue of a “Blue Fairy” and sits there begging to be made human. While there, an underwater Ferris wheel falls over and traps the police heliosub, so creepy/weird robot kid can beg and pray to the “Blue Fairy” until the end of time to be made human. Good thing Teddy is still there to be his companion!

End of movie, right? Nope. It keeps going. Fade to thousands of years in the future, where the world has frozen over. These weird alien creatures are digging in the ice, acting as futuristic archaeologists. They find creepy/weird robot kid and Teddy still in the heliosub, still functional (!) and still wanting to be human. “Blue Fairy” crumbles in front of creepy/weird robot kid’s eyes, though it still held blue color after all these thousands of years… some paint job.

End of movie, right? No, again. The futuristic alien things, which may be robots if you catch on to that, take creepy/weird kid and Teddy to study them. They’re the best connection to humanity they’ve uncovered so far (making me thing they’re shitty archaeologists) and want to learn from them. Creepy/weird kid keeps crying about “Blue Fairy” and how he was supposed to be a real boy now, blah, blah, blah… if you are still interested, go watch the stupid movie and waste your own 146 minutes of time. More garbage happens before the robots (or aliens, you decide on your own) resurrect the mother that ABANDONED CREEPY/WEIRD ROBOT KID IN THE WOODS from a lock of her hair Teddy had kept. Funny thing is, she’ll only live for a day – a fact the future robot-aliens tell creepy/weird robot kid – and he does it anyway because he’s a selfish shit that just wants to love.

Gahhhhhhhhh this movie was so unappealingly bad it skyrocketed way, way up to the top three of terribly bad movies! I mean, it sits in second place, in a tie with INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, fighting for position. The only saving grace in the film is Teddy, who is voiced to perfection by veteran talent Jack Angel. I mean, I give much credit to the scenery and SFX, but the movie has no interest in showing those off, so they take a back seat to Teddy, who was a more old-school animatronic creation, and done greatly. If this movie had focused fully on Teddy, I doubt A.I. would be anywhere near this month of SPEED 2. Yes, Teddy, an animatronic robot toy has shamed Jan de Bont’s creative masterfuck enough to not take the throne.

The strange thing about A.I. is that it maintains a decent average of interest on a variety of sites dedicated to film. People didn’t hate it so much as they didn’t go and see it. It had a budget of 100 million, even less than the estimated budget of SPEED 2. It made more than SPEED 2, even if it was a bomb for American viewers. It only took in 78 million here, while raking in under 160 million overseas. So, while it likely broke even, it did nothing for film but cause more questions from trivial pursuers. Who wrote that, Kubrick or Spielberg? Who thought up that scene? Who did that? Who did… ahhh fuck it, who cares? The movie is so wretched if you’re not hoping someone just rips out the battery of creepy/weird robot kid by the third scene he’s sidling through, you’re not watching the same movie. In fact, this movie is so bad, do yourself a favor and go watch BICENTENNIAL MAN with Robin Williams. That movie is basically the same plot, only less meandering, with less inferred ideals and tons less depressive nonsense. It also doesn’t have the main character have its adopted mother resurrected from a swatch of hair just to watch her die in a 24 hour period. Love, my ass.

In fact, here’s a short list of robot movies that are three hundred times more watchable than A.I: I, ROBOT. ROBOT JOX. REAL STEEL. SHORT CIRCUIT 2. Or, watch all four seasons of the 80’s television show SMALL WONDER, it’s time better spent.

I want to thank Vinnie Agosta, host of the great podcast From the Hip, for finally getting me to watch some drek. I mean, if it weren’t for him, I’d probably never have sat through the entirety of A.I. One of these days I’ll talk him into doing a podcast while the two of us and John Amenta watch SPEED 2 in payback. Tomorrow for SPEED 2 Month, I have a special surprise waiting for you. No, really.

SPEED 2 Month 2015 Day 1: Projecting

June is the official SPEED 2 Month of a Leaf on the Wind, thirty days of disseminating all sorts of movies to conclude irrevocably that SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL is the worst film ever released to the silver screen. As many visitors to A Leaf on the Wind are likely new and unaware of SPEED 2 Month, I’ll explain a little of the history of how this became an annual event.

Some years past, while discussing films and comic books and other geek nation topics at a nearby comic and game store, I happened to mention SPEED 2 and the horrifying displeasure this movie impressed upon me. It, to be blunt, was a ridiculous mess of a story, with acting better suited for a Junior High School setting. This apparently was somewhat upsetting to a friend of mine who was there at the time, Mr. John Amenta. John claimed to have enjoyed the movie, disagreeing with me that it was the worst he’d ever seen. I took umbrage to the fact that he, a man of esteemed good taste, could even find a minutes worth of entertainment in the 122 that made up the waste of celluloid. SPEED 2 became a running gag for me, particularly in response to anything that John made claim to enjoy. For myself, I took immense pleasure not only in teasing John, but in discovering how many movies, no matter how bad, are not nearly on the low level of SPEED 2.

This… celebration of inadequacy… began as an oft-mentioned topic when A Leaf on the Wind began as a weblog at Myspace. It became a daily event through the month of June a few years back, though only being fully realized last year. If you’re of stout mind, you can go through the archives and read what was done last year in conjunction with this year, which may prove to be a landmark thirty days.

What will be seen here over the next few weeks will be movie versus movie comparisons, in-depth explorations of movie making and historical research into the films of the stars of SPEED 2, the director and producers. By June 30^th, A Leaf on the Wind hopes to impress that this movie is the worst Hollywood had yet pressured upon the viewing public.

Many films have already been mentioned or viewed in previous writs. During the month there may be links to earlier postings, or “reprinting’s” of those no longer on the web. The coming month will have all new areas to explore, bringing surprises, laughs and outrage to more than just one. Feel free to contact the page or post a comment following, or even make suggestions. Nothing is set in stone at A Leaf on the Wind, even SPEED 2 Month.

Day 2 will have the first comparison of a recently viewed film that was an ungodly mess and now sits in the lowest levels of movie hell: A.I. Yet, it’s still better than SPEED 2.

Last minute plug – if A Leaf on the Wind is enjoyable, or just SPEED 2 Month itself, search out From the Hip on the web, Facebook or ITunes. From the Hip is a podcast of pop culture fun and topics that relate to it, hosted by Vinnie Agosta, with the aforementioned John Amenta and myself guesting at times. Recommended, especially if you just want to know that Amenta owns a copy of SPEED 2 but not of the previous SPEED.