If you’re going to be stuck with a shitty movie, you want it to stink so badly that it becomes “funny.” You want people talking back at the screen, throwing empty drink containers and making howling-coyote noises. Then we can all relax and have a good time. I’ve enjoyed this kind of film. It’s a perfectly legitimate form of entertainment.

But there are two kinds of funny-bad. The first is when the actors convey to the audience that they know they’re in a turkey and that it’s cool for everyone to start hooting and making jokes. The second is when they seem to be conveying sincere belief in the material and are trying as best they can to sell it on a genuine level. Then it’s not that funny because you’re feeling tremendous sympathy, or more exactly pity. Don’t these guys realize they’re hurting themselves by acting in this piece of shit and looking like cheap whores?

I’m sorry to say that Olympus Has Fallen is the second kind of bad. I wish it were otherwise. At best it has three or four good laughs and, okay, one of them (a sight gag involving the nation’s 16th President) is intentional. Otherwise it’s a low-budget, Shreveport-y, ultra-sadistic bullshit video-game version of a Die Hard-in-the-White House movie.

The main problems are (a) Gerard Butler‘s simplistic, one-note performance as White House secret service man Mike Bannon — all the wit and charisma of a linebacker in an NFL game, (b) sedative-style dialogue, (c) a mystifying devotion to wheezy cliches (a rugged defrocked hero gets to redeem himself through acts of manly valor, the supportive, teary-eyed wife following the hero’s saga from the sidelines, a coolly sadistic criminal mastermind, a middle-aged American turncoat in league with the baddies, a billowing American flag and the sound of crisp military drums during opening credits), (c) too many boot-kickings, (d) too many tough guys going “whugh!” and “uggh!” and “mughh!” as they fight hand to hand, (e) too many generic orange-fireball explosions and (f) way, way too many bullets fired.

I explained in my “Ten Shot Rule” piece that the fewer bullets fired in an action film, the better it tends be and vice versa. (The rule was based on Shane firing only about ten bullets.) Antoine Fuqua, the director of Olympus Has Fallen, never heard of the ten-shot rule. He seems to believe in an opposite equation. The more brutality, the better. And better still if you throw in several bad-ass, well-armed Koreans who know from martial arts.

In my 1.8.13 review of Ruben Fleischer‘s Gangster Squad , I reported that 478,446 machine-gun bullets are fired in that Warner Bros. film. I brought my counter to yesterday’s screening and Olympus Has Fallen fires off 512,754 bullets. If Fuqua had only kept the count down to 100,000 or less…if he only knew the value of restraint.

The film industry needs to take a restraining order on the guys who wrote this thing — Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt. I’m serious. Or…whatever, invade their homes at 4:30 am and arrest them, put them in chains, put black hoods over their heads, drive them out to the desert and lock them into an underground jail cell and keep them there for a minimum of 18 months.

And talk about fallen — Fuqua has stabbed himself in the head with this thing. Olympus Has Fallen is at least four or five levels below John McTiernan‘s Die Hard. It’s like some kind of factory-level exploitation film made by the second cousins of Danny and Oxide Pang.

The fake White House (apparently built somewhere in Shreveport) looks like a fake White House. The front lawn is too small. The first-floor windows don’t look right.

The great Melissa Leo is beaten up and made to scream and howl and utterly humiliate herself. What was she thinking? She won her Oscar for The Fighter so she could collect a paycheck to act in a film like this? To what end? Mortgage payments?

The film starts [NON-SPOILER because it’s in the trailer] with a mindless car-accident scene in which future Democratic candidate for U.S. Senator from Kentucky Ashley Judd, playing the wife of Aaron Eckart‘s U.S. President, goes over the side of a bridge inside a limousine. At first the limo is teetering on the edge of the bridge Beetlejuice-style, and Butler rushes over to pull Eckhart and Judd out of the back seat. But Eckhart resists and holds his wife for a moment too long, and by the time Butler yanks him out it’s too late and Judd goes over the side. It is somehow decided that Butler allowed the First Lady to die so he’s subsequently taken off White House detail. Absolute nonsense.

Several months later Korean terrorists stage a ridiculous aerial attack on Washington, D.C. — blastaway, blastaway blastaway all! Into the valley of death rode the crazy Koreans! Good action sequences always stay within the realm of the somewhjat conceivable and never tip into the ridiculous, as this one does. Dut-ditty-dut-ditty-dut-ditty-dut-ditty-dut-dut-dut…budda-budda-budda-budda-budda-budda…BOOM! Bud-dut-dut-budda-DOOM!

The less said about the supporting performances by Morgan Freeman (who should never again play a Washington authority figure), Angela Bassett, Dylan McDermott, Robert Forster and Cole Hauser the better.

Here’s hoping this film doesn’t adversely affect Judd’s attempt to unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. I want her to win.

The invaders are led by Kang (Rick Yune), a Korean terrorist in really good shape with a narrow waist and serious arm muscles and a big buffed-up chest. Every time Yune was on-screen I was silently sneering and going “you third-rate asshole and your cheap macho bullshit…Alan Rickman played almost the exact same character 25 years ago and here you going through the motions…you think you’re up to something cool and you’re not…putz.”

David O. Russell‘s Abscam movie, which will open limited on 12.13 or nine months hence, began shooting yesterday in Boston. A 2010 version of Eric Singer’s script runs 134 pages so figure a two-hour running time, give or take. A three-month shooting schedule means principal wraps in late June. Three months of editing and it’ll begin test-screening in late September or thereabouts. Eight weeks for tune-ups and final scoring and whatnot, and then screenings for major critics begin around Thanksgiving.

I’ve been thinking about giving A&E’s Bates Motel a try, but I’m stalling. Freddy Highmore as a teenaged Norman Bates, Vera Farmiga as his highly conflicted mother Norma…okay. The widowed Norma buying the motel in foreclosure, she and Norman moving into the hilltop gothic Victorian…fine. Except it’s set in 2013 and all the moralistic underpinnings and innumerable 1950s details that made the original Psycho what it was have been tossed…or some of them have. A period-flavored contemporary thing.

The series, which began last night, “appears to be a victim of marketing stratagems,”Slant‘s Chuck Bowen wrote on 3.15. “Sure, Psycho carries the ‘brand recognition’ that studios appear to value above any and all common sense, but can viewers belonging to the all-important 18-to-30 quadrant be reasonably expected to tune in to a series inspired by a film from the 1960s?”

A 1960 film, he means, that adapted Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel that was inspired by the 1957 arrest of mass murderer Ed Gein. Plus the Norman-and-Norma backstory would have happened sometime in the mid ’50s.

“Executive producer Carlton Cuse (Lost) has called Bates Motel a ‘contemporary prequel’ to Psycho“…what bullshit. Bowen calls this “an evasive way of saying the show runners have borrowed the elements from the film that suit them with little regard as to whether they logically belong in a contemporary setting that’s otherwise informed by the most successful shows of the last 20 years.

“Unsurprisingly, given this opportunistic grab-bag approach, Bates Motel exhibits virtually no feel for time or place.

“Norman, though a contemporary teen, still dresses in the priggish 1950s mode — all hiked-up trousers, plaid button-ups and hand-me-down sweaters — that we associate with the Norman who once fatefully encountered Marion Crane. That could potentially make sense thematically, as Norman is meant to be a creature of another time, but occasionally we see teachers distractingly dressed as conservative school marms, while Norman’s bad-boy brother, Dylan Massett (Max Thieriot), broods in tailored, fussed-over duds that wouldn’t be out of place in the contemporary incarnation of 90210.

“Norma’s behavior is the least consistent, as she continually wafts back and forth between Norman and Dylan’s conflicting fashion senses: Occasionally she’s the oppressive asexual matriarch the film implied her to be, but she’s also capable of morphing into a sexy, chic, leather jacket-clad vamp when it occurs to the producers that a little cheesecake might be in order.”

So that’s why I haven’t watched it yet. Even though I could watch it right now on the A & E Bates Motel site. That plus the 65% Metacritic rating. But I have to admit I’m somewhat intrigued all the same.

Just noticed this: Check out the house-tour portion of the trailer and you’ll notice that Norman’s room is located in the wrong area of the second floor. In the 1960 film Vera Miles found it by taking a right at the top of the stairs as it was located across the hall from his mother’s large room. Now his mother’s large room has been subdivided and split into two — she has a smaller bedroom toward the front, and Norman’s small room is right to the left at the top of the stairs. So they messed with the original architecture. See what I mean? This why I’m reluctant.

Last fall Scott Foundas was graciously drop-kicked out of his Film Society of Lincoln Center/NY Film Festival programming position when Kent Jones was brought in to run the NY Film Festival. Two or three months ago he moved back to film criticism by taking the top film critic position for the Village Voice. And now Foundas has jettisoned the Voice gig to accept a new job as Variety‘s chief film critic, ranking above Justin Chang and Peter Debruge.

Formerly the top L.A. Weekly critic, Foundas left Los Angeles three (or was it four?) years ago when he took the FSLC/NYFF job, and he’ll remain there for Variety.

So who’ll land the now-vacant Village Voice film gig? Who trusts that the Voice will remain strong and vibrant enough to keep a major film critic on salary?

This is Hollywood to some people. One slippery rock and you’ll fall in…chomp! This town is a lot more about cowardice and complacency than predatory behavior. But as I wrote six years ago, there are some who believe that Life in the Big City is a “steaming cauldron full of rat’s tails and slithering serpents.” And sharks! Can you imagine waking up every day with that vision of things in your head?

I’ve been attending press junkets since the ’80s, and I can tell you that whenever you hear a journalist use the word “pressure” in a question to a director, actor or screenwriter (i.e., “how much pressure did you feel in having to accomplish this or that?”) that is a guaranteed tipoff that the person asking the question is a second-rate tool. All they have to do is say the word “pressure” and right away you’ll know.

The essence of pressure is being stuck with a tough problem that you’re not sure you can handle and especially not having enough time. Something like, oh, Sean Connery trying to figure out how to defuse that nuclear bomb inside of Fort Knox at the the end of Goldfinger with 37 seconds to go. Zen artists don’t look at creative challenges that way. There’s no bomb about to go off. A composer either knows how the tune sounds or he doesn’t. What’s the point of writing anything if you don’t have something in your head to start with? Any writer worth his or her salt knows what what needs to be said or explored or drilled into. The writing process is simply about putting it down in some kind of legible blueprint form. It changes and evolves during that process, but there’s no pressure in that.

To hell with pressure as a concept. Do people feel pressure to get out of bed in the morning? No — you get out of bed because you’re all slept out or because you’re hungry for the day to begin or whatever. Did I feel pressure when I worked as a waiter at the Spring Street Bar in the late ’70s? I guess so but who cares? Do people feel pressure to hit the gas wen the light turns green? Do hikers walking across the Golden Gate bridge for exercise…do they feel pressure not to jump off and commit suicide? I suppose you could say that there are different degrees of pressure and expectation that go with almost any activity but it’s a banal way of looking at it.

Douchebag journalist to James Cameron: “Do you ever feel the pressure of topping yourself? And do you have a release date you can share with us for Avatar 2 and 3?”

Cameron: “Pressure, no. It’s a little daunting because sequels are always tricky. You have to be surprising and stay ahead of audience anticipation. At the same time, you have to massage their feet with things that they know and love about the first film. I’ve walked that line in the past, so I’m not too worried about it. At the same time, I definitely have to deliver the goods. As for a release date that will be determined by when I get the script out. No pressure!”

Most of the reviewers and columnists who write about Blurays tend to praise noticable grain structure, especially on Blurays of classic black-and-white films. On DVD Beaver or Bluray.com it’s not uncommon to read high praise for a monochrome film that’s swarming with hundreds of billions of digital mosquitoes. These same critics also put down Universal Home Video’s tendency to modestly apply digital noise reduction (DNR) to black-and-white films, as they did with the excellent Blurays for Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho and J. Lee Thompson‘s Cape Fear. DNR’ing means these films have been slightly degrained.

I, on the other hand, am probably the only columnist who loudly complains about digital mosquito swarms and who worships good DNR’ing. I don’t just love the Psycho and Cape Fear Blurays — I think their clarity and delivery of detail is orgasmic. They make me purr with delight. And I feel the same way about the recently released Schindler’s List Bluray. I recently called it “sheer black-and-white heaven…rich, razor-sharp, super-textured.” Steven Spielberg‘s film is only 20 years old, of course, and would naturally be expected to look all that much clearer and sharper. So I didn’t presume it had been DNR’ed.

But a couple of weeks ago Universal Senior Vice-President of Technical Operations Michael Daruty told Time‘s Wook Kim that some level of DNR’ing had been applied to the Schinder’s List Bluray. That’s why I like it so much, I guess.

Daruty: “Even though Schindler’s List is mostly a black-and-white film, we are still dealing with black levels and white levels and managing a broad range of highlights and contrasts. Our goal always is to preserve the cinematographer’s vision, while at the same time minimizing undesirable artifacts.”

Kim: “Minimizing artifacts? You mean ‘cleaning’ the picture? Can you explain how that works?”

Daruty: “We have technicians sitting at monitors examining the film, frame by frame, looking for anomalies: dirt, film scratches, stains, anything that shouldn’t be on the image. When they spot something, they move a cursor over the anomaly and paintbox them out.”

Kim: “That sounds like both a labor- and time-intensive process.”

Daruty: “It is. We had anywhere from 20 to 30 people working on it. The whole process took 5 months.”

Kim: “I suppose working in 4K must have brought out details — and imperfections — that were invisible in the DVD version?”

Daruty: “There’s so much finer detail in the clothing and the hair and the skin textures. So we’re trying to bring that out and, at the same time, finding and managing an acceptable level of film grain. Every film has grain — take out too much and it stops looking like film.”

In other words, Universal removed a certain amount of grain from Schindler List. And with Spielberg’s approval, Daruty adds. And this is why the Bluray not only looks cleaner and sharper than any previous DVD version, but cleaner and sharper than the film looked on theatre screens in 1994. It’s really marvellous and should be seen by anyone who cares about this stuff.

This morning’s hoo-hah is that Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni, the guy hired to play the Devil in Mark Burnett‘s The Bible miniseries on the History Channel, strongly resembles President Obama. The association of evil is intensified by Quazani wearing an Emperor Palpatine hoodie cloak. The resemblance hasn’t been exaggerated. Quazani is a dead ringer for an older Obama (i.e., 10 or 15 years from now).

(l.) Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni as the Fallen Angel in Mark Burnett’s The Bible miniseries; (r.) President Obama

Unless The Bible casting director who hired Quazani (either Noureddine Aberdine, Amine Louadni or Carl Proctor) is a drooling idiot, he/she was fully aware of the resemblance.

Ditto Burnett, the reality-show promoter and multi-millionaire (Survivor, Celebrity Apprentice, The Voice, The Job) who produced The Bible along with his actress-wife Rona Downey. They knew exactly what the shot was. They’re rich and almost certainly not stupid. And I seriously doubt that they were entirely disinterested in stirring up reactions among those who would most likely watch The Bible, and I’m not referring to college-educated blue-state urbans. They certainly knew they’d get a lot of press…c’mon.

I have reason to suspect that anyone who even vaguely equates the power of God and teachings of Jesus to powerful engines in hot cars, as Burnett did not long ago, is probably some kind of moderate dimwit.

I also suspect that anyone who has produced a religious-themed film or mini-series who tells a reporter that “the hand of God was on this,” as Burnett recently did, is basically a hustler trying to attract the religious-minded to watch his show.

That goes double if the same Malibu-residing producer has co-authored a Bible-for-simpletons book that will help promote his religious-themed mini-series, which critics have incidentally called a flashy and synthetic exploitation of Bible tales.

Any hustler can get rich off the God-exploiting business, but some take it more seriously than most. If God touches your movie or miniseries, perhaps He/She/It is also touching the heart and soul of its producer[s]. It doesn’t necessarily follow that people who talk about the hand of God affecting this or that human enterprise are idiots, but people who talk this way do tend to be conservative traditionalists, and this tends to overlap with Republican theology.

We all know the score. You can be a liberal and still be a devout Christian, but generally speaking the God who lives in the narrative of the Holy Bible was co-opted by the religious right decades ago, and anyone who says things like “the hand of God” helped us make this movie knows what he/she is saying and who they’re getting through to. You know it. I know it. Cut the crap.

The Bible series airs each Sunday at 8 p.m. on History Channel. The series’ finale is Easter Sunday.

Update: “This is utter nonsense,” Burnett and Downey said in a statement Monday. “The actor who played Satan, Mehdi Ouzaani, is a highly acclaimed Moroccan actor. He has previously played parts in several Biblical epics — including Satanic characters long before Barack Obama was elected as our President.”

A History Channel spokesperson also said the resemblance was not intentional. “History channel has the highest respect for President Obama,” some flack wrote. “The series was produced with an international and diverse cast of respected actors. It’s unfortunate that anyone made this false connection. History’s The Bible is meant to enlighten people on its rich stories and deep history.”

These words were spoken by Mel Gibson‘s Fletcher Christian as he led a mutiny against Anthony Hopkins‘ Captain Bligh in Roger Donaldson‘s The Bounty (’84). They were also silently muttered to myself as I trudged through mobs of St. Patrick’s Day revelers today at the Farmer’s Market and The Grove. For some reason I can walk amongst tens of thousands on the streets of Manhattan or London or Paris or Dublin and not blink an eye, but outdoor shopping mall crowds are different. Not a pestilence but certainly worth avoiding if at all possible.

They’re too plentiful, for one thing. Shuffling along at even slower rates than usual and obstructing anyone trying to stride around with any sense of purpose. They walk around like 85 year-olds (it’s called the “mall meander”) and are always stopping for gelato and or congregating in groups of four or five or six as they wait to get into the Cheesecake Factory. Plus St. Paddy’s is a day of drink and that means a lot of noise and giggling and live bands (some even attempting to play a semblance of traditional Irish music) that no one’s listening to. I learned a long time ago when I was a New Yorker to stay indoors in St. Patrick’s Day — too many drunks. Now I know it’s the same here. I’ll never go St. Paddy-ing in Los Angeles ever again.

On June 4th Kino Video will release a Bluray of Alan Clarke‘s Scum (’79), a violent, survival-of-the-most-brutal drama set inside a British borstal. It starred a very young and intense Ray Winstone — his big breakout role — along with his Quadrophenia costar Phil Daniels. There was a gritty realism thing happening in British films at the time, and Scum was one of the stand-outs. It’s an absolute must-see still.

Clarke made two Scum films — a 1977 TV version made for BBC’s Play for Today that was withdrawn from broadcast due to violence. Two years later Clarke and screenwriter Roy Minton remade it as an even more violent feature. British DVDs of both are apparently purchasable (or were purchasable) but the Bluray is presumably the thing to have.

For whatever reason the Kino Video notes state that Scum‘s running time is 78 minutes while the IMDB gives a running time of 98 minutes. A typo, I’m guessing.

Scum opened in 1980 in New York. I attended the premiere (which happened at some downtown theatre, possible the Eighth Street Playhouse) and then the after-party with my beautiful girlfriend, Kathi Jo, and her fetching best friend. I met Winstone at the party, and right away he asked if I was in the mood to share. “Not the blonde,” I said. “She’s with me but her friend, sure, I guess…go for it.” Smiling Ray liked that response — “Gee, thanks, Jeff!” (Except he pronounced it “Jayff.”) Winstone got distracted by something or someone else and never came over to talk. That night Kathi Jo and her friend and I went back to her place and got into a three-way although not the hot guy-fantasy kind with the women doing each other. It was basically a double-scoop ice cream sundae for me — unforgettable.

20 years later I ran into Winstone at Toronto’s Park Hyatt. This was a day or two after Sexy Beast had opened. Anyway he was with two or three others but we locked eyes and he remembered right away — “Hello, Jayff!”

From the Scum Wiki page: “It was later released on DVD in the UK by Odyssey and Prism Leisure. It was the digitally remastered uncut version but in fullscreen, with only a trailer and an interview as bonus features. In the US an Alan Clarke boxset was issued that included several films, among them both the BBC original and cinema version of the film plus audio commentaries.

“Prism Leisure released a limited edition 2-disc set in the UK on June 13, 2005. Disc One featured the BBC version with an audio commentary and two interviews. Disc Two instead featured the theatrical remake with an audio commentary, several interviews and featurettes and two trailers. It was digitally remastered from a widescreen print. A Region 0 DVD — similar to that in the Alan Clarke boxset, but this time available separately from other Clarke films — followed in the US, released by Blue Underground.”

Here’s a well-written review of the double package by Digitally Obsessed.

Clarke died at age 54 in 1990.