Friday, February 25, 2011

the girl who kicked the hornets' nest

So I had a completely smug moment when I went up to pay for our tickets and said, “Two adults for The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, thanks,” and the cinema person said, “You know, you’re the only person who’s managed to say the title correctly.” Little did she know I’d sold five billion of the book, read it in a frenzy the day it came out, and attacked all customers who bought it afterwards with “I finished this yesterday/last week/a year ago! It is SO GOOD.” Anyway, while the title makes sense, especially within the context of the whole Millennium trilogy (deep breath): number one, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, followed by The Girl who Played with Fire, then ending on The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, it’s still true. Long titles are difficult to remember, like the book The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (aka “The Potato...Jersey...book” to customers) and A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian (“Uh, The Story of Tanks in Brazil?”). So while they’re quirky, publishers shouldn’t do it. And while we’re on the topic of things that are ridiculously long, the film The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, at more than two and a half hours, is ridiculously long. It’s mostly worth it, but you’ll be too distracted by the need to pee to pay attention to the last half hour.

In the third and probably final title in the Millennium Trilogy—there are rumours kicking around of a fourth that is mostly written, and that late author Stieg Larsson was intending to write ten—we pick up from where The Girl who Played with Fire ended. Feisty heroine Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, now ridiculously and deservedly famous) is in the emergency room in hospital after being shot in the head and hip and shoulder, her completely vile father Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov) is down the hall in a room with a Salander-inflicted axe wound to the head, and Lisbeth’s half-brother Ronald Niedermann (Micke Spreitz)—the “blonde giant”, and someone who can’t feel pain—is on the run. Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), journalist at Millennium magazine and champion of Salander’s cause, is doing the very best he can to save Lisbeth from the media storm worked up by the frenzied attacks at Zalachenko’s house, and the residual hype around her from the murders she was accused of in the second movie. Now she is accused of the attempted murder of her father, as well, an accusation aided by her attempted murder of him years earlier as a twelve-year-old defending her abused mother, and supported by master bastard doctor Peter Teleborian (Anders Ahlbom). Yes, it’s all very dramatic. And when it involves politicians from the very highest parts of Swedish society, it’s about as dramatic as you can get. And it makes the ending all the more delicious.

Most of Salander’s screentime is spent with her locked up—first in a hospital room, aided by her hot and all-round fantastic doctor Anders Jonasson (Aksel Morisse); then, in a jail cell; and finally, in a courtroom, assisted by Blomkvist’s pregnant lawyer sister Annika (Annika Giannini). We also follow Blomkvist, and the rest of the Millennium team, as they try to find links between Zalachenko and parliament, despite numerous death threats and Blomkvist’s single-minded approach. Along with the police, aided by Blomkvist, and the bad guys themselves, who basically sit around shitting their pants, we also have the displeasure of watching Niedermann’s grotesque escape route, as he kidnaps and harms everyone in his path.

I have a lot of goodwill for the books, and the brilliantly cast movies. And I enjoyed The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, and it was fabulous to see virtually everything wrapped up. You can’t help but get completely involved with Lisbeth Salander and want desperately to see her free from the horrific life she’s had to live through since she was a child. The movie has a very satisfying black-and-white way of looking at the world, where all the good people are wonderful (though Blomkvist makes some bad decisions, it is ultimately for a greater good) and all the bad people are snivelling monsters who deserve all they get.

Still, this movie was not without its flaws. The police force came across as completely incompetent—too slow-moving to defend against the lumbering Niedermann, unable to figure anything out without the help of a journo, and in one eye-bleedingly cheesy scene, driving along a pavement and almost hitting a woman wheeling a pram (a pram! Wasn’t that trope done and dusted after the bit in Speed where Sandra Bullock hits a pram and it’s full of cans?) Despite the time lapse between the start of the movie and the end—Lisbeth has brain surgery, grows her hair out, becomes stronger—Annika remains just as heavily pregnant throughout the entire film with no actual mention made of the fact that such an integral part of the team may burst into labour on the courtroom floor. If you haven’t seen the two previous movie, it’s really not worth seeing this one, as you’d spend most of it trying to remember what the hell is going on, what happened in the past, and who that middle-aged guy on screen is. Hell, I’ve read all the books and seen the movie and I still had trouble cottoning on sometimes. The courtroom aspect ends neatly but leaves you thinking, “Wait, what was the crime being discussed, and why, despite what just happened, was this the outcome?” It felt that often one little sentence was all that was needed to make a confusing aspect make sense. But they didn’t happen, and so I sometimes sat there with a perplexed look on my face dribbling my Pepsi out the side of my mouth. And seriously, I cannot state this enough: it’s too long.

I’ve mentioned this with the previous movies but it bears repeating: one of my favourite parts of these films is the casting, not just because they’re talented actors (they are), but because all the people are just so damn normal. Blomkvist is handsome—and I adore him—and has a mid-life belly and a rough-skinned face. Erika, his blonde and beautiful editor, wears the same clothes over all the movies and has wrinkles and fuzzy hair. Salander punks up for her courtroom scene in more silver jewellery than a Kmart full of teenagers, and doesn’t really make it sexy deliberately, even though she’s gorgeous. Everyone is just wonderful in their everyday way and it makes movies so much more believable when they are. Of course, they’re all speaking Swedish which just reminds you that American/Australian/British movies have a long way to come in this regard.

In Summary: Meets Expectations. A fine thriller with a dash of politics, a sprinkle of action, one and a half teaspoons of schadenfreude, and sixteen cups of length. It missed out on some parts of the books I was hoping for—the relationship between police officer Monica Figuerola and polyamorist Blomkvist, for one—but did a fairly good job of containing the important parts. May have made a better television series—ten episodes per book or something—and apparently were actually filmed as telemovies in Sweden anyway.

GIVEAWAY! Want to see this, but not sure enough to fork out full price on it? Well I have a handful of two-for-one passes for The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest valid Australia-wide, so if you’re keen, comment here about what you think the fourth book should be called, and if you’re lucky (chances are supremely high) I’ll send you one out!

Monday, February 21, 2011

gnomeo & juliet

I don’t know when it happened—or if it has always been so—but kids movies always have to have a singing and dancing scene. Inevitably, the fuddy-duddy-est of the characters will do the silliest dance and all the under-fives will fall over themselves laughing. I for one am waiting for the one kids movie that doesn’t require a song or a dance to get its point across. After all, life doesn’t work that way, and apparently I am a miserly old cynic who wants to strip all young children of fun in their flicks so that I don’t have to cross my arms and sigh pointedly when everyone bursts into song. So it’s probably not a surprise to you that there’s singing and dancing in Gnomeo & Juliet. Worse still, it’s Elton John—and while he’s a multi-kazillionaire and well-loved, I don’t actually enjoy his music at all. It’s fun enough for a kids movie, and the glitziness that goes alongside his work helps too (you will see glitter sunglasses, fear not), but he is executive producer and thus it seems like a blatant bit of self-promotion. If I liked Sir Elton perhaps I wouldn’t be so ranty right now—and one of my co-watchers loves him and had a dirty great smile on her face whenever his songs came on—but I don’t.

In happier news, I did quite like Gnomeo & Juliet. Aimed squarely at the kidlet market, though still pretty endearing for the old folks (read: twelve-plus), it’s a story we’ve all heard before, but perhaps not in this style. Gnomeo (James McAvoy) is a rough-n-tumble ceramic garden gnome from the blue Montague house, a bit of a larrikin with a podgy gnome belly. Juliet (Emily Blunt) is held literally on a pedestal by her father over the fence in the red Capulet house. Along with the crotchety home owners, the red and the blue gnomes have been enemies for as long as anyone can remember, but when Gnomeo and Juliet bump into each other in another property across the alley, they spark a forbidden romance that causes much drama as their relationship accidentally brings neighbourhood tensions to the fore. Will it follow the same storyline, with a double suicide at the end? I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say “no”, not when it’s a kids movie, though the smirking statue of Shakespeare (voiced by Patrick Stewart) at the gnomes’ local park insisted with a smirk it would end as he originally wrote it.

Frankly, gnomes just take a while to get used to. We know via the Toy Story trilogy that we can fall totally in love with otherwise inanimate objects, but watching gnomes clunk around the place, tending to their garden, repeatedly fishing for one bored fish, and so on—it’s tricky to connect with them, but you really do. The sound design is wonderful in this film, with the ceramic clacking of gnomes against themselves, each other and the environment completely spot-on and natural. They are less fragile than you’d expect but still can’t fall from great heights, and they will freeze as soon as a human is nearby into all manner of hilarious positions. I’m not sure how sold I was until Gnomeo and Juliet meet at a disused glasshouse where Juliet is hunting for the perfect flower, and the introduction of the two characters is one of the sweetest and most entertaining I have seen as the two—both in disguise—swing around the greenhouse in a nifty little action sequence. Once they fall into a pond and discover—to their mutual horror—that they are from opposing houses, their attraction doesn’t wane but things get a bit trickier when it comes to meeting up.

As in all good kids flicks, the main characters’ pals count for a lot. Gnomeo’s main man is actually a clay mushroom that, despite having no face (seriously, it’s just a mushroom) sniffs around the place like a dog and somehow makes barking noises. (What, THIS is what I can’t suspend disbelief for?) Juliet has an Irish pond frog as her helper, one who spurts jets of water out of the hose in her mouth and is happy to leap about singing, “Doooooomed!” after she discovers the dangerous romance. The most emotionally devastating character is, bizarrely, a plastic pink flamingo named Featherstone that Gnomeo and Juliet accidentally let out of a shed, who attacks everyone with love, knows no boundaries, has a strange Latin accent and, after recounting what led to him being trapped in a shed for twenty years, will make you want to bawl your eyes out and ruin your 3D glasses. (Not to mention, he’s voiced by Jim Cummings, who had a similarly devastating storyline in the substandard The Princess and the Frog. I hope his human life is much happier.) Add to that a bad guy in arrogant red gnome Tybalt
voiced, awesomely, by Jason Statham—and the ultra-competitive lawnmower fights the two groups of gnomes get into, and you’ve got yourself total entertainment.

It’s a bit cheesy, the ending is wrapped up far too quickly and with a bit of a vague hand-wave to some loose ends. There is a big stupid dance finale, if you’re bothered by such things. The 3D is absolutely fine—but underused. While it’s a good-looking movie, it’s restricted to two backyards, one neighbouring lot, and a brief foray into a park. It’s nothing that couldn’t have been done with live action, or puppets—there’s no sweeping panoramic shots, and limited action scenes, mostly lawnmower-related. I understand that the gnomes live a sheltered life, and that I’m overthinking this movie, but I’m not sure why they bothered sticking in a third dimension while keeping it so limited.

However, it’s super cute, pretty funny, and there’s lots of bright colours to keep the kids entertained. It’s not too childish for adults, and grown-ups get to play find-the-Shakespeare-in-joke—the houses are on Verona Drive, and when Juliet tries to stop a huge, drooling dog from entering her yard, she pushes a door against him yelling, “Out! Out! Damned Spot.” The computer having a banana as its logo was also a funny (though done before) touch.

In Summary: Meets Expectations. It’s all you could want from a kid’s movie—laughter, tears, and genuine desire for the couple to get together and live happily ever after with purple babies. (NB: This does not happen in the movie, but if I’d written it I would have made it happen. Maybe when I pitch my sequel to Elton at our next coffee meeting.) Gnomeo & Juliet is just plain good standard animation fare.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

127 hours

One thing that is always the kicker when it comes to seeing a movie based on a true story is that often I know how it ends. No one went into Titanic expecting to see the plucky engineers turning the boat in time, missing the iceberg and changing the movie into The Love Boat; no one thought Gallipoli was going to be a gentle travel narrative. So going into 127 Hours, I knew exactly what happened to Aron Ralston during his climbing accident in Utah. If you’ve been paying attention to the movie’s publicity, you’ll know that the film’s based on Ralston’s autobiography, so you know he survives. Because I work in a bookstore, and I can’t ever refrain from flicking through pictures in autobiographies (it’s my protip on the shortest way to understand the entire plot if I get asked questions by customers), I know how it happened. So did Danny Boyle sustain my interest in an entire movie set around one guy stuck between a rock and a hard place (I’m not being corny, that’s the name of the book) and with an ending I knew clearly? We all know I love to answer my own questions, so here: Oh My, Yes.

127 Hours is amazing. I can’t recommend it enough. I also can’t stress enough how much you shouldn’t bring your small children to see this, like the family I saw with a stack of kids so little they needed booster seats—not only is the fourth word of the opening song “fuck”, but there are some scenes so visceral that there are warning signs all over the movie theatre alerting viewers to the danger of seizures. Okay, so maybe I’m a prude, but it’s rated MA15+, so The Man agrees with me.

Aron Ralston is a happy-go-lucky outdoorsman, in his element when thrashing around America’s expansive countryside. One Friday night he drives to Utah’s rocky desert, sleeps in his car, then wakes up fresh and peppy to make his way to Blue John Canyon. On his way he encounters two lost and conveniently pretty girls, and he sets them back on their path, but not before taking them on a nifty little side tour, revealing his ultimate desire to be an outback guide. They part ways, the girls inviting him to a party of theirs locatable by the giant inflatable Scooby Doo, and Aron continues bouncing around the place. Then, while making his way down a crevasse, a solid-looking rock falls and Aron tumbles along with it. When Aron and the rock come to rest, his arm is lodged firmly between the canyon wall and the rock itself.

Movies about people trapped in small spaces have to work hard to keep you from getting bored, and of all directors, the ever-inventive Danny Boyle is absolutely the one to nail the genre. While all moments spent in the enclosed space with the camera lodged in Aron’s face are still compelling, he does give the viewer the relief of flashbacks and elaborate hallucinations, but they are not so extended they remove you from the ultimate claustrophobia of being stuck to a stone. The beauty of his surroundings are lost on neither us nor Aron himself, angling his foot out to catch the fifteen minutes of sunshine he gets a day, or setting his clock by the raven that flies ahead in the morning. He’s in his element, but has made a fatal error: no one knows where he was going, or when he was intending to return. So if the movie has a moral, it’s that. Leave a note, kids. Or take up a low-impact sport like Extreme Toastmaking.

The movie opens with loud intense music, and a three-way splitscreen that takes you between sports, cheering crowds, and the energetic Aron planning his trip to the canyon. The splitscreen continues as Aron bikes his way through the rocky terrain—even spectacularly crashing, the kind of fall that would send me into a whimpering mess and unable to walk for weeks but just makes Aron laugh heartily at his clumsiness and get right back on—and adds to the kind of on-edge hyper-realistic tone of the film. The scenes of Aron taking his new lady friends to a gorgeous blue pool you can get to only by a dangerous and concealed plunge into nothing is breathtaking, and the atmosphere until Aron is trapped absolutely makes the viewer understand the allure of his lifestyle, even for someone like me whose outdoor activities mostly comprise of running only late at night when no one can point and laugh.

Watching Aron use all of his knowledge to survive and try to escape is enlightening—from making an outfit out of rope during the cold nights, conserving his pee to drink later (and you really believe it, too, and feel a bit ill watching it), and attempting to set up a pulley system to get the rock off. As his physical and mental functions start to fail, we see him exhausted, and hallucinating the inflatable Scooby Doo in the recesses of the cavern. (And you will be legitimately spooked, too.) More heartbreaking is Aron’s realisation that he put himself in this position, alienating those that love him—family (including his sister, played by Lizzy Caplan), friends, and lovers (including Harry Potter’s Clemence Poesy as the beautiful wispy partner he pushed away)—causing no one to know he would be gone. His determination to start again eventually drives him to commit the act he is known for—and if you’ve never seen Aron Ralston and know nothing of the story, skip this next paragraph, okay?

So you’re all wondering about the arm scene, aren’t you? Of course you are, you creepazoids. You’ll know the seizure moment when it arrives—more in the form of noise that compounds the tension—and while it doesn’t take the full amount of time it took Ralston himself, it still doesn’t feel like it holds back. Ralston filmed the process at the time, and let Boyle and Franco watch it (apparently his mother did too, and undoubtedly wished she hadn’t), and it does feel real, look gruesome, and make everyone in the cinema cover their eyes and squirm and squeal. Don’t be ashamed. Everyone else is doing it too.

But all of that means that the Sigur Ros-fuelled final moments of the film had me literally clutching my heart and weeping. I’ve never clutched my heart in a movie before, so that was a new thing for me, and a bit embarrassing and histrionic. But I did it, and you might do it too.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations, almost to the point of the ridiculous. It is an incredible film. The only thing that was underplayed was how much pain Franco was in—sure, he looked anguished at the start as he stares at his trapped arm, the wall above flecked with chunks of skin and blood, but then he seems to take a deep breath and never look in pain again. Even if he’d just said at one point, “Well, this hurts a bit, but what can you do?” I would have felt better. But that’s what happens when Danny Boyle doesn’t get me to read over the script.

Monday, February 7, 2011

wanda jackson, the party ain't over

Produced and performed on by no-longer-a-White-Stripe Jack White (who is thanked in the liner notes for “having the faith in me that I could still ‘rock out’”), Wanda Jackson—music’s hottest septuagenarian—has returned with a new hot-pink rockabilly album for me to dance (some would term it “flail”) to in my car. Right from the start, with the awesome drums and brass burst of “Shakin’ All Over”, the album immediately changes the mood of a room and whoever is fortunate enough to be within listening distance. Her voice just still has so much power and brashness that she sounds like she could still be the teenager belting out tunes back in the fifties.

That first track, along with her sassy version of “Rum and Coca-Cola” (aka the only song in the world that my eighty-year-old father and I both like), constitute most of my listening, but the whole shebang is really just the most rockin thing you’ll listen to so far this year. As she sings plaintively yet with such zest about being broke in “Busted”, you’ll want to send her money (don’t, she’s doing just fine and I think she just spends it all on sequins and fring
ed materials). Peppered with sharp little Jack White licks, Her more country-like ballads don’t float my boat as much as the more upbeat/fast-paced tracks do—the energy of those are exactly what I love about rockabilly—but she really doesn’t actually make a bad song, because she’s the Queen of Rockabilly (or First Lady, apparently, which must depend on whether you’re a Monarchist or not) and she is just that great. The digital “shaking” of her voice in the chorus of “Shakin All Over” bothers me a little, making her sound watery and ruining the voice that I adore so vehemently. But I’ll blame Jack for that, because I am biased towards the lovely Wanda. And how couldn’t you be? She’s adorable, and she dated Elvis Presley.



If you haven’t had an opportunity to hear Wanda Jackson before, I discovered her via her song
Funnel of Love, which was on the (sadly never released) But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack. I never found that specific version, but go find the version she did with the Cramps—it’s a knockout, and one of the songs I’ve listened to the most over the years.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations, because if I’m not listening to her, I forget just how fun her music is. And as I went to shelve the CD I noticed I have three other albums of hers that I’d forgotten about (hidden by the cat due to overplaying?) Time for a saucy dress, some flicky eyeliner and a Wanda Jackson marathon, I think.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

sanctum

I wonder how it comes about that you become so tremendously wealthy and famous that people stop saying “no” to you. I mean, when you’re a normal person, you’ll spend a fair amount of time verbalising things you don’t want, like fitness without having to run in the rain, or a new television when you’re scraping the barrel just to pay your electricity bill, or a family that doesn’t spend its time moaning about When Will You Supply Me With Grandchildren. Then suddenly, you’re a hotshot director or writer, and you’ve got so much fame and money you’ve made a Scrooge McDuck-type room furnished with a diving board and a swimming pool full of two-dollar coins. When you’re that rich, you hire a personal trainer to do the getting fit for you (or get liposuction), you put a wing on the house with its own movie theatre, and you hire a hitman to take out your family. And there is no such thing as no, which is great and all if you’re the person with the wealth, but if you’re the unsuspecting audience who originally forked out and made that person famous, suddenly you become lumped with creative output that no one has dared to stand up against. You’ll go and see something like Sanctum, and by the end of it, you will be holding your head in horror and wondering why someone didn’t roll the script into a tube and bat James Cameron on the nose with it, saying in their sternest tone of voice, “NO.”

Based loosely on a true story, a team of cave divers are splashing about in a huge deep Papua New Guinean sinkhole, hoping to discover new cave systems, when a cyclone approaches at high speed and traps them underground. In order to survive, they must make their way through unchartered territory, underwater and with great danger. Will they all live through the journey? God no, but I won’t tell you who does and doesn’t. Suffice it to say it is much less of the docudrama it appears on the ads and more a gorefest by the time the credits roll.

The bulk of the movie is spent following a small band of survivors: gruff old bastard Frank (Richard Roxburgh), son Josh (Rhys Wakefield) who is currently on Frank’s “shit list”, arrogant boss Carl (Ioan Gruffudd), Carl’s mountaineering girlfriend Victoria (Alice Parkinson), old hand and resident Nice Guy George (Dan Wyllie), and local guide Luko (Cramer Cain). They are all decent actors doing the best they possibly could with such a godawful script. Australians are defined by the fact that they say things like “This whole place will be flooded like a blocked dunny!”, Americans by their terrible accents and unconditional arrogance, and Papua New Guineans by their quiet wisdom and heroics. None of them characters are particularly fleshed out, leaving you mostly indifferent as they are picked off by the cave and/or water.

Full of so many plot holes, discrepancies, and under-explained situations that even my usually generous mother rattled off a list of problems she had with it, Sanctum is painful enough to make you snort at inappropriate places and so riddled with clichés even the guys behind us were laughing and yelling out, “Let Josh do the climb, Frank, it’s your son’s time to shine!” during the most moving of scenes. Every plot turn is mapped out so far in advance you felt like Josh’s whinge about his father giving him a boar’s tooth necklace that he’d turned into a torch was basically him holding it up saying, “Look at this plot device my father gave me, expect this to be handy later.” The characters’ bad decisions bit them on the arse just exactly how you expect them to, some comeuppances swifter than others. Some appear to be painfully stuck in—like Victoria’s rejection of wearing a “dead woman’s wetsuit”—so they could shortly thereafter have a scene of her stripping naked to battle hypothermia and we could all get an eyeful of a hot woman in her undergarments. After all, none of the men end up naked but for Speedos.

Not only does Sanctum dismally fail the Bechdel Test, but the women are hysterical and irrational. Victoria—who met Carl while climbing Mount Everest—somehow later needs some lessons to climb up a short ladder, though she could theoretically be the best climber of all of them. She is inexperienced in caves and holds them back, which is frustrating because she’s also the only woman at that point and really, the girl being the helpless one is such an overdone movie trope that James Cameron should be sent angrily to his kennel followed with another angry “NO.” Along with that, the one joke in the whole film (“That’s not a wizard”) is preceded by The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen doing a gross mimicry of an Asian accent when greeting the party at the above-ground base of operations. I don’t often mention the political incorrectness of movies in this blog—others do it much better than me—but really, like Cameron’s Avatar, this was a movie where the White Man saved the day, and women and locals did not.

Sanctum was not actually the worst thing I’ve ever seen. (Maybe second worst.) Despite my lack of concern for the characters, as they died or were injured the scenes were amazingly crafted and heart-wrenching, but only for what they portrayed, not who they were. Seeing a character “put out of their misery” when injured too badly to continue is hard to watch and was handled well. This, peppered with some suspenseful scenes as the team fight through underwater tunnels, and a poignant moment with Frank in a decompression bubble looking bleak as a drowned body is suspended outside in the water, give it points. The actual surrounds are amazing, from the breathtaking huge hole in the ground as Josh, Carl and Victoria arrive by helicopter, and the caves themselves are as beautiful as they are claustrophobic and terrifying. Much has been made of the cinematography, but with about two-thirds of the flick being green-screen, the special effects team deserve more recognition. Unfortunately, unlike Avatar, the effects alone aren’t enough to make Sanctum a worthwhile trip to the cinema; just don’t go. If you want to see a cave movie, watch The Descent and bring a spare pair of pants. If you want a father-son reconciliation, watch The Simpsons (that happens in about every third episode.) If you want some lush visuals, take a bus to the country with the fifty bucks you’ll save forking out for 3D tickets, then send me your change in thanks.

In summary: so far Below Expectations it is practically underground. I mean, really. The use of the decompression bubble was confusing—sometimes needed, then sometimes not an issue, or one that could have been explained away in a short sentence. For those of us not cave diving with our spare time, its use seemed arbitrary. Also, why is Josh even there on the trip if he hates cave diving so much and thinks caves are stupid? And who the fuck wrote the line “[this tunnel is] tighter than a nun’s nasty”? Or coached Welsh and Australian actors Gruffudd and Parkinson in their forced American accents? Or thought that “You need to go easy on him” and “He’s a good kid, Frank” weren’t the second and third Most Uttered Lines in movies after “Behind you!” BAD JAMES CAMERON. BAD. GO TO YOUR ROOM.