Mad Money

Rating: **1/2

Ever hear of this show called Weeds about a suburban soccer mom that deals pot to maintain her upper middle class lifestyle after the untimely death of her husband? Well, it’s pretty funny despite the one fundamental flaw I find in the series’ ethics; that one probably shouldn’t turn to a life of crime to maintain a lifestyle of avarice when downscaling several notches would probably have been the preferable option. A similar flaw is apparent in Mad Money, a bank heist movie that makes Ocean’s 11 look plausible in its execution.

So three ladies work in the federal reserve: Bridget (Diane Keaton), an upper-class housewife struggling to keep the big house after her company man husband (Ted Danson) loses his job; Nina (Queen Latifah), a single mom trying to give her kids a better life; and Jackie (Katie Holmes), a ditz who lives in a trailer with her bum husband. Bridget is the ring leader and comes up with a plan to rip off the reserve of money taken out of circulation and scheduled for destruction. Their plan works too well and they succeed, but then Bridget gets too greedy and pushes the ladies to steal more and more, only to have the authorities begin to clue in.

I guess the reason I’m holding Weeds in higher esteem is because that pot mom Nancy Botwin often finds herself in over her head dealing with dealers, suppliers and the intricacies of having to hide the way she makes money. Mad Money, to the contrary, says, “Hey, if they’re throwing it in the trash, it’s not really stealing.” No consequences in a situation compounded by the fact that it can’t possibly be that easy to rip off a Federal institution on a daily basis for months and years, but hey these guys make it look so easy. Guard finds out: cut him in. Investigator gets suspicious: keeps stealing so that he doesn’t notice a change in your routine.

And what does Diane Keaton think she’s doing? She used to be a respected actress but this is the latest in a line of movies where a woman of her experience and talent shouldn’t be caught dead in. And remember when Kevin Williamson once said that Katie Holmes had an Oscar in her future and then she ended up sequestered as Mrs. Tom Cruise for a year while former Dawson’s co-star Michelle Williams got the nod?

Queen Latifah manages to keep her dignity, maybe because her character is the only one with truly altruistic intensions. Ted Denson though is utterly hysterical as Bridget’s suffering husband, he’s the only one who seems to get the extent of the criminality. Also good in a small and thankless role is Roger Cross (24’s “Black Jack” Curtis Manning), for whom I hope this leads to bigger and much better things, this guy has leading man material written all over him.

Aside from being a mostly unfunny comedy with dubious moral and ethical implications, Mad Money is also bizarrely structured. It starts off with the crew getting rid of the evidence before the cops roll in for the arrest and then shows the various characters in custody as they tell the story in flashback. It’s a little like saying Verbal’s Keyser Soze, now here’s the search for Keyser Soze. Or failing that, kicking off The Sixth Sense by showing that Bruce Willis is a ghost and then showing him get shot by skinny Donnie Wahlberg.

I realize there’s an artistic methodology here; J.J. Abrams has done it numerous times with Alias, Lost and Mission: Impossible III. But the trick is that you’ve got to leave something to the imagination, and if Mad Money were anymore obvious, they would have handed out copies of the script to follow along.

Still though, it bugs me: the main plot with the stealing for the purpose of remodelling the bathroom and maintaining an unattainable lifestyle to maintain one’s social status. Given present economic conditions in the US it seems a pretty crappy message that it’s an acceptable final solution to steal to achieve your dreams and collect all the stuff you really don’t nee in the first. When the man said “land of opportunity” he didn’t imply one should get there by any means necessary.

Aliens Vs Predator - Requiem

Rating: **

First, a note to the family of four that was sitting behind me in the theatre, specifically the parents of the two obviously under-10 children: just what the hell were you thinking? I’m by no means a child psychologist, and for that matter neither are the people who rate movies, but seriously, what part of your brain said that Aliens Vs Predator was the appropriate holiday choice?

Seriously, it’s people like you that are ruining it for people like me to enjoy entertainment that’s aimed at a mature audience, like the idiots who don’t check the video game rating before giving their kids “Blood & Guts 3” for X-Box. And it’s also people like you who fan the flames of idiots like Bill O’Reilly, whose recent campaign against Naked News proves that he has finger on the pulse of the biggest internet trends of 2001. But I digress; let’s talk about Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem.

It sucked. No seriously, what were you expecting?

Not that this is a truly disappointing development, but frankly after Paul W.S. Anderson’s craptacular inaugural film released in 2004 the franchise had nowhere to go but up. The trailer released after Comic Con did display some amount of cleverness, naturally though this was a trick of the light and a trick of the grand olde marketing machine. Those expecting the very best that these two marvellous movie monsters have to offer will be disappointed or, if you’re like me, it will barely meet your expectations.

Unfortunately picking up from the conclusion of the first Alien/Predator, we begin on the departing Predator spacecraft and the birth of what is presumably the first ever Predalien, bursting forth from the chest of the sole surviving Predator from part one. The ship crashes in the woods outside a small town in Colorado town killing everyone onboard except the Predalien and about half-a-dozen of the Facehuggers, which are all set loose on an unsuspecting population. A Predator “cleaner” soon arrives, but not before an Alien infestation grips the small town leaving a handful of survivors.

What amazes me the most is how the storylines for these movies haven’t changed since James Cameron’s Aliens over 20 years ago. (And just to remind us of the fact, the unmistakable sound of the motion-detectors operated by the Colonial Marines in that movie is heard overtop of the opening credits.) As you may have already guessed, only the most necessary and most iconoclast of the townspeople rally together as the alien war cuts them off from civilization. In a situation like this you not only need the town sheriff, an army officer back from combat and an ex-con but a pizza delivery boy, a dumb jock, a couple of kids and some eye candy.

And typically not a single one of these characters is developed well enough to be anyone worth caring about, and it seems that the screenwriter and directors didn’t care about them either. Why was the one character an ex-con, it’s not like it figures into the story at all. Oh, and the poor pizza boy? He never even gets to coitus with the pretty girl, let alone to the interuptus. It’s emblematic of everything that’s wrong with the movie: it looks like things are going one way, but things never turn out the way you expect them, not how you want them.

In the original 1992 Alien Vs Predator comic, a newly colonized world is overrun by Aliens and Predators arrive to begin the hunt. A human woman named Machiko Noguchi assists the Predators in defeating the Aliens and is accepted as part of the Predator tribe and leaves with them on another hunt. I had thoughts of this as I watched Requiem because things seemed so set-up to take us there.

One of the characters is a returning army officer named Kelly (Reiko Aylesworth, 24), who’s unexplored storyline involves a detachment from her husband and daughter after what is presumably years overseas. So here, you’re thinking: well this is a cool way to set up Kelly as the new Ripley, their names are even kind of similar. It would have awesome if the filmmakers had taken the time to set up Kelly as a real hero who could be followed through possible, subsequent films as she, perhaps, joins the Predators on future hunts. But instead the movie squanders time on the pizza boy.

Also, why does it seem that there are only three alien races in the universe? When we see the Predator trophy case in Predator 2, it’s filled with a variety of skulls, where are some of these races? In Requiem, we see another trophy case, this time: purely made up of Alien skulls. Is there some kind of imagination limitation requirement for the people that are assigned the stewardship of these movies? It’s a big wide galaxy out there, but what are we doing? Retreading the same narrative ground over and over again in a place as bland and ordinary as small town America. (Though I’m pretty sure it’s really British Columbia.)

And for a movie directed by a couple of guys who come from the fertile creative background of visual effects, the movie looks oddly stale. While this movie isn’t shy about gore, as opposed to its PG-13, Anderson-directed predecessor, it doesn’t really go for the juggular either, which would make up for the fact that it doesn’t do anything all that creative either. It’s a terrible thing when you’re bored seeing two monsters fighting and I was bored solid and left twiddling my thumbs waiting for the body count to rise. The problem there, of course, was that I wasn’t all that invested in whether the heroes lived or died.

I wish I could say, “A for effort”, but this is an all-round D-movie. I know that there’s a lot of love out there for both franchises and a lot of potential in the ether for the collection of huge sums of cash, but until the executives in charge of the properties can do right by then and the fans, maybe they should leave well enough alone.